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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 ----- -----------------------
71 14 image/x-portable-pixmap
72 14 image/x-portable-bitmap
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
140 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>.
145 <div class=
"padding"></div>
149 <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>
155 <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
156 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
157 values provided by the Linux kernel
</a> following my hope for
158 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
159 dongle support in Debian
</a>. Using this knowledge, I have tested how
160 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
161 to hardware. This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
162 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
163 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
166 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
167 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
168 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
172 Package: package-name
173 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)
</p>
176 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
177 for a given modalias value using this file.
</p>
179 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
180 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class
0E01):
</p>
184 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)
</p>
187 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
188 CardBus bridge (bus class
0607) PCI device is present:
</p>
192 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
195 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
196 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs
04D8:F8DA:
</p>
199 Package: colorhug-client
200 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)
</p>
203 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
204 file in the Debian archive. Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
205 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.
</p>
207 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
208 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
209 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
210 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
211 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information. I've
212 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
213 is working as it should with my prototype. It even made it to Ubuntu
216 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
217 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
218 implementation of the lookup code. The idea is to create files for
219 each modalias and let the shell do the matching. Please check out and
221 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup
</a>
222 shell script. It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
223 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
224 repository where I currently work on my prototype.
</p>
226 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
227 install yubikey-personalization:
</p>
230 % ./hw-support-lookup
231 <br>yubikey-personalization
235 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
236 propose to install the pcmciautils package:
</p>
239 % ./hw-support-lookup
244 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
245 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
246 database
</a>, please tell me about it.
</p>
248 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
249 packages and hardware. One source would be to look at packages with
250 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
251 extract their modalias information. Another would be to look at
252 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
253 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
254 generate a modalias matching rule. I have not tested any of these to
257 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
258 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
259 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
260 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel
</a>.
</p>
266 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>.
271 <div class=
"padding"></div>
275 <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>
281 <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
282 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
283 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
284 to document the details. Here are my findings so far, also available
286 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
287 Debian Edu subversion repository
</a>:
289 <p><strong>Modalias decoded
</strong></p>
291 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
292 values stands for. It is in part based on information from
293 <URL:
<a href=
"https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias
</a> >,
294 <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> >,
295 <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
296 <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> >.
298 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
299 this shell script:
</p>
302 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -
0 cat | sort -u
305 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
309 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
310 alias: serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
311 alias: serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
315 <p><strong>PCI subtype
</strong></p>
317 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this. This is an Intel Host
318 Bridge memory controller:
</p>
321 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
324 <p>This represent these values:
</p>
329 sv
00001028 (subvendor)
330 sd
000001AD (subdevice)
336 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
337 -n' as
8086:
2770. The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
338 0600. The
0600 class is a host bridge. Other useful bus values are
339 0300 (VGA compatible card) and
0200 (Ethernet controller).
</p>
341 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
344 <p><strong>USB subtype
</strong></p>
346 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this. This is an internal
347 USB hub in a laptop:
</p>
350 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
353 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:
</p>
356 v
1D6B (device vendor)
357 p
0001 (device product)
360 dsc
00 (device subclass)
361 dp
00 (device protocol)
362 ic
09 (interface class)
363 isc
00 (interface subclass)
364 ip
00 (interface protocol)
367 <p>The
0900 device class/subclass means hub. Some times the relevant
368 class is in the interface class section. For a simple USB web camera,
369 these alias entries show up:
</p>
372 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
373 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
374 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
375 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
378 <p>Interface class
0E01 is video control,
0E02 is video streaming (aka
379 camera),
0101 is audio control device and
0102 is audio streaming (aka
380 microphone). Thus this is a camera with microphone included.
</p>
382 <p><strong>ACPI subtype
</strong></p>
384 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff. This is an IR
385 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:
</p>
388 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
391 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.
</p>
393 <p><strong>DMI subtype
</strong></p>
395 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
396 and model. This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
397 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:
</p>
400 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(
1.66):bd06/
15/
2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
403 <p>The values present are
</p>
406 bvn IBM (BIOS vendor)
407 bvr
1UETB
6WW(
1.66) (BIOS version)
408 bd
06/
15/
2005 (BIOS date)
409 svn IBM (system vendor)
410 pn
2371H4G (product name)
411 pvr ThinkPadX40 (product version)
412 rvn IBM (board vendor)
413 rn
2371H4G (board name)
414 rvr NotAvailable (board version)
415 cvn IBM (chassis vendor)
417 cvr NotAvailable (chassis version)
420 <p>The chassis type
10 is Notebook. Other interesting values can be
421 found in the dmidecode source:
</p>
425 4 Low Profile Desktop
438 17 Main Server Chassis
441 20 Bus Expansion Chassis
442 21 Peripheral Chassis
444 23 Rack Mount Chassis
453 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
454 table. For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
455 claim it is a desktop.
