<channel>
<title>Petter Reinholdtsen</title>
<description></description>
- <link></link>
- <atom:link href="index.rss" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>
+ <atom:link href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/index.rss" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
<item>
- <title>Relative popularity of document formats (MS Office vs. ODF)</title>
- <link>Relative_popularity_of_document_formats__MS_Office_vs__ODF_.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">Relative_popularity_of_document_formats__MS_Office_vs__ODF_.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <title>Togsatsing på norsk, mot sykkel</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Togsatsing_p___norsk__mot_sykkel.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Togsatsing_p___norsk__mot_sykkel.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 2 Jun 2010 23:45:00 +0200</pubDate>
<description>
-<p>Just for fun, I did a search right now on Google for a few file ODF
-and MS Office based formats, to get an idea of their relative usage.
-I searched using 'filetype:odt' and equvalent terms, and got these
-results:</P>
-
-<table>
-<tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
-<tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:282000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
-<tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:75600</td> <td>pptx:183000</td></tr>
-<tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500 </td> <td>xlsx:145000</td></tr>
-</table>
-
-<p>Next, I added a 'site:no' limit to get the numbers for Norway, and
-got these numbers:</p>
-
-<table>
-<tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
-<tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480 </td> <td>docx:4460</td></tr>
-<tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:299 </td> <td>pptx:741</td></tr>
-<tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:187 </td> <td>xlsx:372</td></tr>
-</table>
-
-<p>I wonder how these numbers change over time.</p>
-
-<p>I am aware of Google returning different results and numbers based
-on where the search is done, so I guess these numbers will differ if
-they are conduced in another country. Because of this, I did the same
-search from a machine in California, USA, a few minutes after the
-search done from a machine here in Norway.</p>
-
-
-<table>
-<tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
-<tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:129000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
-<tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:44200</td> <td>pptx:93900</td></tr>
-<tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500 </td> <td>xlsx:82400</td></tr>
-</table>
-
-<p>And with 'site:no':
-
-<table>
-<tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
-<tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480</td> <td>docx:3410</td></tr>
-<tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:175</td> <td>pptx:604</td></tr>
-<tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:186 </td> <td>xlsx:296</td></tr>
-</table>
-
-<p>Interesting difference, not sure what to conclude from these
-numbers.</p>
+<p>Det står dårlig til med toget når en finner på å la det
+<a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/article3677060.ece">kappkjøre
+med sykkel</a>... Jeg tror det trengs strukturendringer for å få
+fikset på togproblemene i Norge.</p>
+
+<p>Mon tro hva toglinje mellom Narvik og Tromsø ville hatt slags
+effekt på området der?</p>
</description>
</item>
<item>
- <title>ISO still hope to fix OOXML</title>
- <link>ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Sat, 8 Aug 2009 14:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <title>KDM fail at boot with NVidia cards - and no one try to fix it?</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Tue, 1 Jun 2010 17:05:00 +0200</pubDate>
<description>
-<p>According to <a
-href="http://twerner.blogspot.com/2009/08/defects-of-office-open-xml.html">a
-blog post from Torsten Werner</a>, the current defect report for ISO
-29500 (ISO OOXML) is 809 pages. His interesting point is that the
-defect report is 71 pages more than the full ODF 1.1 specification.
