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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/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html">What is the most supported MIME type in Debian?
</a>
31 <p>The
<a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-
11
32 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive
</a>, is a
33 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
34 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
35 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing. With such
36 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
37 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
38 downloaded by the browser.
</p>
40 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
41 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
42 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there. The result
44 <a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
45 site
</a>. Using the collected information, it become possible to
46 answer the question in the title. Here are the
20 most supported MIME
47 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
48 The complete list is available from the link above.
</p>
50 <p><strong>Debian Stable:
</strong></p>
54 ----- -----------------------
77 <p><strong>Debian Testing:
</strong></p>
81 ----- -----------------------
104 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:
</strong></p>
108 ----- -----------------------
131 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
132 information mentioned in DEP-
11. I have not yet had time to look at
133 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
136 <p><strong>Update
2013-
01-
16 13:
35</strong>: Updated numbers after
137 discovering a typo in my script.
</p>
143 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>.
148 <div class=
"padding"></div>
152 <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>
158 <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
159 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
160 values provided by the Linux kernel
</a> following my hope for
161 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
162 dongle support in Debian
</a>. Using this knowledge, I have tested how
163 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
164 to hardware. This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
165 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
166 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
169 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
170 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
171 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
175 Package: package-name
176 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)
</p>
179 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
180 for a given modalias value using this file.
</p>
182 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
183 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class
0E01):
</p>
187 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)
</p>
190 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
191 CardBus bridge (bus class
0607) PCI device is present:
</p>
195 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
198 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
199 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs
04D8:F8DA:
</p>
202 Package: colorhug-client
203 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)
</p>
206 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
207 file in the Debian archive. Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
208 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.
</p>
210 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
211 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
212 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
213 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
214 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information. I've
215 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
216 is working as it should with my prototype. It even made it to Ubuntu
219 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
220 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
221 implementation of the lookup code. The idea is to create files for
222 each modalias and let the shell do the matching. Please check out and
224 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup
</a>
225 shell script. It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
226 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
227 repository where I currently work on my prototype.
</p>
229 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
230 install yubikey-personalization:
</p>
233 % ./hw-support-lookup
234 <br>yubikey-personalization
238 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
239 propose to install the pcmciautils package:
</p>
242 % ./hw-support-lookup
247 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
248 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
249 database
</a>, please tell me about it.
</p>
251 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
252 packages and hardware. One source would be to look at packages with
253 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
254 extract their modalias information. Another would be to look at
255 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
256 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
257 generate a modalias matching rule. I have not tested any of these to
260 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
261 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
262 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
263 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel
</a>.
</p>
269 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>.
274 <div class=
"padding"></div>
278 <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>
284 <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
285 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
286 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
287 to document the details. Here are my findings so far, also available
289 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
290 Debian Edu subversion repository
</a>:
292 <p><strong>Modalias decoded
</strong></p>
294 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
295 values stands for. It is in part based on information from
296 <URL:
<a href=
"https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias
</a> >,
297 <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> >,
298 <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
299 <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> >.
301 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
302 this shell script:
</p>
305 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -
0 cat | sort -u
308 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
312 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
313 alias: serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
314 alias: serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
318 <p><strong>PCI subtype
</strong></p>
320 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this. This is an Intel Host
321 Bridge memory controller:
</p>
324 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
327 <p>This represent these values:
</p>
332 sv
00001028 (subvendor)
333 sd
000001AD (subdevice)
339 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
340 -n' as
8086:
2770. The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
341 0600. The
0600 class is a host bridge. Other useful bus values are
342 0300 (VGA compatible card) and
0200 (Ethernet controller).
</p>
344 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
347 <p><strong>USB subtype
</strong></p>
349 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this. This is an internal
350 USB hub in a laptop:
</p>
353 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
356 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:
</p>
359 v
1D6B (device vendor)
360 p
0001 (device product)
363 dsc
00 (device subclass)
364 dp
00 (device protocol)
365 ic
09 (interface class)
366 isc
00 (interface subclass)
367 ip
00 (interface protocol)
370 <p>The
0900 device class/subclass means hub. Some times the relevant
371 class is in the interface class section. For a simple USB web camera,
372 these alias entries show up:
</p>
375 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
376 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
377 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
378 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
381 <p>Interface class
0E01 is video control,
0E02 is video streaming (aka
382 camera),
0101 is audio control device and
0102 is audio streaming (aka
383 microphone). Thus this is a camera with microphone included.
</p>
385 <p><strong>ACPI subtype
</strong></p>
387 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff. This is an IR
388 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:
</p>
391 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
394 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.
</p>
396 <p><strong>DMI subtype
</strong></p>
398 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
399 and model. This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
400 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:
</p>
403 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(
1.66):bd06/
15/
2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
406 <p>The values present are
</p>
409 bvn IBM (BIOS vendor)
410 bvr
1UETB
6WW(
1.66) (BIOS version)
411 bd
06/
15/
2005 (BIOS date)
412 svn IBM (system vendor)
413 pn
2371H4G (product name)
414 pvr ThinkPadX40 (product version)
415 rvn IBM (board vendor)
416 rn
2371H4G (board name)
417 rvr NotAvailable (board version)
418 cvn IBM (chassis vendor)
420 cvr NotAvailable (chassis version)
423 <p>The chassis type
10 is Notebook. Other interesting values can be
424 found in the dmidecode source:
</p>
428 4 Low Profile Desktop
441 17 Main Server Chassis
444 20 Bus Expansion Chassis
445 21 Peripheral Chassis
447 23 Rack Mount Chassis
456 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
457 table. For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
458 claim it is a desktop.
</p>
460 <p><strong>SerIO subtype
</strong></p>
462 <p>This type is used for PS/
2 mouse plugs. One example is from my
466 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
469 <p>The values present are
</p>
478 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver. I am not sure what
479 the valid values are.
</p>
481 <p><strong>Other subtypes
</strong></p>
483 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
484 file2alias.c. There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
485 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
486 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
487 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro. I did not spend time documenting all of
488 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
489 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.
</p>
491 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values
</strong></p>
493 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
494 one can use the following shell script:
</p>
497 for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -
0 cat | sort -u); do \
499 /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/ /' ; \
503 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
504 list is very long on my test machine):
</p>
508 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
510 FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
512 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
513 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
514 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
515 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
516 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
517 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
518 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
519 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
523 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
524 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
525 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
526 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel
</a>.
</p>
528 <p><strong>Update
2013-
01-
15:
</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
529 "find ... -print0 | xargs -
0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
530 in /sys/ with space in them.
</p>
536 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>.
541 <div class=
"padding"></div>
545 <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>
551 <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
552 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
553 Launcher and updated the Debian package
554 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile
</a> to make
555 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in. I
556 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
557 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
558 plug in his rocket launcher. In the process I moved the source to a
559 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
560 contribute.
<a href=
"http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream
</a>
561 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
562 years of relative silence. The new git repository is not listed in
563 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
564 bit more before I upload the new version. If you want to check out
565 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
566 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
567 view
</a> or use "
<tt>git clone
568 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git
</tt>".</p>
574 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>.
579 <div class="padding
"></div>
583 <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>
589 <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
590 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
591 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
592 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
593 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
594 machine. Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
595 Linux distribution. When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
596 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
597 I need to talk to it. When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
598 yubikey-personalization package. The information required to do this
599 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
601 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
602 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/
2010/
05/msg01206.html
">use
603 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>. The idea is fairly
608 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
609 starting when a user log in.</li>
611 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
612 hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
614 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
615 database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
618 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
619 package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
623 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
624 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
625 discover database to find packages and
626 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/
">PackageKit</a> to install
629 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
630 draft package is now checked into
631 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/
">the
632 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>. In the process, I updated the
633 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html
">discover-data</a>
634 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
635 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
636 2.2013.01.09 to unstable. I also discovered that the current
637 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html
">discover</a>
638 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
639 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present. I ported it to use
640 libusb as a fall back option to get it working. The fixed package
641 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
642 because of the freeze).</p>
644 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
645 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
648 <p align="center
"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
01-
09-hw-autoinstall.png
"></p>
650 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
651 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
652 program(s)" button should to be implemented.
</p>
654 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
655 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
656 from hardware to Debian packages. Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
657 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
658 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
659 reportbug if it isn't. Or, if you know of a better way to provide
660 such mapping, please let me know.
</p>
662 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
663 should be considered before it is ready for production use. Is dbus
664 the correct way to detect new hardware? At the moment I look for HAL
665 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
666 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop. Are there better events to use?
667 How should the user be notified? Is the desktop notification
668 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
669 popup instead? How should packages be installed? When should they
670 not be installed?
</p>
672 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
673 please send me an email. :)
</p>
679 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>.
684 <div class=
"padding"></div>
688 <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>
694 <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
695 <a href=
"http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
696 NXT
</a>. My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
697 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
698 already in Debian Squeeze. If Debian support for LEGO is something
699 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
700 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego
</a> (server
701 irc.debian.org). There is a lot that could be done to improve the
702 Debian support for LEGO designers. For example both CAD software
703 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)
</p>
705 <p>Update
2012-
01-
03: A
706 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page
</a>
707 including links to Lego related packages is now available.
</p>
713 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>.
718 <div class=
"padding"></div>
722 <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>
728 <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
729 year! I hope next year will prove to be a good year.
</p>
731 <p><a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin
</a>, the digital
732 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
733 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
734 experiment. And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
735 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/">Debian
</a> is about to improve a bit.
736 The
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
737 package
</a> (version
0.7.2-
2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
738 in
<a href=
"http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue
</A>
739 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
742 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
743 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
744 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:
</p>
747 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
749 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=
1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
750 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
753 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well. The
754 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
755 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment. Note that the
756 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
757 around
5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment. Make sure your
758 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
759 all the blocks. The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
760 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
761 not be able to get all the features out of the client.