</p>
457 <p><strong>SerIO subtype
</strong></p>
459 <p>This type is used for PS/
2 mouse plugs. One example is from my
463 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
466 <p>The values present are
</p>
475 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver. I am not sure what
476 the valid values are.
</p>
478 <p><strong>Other subtypes
</strong></p>
480 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
481 file2alias.c. There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
482 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
483 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
484 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro. I did not spend time documenting all of
485 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
486 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.
</p>
488 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values
</strong></p>
490 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
491 one can use the following shell script:
</p>
494 for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -
0 cat | sort -u); do \
496 /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/ /' ; \
500 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
501 list is very long on my test machine):
</p>
505 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
507 FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
509 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
510 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
511 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
512 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
513 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
514 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
515 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
516 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
520 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
521 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
522 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
523 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel
</a>.
</p>
525 <p><strong>Update
2013-
01-
15:
</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
526 "find ... -print0 | xargs -
0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
527 in /sys/ with space in them.
</p>
533 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>.
538 <div class=
"padding"></div>
542 <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>
548 <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
549 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
550 Launcher and updated the Debian package
551 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile
</a> to make
552 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in. I
553 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
554 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
555 plug in his rocket launcher. In the process I moved the source to a
556 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
557 contribute.
<a href=
"http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream
</a>
558 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
559 years of relative silence. The new git repository is not listed in
560 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
561 bit more before I upload the new version. If you want to check out
562 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
563 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
564 view
</a> or use "
<tt>git clone
565 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git
</tt>".</p>
571 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>.
576 <div class="padding
"></div>
580 <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>
586 <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
587 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
588 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
589 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
590 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
591 machine. Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
592 Linux distribution. When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
593 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
594 I need to talk to it. When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
595 yubikey-personalization package. The information required to do this
596 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
598 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
599 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/
2010/
05/msg01206.html
">use
600 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>. The idea is fairly
605 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
606 starting when a user log in.</li>
608 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
609 hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
611 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
612 database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
615 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
616 package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
620 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
621 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
622 discover database to find packages and
623 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/
">PackageKit</a> to install
626 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
627 draft package is now checked into
628 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/
">the
629 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>. In the process, I updated the
630 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html
">discover-data</a>
631 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
632 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
633 2.2013.01.09 to unstable. I also discovered that the current
634 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html
">discover</a>
635 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
636 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present. I ported it to use
637 libusb as a fall back option to get it working. The fixed package
638 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
639 because of the freeze).</p>
641 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
642 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
645 <p align="center
"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
01-
09-hw-autoinstall.png
"></p>
647 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
648 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
649 program(s)" button should to be implemented.
</p>
651 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
652 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
653 from hardware to Debian packages. Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
654 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
655 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
656 reportbug if it isn't. Or, if you know of a better way to provide
657 such mapping, please let me know.
</p>
659 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
660 should be considered before it is ready for production use. Is dbus
661 the correct way to detect new hardware? At the moment I look for HAL
662 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
663 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop. Are there better events to use?
664 How should the user be notified? Is the desktop notification
665 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
666 popup instead? How should packages be installed? When should they
667 not be installed?
</p>
669 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
670 please send me an email. :)
</p>
676 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>.
681 <div class=
"padding"></div>
685 <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>
691 <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
692 <a href=
"http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
693 NXT
</a>. My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
694 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
695 already in Debian Squeeze. If Debian support for LEGO is something
696 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
697 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego
</a> (server
698 irc.debian.org). There is a lot that could be done to improve the
699 Debian support for LEGO designers. For example both CAD software
700 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)
</p>
702 <p>Update
2012-
01-
03: A
703 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page
</a>
704 including links to Lego related packages is now available.
</p>
710 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>.
715 <div class=
"padding"></div>
719 <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>
725 <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
726 year! I hope next year will prove to be a good year.
</p>
728 <p><a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin
</a>, the digital
729 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
730 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
731 experiment. And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
732 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/">Debian
</a> is about to improve a bit.
733 The
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
734 package
</a> (version
0.7.2-
2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
735 in
<a href=
"http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue
</A>
736 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
739 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
740 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
741 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:
</p>
744 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
746 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=
1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
747 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
750 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well. The
751 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
752 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment. Note that the
753 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
754 around
5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment. Make sure your
755 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
756 all the blocks. The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
757 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
758 not be able to get all the features out of the client.