-Personally I find it more interesting that ISO still believe ISO OOXML
-can be fixed in ISO. Personally, I believe it is broken beyon repair,
-and I completely lack any trust in ISO for being able to get anywhere
-close to solving the problems. I was part of the Norwegian committee
-involved in the OOXML fast track process, and was not impressed with
-Standard Norway and ISO in how they handled it.</p>
-
-<p>These days I focus on ODF instead, which seem like a specification
-with the future ahead of it. We are working in NUUG to organise a ODF
-seminar this autumn.</p>
+<p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
+start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled. The
+problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
+initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
+wait.</p>
+
+<p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
+against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
+that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
+kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
+
+<p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
+problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
+distribution work out of the box for these users. The nvidia driver
+maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
+the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
+while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
+distribution that work for them. I have no idea what the solution is,
+but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
+
+<p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
</description>
</item>
<item>
- <title>Debian has switched to dependency based boot sequencing</title>
- <link>Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Mon, 27 Jul 2009 23:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <title>Parallellized boot seem to hold up well in Debian/testing</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Thu, 27 May 2010 23:55:00 +0200</pubDate>
<description>
-<p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
-and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
-have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing. This
-conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
-It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
-installation. Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
-are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
-
-<p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
-fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
-non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
+<p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
+The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
+issues are known and should be solved:
+
+<p><ul>
+
+<li>The wicd package seen to
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
+parallel booting is enabled. No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
+seem to be on the case.</li>
+
+<li>The nvidia X driver seem to
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
+triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect. The
+maintainer is on the case.</li>
+
+<li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
+sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
+sysv-rc. One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
+/etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
+sysv-rc more robust. Will investigate some more and probably upload a
+workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
+sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
+
+</ul></p>
+
+<p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
+solvable before Squeeze is released. In addition to these there are
+some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
+which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
+
+<p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
+the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
+list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
+
+<p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
</description>
</item>
<item>
- <title>Taking over sysvinit development</title>
- <link>Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Wed, 22 Jul 2009 23:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <title>More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sat, 22 May 2010 21:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
<description>
-<p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
-the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
-take over the package and become the new upstream. The number of
-patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
-lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
-the package up to date.</p>
-
-<p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
-and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman. About 10 days ago, I made
-a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
-and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
-distributions. We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
-the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge. Since the
-new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
-upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
-development there. The project is registered and currently waiting
-for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
-approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
-working on the future release.</p>
-
-<p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
-distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
+<p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
+found time today to return to the project. Having to spend less time
+working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
+definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
+
+<p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu. We
+include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
+get disk and network controllers working. Without having these
+firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
+install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
+are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
+an external medium is a support pain. Initially, I expected it to be
+enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
+debian-installer to find and use them. This proved to be wrong.
+Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
+to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