</p>
763 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
764 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
765 <b><a href=
"bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a></b>.
</p>
771 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>.
776 <div class=
"padding"></div>
780 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian
</a>
786 <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
787 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin
</a>, the decentralised
788 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
789 have been busy elsewhere. But two days ago, I started looking at the
790 state of
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
791 Debian
</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet. The package
792 is now maintained by a
793 <a href=
"https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
794 people
</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team. We
795 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
796 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
797 Wheezy. It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
798 backports). The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
799 it from entering testing. To try to help the team and improve the
800 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
801 reports. I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
803 <a href=
"https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
804 Ubuntu
</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
807 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
808 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
809 improve the package. It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
810 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
811 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
812 setup. As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
813 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
814 patch to backport
</a> the latest version. Jonas is going to look at
815 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
816 new version to unstable.
818 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
819 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system. I
820 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
821 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
822 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
823 transactions to Wikileaks. But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
824 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
825 they sell products and services. Improving the bitcoin support in
826 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
827 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
828 pay with bitcoin is still not very good. The bitcoin: URI is a step
829 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
830 use. Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
831 quick transaction. I believe there are other clients available, but
832 have not tested them.
</p>
835 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
836 with bitcoins
</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
837 I received
20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
839 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
840 on the blockexplorer service
</a>. Thank you everyone for your
841 donation. The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
842 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
843 number of users have gone up since then. If you use bitcoin and want
844 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
845 the same address as last time,
846 <b><a href=
"bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a></b>.
</p>
852 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>.
857 <div class=
"padding"></div>
861 <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>
868 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
869 this summer
</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
870 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
871 <a href=
"https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
872 repository for the project
</a>.
</p>
874 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
875 to the HTML version. To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
876 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
877 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.
</p>
879 <p>Want to sing? You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
880 PostScript formats at
881 <a href=
"http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
882 Science Songbook
</a>.
</p>
888 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>.
893 <div class=
"padding"></div>
897 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gratulerer_med_19__rsdagen__Debian_.html">Gratulerer med
19-årsdagen, Debian!
</a>
904 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120813">Debian-prosjektet
19
905 år
</a>. Jeg har fulgt det de siste
12 årene, og er veldig glad for å kunne
906 si gratulerer med dagen, Debian!
</p>
912 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>.
917 <div class=
"padding"></div>
921 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists
</a>
927 <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
928 <a href=
"http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø
</a>, I started
929 collecting computer related songs for use at parties. The original
930 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
931 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
932 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format. I have
933 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
934 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
935 help me extend and update the book. If anyone is volunteering to help
936 me with this, send me an email. Also let me know if there are songs
937 missing in my book.
</p>
939 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
940 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
941 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
942 Especially now that
<a href=
"http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
943 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going). Want to sing? Check
944 out
<a href=
"http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
945 Computer Science Songbook
</a>.
951 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>.
956 <div class=
"padding"></div>
960 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge
</a>
966 <p>At work we have heaps of servers. I believe the total count is
967 around
1000 at the moment. To be able to get help from the vendors
968 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
969 up to date. If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
970 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
971 firmware is upgraded. So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
972 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
973 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
974 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
975 the tools to do so.
</p>
977 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
978 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got. Most of
979 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
980 so far. This blog post is about the Dell part.
</P>
982 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
983 <a href=
"ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file
</a>
984 with firmware information for all
11th generation servers, listing
985 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
986 site I can find it. Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
987 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
988 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
989 be activated on the first reboot.
</p>
991 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
992 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
993 servers at a site? Please get in touch and lets share resources.
</p>
999 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
1001 # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
1003 'XML::Simple' =
> 'perl-XML-Simple',
1005 for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
1006 eval "use $module;";
1008 my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
1009 system("yum install -y $pkg");
1010 eval "use $module;";
1014 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
1020 sub run_firmware_script {
1021 my ($opts, $script) = @_;
1023 print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
1026 print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
1028 if (
0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
1029 print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
1031 print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
1035 sub run_firmware_scripts {
1036 my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
1037 # Run firmware packages
1038 for my $dir (@dirs) {
1039 print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
1040 opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
1041 while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
1042 next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
1043 run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
1051 print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
1052 system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
1057 my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
1060 if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
1062 # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
1063 system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-
33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
1065 my $tmpdir = tempdir(
1069 fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
1070 system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
1071 my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
1072 # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
1075 for my $url (@paths) {
1076 fetch_dell_fw($url);
1078 run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
1080 print STDERR
"error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
1081 print STDERR
"error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
1085 print STDERR
"error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
1086 print STDERR
"error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
1092 my $url =
"ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
1096 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
1097 # firmware packages to download from Dell. Only work for Linux
1098 # machines and
11th generation Dell servers.
1099 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
1100 my $filename = shift;
1102 my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
1104 my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
1106 print STDERR
"Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
1108 my $xml = XMLin($filename);
1110 for my $bundle (@{$xml-
>{SoftwareBundle}}) {
1111 my $brand = $bundle-
>{TargetSystems}-
>{Brand}-
>{Display}-
>{content};
1112 my $model = $bundle-
>{TargetSystems}-
>{Brand}-
>{Model}-
>{Display}-
>{content};
1114 if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle-
>{TargetOSes}-
>{OperatingSystem}) {
1115 $oscode = $bundle-
>{TargetOSes}-
>{OperatingSystem}[
0]-
>{osCode};
1117 $oscode = $bundle-
>{TargetOSes}-
>{OperatingSystem}-
>{osCode};
1119 if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
1121 @paths = map { $_-
>{path} } @{$bundle-
>{Contents}-
>{Package}};
1124 for my $component (@{$xml-
>{SoftwareComponent}}) {
1125 my $componenttype = $component-
>{ComponentType}-
>{value};
1127 # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
1128 next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
1130 my $cpath = $component-
>{path};
1131 for my $path (@paths) {
1132 if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
1133 push(@paths, $cpath);
1141 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
1142 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking. Anyone know a
1143 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers? At the
1144 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
1151 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>.
1156 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1160 <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>
1166 <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
1167 <a href=
"http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
1168 comments and opinions
</a> on my blog post on
1169 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
1170 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian
</a> and my blog post about
1171 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
1172 default KDE desktop in Debian
</a>. I only have time to address one
1173 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
1174 misunderstanding he bring forward:
</p>
1177 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
1178 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
1179 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
1182 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
1183 and booting into runlevel
1 is the same. I am not surprised he
1184 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
1185 thing to believe. But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
1186 runlevel
1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
1187 mode. I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
1188 hard to explain.
</p>
1190 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
1191 "
<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin
</tt>". This means the only thing that is
1192 executed in single user mode is sulogin. Single user mode is a boot
1193 state "between
" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
1194 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
1195 enters the single user state. When switching to runlevel 1, the state
1196 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
1197 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
1198 runs "init -t1 S
" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
1199 1. It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
1200 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
1203 <p>This summary might make it clearer. When booting for the first
1204 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
1205 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin
</tt>". When booting into
1206 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
1207 S; /etc/init.d/rc
1; /sbin/sulogin
</tt>". A problem show up when
1208 trying to continue after visiting single user mode. Not all services
1209 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
1210 unpredicatble state. This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
1211 after visiting single user mode.</p>
1213 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
1214 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/. When switching from say runlevel 2
1215 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
1216 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
1217 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
1218 2-5. I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
1219 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
1220 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
1222 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
1223 and discovered this problem a few years ago. I suspect it originates
1224 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
1230 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>.
1235 <div class="padding
"></div>
1239 <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>
1245 <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
1246 are started from /etc/rcS.d/. In fact, there is a bite more of them
1247 than make sense, and this causes a few problems. What kind of
1248 problems, you might ask. There are at least two problems. The first
1249 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
1250 runlevel 1. One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
1251 the expected state. The other is that single user boot will sometimes
1252 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
1253 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
1254 machine from a problem in that subsystem. A minor additional point is
1255 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
1256 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
1257 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
1259 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/. In short, only the
1260 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
1261 presented during a single user boot should go there. Everything else
1262 should go into the numeric runlevels. This means things like
1263 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
1264 the numeric runlevels. Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
1265 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
1266 out. Do your package have one of them? Please help us make single
1267 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
1269 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
1270 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
1271 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
1274 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound. To keep
1275 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
1276 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
1277 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
1278 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
1279 moved first. This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
1280 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
1281 the system state correct. This will require some coordination when it
1282 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
1283 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
1284 on them. Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
1285 package, while others are still left to do. I wish I had time to work
1286 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
1287 find time to push this forward.</p>
1293 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>.
1298 <div class="padding
"></div>
1302 <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>
1308 <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
1309 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
1310 desktop to be useful for more people. The use case for this is my
1311 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
1314 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
1315 implement. After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
1316 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
1320 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
1321 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
1322 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
1323 tool to handle it. I have no problem guiding both of my parents
1324 through the process over the phone. If a kernel reboot is required,
1325 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool. Last
1326 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
1329 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
1330 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
1331 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
1332 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
1333 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
1334 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
1335 Packages file in the APT archive). If one or more packages are found,
1336 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
1337 type. If the package require the user to accept some non-free
1338 license, this is explained to the user. The entire process make it
1339 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
1340 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
1341 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
1343 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
1344 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
1345 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
1346 should search for a package that would add support for it. This
1347 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264. The selection
1348 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
1349 plugin handling. This is as far as I know implemented using a
1350 gstreamer hook. The end result is that the user easily get access to
1351 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
1352 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
1354 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
1355 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
1356 start emacs to show it. If I remember correctly, when doing the same
1357 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser. At least I
1358 know Opera will show text files within the browser. I much prefer the
1359 latter behaviour.</li>
1363 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
1364 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
1365 it do not matter much.</p>
1367 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
1368 Debian release. It would require the coordinated effort of several
1369 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
1375 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>.