</p>
760 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
761 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
762 <b><a href=
"bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a></b>.
</p>
768 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>.
773 <div class=
"padding"></div>
777 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian
</a>
783 <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
784 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin
</a>, the decentralised
785 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
786 have been busy elsewhere. But two days ago, I started looking at the
787 state of
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
788 Debian
</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet. The package
789 is now maintained by a
790 <a href=
"https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
791 people
</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team. We
792 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
793 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
794 Wheezy. It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
795 backports). The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
796 it from entering testing. To try to help the team and improve the
797 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
798 reports. I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
800 <a href=
"https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
801 Ubuntu
</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
804 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
805 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
806 improve the package. It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
807 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
808 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
809 setup. As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
810 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
811 patch to backport
</a> the latest version. Jonas is going to look at
812 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
813 new version to unstable.
815 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
816 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system. I
817 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
818 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
819 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
820 transactions to Wikileaks. But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
821 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
822 they sell products and services. Improving the bitcoin support in
823 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
824 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
825 pay with bitcoin is still not very good. The bitcoin: URI is a step
826 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
827 use. Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
828 quick transaction. I believe there are other clients available, but
829 have not tested them.
</p>
832 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
833 with bitcoins
</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
834 I received
20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
836 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
837 on the blockexplorer service
</a>. Thank you everyone for your
838 donation. The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
839 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
840 number of users have gone up since then. If you use bitcoin and want
841 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
842 the same address as last time,
843 <b><a href=
"bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a></b>.
</p>
849 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>.
854 <div class=
"padding"></div>
858 <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>
865 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
866 this summer
</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
867 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
868 <a href=
"https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
869 repository for the project
</a>.
</p>
871 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
872 to the HTML version. To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
873 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
874 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.
</p>
876 <p>Want to sing? You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
877 PostScript formats at
878 <a href=
"http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
879 Science Songbook
</a>.
</p>
885 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>.
890 <div class=
"padding"></div>
894 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gratulerer_med_19__rsdagen__Debian_.html">Gratulerer med
19-årsdagen, Debian!
</a>
901 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120813">Debian-prosjektet
19
902 år
</a>. Jeg har fulgt det de siste
12 årene, og er veldig glad for å kunne
903 si gratulerer med dagen, Debian!
</p>
909 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>.
914 <div class=
"padding"></div>
918 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists
</a>
924 <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
925 <a href=
"http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø
</a>, I started
926 collecting computer related songs for use at parties. The original
927 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
928 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
929 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format. I have
930 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
931 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
932 help me extend and update the book. If anyone is volunteering to help
933 me with this, send me an email. Also let me know if there are songs
934 missing in my book.
</p>
936 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
937 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
938 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
939 Especially now that
<a href=
"http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
940 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going). Want to sing? Check
941 out
<a href=
"http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
942 Computer Science Songbook
</a>.
948 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>.
953 <div class=
"padding"></div>
957 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge
</a>
963 <p>At work we have heaps of servers. I believe the total count is
964 around
1000 at the moment. To be able to get help from the vendors
965 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
966 up to date. If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
967 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
968 firmware is upgraded. So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
969 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
970 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
971 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
972 the tools to do so.
</p>
974 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
975 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got. Most of
976 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
977 so far. This blog post is about the Dell part.
</P>
979 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
980 <a href=
"ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file
</a>
981 with firmware information for all
11th generation servers, listing
982 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
983 site I can find it. Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
984 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
985 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
986 be activated on the first reboot.
</p>
988 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
989 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
990 servers at a site? Please get in touch and lets share resources.
</p>
996 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
998 # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
1000 'XML::Simple' =
> 'perl-XML-Simple',
1002 for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
1003 eval "use $module;";
1005 my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
1006 system("yum install -y $pkg");
1007 eval "use $module;";
1011 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
1017 sub run_firmware_script {
1018 my ($opts, $script) = @_;
1020 print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
1023 print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
1025 if (
0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
1026 print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
1028 print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
1032 sub run_firmware_scripts {
1033 my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
1034 # Run firmware packages
1035 for my $dir (@dirs) {
1036 print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
1037 opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
1038 while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
1039 next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
1040 run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
1048 print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
1049 system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
1054 my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
1057 if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
1059 # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
1060 system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-
33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
1062 my $tmpdir = tempdir(
1066 fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
1067 system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
1068 my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
1069 # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
1072 for my $url (@paths) {
1073 fetch_dell_fw($url);
1075 run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
1077 print STDERR
"error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
1078 print STDERR
"error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
1082 print STDERR
"error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
1083 print STDERR
"error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
1089 my $url =
"ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
1093 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
1094 # firmware packages to download from Dell. Only work for Linux
1095 # machines and
11th generation Dell servers.