+/cdrom/firmware/). This also proved to not work, and at this point I
+found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
+going to work.</p>
+
+<p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
+look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
+the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
+packages. It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
+"external" media devices. Today I changed it to also look in the
+/cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
+solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu. I also changed it to
+look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
+provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
+to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
+Edu.</p>
+
+<p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
+activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
+hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
+run these before activating the firmware during installation. The
+license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
+solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
+
+<p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
+contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
</description>
</item>
<item>
- <title>Regjerningens oppsummering av høringen om standardkatalogen versjon 2</title>
- <link>Regjerningens_oppsummering_av_h__ringen_om_standardkatalogen_versjon_2.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">Regjerningens_oppsummering_av_h__ringen_om_standardkatalogen_versjon_2.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Thu, 9 Jul 2009 14:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <title>Magnetstripeinnhold i billetter fra Flytoget og Hurtigruten</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Magnetstripeinnhold_i_billetter_fra_Flytoget_og_Hurtigruten.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Magnetstripeinnhold_i_billetter_fra_Flytoget_og_Hurtigruten.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 21 May 2010 16:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
<description>
-<p>For å forstå mer om hvorfor standardkatalogens versjon 2 ble som
-den ble, har jeg bedt om kopi fra FAD av dokumentene som ble lagt frem
-for regjeringen da de tok sin avgjørelse. De er nå lagt ut på NUUGs
-wiki, direkte tilgjengelig via "<a
-href="http://wiki.nuug.no/uttalelser/200901-standardkatalog-v2?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=kongelig-resolusjon.pdf">Referansekatalogen
-v2.0 - Oppsummering av høring</a>" og "<a
-href="http://wiki.nuug.no/uttalelser/200901-standardkatalog-v2?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=kongelig-resolusjon-katalogutkast.pdf">Referansekatalog
-for IT-standarder i offentlig sektor Versjon 2.0, dd.mm.åååå -
-UTKAST</a>".</p>
-
-<p>Det er tre ting jeg merker meg i oppsummeringen fra
-høringsuttalelsen da jeg skummet igjennom den. Det første er at
-forståelsen av hvordan programvarepatenter påvirker fri
-programvareutvikling også i Norge når en argumenterer med at
-royalty-betaling ikke er et relevant problem i Norge. Det andre er at
-FAD ikke har en prinsipiell forståelse av verdien av en enkelt
-standard innenfor hvert område. Det siste er at påstander i
-høringsuttalelsene ikke blir etterprøvd (f.eks. påstanden fra
-Microsoft om hvordan Ogg blir standardisert og påstanden fra
-politidirektoratet om patentproblemer i Theora).</p>
+<p>For en stund tilbake kjøpte jeg en magnetkortleser for å kunne
+titte på hva som er skrevet inn på magnetstripene til ulike kort. Har
+ikke hatt tid til å analysere mange kort så langt, men tenkte jeg
+skulle dele innholdet på to kort med mine lesere.</p>
+
+<p>For noen dager siden tok jeg flyet til Harstad og Hurtigruten til
+Bergen. Flytoget fra Oslo S til flyplassen ga meg en billett med
+magnetstripe. Påtrykket finner jeg følgende informasjon:</p>
+
+<pre>
+Flytoget Airport Express Train
+
+Fra - Til : Oslo Sentralstasjon
+Kategori : Voksen
+Pris : Nok 170,00
+Herav mva. 8,00% : NOK 12,59
+Betaling : Kontant
+Til - Fra : Oslo Lufthavn
+Utstedt: : 08.05.10
+Gyldig Fra-Til : 08.05.10-07.11.10
+Billetttype : Enkeltbillett
+
+102-1015-100508-48382-01-08
+</pre>
+
+<p>På selve magnetstripen er innholdet
+<tt>;E?+900120011=23250996541068112619257138248441708433322932704083389389062603279671261502492655?</tt>.
+Aner ikke hva innholdet representerer, og det er lite overlapp mellom
+det jeg ser trykket på billetten og det jeg ser av tegn i
+magnetstripen. Håper det betyr at de bruker kryptografiske metoder
+for å gjøre det vanskelig å forfalske billetter.</p>
+
+<p>Den andre billetten er fra Hurtigruten, der jeg mistenker at
+strekkoden på fronten er mer brukt enn magnetstripen (det var i hvert
+fall den biten vi stakk inn i dørlåsen).</p>
+
+<p>Påtrykket forsiden er følgende:</p>
+
+<pre>
+Romnummer 727
+Hurtigruten
+Midnatsol
+Reinholdtsen
+Petter
+Bookingno: SAX69 0742193
+Harstad-Bergen
+Dep: 09.05.2010 Arr: 12.05.2010
+Lugar fra Risøyhamn
+Kost: FRO=4
+</pre>
+
+<p>På selve magnetstripen er innholdet
+<tt>;1316010007421930=00000000000000000000?+E?</tt>. Heller ikke her
+ser jeg mye korrespondanse mellom påtrykk og magnetstripe.</p>
</description>
</item>
<item>
- <title>Regjerningen forlater prinsippet om ingen royalty-betaling i standardkatalogen versjon 2</title>
- <link>Regjerningen_forlater_prinsippet_om_ingen_royalty_betaling_i_standardkatalogen_versjon_2.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">Regjerningen_forlater_prinsippet_om_ingen_royalty_betaling_i_standardkatalogen_versjon_2.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Mon, 6 Jul 2009 21:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <title>Pieces of the roaming laptop puzzle in Debian</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pieces_of_the_roaming_laptop_puzzle_in_Debian.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pieces_of_the_roaming_laptop_puzzle_in_Debian.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 19 May 2010 19:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
<description>
-<p>Jeg ble glad da regjeringen
-<a href="http://www.digi.no/817635/her-er-statens-nye-it-standarder">annonserte</a>
-versjon 2 av
-<a href="http://www.regjeringen.no/upload/FAD/Vedlegg/IKT-politikk/Referansekatalogen_versjon2.pdf">statens
-referansekatalog over standarder</a>, men trist da jeg leste hva som
-faktisk var vedtatt etter
-<a href="http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad/dok/horinger/horingsdokumenter/2009/horing---referansekatalog-versjon-2.html">høringen</a>.