1380 <div class="padding
"></div>
1384 <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>
1390 <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/
">FiksGataMi</A>
1391 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
1392 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
1393 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
1394 security support for a few years.</p>
1396 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
1397 that are missing in Debian at the moment. It would be great if these
1398 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
1399 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com
">FixMyStreet</a> clone
1400 in their own country using only Debian packages. The list of modules
1401 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
1402 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
1403 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
1404 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
1405 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
1406 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
1407 easier in the future.</p>
1409 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
1410 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
1411 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package. But this leave me
1412 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
1413 do not have time for.</p>
1419 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>.
1424 <div class="padding
"></div>
1428 <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>
1434 <p>Here is a small update for my English readers. Most of my blog
1435 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
1436 update in English.</p>
1438 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
1439 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
1440 of the British service
1441 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/
">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
1442 and it has been running for a month now. The entire project has been
1443 organised by me and two others. Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
1444 to fund the development work. In January I drafted a contract with
1445 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/
">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
1446 and in February the development took place. Most of it involved
1447 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
1448 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
1449 running in any country by now. The Norwegian
1450 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/
">FiksGataMi</a> is using
1451 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/
">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
1452 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
1453 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
1455 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
1456 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th. The system is
1457 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
1458 problem reports in a few weeks. Soon we hope to announce the Android
1459 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
1460 public infrastructure.</p>
1462 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
1469 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>.
1474 <div class="padding
"></div>
1478 <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>
1484 <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
1485 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo. My idea is that
1486 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
1487 available on the Internet, and check our locally
1488 maintained/distributed software against this information. It should
1489 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten. The
1490 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
1491 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
1492 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
1493 out which security holes were present in our free software
1496 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
1497 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
1498 consistent way across data sources. I considered several ways to do
1499 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
1500 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
1501 existing naming scheme. And it seem like I am not the first one to
1502 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
1503 solution. Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html
">Common
1504 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
1505 software, hardware and other platform components. The CPE ids are
1506 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/
">National
1507 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
1508 issues for any CPE name. With this in place, all I need to do is to
1509 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
1510 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
1511 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
1513 <p>To give you an example. The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
1514 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip. If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
1515 check out, one could look up
1516 <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
1517 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
1518 The most recent one is
1519 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-
2010-
0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
1520 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
1521 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
1523 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
1524 for offline processing of issues. Using this dump, I've written a
1525 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
1526 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs. One give it CPEs
1527 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
1528 security issues out.</p>
1530 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
1531 information need to be high. For that to happen, I believe as many as
1532 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database. I notice
1534 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt
">a
1535 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
1536 information. I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
1538 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
1539 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
1540 the CVE database in NVD. The result look fairly good, but there are
1541 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
1542 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
1543 Debian believe are affected by a CVE). Hope to find time to improve
1544 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
1545 someone maintaining it. So far my three emails with questions and
1546 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
1547 established soon.</p>
1549 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
1550 mapping. It would be useful to know which packages in for example
1551 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
1552 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
1553 for their packages.</p>
1559 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>.
1564 <div class="padding
"></div>
1568 <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>
1575 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data
">discover-data</a>
1576 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
1577 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
1578 information. One part of this script that I find very useful when
1579 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
1580 to the PCI device it claims. It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
1581 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with. To see
1582 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
1583 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>. The relevant output on
1584 one of my machines like this:</p>
1588 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
1591 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
1600 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
1601 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
1604 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
1605 echo loaded pci modules:
1607 cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
1608 for address in * ; do
1609 if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
1610 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
1611 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
1612 address=$(echo $address |sed s/
0000://)
1613 id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n
1 | awk '{print $
3}'`
1623 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
1627 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
1628 echo loaded usb modules:
1630 cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
1631 for address in * ; do
1632 if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
1633 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
1634 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
1635 address=$(echo $address |sed s/
0000://)
1636 id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n
1 | awk '{print $
6}')
1648 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
1655 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>.
1660 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1664 <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>
1670 <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the
<a
1671 href=
"http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo
</a> testing if the new
1672 batch of computers will work with Linux. Every year for the last few
1673 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
1674 computers, and this year HP won the bid. Two different desktops and
1675 five different laptops are on the list this year. We in the UNIX
1676 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
1677 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
1680 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
1681 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well. To test, I PXE
1682 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
1683 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware. When
1684 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
1685 on. If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
1686 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
1687 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.
</p>
1689 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post. Here is the simple tests
1690 I perform on a new model.
</p>
1694 <li>Is PXE installation working? I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
1695 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment. If I feel like it, I also test with
1696 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.
</li>
1698 <li>Is X.org working? If the graphical login screen show up after
1699 installation, X.org is working.
</li>
1701 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working? Running glxgears (in
1702 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
1703 reported by the program.
</li>
1705 <li>Is sound working? With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
1706 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful. If there
1707 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
1708 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound. I
1709 normally test this by playing
1710 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
1711 video
</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.
</li>
1713 <li>Is the USB subsystem working? I test this by plugging in a USB
1714 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.
</li>
1716 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working? I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
1717 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.
</li>
1719 <li>Is any built in camera working? Test using cheese, and see if a
1720 picture from the v4l device show up.
</li>
1722 <li>Is bluetooth working? Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
1723 any bluetooth devices are discovered. In my office, I normally see a
1726 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working. I have
1727 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
1730 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working? I'm testing if the
1731 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
1734 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
1735 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
1736 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc? The set of buttons differ from
1737 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
1740 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
1741 acceleration sensors etc. I rarely test these, as I do not know how
1742 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
1747 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
1748 for the HP machines I am testing. I'm not done yet, so I will report
1749 the test results later. For now I can report that HP
8100 Elite work
1750 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook
8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
1751 and audio fail on RHEL6. Ubuntu Maverik worked with
8440p. As you
1752 can see, I have most machines left to test. One interesting
1753 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
1754 RHEL6 with glxgears. No idea why.
</p>
1760 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>.
1765 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1769 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins
</a>
1775 <p>As I continue to explore
1776 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin
</a>, I've starting to wonder
1777 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
1778 and regulations here in Norway. Here are some random notes.
</p>
1780 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
1781 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
1782 is known to everyone. This means that if a BitCoin address has been
1783 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
1784 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
1785 that address. There is even a web service to look at the details for
1786 all transactions. There I can see that my address
1787 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a>
1788 have received
16.06 Bitcoin, the
1789 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv
8MHqvwst
3</a>
1790 address of Simon Phipps have received
181.97 BitCoin and the address
1791 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt
</A>
1792 of EFF have received
2447.38 BitCoins so far. Thank you to each and
1793 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
1794 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
1795 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
1796 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction. I'm told
1797 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
1798 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
1799 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.
</p>
1801 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
1802 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
1803 without declaring it. There are money laundering, tax and accounting
1804 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
1805 If the Skolelinux foundation
1806 (
<a href=
"http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
1807 Debian Labs
</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
1808 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
1809 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
1810 not, should everything or nothing be declared? What exchange rate
1811 should be used when calculating taxes? Would receivers have to pay
1812 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
1813 BitCoin? I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.
</p>
1815 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
1816 accepted by a lot of users. It must be possible to get easy access to
1817 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
1818 easy to spend it. At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
1819 access to, but there are very few places to spend it. I am not really
1820 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
1821 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins. I
1822 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
1823 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
1824 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
1825 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular. I'm sure they
1826 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
1827 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
1828 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
1831 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
1832 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
1833 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
1834 to see which one get the next lump of cash). The "winner" get
50
1835 BitCoin when this happen. Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
1836 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
1837 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
1838 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the
50
1840 <a href=
"http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool
</a>
1841 if this sounds interesting. I have not had time to try to set up a
1842 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
1843 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
1846 <p>Update
2010-
12-
15: Found an
<a
1847 href=
"http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
1848 criticism
</a> of bitcoin. Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
1849 it was interesting to read. The arguments presented seem to be
1850 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.
</p>
1856 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>.
1861 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1865 <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>
1871 <p>With this weeks lawless
1872 <a href=
"http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
1873 attacks
</a> on Wikileak and
1874 <a href=
"http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
1875 speech
</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
1876 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
1878 <a href=
"http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
1879 Phipps on bitcoin
</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
1880 mine mentioned earlier. I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
1881 involved with
<a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin
</a>. I got
1882 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
1883 some bitcoins to get started. I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
1884 for helping me remember BitCoin.
</p>
1886 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder? It is a digital
1887 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
1888 networks. It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
1889 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
1890 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions. The
1891 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets
2.9
1892 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
1893 line client builds just fine. Hopefully Jonas
1894 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
1895 Debian
</a> soon.
</p>
1897 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
1898 There are
<a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
1899 bitcoins
</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
1900 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided. There
1901 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising. If you
1902 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
1904 <a href=
"https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free
</a> (
0.05
1905 bitcoin at the time of writing). Use
1906 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch
</a> to keep an eye
1907 on the current exchange rates.
</p>
1909 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
1910 machines. If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
1911 donations to the address
1912 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</b>. Thank you!
</p>
1918 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>.
1923 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1927 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?
</a>
1933 <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
1934 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
1935 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
1936 to play a video file or stream. Only if VLC fail will I drag out
1937 gmplayer to see if it can do better. The reason is mostly the failure
1938 model and trust. When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
1939 reporting the problem. When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
1940 just hangs. The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.
<p>
1942 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
1943 mplayer in
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
1944 Edu/Skolelinux
</a>. The reason is simple. We need a good browser
1945 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
1946 not very good. For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
1947 is no way for the user to pause the video. Also, when I
1948 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
1949 tested the browser plugins
</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
1950 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked. If
1951 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
1952 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.