1096 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
1097 my $filename = shift;
1099 my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
1101 my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
1103 print STDERR
"Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
1105 my $xml = XMLin($filename);
1107 for my $bundle (@{$xml-
>{SoftwareBundle}}) {
1108 my $brand = $bundle-
>{TargetSystems}-
>{Brand}-
>{Display}-
>{content};
1109 my $model = $bundle-
>{TargetSystems}-
>{Brand}-
>{Model}-
>{Display}-
>{content};
1111 if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle-
>{TargetOSes}-
>{OperatingSystem}) {
1112 $oscode = $bundle-
>{TargetOSes}-
>{OperatingSystem}[
0]-
>{osCode};
1114 $oscode = $bundle-
>{TargetOSes}-
>{OperatingSystem}-
>{osCode};
1116 if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
1118 @paths = map { $_-
>{path} } @{$bundle-
>{Contents}-
>{Package}};
1121 for my $component (@{$xml-
>{SoftwareComponent}}) {
1122 my $componenttype = $component-
>{ComponentType}-
>{value};
1124 # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
1125 next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
1127 my $cpath = $component-
>{path};
1128 for my $path (@paths) {
1129 if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
1130 push(@paths, $cpath);
1138 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
1139 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking. Anyone know a
1140 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers? At the
1141 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
1148 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>.
1153 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1157 <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>
1163 <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
1164 <a href=
"http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
1165 comments and opinions
</a> on my blog post on
1166 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
1167 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian
</a> and my blog post about
1168 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
1169 default KDE desktop in Debian
</a>. I only have time to address one
1170 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
1171 misunderstanding he bring forward:
</p>
1174 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
1175 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
1176 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
1179 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
1180 and booting into runlevel
1 is the same. I am not surprised he
1181 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
1182 thing to believe. But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
1183 runlevel
1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
1184 mode. I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
1185 hard to explain.
</p>
1187 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
1188 "
<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin
</tt>". This means the only thing that is
1189 executed in single user mode is sulogin. Single user mode is a boot
1190 state "between
" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
1191 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
1192 enters the single user state. When switching to runlevel 1, the state
1193 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
1194 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
1195 runs "init -t1 S
" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
1196 1. It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
1197 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
1200 <p>This summary might make it clearer. When booting for the first
1201 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
1202 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin
</tt>". When booting into
1203 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
1204 S; /etc/init.d/rc
1; /sbin/sulogin
</tt>". A problem show up when
1205 trying to continue after visiting single user mode. Not all services
1206 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
1207 unpredicatble state. This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
1208 after visiting single user mode.</p>
1210 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
1211 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/. When switching from say runlevel 2
1212 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
1213 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
1214 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
1215 2-5. I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
1216 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
1217 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
1219 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
1220 and discovered this problem a few years ago. I suspect it originates
1221 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
1227 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>.
1232 <div class="padding
"></div>
1236 <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>
1242 <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
1243 are started from /etc/rcS.d/. In fact, there is a bite more of them
1244 than make sense, and this causes a few problems. What kind of
1245 problems, you might ask. There are at least two problems. The first
1246 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
1247 runlevel 1. One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
1248 the expected state. The other is that single user boot will sometimes
1249 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
1250 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
1251 machine from a problem in that subsystem. A minor additional point is
1252 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
1253 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
1254 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
1256 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/. In short, only the
1257 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
1258 presented during a single user boot should go there. Everything else
1259 should go into the numeric runlevels. This means things like
1260 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
1261 the numeric runlevels. Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
1262 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
1263 out. Do your package have one of them? Please help us make single
1264 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
1266 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
1267 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
1268 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
1271 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound. To keep
1272 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
1273 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
1274 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
1275 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
1276 moved first. This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
1277 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
1278 the system state correct. This will require some coordination when it
1279 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
1280 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
1281 on them. Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
1282 package, while others are still left to do. I wish I had time to work
1283 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
1284 find time to push this forward.</p>
1290 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>.