-De fleste av de valgte åpne standardene er gode og vil bidra til at
-alle kan delta på like vilkår i å lage løsninger for staten, men
-noen av dem blokkerer for de som ikke har anledning til å benytte
-spesifikasjoner som krever betaling for bruk (såkalt
-royalty-betaling). Det gjelder spesifikt for H.264 for video og MP3
-for lyd. Så lenge bruk av disse var valgfritt mens Ogg Theora og Ogg
-Vorbis var påkrevd, kunne alle som ønsket å spille av video og lyd
-fra statens websider gjøre dette uten å måtte bruke programmer der
-betaling for bruk var nødvendig. Når det nå er gjort valgfritt for
-de statlige etatene å bruke enten H.264 eller Theora (og MP3 eler
-Vorbis), så vil en bli tvunget til å forholde seg til
-royalty-belastede standarder for å få tilgang til videoen og
-lyden.</p>
-
-<p>Det gjør meg veldig trist at regjeringen har forlatt prinsippet om
-at alle standarder som ble valgt til å være påkrevd i katalogen skulle
-være uten royalty-betaling. Jeg håper det ikke betyr at en har mistet
-all forståelse for hvilke prinsipper som må følges for å oppnå
-likeverdig konkurranse mellom aktørene i IT-bransjen. NUUG advarte
-mot dette i
-<a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/uttalelser/200901-standardkatalog-v2">sin
-høringsuttalelse</a>, men ser ut til å ha blitt ignorert.</p>
+<p>Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
+Edu finally entered the Debian archive. Today, the new
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html">libpam-mklocaluser</a>
+package was accepted. Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
+into unstable. The
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html">pam-python</a>
+package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd</a> package
+passed NEW on Monday. In addition, the
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
+package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and
+hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.</p>
+
+<p>This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
+roaming laptops. The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
+nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
+which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
+for nscd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">BTS report
+#485282</a> is implemented. The alternative setup is to use sssd with
+libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
+care of the caching of passwords and group information.</p>
+
+<p>I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
+at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
+problem with the server certificate. I plan to update the Debian
+package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
+find time to make sure the next release will include both the
+Debian/Ubuntu specific patches. Upstream is friendly and responsive,
+and I am sure we will find a good solution.</p>
+
+<p>The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
+LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
+when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
+cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
+memberhips and other relevant LDAP information. The
+libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
+directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
+be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used. To avoid confusion
+with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
+to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
+on the home directory servers.</p>
+
+<p>One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
+message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
+is created. Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
+message. The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
+a bug in gdm. Have not investigated if there is some other message
+type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.</p>
+
+<p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
+please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
</description>
</item>
<item>
- <title>Microsofts misvisende argumentasjon rundt multimediaformater</title>
- <link>Microsofts_misvisende_argumentasjon_rundt_multimediaformater.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">Microsofts_misvisende_argumentasjon_rundt_multimediaformater.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <title>Parallellized boot is now the default in Debian/unstable</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 14 May 2010 22:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
<description>
-<p>I
-<a href="http://www.regjeringen.no/upload/FAD/Vedlegg/Hoeringer/Refkat_V2/MicrosoftNorge.pdf">Microsoft
-sin høringsuttalelse</a> til
-<a href="http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad/dok/horinger/horingsdokumenter/2009/horing---referansekatalog-versjon-2.html?id=549422">forslag
-til versjon 2 av statens referansekatalog over standarder</a>, lirer
-de av seg følgende FUD-perle:</p>
-
-<p><blockquote>"Vorbis, OGG, Theora og FLAC er alle tekniske
- spesifikasjoner overordnet styrt av xiph.org, som er en
- ikke-kommersiell organisasjon. Etablerte og anerkjente
- standardiseringsorganisasjoner, som Oasis, W3C og Ecma, har en godt
- innarbeidet vedlikeholds- og forvaltningsprosess av en standard.