</P>
1954 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
1955 annoying. The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
1956 keyboard shortcuts. When the player is in full screen mode, its
1957 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
1958 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode. I
1959 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
1960 window mode. Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
1961 the current video. It is very nice when playing short videos from the
1962 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
1963 what is going on.
</p>
1969 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>.
1974 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1978 <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>
1984 <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
1985 upgrade testing of the
1986 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
1987 Gnome and KDE Desktop
</a> to do
<tt>apt-get autoremove
</tt> when using apt-get.
1988 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
1989 can now present the updated result from today:
</p>
1991 <p>This is for Gnome:
</p>
1993 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p>
2000 browser-plugin-gnash
2007 freedesktop-sound-theme
2009 gconf-defaults-service
2024 gnome-desktop-environment
2028 gnome-session-canberra
2033 gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
2039 libapache2-mod-dnssd
2042 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
2045 libboost-date-time1.42
.0
2046 libboost-python1.42
.0
2047 libboost-thread1.42
.0
2049 libchamplain-gtk-
0.4-
0
2051 libclutter-gtk-
0.10-
0
2058 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
2073 libgnomepanel2.24-cil
2078 libgtksourceview2.0-common
2079 libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
2080 libmono-addins0.2-cil
2081 libmono-cairo2.0-cil
2082 libmono-corlib2.0-cil
2083 libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
2084 libmono-posix2.0-cil
2085 libmono-security2.0-cil
2086 libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
2087 libmono-system2.0-cil
2090 libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
2091 libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
2101 libtelepathy-farsight0
2110 nautilus-sendto-empathy
2114 python-aptdaemon-gtk
2116 python-beautifulsoup
2131 python-gtksourceview2
2142 python-pkg-resources
2149 python-twisted-conch
2155 python-zope.interface
2160 rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
2167 system-config-printer-udev
2169 telepathy-mission-control-
5
2182 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p>
2190 fast-user-switch-applet
2209 libgtksourceview2.0-
0
2211 libsdl1.2debian-alsa
2217 system-config-printer
2224 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p>
2227 gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
2230 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p>
2236 <p>This is for KDE:
</p>
2238 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p>
2244 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p>
2251 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p>
2267 kdeartwork-emoticons
2269 kdeartwork-theme-icon
2273 kdebase-workspace-bin
2274 kdebase-workspace-data
2288 kscreensaver-xsavers
2303 plasma-dataengines-workspace
2305 plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
2306 plasma-runners-addons
2307 plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
2308 plasma-scriptengine-python
2309 plasma-scriptengine-qedje
2310 plasma-scriptengine-ruby
2311 plasma-scriptengine-webkit
2312 plasma-scriptengines
2313 plasma-wallpapers-addons
2314 plasma-widget-folderview
2315 plasma-widget-networkmanagement
2319 xscreensaver-data-extra
2321 xscreensaver-gl-extra
2322 xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
2325 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p>
2329 google-gadgets-common
2347 libggadget-qt-
1.0-
0b
2352 libkonqsidebarplugin4a
2361 libplasma-geolocation-interface4
2363 libplasmagenericshell4
2377 libsmokeknewstuff2-
3
2378 libsmokeknewstuff3-
3
2380 libsmokektexteditor3
2388 libsmokeqtnetwork4-
3
2394 libsmokeqtuitools4-
3
2406 plasma-dataengines-addons
2407 plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
2408 plasma-widget-lancelot
2409 plasma-widgets-addons
2410 plasma-widgets-workspace
2414 update-notifier-common
2417 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
2418 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
2419 differences. I have no idea what packages should be installed after
2420 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.
</p>
2426 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>.
2431 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2435 <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>
2441 <p>Most of the computers in use by the
2442 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project
</a>
2443 are virtual machines. And they have been Xen machines running on a
2444 fairly old IBM eserver xseries
345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
2445 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge
2950 host machine. This was a
2446 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
2447 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
2448 know is not supported by KVM. So to migrate, we had to convert
2449 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.
</p>
2452 <a href=
"http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
2453 nice recipe
</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
2454 migration. It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
2455 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
2456 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data. I NFS mounted the
2457 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.
</p>
2463 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/
35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
2468 if [ -z "$
1" ] ; then
2469 echo "Usage: $
0 <hostname
>"
2475 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
2476 echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
2480 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs. not sure why.
2481 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $
4} END { print int(sum *
1.05) }')
2482 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $
4} END { print int(sum *
1.05) }')
2483 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
2486 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=
1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
2487 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
2489 parted $img mklabel msdos
2490 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap
0 $disksize
2491 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
2492 parted $img set
1 boot on
2495 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
2496 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
2498 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=
1M
2499 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
2500 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
2502 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
2503 losetup -d /dev/loop0
2506 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
2507 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.
</p>
2509 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
2510 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-
686 and
2511 set up grub to boot from the disk image. After this, the KVM machines
2512 seem to work just fine.
</p>
2518 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>.
2523 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2527 <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>
2533 <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
2534 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
2535 Gnome and KDE Desktop
</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
2536 status. Here is a short update based on a test I ran
20101118.
</p>
2538 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
2539 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
2540 can see if anything should be changed.
</p>
2542 <p>This is for Gnome:
</p>
2544 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p>
2547 apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
2548 browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-
4.3 cups-pk-helper
2549 dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
2550 freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
2551 gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
2552 geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
2553 gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
2554 gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
2555 gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
2556 gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
2557 gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
2558 gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
2559 gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
2560 libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
2561 libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-
0 libboost-date-time1.42
.0
2562 libboost-python1.42
.0 libboost-thread1.42
.0 libchamplain-
0.4-
0
2563 libchamplain-gtk-
0.4-
0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-
0.10-
0
2564 libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-
1.0-
2
2565 libepc-common libepc-ui-
1.0-
2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
2566 libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
2567 libgdl-
1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-
0 libgif4
2568 libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
2569 libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
2570 libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
2571 libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
2572 libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
2573 libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
2574 libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
2575 libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
2576 libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-
6
2577 libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6
.8
2578 libpolkit-gtk-
1-
0 libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-alsa
2579 libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6
.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
2580 libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-
4
2581 libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-
0.99-
0
2582 libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
2583 mono-
2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
2584 nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
2585 openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-
4suite-xml
2586 python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
2587 python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
2588 python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
2589 python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
2590 python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
2591 python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
2592 python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
2593 python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
2594 python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
2595 python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
2596 python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
2597 python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
2598 python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
2599 remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
2600 rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
2601 software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
2602 telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-
5 telepathy-salut tomboy
2603 totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
2604 transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
2608 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
2611 arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
2612 epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
2613 fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
2614 gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
2615 gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
2616 gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
2617 guile-
1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
2618 libavahi-ui0 libbind9-
50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-
11 libcdio7
2619 libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
2620 libedata-cal1.2-
6 libedataserver1.2-
9 libeel2-
2.20 libepc-
1.0-
1
2621 libepc-ui-
1.0-
1 libexchange-storage1.2-
3 libfaad0 libgadu3
2622 libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-
3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
2623 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-
0 libgksuui1.0-
1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-
2
2624 libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-
1 libgnomeprint2.2-
0
2625 libgnomeprintui2.2-
0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-
1.0-
0
2626 libgtkhtml2-
0 libgtksourceview1.0-
0 libgtksourceview2.0-
0
2627 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
2628 libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
2629 libmagick++
10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
2630 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
2631 libnm-util0 libopal-
2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-
10 libpisock9
2632 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-
1.10.10 libraw1394-
8
2633 libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-
8
2634 libspeexdsp1 libssh2-
1 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libsvga1
2635 libswfdec-
0.6-
90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
2636 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
2637 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
2638 sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
2639 totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
2642 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p>
2645 gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
2648 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p>
2654 <p>This is for KDE:
</p>
2656 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p>
2659 autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-
4.3 dcoprss
2660 edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
2661 ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
2662 gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
2663 kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
2664 kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
2665 kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
2666 kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
2667 kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
2668 kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
2669 kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
2670 kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
2671 killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
2672 kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
2673 ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42
.0
2674 libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
2675 libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
2676 libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
2677 libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
2678 libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
2679 libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
2680 libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
2681 libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
2682 libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
2683 lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
2684 openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
2685 parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
2686 pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
2687 speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
2691 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p>
2694 amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
2695 dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
2696 kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
2697 kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
2698 keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
2699 kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
2700 kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
2701 klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
2702 kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
2703 kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
2704 kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
2705 ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
2706 ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
2707 kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
2708 kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
2709 libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
2710 libavahi-core5 libavc1394-
0 libbind9-
50 libbluetooth2
2711 libboost-python1.34
.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
2712 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
2713 libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-
0 libicu38
2714 libiec61883-
0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
2715 libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
2716 libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
2717 libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
2718 libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
2719 libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
2720 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
2721 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-
8 librss1 libsensors3
2722 libsmbios2 libssh2-
1 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libswfdec-
0.6-
90
2723 libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
2724 mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
2725 texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
2726 ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
2729 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p>
2732 dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
2733 kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
2734 kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
2735 kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
2736 netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
2737 xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
2738 xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
2741 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p>
2744 kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
2751 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>.
2756 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2760 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd
</a>
2767 <a href=
"http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
2768 call from the Gnash project
</a> for
2769 <a href=
"http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot
</a> slaves to test the
2770 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
2771 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
2772 Debian/Squeeze. I hope this can help the developers in getting new
2773 releases out more often.
</p>
2775 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
2776 I have considered setting up a
<a
2777 href=
"http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd
</a>
2778 machine as well. I have also considered using the kfreebsd
2779 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the
5
2780 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video. Because of this, I
2781 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
2782 kfreebsd. Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
2783 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
2784 screen at random locations). Have not gotten very far with the
2785 testing. Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
2786 fatal problem. Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
2787 useful as a file server for NUUG. Will try to find time to set up a
2788 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.