1295 <div class="padding
"></div>
1299 <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>
1305 <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
1306 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
1307 desktop to be useful for more people. The use case for this is my
1308 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
1311 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
1312 implement. After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
1313 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
1317 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
1318 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
1319 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
1320 tool to handle it. I have no problem guiding both of my parents
1321 through the process over the phone. If a kernel reboot is required,
1322 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool. Last
1323 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
1326 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
1327 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
1328 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
1329 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
1330 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
1331 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
1332 Packages file in the APT archive). If one or more packages are found,
1333 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
1334 type. If the package require the user to accept some non-free
1335 license, this is explained to the user. The entire process make it
1336 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
1337 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
1338 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
1340 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
1341 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
1342 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
1343 should search for a package that would add support for it. This
1344 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264. The selection
1345 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
1346 plugin handling. This is as far as I know implemented using a
1347 gstreamer hook. The end result is that the user easily get access to
1348 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
1349 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
1351 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
1352 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
1353 start emacs to show it. If I remember correctly, when doing the same
1354 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser. At least I
1355 know Opera will show text files within the browser. I much prefer the
1356 latter behaviour.</li>
1360 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
1361 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
1362 it do not matter much.</p>
1364 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
1365 Debian release. It would require the coordinated effort of several
1366 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
1372 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>.
1377 <div class="padding
"></div>
1381 <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>
1387 <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/
">FiksGataMi</A>
1388 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
1389 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
1390 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
1391 security support for a few years.</p>
1393 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
1394 that are missing in Debian at the moment. It would be great if these
1395 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
1396 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com
">FixMyStreet</a> clone
1397 in their own country using only Debian packages. The list of modules
1398 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
1399 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
1400 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
1401 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
1402 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
1403 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
1404 easier in the future.</p>
1406 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
1407 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
1408 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package. But this leave me
1409 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
1410 do not have time for.</p>
1416 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>.
1421 <div class="padding
"></div>
1425 <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>
1431 <p>Here is a small update for my English readers. Most of my blog
1432 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
1433 update in English.</p>
1435 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
1436 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
1437 of the British service
1438 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/
">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
1439 and it has been running for a month now. The entire project has been
1440 organised by me and two others. Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
1441 to fund the development work. In January I drafted a contract with
1442 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/
">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
1443 and in February the development took place. Most of it involved
1444 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
1445 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
1446 running in any country by now. The Norwegian
1447 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/
">FiksGataMi</a> is using
1448 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/
">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
1449 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
1450 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
1452 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
1453 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th. The system is
1454 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
1455 problem reports in a few weeks. Soon we hope to announce the Android
1456 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
1457 public infrastructure.</p>
1459 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
1466 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>.
1471 <div class="padding
"></div>
1475 <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>
1481 <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
1482 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo. My idea is that
1483 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
1484 available on the Internet, and check our locally
1485 maintained/distributed software against this information. It should
1486 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten. The
1487 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
1488 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
1489 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
1490 out which security holes were present in our free software
1493 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
1494 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
1495 consistent way across data sources. I considered several ways to do
1496 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
1497 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
1498 existing naming scheme. And it seem like I am not the first one to
1499 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
1500 solution. Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html
">Common
1501 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
1502 software, hardware and other platform components. The CPE ids are
1503 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/
">National
1504 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
1505 issues for any CPE name. With this in place, all I need to do is to
1506 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
1507 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
1508 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
1510 <p>To give you an example. The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
1511 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip. If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
1512 check out, one could look up
1513 <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
1514 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
1515 The most recent one is
1516 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-
2010-
0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
1517 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
1518 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
1520 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
1521 for offline processing of issues. Using this dump, I've written a
1522 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
1523 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs. One give it CPEs
1524 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
1525 security issues out.</p>
1527 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
1528 information need to be high. For that to happen, I believe as many as
1529 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database. I notice
1531 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt
">a
1532 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
1533 information. I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
1535 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
1536 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
1537 the CVE database in NVD. The result look fairly good, but there are
1538 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
1539 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
1540 Debian believe are affected by a CVE). Hope to find time to improve
1541 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
1542 someone maintaining it. So far my three emails with questions and
1543 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
1544 established soon.</p>
1546 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
1547 mapping. It would be useful to know which packages in for example
1548 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
1549 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
1550 for their packages.</p>
1556 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>.
1561 <div class="padding
"></div>
1565 <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>
1572 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data
">discover-data</a>
1573 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
1574 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
1575 information. One part of this script that I find very useful when
1576 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
1577 to the PCI device it claims. It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
1578 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with. To see
1579 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
1580 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>. The relevant output on
1581 one of my machines like this:</p>
1585 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
1588 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
1597 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
1598 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
1601 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
1602 echo loaded pci modules:
1604 cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
1605 for address in * ; do
1606 if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
1607 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
1608 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
1609 address=$(echo $address |sed s/
0000://)
1610 id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n
1 | awk '{print $
3}'`
1620 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
1624 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
1625 echo loaded usb modules:
1627 cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
1628 for address in * ; do
1629 if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
1630 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
1631 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
1632 address=$(echo $address |sed s/
0000://)
1633 id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n
1 | awk '{print $
6}')
1645 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
1652 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>.