- Det er derimot helt opp til hver enkelt organisasjon å bestemme
- hvordan tekniske spesifikasjoner videreutvikles og endres, og disse
- spesifikasjonene bør derfor ikke defineres som åpne
- standarder."</blockquote></p>
-
-<p>De vokter seg vel for å nevne den anerkjente
-standardiseringsorganisasjonen IETF, som er organisasjonen bak HTTP,
-IP og det meste av protokoller på Internet, og RFC-standardene som
-IETF står bak. Ogg er spesifisert i
-<a href="http://ietf.org/rfc/rfc3533.txt">RFC 3533</a>, og er uten
-tvil å anse som en åpen standard. Vorbis er
-<a href="http://ietf.org/rfc/rfc5215.txt">RFC 5215</a>. Theora er
-
-under standardisering via IETF, med
-<a href="http://svn.xiph.org/trunk/theora/doc/draft-ietf-avt-rtp-theora-00.txt">siste
-utkast publisert 2006-07-21</a> (riktignok er dermed teksten ikke
-skrevet i stein ennå, men det blir neppe endringer som ikke er
-bakoverkompatibel). De kan være inne på noe når det gjelder FLAC da
-jeg ikke finner tegn til at <a
-href="http://flac.sourceforge.net/format.html">spesifikasjonen
-tilgjengelig på web</a> er på tur via noen
-standardiseringsorganisasjon, men i og med at folkene bak Ogg, Theora
-og Vorbis også har involvert seg i Flac siden 2003, så ser jeg ikke
-bort fra at også den organiseres via IETF. Jeg kjenner personlig lite
-til FLAC.</p>
-
-<p>Uredelig argumentasjon bør en holde seg for god til å komme med,
-spesielt når det er så enkelt i dagens Internet-hverdag å gå
-misvisende påstander etter i sømmene.</p>
+<p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
+Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
+Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
+expected, if I am to believe the
+<a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
+on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
+with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
+remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen. If serious problems are
+detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
+The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
+version.</p>
+
+More information about
+<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
+based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki. It is
+currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
+problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+CONCURRENCY=none
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
+the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
+list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
</description>
</item>
<item>
- <title>Debian boots quicker and quicker</title>
- <link>Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <title>Sitesummary tip: Listing MAC address of all clients</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 14 May 2010 21:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
<description>
-<p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
-people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
-could find more ways to speed up the boot system. This was an Ubuntu
-funded
-<a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
-gathering</a>. It was quite productive. We also discussed the future
-of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
-issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
-asynchronous and event base. The Ubuntu approach using udev and
-upstart might be a good way forward. Time will show.</p>
-
-<p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
-process in Debian. All of these should be applied to get a quick
-boot:</p>
-
-<ul>
-
-<li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
-
-<li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
- clock is in UTC.</li>
-
-<li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
- <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
- based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
-
-</ul>
-
-These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
-<a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
-Villegas</a>.
-
-<p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
-unstable yesterday. When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
-from the boot sequence. It depend on very correct dependency
-declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
-where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
-using this.</p>
-
-<p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
-introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
-startup speed as well. Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
-from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
-possible to run a of them in the same process. A quick way to test
-this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
-insserv'. Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
+<p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
+<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
+system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
+network. Each machine will automatically report its status to the
+central server after boot and once per night. The network setup is
+also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
+MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines. This is useful
+to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
+
+<p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
+ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary. Run
+this on the collector host:</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
+line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
+
+<p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
+addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
+machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
+tables in LDAP using this information. Such tool is unfortunately not
+written yet.</p>
</description>
</item>
<item>
- <title>Litt om valgfusk og problemet med elektronisk stemmegiving</title>
- <link>Litt_om_valgfusk_og_problemet_med_elektronisk_stemmegiving.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">Litt_om_valgfusk_og_problemet_med_elektronisk_stemmegiving.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <title>systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Thu, 13 May 2010 22:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
<description>
-<p><a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/uriks/article3127058.ece">Aftenposten
-melder</a> at det kan se ut til at Iran ikke har lært av USA når det
-gjelder valgfusk. En bør endre tallene før de publiseres, slik at en
-kandidat aldri får færre stemmer under opptellingen, ellers blir det
-veldig tydelig at tallene ikke er til å stole på. I USA er det
-derimot <a href="http://www.blackboxvoting.org/">rapporter om at
-tallene har vært endret</a> på tur mot opptellingen, ikke etter at
-tallene er publiserte (i tillegg til en rekke andre irregulariteter).
