<link></link>
<atom:link href="index.rss" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
+ <item>
+ <title>Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</title>
+ <link>Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sun, 29 Mar 2009 21:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description>
+<p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
+Edu/Skolelinux development gathering. I got a bit done tuning the
+desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
+implementation avahi. It look like it could be useful for us. Almost
+30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
+get to know the Skolelinux system. Walter Bender, involved in the
+development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
+also helped me improve my OLPC installation. He also showed me that
+his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
+agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian. As a
+standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu. We also
+tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
+proved to be too hard for us. The application seem to need more work
+before it is ready for me. I look forward to getting home and relax
+now. :)</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Time for new LDAP schemas replacing RFC 2307?</title>
+ <link>Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sun, 29 Mar 2009 20:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description>
+<p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
+optimal. There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
+LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
+some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory. The RFC
+specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
+not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
+
+<p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
+we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
+filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
+and LTSP configuration in LDAP. These objects have a lot in common,
+but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
+object per entity. For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
+objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
+DNS information and another with DHCP information. The schemas
+provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
+object. In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
+netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
+It just do not scale. I believe it is time for a few RFC
+specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
+
+<p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
+the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
+(mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
+It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
+
+<p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
+computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
+
+<p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
+in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up. Time to start a
+new IETF work group?</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
<item>
<title>Hva er egentlig en åpen standard?</title>
<link>Hva_er_egentlig_en___pen_standard_.html</link>
</description>
</item>
- <item>
- <title>Teknisk program for Go Open 2009 er nesten ferdig</title>
- <link>Teknisk_program_for_Go_Open_2009_er_nesten_ferdig.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">Teknisk_program_for_Go_Open_2009_er_nesten_ferdig.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Thu, 5 Mar 2009 22:30:00 +0100</pubDate>
- <description>
-<p>Etter lang tids jobbing begynner endelig programmet til det
-tekniske sporet på konferansen <a href="http://www.goopen.no/">Go Open
-2009</a> å bli ferdig. Det blir 9 punkter på programmet, og etter alt
-å dømme blir det disse 9:</p>
-
-<ul>
-
-<li>"Open Telephony: A solution greater than the sum of its parts" med
- Jon "maddog" Hall</li>
-<li>OpenSolaris-relatert med Ian Murdock fra SUN</li>
-<li>"The inner workings of the OpenStreetmap project and the
- technology used" med Andy Allan </li>
-<li>Coreboot-relatert med Peter Stuge</li>
-<li>"Gratis værdata fra Meteorologisk institutt" med Trond Michelsen</li>
-<li>RRDtool/Nagios-relatert med Tobias Oetiker</li>
-<li>"Developers guide to server-side productivity and fun using open
- source platforms and frameworks" med en gjeng folk fra
- JavaBin-miljøet</li>
-<li>"G(et)it Nå!" med Marcus Ramberg</li>
-<li>Om kontrolltelling av valgresultater med fri programvare med Mitch
- Trachtenberg</li>
-
-</ul>
-
-<p>De siste bekreftelsene og overskrifter mangler og kommer
-forhåpentlig på plass før mandag, men jeg håper dette blir et program
-flere enn meg vil sette pris på. Jeg gleder meg i hvert fall
-stort.</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-
- <item>
- <title>Checking server hardware support status for Dell, HP and IBM servers</title>
- <link>Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2009 23:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
- <description>
-<p>At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
-of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
-contract expire for each server. We have a machine (and service)
-register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
-machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
-each machine. To make it easier for us to track support contract
-status, I've recently spent time on extending the machine register to
-include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
-machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
-machines. I extended a perl script already being used to import
-information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
-scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
-are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
-for the relevant machines. This make the support status information
-easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
-owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
-The result of this work documented that 27% of the machines in the
-registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
-them. 27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
-using machines a bit longer than the 3 years a normal support contract
-last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
-services. After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
-at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
-them break down. When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
-parts from other machines or move the service to another old
-machine.</p>
-
-<p>I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
-written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
-Werner Forsbring. The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
-nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
-scraping was written by me based on the Dell code. I know the HTML
-parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
-introduce more dependencies. This is the current incarnation:</p>
-
-<pre>
-use LWP::Simple;
-use POSIX;
-use WWW::Mechanize;
-use Date::Parse;
-[...]
-sub get_support_info {
- my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
- my $str;
-
- if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
- # fetch website from Dell support
- my $url = "http://support.euro.dell.com/support/topics/topic.aspx/emea/shared/support/my_systems_info/no/details?c=no&amp;cs=nodhs1&amp;l=no&amp;s=dhs&amp;ServiceTag=$serial";
- my $webpage = get($url);
- return undef unless ($webpage);
-
- my $daysleft = -1;
- my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
- foreach my $line (@lines) {
- next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
- $line =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
- $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$1/;
-
- my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
- @f = @f[13 .. $#f];
- my $lastend = "";
- while ($f[3] eq "DELL") {
- my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[0, 5, 7, 10];
-
- my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
- localtime(str2time($startstr)));
- my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
- localtime(str2time($endstr)));
- $str .= "$type $start -> $end ";
- @f = @f[14 .. $#f];
- $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
- }
- my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
- tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
- if ($lastend lt $today);
- }
- } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
- my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
- my $url =
- 'http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do';
- $mech->get($url);
- my $fields = {
- 'BODServiceID' => 'NA',
- 'RegisteredPurchaseDate' => '',
- 'country' => 'NO',
- 'productNumber' => $productnumber,
- 'serialNumber1' => $serial,
- };
- $mech->submit_form( form_number => 2,
- fields => $fields );
- # Next step is screen scraping
- my $content = $mech->content();
-
- $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
- $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
- $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
- $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
-
- my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
-
- while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
- my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
- m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
- $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
- my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
- localtime(str2time($startstr)));
- my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
- localtime(str2time($stopstr)));
-
- $str .= "$type ($status) $start -> $end ";
-
- tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
- if ($end lt $today);
- }
- } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
- # This code ignore extended support contracts.
- my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{4}).+\]-/;
- if ($producttype &amp;&amp; $serial) {
- my $content =
- get("http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty&amp;brandind=5000008&amp;Submit=Submit&amp;type=$producttype&amp;serial=$serial");
- if ($content) {
- $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
- $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
- $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
- $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
-
- $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
- my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;
-
- $str .= "($status) -> $end ";
-
- my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
- tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
- if ($end lt $today);
- }
- }
- }
- return $str;
-}
-</pre>
-
-<p>Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
-serial numbers. The information passed in as arguments are fetched
-from dmidecode.</p>
-
-<pre>
-print get_support_info("hp.host", "HP ProLiant BL460c G1", "1234567890"
- "447707-B21");
-print get_support_info("dell.host", "Dell Inc. PowerEdge 2950", "1234567");
-print get_support_info("ibm.host", "IBM eserver xSeries 345 -[867061X]-",
- "1234567");
-</pre>
-
-<p>I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
-everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)</p>
-
-<p>Update 2009-03-06: The IBM page do not include extended support
-contracts, so it is useless in that case. The original Dell code do
-not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
-do so.</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-
</channel>
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