1657 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1661 <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>
1667 <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the
<a
1668 href=
"http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo
</a> testing if the new
1669 batch of computers will work with Linux. Every year for the last few
1670 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
1671 computers, and this year HP won the bid. Two different desktops and
1672 five different laptops are on the list this year. We in the UNIX
1673 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
1674 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
1677 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
1678 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well. To test, I PXE
1679 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
1680 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware. When
1681 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
1682 on. If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
1683 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
1684 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.
</p>
1686 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post. Here is the simple tests
1687 I perform on a new model.
</p>
1691 <li>Is PXE installation working? I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
1692 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment. If I feel like it, I also test with
1693 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.
</li>
1695 <li>Is X.org working? If the graphical login screen show up after
1696 installation, X.org is working.
</li>
1698 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working? Running glxgears (in
1699 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
1700 reported by the program.
</li>
1702 <li>Is sound working? With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
1703 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful. If there
1704 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
1705 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound. I
1706 normally test this by playing
1707 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
1708 video
</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.
</li>
1710 <li>Is the USB subsystem working? I test this by plugging in a USB
1711 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.
</li>
1713 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working? I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
1714 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.
</li>
1716 <li>Is any built in camera working? Test using cheese, and see if a
1717 picture from the v4l device show up.
</li>
1719 <li>Is bluetooth working? Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
1720 any bluetooth devices are discovered. In my office, I normally see a
1723 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working. I have
1724 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
1727 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working? I'm testing if the
1728 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
1731 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
1732 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
1733 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc? The set of buttons differ from
1734 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
1737 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
1738 acceleration sensors etc. I rarely test these, as I do not know how
1739 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
1744 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
1745 for the HP machines I am testing. I'm not done yet, so I will report
1746 the test results later. For now I can report that HP
8100 Elite work
1747 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook
8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
1748 and audio fail on RHEL6. Ubuntu Maverik worked with
8440p. As you
1749 can see, I have most machines left to test. One interesting
1750 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
1751 RHEL6 with glxgears. No idea why.
</p>
1757 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>.
1762 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1766 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins
</a>
1772 <p>As I continue to explore
1773 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin
</a>, I've starting to wonder
1774 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
1775 and regulations here in Norway. Here are some random notes.
</p>
1777 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
1778 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
1779 is known to everyone. This means that if a BitCoin address has been
1780 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
1781 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
1782 that address. There is even a web service to look at the details for
1783 all transactions. There I can see that my address
1784 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a>
1785 have received
16.06 Bitcoin, the
1786 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv
8MHqvwst
3</a>
1787 address of Simon Phipps have received
181.97 BitCoin and the address
1788 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt
</A>
1789 of EFF have received
2447.38 BitCoins so far. Thank you to each and
1790 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
1791 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
1792 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
1793 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction. I'm told
1794 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
1795 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
1796 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.
</p>
1798 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
1799 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
1800 without declaring it. There are money laundering, tax and accounting
1801 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
1802 If the Skolelinux foundation
1803 (
<a href=
"http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
1804 Debian Labs
</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
1805 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
1806 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
1807 not, should everything or nothing be declared? What exchange rate
1808 should be used when calculating taxes? Would receivers have to pay
1809 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
1810 BitCoin? I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.
</p>
1812 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
1813 accepted by a lot of users. It must be possible to get easy access to
1814 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
1815 easy to spend it. At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
1816 access to, but there are very few places to spend it. I am not really
1817 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
1818 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins. I
1819 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
1820 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
1821 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
1822 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular. I'm sure they
1823 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
1824 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
1825 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
1828 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
1829 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
1830 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
1831 to see which one get the next lump of cash). The "winner" get
50
1832 BitCoin when this happen. Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
1833 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
1834 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
1835 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the
50
1837 <a href=
"http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool
</a>
1838 if this sounds interesting. I have not had time to try to set up a
1839 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
1840 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
1843 <p>Update
2010-
12-
15: Found an
<a
1844 href=
"http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
1845 criticism
</a> of bitcoin. Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
1846 it was interesting to read. The arguments presented seem to be
1847 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.
</p>
1853 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>.
1858 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1862 <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>
1868 <p>With this weeks lawless
1869 <a href=
"http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
1870 attacks
</a> on Wikileak and
1871 <a href=
"http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
1872 speech
</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
1873 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
1875 <a href=
"http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
1876 Phipps on bitcoin
</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
1877 mine mentioned earlier. I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
1878 involved with
<a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin
</a>. I got
1879 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
1880 some bitcoins to get started. I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
1881 for helping me remember BitCoin.