-En ting Iran åpenbart har forstått, er verdien av å kunne
-kontrolltelle stemmer. Det ligger an til kontrolltelling i hvert fall
-i noen områder. Hvorvidt det har verdi, kommer an på hvordan
-stemmene har vært oppbevart.</p>
-
-<p><a href="http://universitas.no/kronikk/48334/kan-vi-stole-pa-universitetets-elektroniske-valgsystem-/">Universitetet
-i Oslo derimot</a>, har ikke forstått verdien av å kunne
-kontrolltelle. Her har en valgt å ta i bruk elektronisk stemmegiving
-over Internet, med et system som ikke kan kontrolltelles hvis det
-kommer anklager om juks med stemmene. Systemet har flere kjente
-problemer og er i mine øyne ikke bedre enn en spørreundersøkelse, og
-jeg har derfor latt være å stemme ved valg på UiO siden det ble
-innført.</p>
-
-<p>Universitet i Bergen derimot har klart det kunststykket å aktivt gå
-inn for å gjøre det kjent at det elektroniske stemmegivingssystemet
-over Internet <a href="http://nyheter.uib.no/?modus=vis_nyhet&id=43404">kan
-spore hvem som stemmer hva</a> (det kan en forøvrig også ved UiO), og tatt
-kontakt med stemmegivere for å spørre hvorfor de stemte som de gjorde.
-Hemmelige valg står for fall. Mon tro hva stemmesedlenne hadde
-inneholdt i Iran hvis de ikke hadde hemmelige valg?</p>
+<p>The last few days a new boot system called
+<a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
+has been
+<a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
+
+to the free software world. I have not yet had time to play around
+with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
+<a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
+a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
+based boot system. Tollef is
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
+systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work. I
+like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
+information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
+at the moment do not.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
+platform support. It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
+some new kernel features enabled to function properly. This means
+kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
+system. Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
+way forward.</p>
+
+<p>In the mean time, based on the
+<a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
+on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
+decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
+soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
+there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies. A
+new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
+already in experimental. If all go well, Squeeze will be released
+with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
</description>
</item>
<item>
- <title>Standarder fungerer best når en samler seg rundt dem</title>
- <link>Standarder_fungerer_best_n__r_en_samler_seg_rundt_dem.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">Standarder_fungerer_best_n__r_en_samler_seg_rundt_dem.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Tue, 19 May 2009 11:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <title>Parallellizing the boot in Debian Squeeze - ready for wider testing</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Thu, 6 May 2010 23:25:00 +0200</pubDate>
<description>
-<p>En standard er noe man samler seg rundt, ut fra ideen om at en får
-fordeler når mange står sammen. Jo flere som står sammen, jo
-bedre. Når en vet dette, blir det litt merkelig å lese noen av
-uttalelsene som er kommet inn til
-<a href="http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad/dok/horinger/horingsdokumenter/2009/horing---referansekatalog-versjon-2/horingsuttalelser.html?id=549423">høringen
-om versjon 2 av statens referansekatalog over standarder</a>. Blant
-annet Abelia, NHO og Microsoft tror det er lurt med flere standarder
-innenfor samme område. Det blir som å si at det er fint om Norge
-standardiserte både på A4- og Letter-størrelser på arkene, ulik
-sporvidde på jernbaneskinnene, meter og fot som lengemål, eller
-høyre- og venstrekjøring - slik at en kan konkurrere på hvilken
-standard som er best. De fleste forstår heldigvis at dette ikke
-bidrar positivt.</p>
+<p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
+complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
+init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies. If you want
+to test your Squeeze system, make sure
+<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
+based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
+/etc/default/rcS:</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+CONCURRENCY=makefile
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>That is it. It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
+scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
+/etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
+/etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts. Startpar is configured
+to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
+start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
+make this happen.</p>
+
+<p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result. If some services
+fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
+init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
+dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies). Report bugs and get
+the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
+
+<p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
+manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct. I
+expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
+fix the remaining issues.</p>
+
+<p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
+the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
+list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
</description>
</item>
projects / homepage.git / blobdiff