</p>
2794 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>.
2799 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2803 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in
3D
</a>
2809 <p><img src=
"http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
2811 <p>3D printing is just great. I just came across this Debian logo in
2813 <a href=
"http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
2814 thingiverse blog
</a>.
</p>
2820 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>.
2825 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2829 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates
2010-
10-
24</a>
2835 <p>Some updates.
</p>
2837 <p>My
<a href=
"http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge
</a> to
2838 raise money for the project is going well. The lower limit of
10
2839 signers was reached in
24 hours, and so far
13 people have signed it.
2840 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
2841 how far we can get before the time limit of December
24 is reached.
2844 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
2845 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
2846 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
2848 <a href=
"http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov
</a>,
2849 and can be used using
<tt>kcov
<directory
> <binary
></tt>.
2850 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
2851 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
2852 libglib2.0-dev. Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
2853 solvable. I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.
</p>
2855 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for
<a
2856 href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
2857 new alpha release of Debian Edu
</a>, and just published the second
2858 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
2859 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
</a>
2860 release. Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
2861 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
2862 client servers and diskless workstations. A nice touch added
2863 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
2864 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.
</p>
2870 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>.
2875 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2879 <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>
2885 <p>In the
<a href=
"http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
2886 popularity-contest numbers
</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
2887 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian. The sixth
2888 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla. This is a clear indication that
2889 working flash is important for Debian users. Around
10 percent of the
2890 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
2893 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August
2008
2894 («
<a href=
"http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
2895 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
2896 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs
</a>»), one of the most important problems
2897 schools experienced with
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
2898 Edu/Skolelinux
</a> was the lack of working Flash. A lot of educational
2899 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
2900 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
2901 good reason to stay with Windows.
</p>
2903 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
2904 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
2905 everything you told him but could work fairly well. This was a
2906 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
2907 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
2908 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
2909 example Internet Explorer
6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
2910 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
2911 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
2912 pages they want to visit.
</p>
2914 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
2915 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
2916 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
2917 Video to working out of the box. For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
2918 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
2919 the new release
0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
2920 unstable. The new version work with more sites that version
0.8.7.
2921 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
2922 release team have not had time to reply to it yet. I hope they agree
2923 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
2924 accept the new package into Squeeze.
</p>
2930 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>.
2935 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2939 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery
</a>
2945 <p>I discovered this while doing
2946 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
2947 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze
</a>. A few packages
2948 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
2949 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
2950 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.
</p>
2952 <p>An example is from todays
2953 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
2954 of KDE using aptitude
</a>. In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
2955 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade. The cause is simple. If a
2956 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
2957 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
2958 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
2959 because its dependencies are unavailable.
</p>
2961 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:
</p>
2964 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
2965 perl-modules depends on perl (
>=
5.10.1-
1); however:
2966 Version of perl on system is
5.10.0-
19lenny
2.
2967 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
2968 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
2971 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
2972 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug
</a>, and will
2973 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
2974 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
2975 failures. Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
2976 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
2977 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
2978 of dependency loops.
</p>
2981 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
2982 tireless effort by Bill Allombert
</a>, the number of circular
2984 <a href=
"http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
2985 is dropping
</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)
</p>
2987 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
2988 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier
</a> and
2989 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour
</a> between
2990 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
2991 dependency. Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
2998 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>.
3003 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3007 <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>
3014 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup
</a>
3016 <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
3018 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
3019 all
</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.
</p>
3021 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
3022 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
3023 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server. The two
3024 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.
</p>
3026 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
3027 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
3028 on a Debian Edu main-server. Here is a summary.
3030 <p><strong>powerdns
</strong></p>
3032 <a href=
"http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
3033 on how to
</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
3036 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
3037 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
3038 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
3039 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
3040 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
3041 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.
</p>
3043 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
3044 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
3045 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
3046 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
3047 "dc=
2,dc=
2,dc=
0,dc=
10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
3048 "(associateddomain=
2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry. For
3049 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
3050 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
3051 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
3052 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
3053 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
3054 spfrecord and modifytimestamp. For reverse entries it is looking for
3055 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
3056 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
3057 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp. The equivalent
3058 ldapsearch commands could look like this:
</p>
3061 ldapsearch -h ldap \
3062 -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
3063 -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
3064 cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
3065 rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
3066 nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
3067 rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
3069 ldapsearch -h ldap \
3070 -b dc=
2,dc=
2,dc=
0,dc=
10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
3071 -s base -x '(associateddomain=
2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
3072 dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
3073 hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
3074 srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
3077 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
3078 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
3079 example LDAP objects used there. In addition to these objects, the
3080 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3084 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3086 objectclass: dnsdomain
3087 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
3090 associateddomain: tjener.intern
3092 dn: dc=
2,dc=
2,dc=
0,dc=
10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3094 objectclass: dnsdomain2
3095 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
3097 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
3098 associateddomain:
2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
3101 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently. When looking for
3102 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
3103 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
3104 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
3105 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
3106 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
3107 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp. For reverse entires it also do a
3108 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=
10.0.2.2)"
3109 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
3110 modifytimestamp. In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
3111 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
3114 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
3118 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
3119 '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
3120 cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
3121 rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
3122 nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
3123 rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
3125 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
3126 '(arecord=
10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
3129 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
3130 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
3131 reverse lookups.
</p>
3133 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
3134 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
3135 need to generate a DNS reply. This make it able to work with any
3136 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.
</p>
3138 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC
1274) and
3139 dnsdomain2 schemas. The latter is used for reverse entries like
3140 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.
</p>
3142 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
3143 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
3144 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain). The use
3145 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
3146 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.
</p>
3148 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
3149 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
3150 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
3151 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
3152 (zonename and relativedomainname).
</p>
3154 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
3155 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
3156 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
3157 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
3158 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
3159 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):
</p>
3162 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
3165 MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
3166 DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
3167 TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
3168 NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
3169 A6Record $ DNAMERecord
3173 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
3174 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
3175 all the attributes PowerDNS wants. I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
3176 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
3177 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
3178 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.
</p>
3180 <p><strong>ISC dhcp
</strong></p>
3182 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
3183 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want. This
3184 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
3185 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
3186 what is needed without having to read the source code.
</p>
3188 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
3189 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
3190 stored. These are the relevant entries from
3191 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:
</p>
3194 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
3195 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
3198 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
3199 configuration it need. The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
3200 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))". The
3201 search result is this entry:
</p>
3204 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3207 objectClass: dhcpServer
3208 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3211 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
3212 subtree with DHCP configuration. The DHCP configuration subtree base
3213 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
3214 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
3215 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
3216 The search result is this entry:
</p>
3219 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3222 objectClass: dhcpService
3223 objectClass: dhcpOptions
3224 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3225 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
3226 dhcpStatements: authoritative
3227 dhcpOption: smtp-server code
69 = array of ip-address
3228 dhcpOption: www-server code
72 = array of ip-address
3229 dhcpOption: wpad-url code
252 = text
3232 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time. When
3233 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
3234 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
3235 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
3236 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost. These provide options
3237 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc. Leaving out the
3238 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
3239 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
3240 related computer objects.
</p>
3242 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
3243 of the client (
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00 in this example), using a subtree
3244 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
3245 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
3246 00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00))" as the filter. This is what a host object look
3250 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3253 objectClass: dhcpHost
3254 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00
3255 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
3258 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
3259 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
3260 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure. On the
3261 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
3262 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries. The latter should make
3263 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
3264 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
3265 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
3266 structural object class.
3268 <p><strong>Conclusion
</strong></p>
3270 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
3271 to which LDAP schemas to use. While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
3272 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
3273 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
3274 in the configuration.
</p>
3276 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
3277 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
3278 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
3279 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
3280 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
3283 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
3284 this might work for Debian Edu:
</p>
3288 cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
3289 cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
3290 cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
3291 cn=
10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
3292 cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
3293 cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
3294 cn=
192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
3295 cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
3296 ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
3297 cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
3300 <P>This is not tested yet. If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
3301 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
3302 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
3303 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.
</p>
3305 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
3309 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3312 objectClass: dhcpHost
3313 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
3314 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
3315 associateddomain: hostname.intern
3316 arecord:
10.11.12.13
3317 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00
3318 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
3321 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
3322 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
3323 auxiliary object class.
</p>
3329 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>.
3334 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3338 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects
</a>
3344 <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
3345 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
3346 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
3347 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
3348 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.
</p>
3350 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
3351 information finally found a solution that seem to work.
</p>
3353 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
3354 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry. If
3355 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
3356 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
3357 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
3358 to a slave DNS server.
</p>
3360 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
3361 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
3362 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
3363 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
3364 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup. It
3367 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
3368 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
3369 an earlier email. The combined LDAP object will look something like
3373 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3375 objectClass: dhcphost
3376 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
3377 objectclass: dnsdomainaux
3378 associateddomain: hostname.intern
3379 arecord:
10.11.12.13
3380 dhcphwaddress: ethernet
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00
3381 dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
3385 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
3386 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
3387 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress. LTSP will use
3388 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.
</p>
3390 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
3391 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
3392 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
3393 that. If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
3394 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
3395 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
3396 content. I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
3397 might be a good place to put it.
</p>
3399 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
3400 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p>
3406 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>.
3411 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3415 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP
</a>
3421 <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
3422 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
3423 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
3424 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.
</p>
3426 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
3427 to get configuration from LDAP. The idea is to look up the MAC
3428 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
3429 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
3432 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
3433 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
3434 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.
</p>
3436 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
3437 this approach. A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
3438 need to be written. Comments, suggestions, etc?