</p>
1883 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder? It is a digital
1884 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
1885 networks. It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
1886 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
1887 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions. The
1888 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets
2.9
1889 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
1890 line client builds just fine. Hopefully Jonas
1891 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
1892 Debian
</a> soon.
</p>
1894 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
1895 There are
<a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
1896 bitcoins
</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
1897 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided. There
1898 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising. If you
1899 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
1901 <a href=
"https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free
</a> (
0.05
1902 bitcoin at the time of writing). Use
1903 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch
</a> to keep an eye
1904 on the current exchange rates.
</p>
1906 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
1907 machines. If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
1908 donations to the address
1909 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</b>. Thank you!
</p>
1915 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>.
1920 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1924 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?
</a>
1930 <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
1931 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
1932 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
1933 to play a video file or stream. Only if VLC fail will I drag out
1934 gmplayer to see if it can do better. The reason is mostly the failure
1935 model and trust. When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
1936 reporting the problem. When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
1937 just hangs. The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.
<p>
1939 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
1940 mplayer in
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
1941 Edu/Skolelinux
</a>. The reason is simple. We need a good browser
1942 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
1943 not very good. For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
1944 is no way for the user to pause the video. Also, when I
1945 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
1946 tested the browser plugins
</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
1947 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked. If
1948 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
1949 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.
</P>
1951 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
1952 annoying. The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
1953 keyboard shortcuts. When the player is in full screen mode, its
1954 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
1955 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode. I
1956 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
1957 window mode. Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
1958 the current video. It is very nice when playing short videos from the
1959 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
1960 what is going on.
</p>
1966 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>.
1971 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1975 <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>
1981 <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
1982 upgrade testing of the
1983 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
1984 Gnome and KDE Desktop
</a> to do
<tt>apt-get autoremove
</tt> when using apt-get.
1985 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
1986 can now present the updated result from today:
</p>
1988 <p>This is for Gnome:
</p>
1990 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p>
1997 browser-plugin-gnash
2004 freedesktop-sound-theme
2006 gconf-defaults-service
2021 gnome-desktop-environment
2025 gnome-session-canberra
2030 gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
2036 libapache2-mod-dnssd
2039 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
2042 libboost-date-time1.42
.0
2043 libboost-python1.42
.0
2044 libboost-thread1.42
.0
2046 libchamplain-gtk-
0.4-
0
2048 libclutter-gtk-
0.10-
0
2055 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
2070 libgnomepanel2.24-cil
2075 libgtksourceview2.0-common
2076 libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
2077 libmono-addins0.2-cil
2078 libmono-cairo2.0-cil
2079 libmono-corlib2.0-cil
2080 libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
2081 libmono-posix2.0-cil
2082 libmono-security2.0-cil
2083 libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
2084 libmono-system2.0-cil
2087 libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
2088 libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
2098 libtelepathy-farsight0
2107 nautilus-sendto-empathy
2111 python-aptdaemon-gtk
2113 python-beautifulsoup
2128 python-gtksourceview2
2139 python-pkg-resources
2146 python-twisted-conch
2152 python-zope.interface
2157 rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
2164 system-config-printer-udev
2166 telepathy-mission-control-
5
2179 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p>
2187 fast-user-switch-applet
2206 libgtksourceview2.0-
0
2208 libsdl1.2debian-alsa
2214 system-config-printer
2221 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p>
2224 gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
2227 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p>
2233 <p>This is for KDE:
</p>
2235 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p>
2241 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p>
2248 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p>
2264 kdeartwork-emoticons
2266 kdeartwork-theme-icon
2270 kdebase-workspace-bin
2271 kdebase-workspace-data
2285 kscreensaver-xsavers
2300 plasma-dataengines-workspace
2302 plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
2303 plasma-runners-addons
2304 plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
2305 plasma-scriptengine-python
2306 plasma-scriptengine-qedje
2307 plasma-scriptengine-ruby
2308 plasma-scriptengine-webkit
2309 plasma-scriptengines
2310 plasma-wallpapers-addons
2311 plasma-widget-folderview
2312 plasma-widget-networkmanagement
2316 xscreensaver-data-extra
2318 xscreensaver-gl-extra
2319 xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
2322 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p>
2326 google-gadgets-common
2344 libggadget-qt-
1.0-
0b
2349 libkonqsidebarplugin4a
2358 libplasma-geolocation-interface4
2360 libplasmagenericshell4
2374 libsmokeknewstuff2-
3
2375 libsmokeknewstuff3-
3
2377 libsmokektexteditor3
2385 libsmokeqtnetwork4-
3
2391 libsmokeqtuitools4-
3
2403 plasma-dataengines-addons
2404 plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
2405 plasma-widget-lancelot
2406 plasma-widgets-addons
2407 plasma-widgets-workspace
2411 update-notifier-common
2414 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
2415 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
2416 differences. I have no idea what packages should be installed after
2417 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.