</p>
3441 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
3443 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
3445 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
3446 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
3447 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
3449 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
3450 # existence of attribute names.
3452 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
3453 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
3454 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
3456 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
3457 # configuration settings. Something like this should work:
3459 # objectclass (
1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
3462 # MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
3464 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
3465 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
3466 LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
3467 for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $
5}'|sort -u) ; do
3468 filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
3469 ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
3470 grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
3471 # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
3472 attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
3473 # bass value on to clients
3474 eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
3480 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
3481 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
3482 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
3483 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
3484 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)
</p>
3486 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
3487 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p>
3489 <p>Update
2010-
07-
17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
3490 configuration in LDAP that was created around year
2000 by
3491 <a href=
"http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
3492 Xperience, Inc.,
2000</a>. I found its
3493 <a href=
"http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files
</a> on a
3494 personal home page over at redhat.com.
</p>
3500 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>.
3505 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3509 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI
</a>
3516 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
3517 last post
</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
3518 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma. The java application
3519 <a href=
"http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer
</a> is claimed to be capable of
3520 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
3521 authenticate using Kerberos. I have only tested the Kerberos
3522 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
3523 LDAP with my test user yet. It is
3524 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
3525 Debian
</a> testing and unstable at the moment. The only problem I
3526 have with it is how it handle errors. If something go wrong, its
3527 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
3528 and remove the failing query. Nothing big, but very annoying.
</p>
3534 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>.
3539 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3543 <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>
3549 <p>Here is a short update on my
<a
3550 href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
3551 Debian Lenny-
>Squeeze upgrade testing
</a>. Here is a summary of the
3552 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude. I'm
3553 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
3554 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
3555 (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#
584861</a> and
3556 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#
585716</a>).
</p>
3558 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
3559 complete list of the installed packages. Based on this I see these
3560 differences when I did a test run today. As usual, I do not really
3561 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
3562 publish the difference.
</p>
3564 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p>
3567 at-spi cpp-
4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
3568 libatspi1.0-
0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-
1-common
3569 libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
3570 libgtksourceview-common libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-alsa
3571 libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
3572 libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
3573 python-
4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
3574 python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
3577 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p>
3580 bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
3581 gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
3582 libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-
50
3583 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-
11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
3584 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-
6 libedataserver1.2-
9
3585 libeel2-
2.20 libepc-
1.0-
1 libepc-ui-
1.0-
1 libexchange-storage1.2-
3
3586 libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-
3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
3587 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-
0 libgksuui1.0-
1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-
2
3588 libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-
1 libgnomeprint2.2-
0
3589 libgnomeprintui2.2-
0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-
0
3590 libgtksourceview1.0-
0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
3591 libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++
10
3592 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
3593 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-
2.2 libosp5
3594 libparted1.8-
10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
3595 libpt-
1.10.10 libraw1394-
8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-
8
3596 libssh2-
1 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libswfdec-
0.6-
90 libtalloc1
3597 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
3598 libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
3599 mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
3602 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p>
3605 gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
3606 python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
3607 xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
3608 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
3609 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
3610 xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
3611 xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
3612 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
3613 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
3614 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
3615 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
3616 xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
3617 xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
3618 xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
3619 xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
3620 xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
3621 xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
3622 xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
3623 xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
3624 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
3625 xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
3628 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p>
3631 deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
3632 xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
3633 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
3636 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
3637 <a href=
"http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
3638 in git
</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
3639 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
3640 the difference somewhat.
3646 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>.
3651 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3655 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI
</a>
3661 <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
3662 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
3663 tool to browse the LDAP tree. The only one I was able to find in
3664 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
3665 <a href=
"http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA
</a>, which has proved to
3666 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
3667 populated by default in Skolelinux. Thanks to it, I have been able to
3668 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
3669 objects. It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze. If you
3670 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)
</p>
3672 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
3673 the BTS yet. There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
3674 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
3675 Debian submenu in KDE. I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
3678 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet. I would
3679 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
3680 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet. So in the mean time, I use
3681 <a href=
"http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi
</a> for that.
</p>
3683 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
3684 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p>
3686 <p>Update
2010-
06-
29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
3687 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq
</a> package as a
3688 useful GUI alternative. It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
3689 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze. Unless that
3690 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.
</p>
3696 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>.
3701 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3705 <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>
3712 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
3713 about the fact
</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
3714 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
3715 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.
</p>
3717 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
3718 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
3719 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
3720 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.
</p>
3722 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
3723 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
3724 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
3727 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
3729 <a href=
"http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
3730 schema
</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
3731 available today from IETF.
</p>
3734 --- dhcp.schema (revision
65192)
3735 +++ dhcp.schema (working copy)
3737 objectclass (
2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
3739 DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
3743 MAY (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
3744 X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
3747 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
3748 Edu/Squeeze. We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
3749 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.
</p>
3751 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
3752 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p>
3758 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>.
3763 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3767 <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>
3773 <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
3774 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run. Until now,
3775 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
3776 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
3777 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
3781 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
3782 tasksel --new-install
3785 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
3786 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
3787 any output what so ever.
3789 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
3790 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
3791 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
3792 happen. Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
3793 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
3794 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run. I ended up using
3798 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
3799 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
3803 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "
<tt>aptitude -q
3804 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
3805 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
3806 ~pimportant
</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
3807 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
3808 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
3811 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
3812 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
3819 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>.
3824 <div class="padding
"></div>
3828 <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>
3835 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html
">testing
3836 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
3837 finally made the upgrade logs available from
3838 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/
">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
3839 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
3840 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting. This time
3841 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
3843 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
3844 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze. The
3845 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
3846 xserver-xorg-video* drivers. Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
3847 sure why. When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
3848 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
3849 longer needed. Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
3850 I do not know. Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
3852 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
3853 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
3854 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
3857 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
3858 and avoided, and perhaps others as well. Here are the complete list
3859 of planned removals. The complete logs is available from the URL
3860 above. Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
3861 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
3862 conffile questions. No idea why. I worked around it by using
3863 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
3866 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
3867 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
3868 gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
3869 iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
3870 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
3871 nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
3872 serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
3873 xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
3874 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
3875 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
3876 xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
3877 xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
3878 xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
3879 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
3880 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
3881 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
3882 xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
3883 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
3884 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
3885 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
3886 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
3887 xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
3888 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
3889 xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
3890 xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
3891 xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
3892 xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
3893 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
3894 xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
3895 xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
3897 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
3899 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
3900 djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
3901 gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
3902 gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
3903 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
3904 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
3905 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
3906 libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
3907 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
3908 libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
3909 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
3910 libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
3911 libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
3912 libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
3913 libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
3914 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
3915 libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
3916 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
3917 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
3918 libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
3919 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
3920 libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
3921 libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
3922 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
3923 openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
3924 python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
3925 python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
3926 python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
3927 swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
3928 xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
3929 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
3932 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
3934 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
3935 kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
3936 kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
3937 kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
3938 kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
3939 libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
3940 xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
3941 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
3942 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
3943 xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
3944 xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
3945 xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
3946 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
3947 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
3948 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
3949 xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
3950 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
3951 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
3952 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
3953 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
3954 xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
3955 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
3956 xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
3957 xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
3958 xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
3959 xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
3960 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
3961 xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
3963 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
3964 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
3965 djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
3966 ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
3967 kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
3968 kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
3969 kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
3970 kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
3971 kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
3972 kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
3973 kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
3974 kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
3975 klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
3976 kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
3977 krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
3978 ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
3979 kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
3980 kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
3981 libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
3982 libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
3983 libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
3984 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
3985 libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
3986 libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
3987 libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
3988 libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
3989 libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
3990 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
3991 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
3992 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
3993 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
3994 libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
3995 openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
3996 superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
3997 texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
3998 xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
3999 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
4007 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>.
4012 <div class="padding
"></div>
4016 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html
">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
4022 <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
4023 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly. A few bugs
4024 have been discovered and reported in the process
4025 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/
585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
4026 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/
584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
4027 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/
584861">#584861</a> in
4028 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
4029 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
4031 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
4032 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
4033 it. To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
4034 script is inserted. To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
4035 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
4036 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
4038 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
4039 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
4040 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
4041 is created. The bug report
4042 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/
566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
4043 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
4044 to make sure the upgrade go well. Testing on virtual and real
4045 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
4046 do the trick in such settings anyway. This is a
4047 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-
26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-
804130/
">known
4048 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
4049 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
4050 working with old kernels or something like that. I really wish the
4051 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
4052 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
4053 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
4056 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades. This test
4057 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
4075 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
4076 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
4078 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
4079 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
4080 cat
> $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
<<EOF
4084 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
4088 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
4089 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
4090 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
4092 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
4094 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger. It need the test scripts
4095 # to return the correct answers.
4096 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
4097 chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
4099 # Include the desktop and laptop task
4100 for test in desktop laptop ; do
4101 echo
> $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
<<EOF
4105 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
4108 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
4109 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
4110 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
4111 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
4113 echo deb $mirror $to main
> $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
4114 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
4115 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
4116 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
4120 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
4121 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
4122 differently so far. I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
4123 regularly and post the result on the web. The Gnome upgrade currently
4124 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
4125 kdebase-workspace-data
</p>
4127 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
4128 (KDE
167 KiB, Gnome
516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
4129 post, so I will refrain from trying. I can report that for Gnome,
4130 aptitude report
760 packages upgraded,
448 newly installed,
129 to
4131 remove and
1 not upgraded and
1024MB need to be downloaded while for
4132 KDE the same numbers are
702 packages upgraded,
507 newly installed,
4133 193 to remove and
0 not upgraded and
1117MB need to be downloaded
</p>
4135 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
4136 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
4137 booting without a hitch. Was unsure if there were still bugs with
4138 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
4139 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
4146 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>.
4151 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4155 <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>
4161 <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
4162 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
4163 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd. The packages with such
4164 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
4165 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart. Because of
4166 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
4167 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.
</p>
4169 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
4170 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
4179 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
4181 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
4184 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
4188 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-
2.88
4195 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
4196 sysvinit are not set by upstart. Not sure if it is intentional or not
4197 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.
</p>
4199 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
4200 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
4207 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>.
4212 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4216 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...
</a>
4223 <a href=
"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
4224 of Rob Weir
</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
4225 <a href=
"http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
4226 Standards Wars
</a> (PDF
25 pages). I recommend it for everyone
4227 following the standards wars of today.
</p>
4233 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>.
4238 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4242 <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>
4248 <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
4249 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
4250 information extracted from each machine. The script to do so is
4251 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
4252 the Skolelinux build servers:
</p>
4255 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
4257 Dell Computer Corporation
1
4260 eserver xSeries
345 -[
8670M1X]-
1
4266 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
4267 provided in each machine. Here there are Intel machines without model
4268 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
4269 machines listed as [no-dmi-info]. One can add -l as a command line
4270 option to list the individual machines.
</p>
4273 <a href=
"http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
4274 city of Narvik
</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
4275 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly. In their report there
4276 are ~
1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
4277 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
4278 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
4285 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>.
4290 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4294 <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>
4300 <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
4301 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled. The
4302 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
4303 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
4306 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
4307 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#
583312</a> initially filed
4308 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
4309 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
4310 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#
524751</a> initially filed against
4311 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.
</p>
4313 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
4314 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
4315 distribution work out of the box for these users. The nvidia driver
4316 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
4317 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
4318 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
4319 distribution that work for them. I have no idea what the solution is,
4320 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.
</p>
4322 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.
</p>
4328 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>.
4333 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4337 <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>
4343 <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
4344 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
4345 issues are known and should be solved:
4349 <li>The wicd package seen to
4350 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting
</a> and
4351 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup
</a> when
4352 parallel booting is enabled. No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
4353 seem to be on the case.
</li>
4355 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
4356 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition
</a>
4357 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect. The
4358 maintainer is on the case.
</li>
4360 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
4361 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
4362 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back
</a> to
4363 sysv-rc. One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
4364 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
4365 sysv-rc more robust. Will investigate some more and probably upload a
4366 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
4367 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.
</li>
4371 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
4372 solvable before Squeeze is released. In addition to these there are
4373 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
4374 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.
</p>
4376 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
4377 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
4378 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
4379 list of usertagged bugs related to this
</a>.
</p>
4381 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.
</p>
4387 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>.
4392 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4396 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer
</a>
4402 <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
4403 found time today to return to the project. Having to spend less time
4404 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
4405 definitely helped freeing some time.
</p>
4407 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu. We
4408 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
4409 get disk and network controllers working. Without having these
4410 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
4411 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
4412 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
4413 an external medium is a support pain. Initially, I expected it to be
4414 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
4415 debian-installer to find and use them. This proved to be wrong.
4416 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
4417 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
4418 /cdrom/firmware/). This also proved to not work, and at this point I
4419 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
4422 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
4423 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
4424 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
4425 packages. It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
4426 "external" media devices. Today I changed it to also look in the
4427 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
4428 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu. I also changed it to
4429 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
4430 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
4431 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
4434 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
4435 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
4436 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
4437 run these before activating the firmware during installation. The
4438 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
4439 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.
</p>
4441 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
4442 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.
</p>
4448 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>.
4453 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4457 <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>
4463 <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
4464 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
4465 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
4466 expected, if I am to believe the
4467 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
4468 on debian-devel@
</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
4469 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
4470 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen. If serious problems are
4471 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
4472 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
4475 More information about
4476 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
4477 based boot sequencing
</a> is available from the Debian wiki. It is
4478 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
4479 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:
</p>
4485 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
4486 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
4487 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
4488 list of usertagged bugs related to this
</a>.
</p>
4494 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>.
4499 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4503 <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>
4509 <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
4510 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
4511 system
</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
4512 network. Each machine will automatically report its status to the
4513 central server after boot and once per night. The network setup is
4514 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
4515 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines. This is useful
4516 to update the DHCP configuration.
</p>
4518 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
4519 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary. Run
4520 this on the collector host:
</p>
4523 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
4526 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
4527 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.
</p>
4529 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
4530 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
4531 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
4532 tables in LDAP using this information. Such tool is unfortunately not
4539 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>.
4544 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4548 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart
</a>
4554 <p>The last few days a new boot system called
4555 <a href=
"http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd
</a>
4557 <a href=
"http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced
</a>
4559 to the free software world. I have not yet had time to play around
4560 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
4561 <a href=
"http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart
</a>, and might prove to be
4562 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
4563 based boot system. Tollef is
4564 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process
</a> of getting
4565 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work. I
4566 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
4567 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
4568 at the moment do not.
</p>
4570 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
4571 platform support. It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
4572 some new kernel features enabled to function properly. This means
4573 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
4574 system. Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
4577 <p>In the mean time, based on the
4578 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
4579 on debian-devel@
</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
4580 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
4581 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
4582 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies. A
4583 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
4584 already in experimental. If all go well, Squeeze will be released
4585 with parallel booting enabled by default.
</p>
4591 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>.
4596 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4600 <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>
4606 <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
4607 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
4608 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies. If you want
4609 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
4610 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
4611 based boot sequencing
</a> is enabled, and add this line to
4612 /etc/default/rcS:
</p>
4615 CONCURRENCY=makefile
4618 <p>That is it. It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
4619 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
4620 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
4621 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts. Startpar is configured
4622 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
4623 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
4624 make this happen.
</p>
4626 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result. If some services
4627 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
4628 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
4629 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies). Report bugs and get
4630 the package maintainers to fix it. :)
</p>
4632 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
4633 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct. I
4634 expect we will get there in Squeeze+
1, if we get manage to test and
4635 fix the remaining issues.
</p>
4637 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
4638 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
4639 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
4640 list of usertagged bugs related to this
</a>.
</p>
4646 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>.
4651 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4655 <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>
4661 <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version
2.87dsf-
2,
4662 and the upload of insserv version
1.12.0-
10 yesterday, Debian unstable
4663 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing. This
4664 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
4665 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
4666 installation. Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
4667 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.
</p>
4669 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
4670 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
4671 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.
</p>
4677 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>.
4682 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4686 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development
</a>
4692 <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
4693 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
4694 take over the package and become the new upstream. The number of
4695 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
4696 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
4697 the package up to date.
</p>
4699 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
4700 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman. About
10 days ago, I made
4701 a new upstream tarball with version number
2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
4702 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
4703 distributions. We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
4704 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge. Since the
4705 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
4706 upstream project at
<a href=
"http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah
</a>, and continue
4707 development there. The project is registered and currently waiting
4708 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
4709 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
4710 working on the future release.
</p>
4712 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
4713 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.
</p>
4719 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>.
4724 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4728 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker
</a>
4734 <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
4735 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
4736 could find more ways to speed up the boot system. This was an Ubuntu
4738 <a href=
"https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
4739 gathering
</a>. It was quite productive. We also discussed the future
4740 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
4741 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
4742 asynchronous and event base. The Ubuntu approach using udev and
4743 upstart might be a good way forward. Time will show.
</p>
4745 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
4746 process in Debian. All of these should be applied to get a quick
4751 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.
</li>
4753 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
4754 clock is in UTC.
</li>
4756 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
4757 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
4758 based boot sequencing
</a>, and enable concurrent booting.
</li>
4762 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
4763 <a href=
"http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
4766 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
4767 unstable yesterday. When we tested it, we were able to cut
6 seconds
4768 from the boot sequence. It depend on very correct dependency
4769 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
4770 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
4773 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
4774 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
4775 startup speed as well. Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
4776 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
4777 possible to run a of them in the same process. A quick way to test
4778 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
4779 insserv'. Will need to test if that work. :)
</p>
4785 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>.
4790 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4794 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/BSAs_p_stander_om_piratkopiering_m_ter_motstand.html">BSAs påstander om piratkopiering møter motstand
</a>
4800 <p>Hvert år de siste årene har BSA, lobbyfronten til de store
4801 programvareselskapene som Microsoft og Apple, publisert en rapport der
4802 de gjetter på hvor mye piratkopiering påfører i tapte inntekter i
4803 ulike land rundt om i verden. Resultatene er tendensiøse. For noen
4805 <a href=
"http://global.bsa.org/globalpiracy2008/studies/globalpiracy2008.pdf">siste
4806 rapport
</a>, og det er flere kritiske kommentarer publisert de siste
4807 dagene. Et spesielt interessant kommentar fra Sverige,
4808 <a href=
"http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.229795/bsa-hoftade-sverigesiffror">BSA
4809 höftade Sverigesiffror
</a>, oppsummeres slik:
</p>
4812 I sin senaste rapport slår BSA fast att
25 procent av all mjukvara i
4813 Sverige är piratkopierad. Det utan att ha pratat med ett enda svenskt
4814 företag. "Man bör nog kanske inte se de här siffrorna som helt
4815 exakta", säger BSAs Sverigechef John Hugosson.
4818 <p>Mon tro om de er like metodiske når de gjetter på andelen piratkopiering i Norge? To andre kommentarer er
<a
4819 href=
"http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/comment/2242134/bsa-piracy-figures-shot-reality">BSA
4820 piracy figures need a shot of reality
</a> og
<a
4821 href=
"http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3958/125/">Does The WIPO
4822 Copyright Treaty Work?
</a></p>
4824 <p>Fant lenkene via
<a
4825 href=
"http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/17/1632242">oppslag
4826 på Slashdot
</a>.
</p>
4832 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>.
4837 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4841 <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>
4848 <a href=
"http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10216873-16.html">interessante
4849 tall
</a> fra IDG om utviklingen av linuxservermarkedet. Fikk meg til
4850 å tenke på antall tjenermaskiner ved Universitetet i Oslo der jeg
4851 jobber til daglig. En rask opptelling forteller meg at vi har
490
4852 (
61%) fysiske unix-tjener (mest linux men også noen solaris) og
196
4853 (
25%) windowstjenere, samt
112 (
14%) virtuelle unix-tjenere. Med den
4854 bakgrunnskunnskapen kan jeg godt tro at IDG er inne på noe.
</p>
4860 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>.
4865 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4869 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kryptert_harddisk___naturligvis.html">Kryptert harddisk - naturligvis
</a>
4875 <p><a href=
"http://www.dagensit.no/trender/article1658676.ece">Dagens
4876 IT melder
</a> at Intel hevder at det er dyrt å miste en datamaskin,
4877 når en tar tap av arbeidstid, fortrolige dokumenter,
4878 personopplysninger og alt annet det innebærer. Det er ingen tvil om
4879 at det er en kostbar affære å miste sin datamaskin, og det er årsaken
4880 til at jeg har kryptert harddisken på både kontormaskinen og min
4881 bærbare. Begge inneholder personopplysninger jeg ikke ønsker skal
4882 komme på avveie, den første informasjon relatert til jobben min ved
4883 Universitetet i Oslo, og den andre relatert til blant annet
4884 foreningsarbeide. Kryptering av diskene gjør at det er lite
4885 sannsynlig at dophoder som kan finne på å rappe maskinene får noe ut
4886 av dem. Maskinene låses automatisk etter noen minutter uten bruk,
4887 og en reboot vil gjøre at de ber om passord før de vil starte opp.
4888 Jeg bruker Debian på begge maskinene, og installasjonssystemet der
4889 gjør det trivielt å sette opp krypterte disker. Jeg har LVM på toppen
4890 av krypterte partisjoner, slik at alt av datapartisjoner er kryptert.
4891 Jeg anbefaler alle å kryptere diskene på sine bærbare. Kostnaden når
4892 det er gjort slik jeg gjør det er minimale, og gevinstene er
4893 betydelige. En bør dog passe på passordet. Hvis det går tapt, må
4894 maskinen reinstalleres og alt er tapt.
</p>
4896 <p>Krypteringen vil ikke stoppe kompetente angripere som f.eks. kjøler
4897 ned minnebrikkene før maskinen rebootes med programvare for å hente ut
4898 krypteringsnøklene. Kostnaden med å forsvare seg mot slike angripere
4899 er for min del høyere enn gevinsten. Jeg tror oddsene for at
4900 f.eks. etteretningsorganisasjoner har glede av å titte på mine
4901 maskiner er minimale, og ulempene jeg ville oppnå ved å forsøke å
4902 gjøre det vanskeligere for angripere med kompetanse og ressurser er
4909 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>.
4914 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4918 <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>
4924 <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
4925 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
4926 do not yet know them.
</p>
4928 <p>The first one is
<a href=
"http://valgrind.org/">valgrind
</a>, a
4929 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
4930 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
4931 and it will report any problems on stdout. It is even better if the
4932 program include debug information. With debug information, it is able
4933 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
4934 occurs. It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
4935 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
4936 'using uninitialised value in control logic'. This tool has made it
4937 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
4938 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
4940 <p>The second one is
4941 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity
</a> which is
4942 a source code checker. It is able to process the source of a program
4943 and find problems in the logic without running the program. It
4944 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
4945 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel. It is now a commercial tool
4946 and the company behind it is running
4947 <a href=
"http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service
</a> for the
4948 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
4949 their source checked for free. Several thousand defects have been
4950 found and fixed so far. It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
4951 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
4952 Y lines O to P can never be executed'. The projects included in the
4953 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
4954 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.
</p>
4956 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
4957 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
4958 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
4959 surrounded by today.
</p>
4965 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>.
4970 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4974 <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>
4981 <a href=
"http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
4982 patch is better than a useless patch
</a>. I completely disagree, as a
4983 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
4984 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
4985 time on fixing it. No patch do not provide any of these positive
4992 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>.
4997 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5001 <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>
5007 <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
5008 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure. It is the
5009 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
5010 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
5011 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
5012 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
5013 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
5016 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
5017 independently of the server applications. One can even allow users to
5018 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
5019 protocol and format. In the normal case, only one client application
5020 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
5021 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
5022 blocked from doing so.
</p>
5024 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
5025 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
5026 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
5027 requirements change.
</p>
5029 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
5030 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
5031 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.
</p>
5037 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>.
5042 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5046 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering
</a>
5052 <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
5053 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering. I got a bit done tuning the
5054 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
5055 implementation avahi. It look like it could be useful for us. Almost
5056 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
5057 get to know the Skolelinux system. Walter Bender, involved in the
5058 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
5059 also helped me improve my OLPC installation. He also showed me that
5060 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
5061 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian. As a
5062 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu. We also
5063 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
5064 proved to be too hard for us. The application seem to need more work
5065 before it is ready for me. I look forward to getting home and relax
5072 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>.
5077 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5081 <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>
5087 <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
5088 optimal. There is RFC
2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
5089 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC
2307bis, with
5090 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory. The RFC
5091 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
5092 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.
</p>
5094 <p>In
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux
</a>,
5095 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
5096 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
5097 and LTSP configuration in LDAP. These objects have a lot in common,
5098 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
5099 object per entity. For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
5100 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
5101 DNS information and another with DHCP information. The schemas
5102 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
5103 object. In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
5104 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
5105 It just do not scale. I believe it is time for a few RFC
5106 specifications to cleam up this mess.
</p>
5108 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
5109 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
5110 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
5111 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.
</p>
5113 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
5114 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.
</p>
5116 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
5117 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up. Time to start a
5118 new IETF work group?
</p>
5124 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>.
5129 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5133 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Endelig_er_Debian_Lenny_gitt_ut.html">Endelig er Debian Lenny gitt ut
</a>
5139 <p>Endelig er
<a href=
"http://www.debian.org/">Debian
</a>
5140 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090214">Lenny
</a> gitt ut.
5141 Et langt steg videre for Debian-prosjektet, og en rekke nye
5142 programpakker blir nå tilgjengelig for de av oss som bruker den
5143 stabile utgaven av Debian. Neste steg er nå å få
5144 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
</a> /
5145 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu
</a> ferdig
5146 oppdatert for den nye utgaven, slik at en oppdatert versjon kan
5147 slippes løs på skolene. Takk til alle debian-utviklerne som har
5148 gjort dette mulig. Endelig er f.eks. fungerende avhengighetsstyrt
5149 bootsekvens tilgjengelig i stabil utgave, vha pakken
5150 <tt>insserv
</tt>.
</p>
5156 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>.
5161 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5165 <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>
5171 <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
5172 Oslo. Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
5173 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
5174 LTSP installation. LTSP now work out of the box on the
10-network.
5175 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
5176 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box. Was working on getting the
5177 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
5178 finish it before the weekend was up.
</p>
5180 <p>Did not find time to look at the
4 VGA cards in one box we got from
5181 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
5182 development gathering. Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
5183 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
5190 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>.
5195 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5199 <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>
5205 <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
5206 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
5207 default in Debian Edu. We need an embedded video playing plugin with
5208 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
5209 all the multimedia content available on the web. The test results and
5210 notes are available on
5211 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
5212 Debian wiki
</a>. I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
5213 fill this need. My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
5214 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages. A lot of the MIME
5215 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
5216 video/ogg), just do not work. And simple formats like the
5217 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
5218 totem and vlc plugins. I hope the situation will improve soon. No
5219 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.
</p>
5221 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin. It seem to
5222 be the only one fitting our needs. :/
</p>
5228 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>.
5233 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5235 <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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7)
</a></li>
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"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (
10)
</a></li>
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17)
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</a></li>
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</a></li>
5386 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (
1)
</a></li>
5388 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (
4)
</a></li>
5390 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (
5)
</a></li>
5392 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (
12)
</a></li>
5394 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (
2)
</a></li>
5396 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (
65)
</a></li>
5398 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (
118)
</a></li>
5400 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (
9)
</a></li>
5402 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (
7)
</a></li>
5404 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (
4)
</a></li>
5406 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (
171)
</a></li>
5408 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (
21)
</a></li>
5410 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (
12)
</a></li>
5412 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (
10)
</a></li>
5414 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (
9)
</a></li>
5416 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (
32)
</a></li>
5418 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (
17)
</a></li>
5420 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (
8)
</a></li>
5422 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (
6)
</a></li>
5424 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (
1)
</a></li>
5426 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (
25)
</a></li>
5428 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (
219)
</a></li>
5430 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (
148)
</a></li>
5432 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (
6)
</a></li>
5434 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (
2)
</a></li>
5436 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (
41)
</a></li>
5438 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (
61)
</a></li>
5440 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (
1)
</a></li>
5442 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (
11)
</a></li>
5444 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (
2)
</a></li>
5446 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (
6)
</a></li>
5448 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (
1)
</a></li>
5450 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (
4)
</a></li>
5452 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (
2)
</a></li>
5454 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (
28)
</a></li>
5456 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (
4)
</a></li>
5458 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (
4)
</a></li>
5460 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (
39)
</a></li>
5462 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (
3)
</a></li>
5464 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (
5)
</a></li>
5466 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (
12)
</a></li>
5468 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (
1)
</a></li>
5470 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (
7)
</a></li>
5472 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (
35)
</a></li>
5474 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (
4)
</a></li>
5476 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (
26)
</a></li>
5482 <p style=
"text-align: right">
5483 Created by
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