</p>
2423 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>.
2428 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2432 <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>
2438 <p>Most of the computers in use by the
2439 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project
</a>
2440 are virtual machines. And they have been Xen machines running on a
2441 fairly old IBM eserver xseries
345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
2442 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge
2950 host machine. This was a
2443 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
2444 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
2445 know is not supported by KVM. So to migrate, we had to convert
2446 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.
</p>
2449 <a href=
"http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
2450 nice recipe
</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
2451 migration. It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
2452 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
2453 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data. I NFS mounted the
2454 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.
</p>
2460 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/
35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
2465 if [ -z "$
1" ] ; then
2466 echo "Usage: $
0 <hostname
>"
2472 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
2473 echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
2477 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs. not sure why.
2478 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $
4} END { print int(sum *
1.05) }')
2479 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $
4} END { print int(sum *
1.05) }')
2480 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
2483 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=
1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
2484 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
2486 parted $img mklabel msdos
2487 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap
0 $disksize
2488 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
2489 parted $img set
1 boot on
2492 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
2493 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
2495 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=
1M
2496 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
2497 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
2499 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
2500 losetup -d /dev/loop0
2503 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
2504 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.
</p>
2506 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
2507 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-
686 and
2508 set up grub to boot from the disk image. After this, the KVM machines
2509 seem to work just fine.
</p>
2515 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>.
2520 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2524 <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>
2530 <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
2531 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
2532 Gnome and KDE Desktop
</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
2533 status. Here is a short update based on a test I ran
20101118.
</p>
2535 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
2536 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
2537 can see if anything should be changed.
</p>
2539 <p>This is for Gnome:
</p>
2541 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p>
2544 apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
2545 browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-
4.3 cups-pk-helper
2546 dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
2547 freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
2548 gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
2549 geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
2550 gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
2551 gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
2552 gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
2553 gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
2554 gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
2555 gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
2556 gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
2557 libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
2558 libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-
0 libboost-date-time1.42
.0
2559 libboost-python1.42
.0 libboost-thread1.42
.0 libchamplain-
0.4-
0
2560 libchamplain-gtk-
0.4-
0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-
0.10-
0
2561 libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-
1.0-
2
2562 libepc-common libepc-ui-
1.0-
2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
2563 libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
2564 libgdl-
1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-
0 libgif4
2565 libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
2566 libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
2567 libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
2568 libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
2569 libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
2570 libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
2571 libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
2572 libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
2573 libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-
6
2574 libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6
.8
2575 libpolkit-gtk-
1-
0 libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-alsa
2576 libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6
.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
2577 libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-
4
2578 libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-
0.99-
0
2579 libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
2580 mono-
2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
2581 nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
2582 openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-
4suite-xml
2583 python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
2584 python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
2585 python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
2586 python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
2587 python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
2588 python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
2589 python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
2590 python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
2591 python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
2592 python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
2593 python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
2594 python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
2595 python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
2596 remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
2597 rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
2598 software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
2599 telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-
5 telepathy-salut tomboy
2600 totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
2601 transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
2605 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
2608 arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
2609 epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
2610 fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
2611 gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
2612 gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
2613 gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
2614 guile-
1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
2615 libavahi-ui0 libbind9-
50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-
11 libcdio7
2616 libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
2617 libedata-cal1.2-
6 libedataserver1.2-
9 libeel2-
2.20 libepc-
1.0-
1
2618 libepc-ui-
1.0-
1 libexchange-storage1.2-
3 libfaad0 libgadu3
2619 libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-
3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
2620 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-
0 libgksuui1.0-
1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-
2
2621 libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-
1 libgnomeprint2.2-
0
2622 libgnomeprintui2.2-
0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-
1.0-
0
2623 libgtkhtml2-
0 libgtksourceview1.0-
0 libgtksourceview2.0-
0
2624 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
2625 libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
2626 libmagick++
10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
2627 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
2628 libnm-util0 libopal-
2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-
10 libpisock9
2629 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-
1.10.10 libraw1394-
8
2630 libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-
8
2631 libspeexdsp1 libssh2-
1 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libsvga1
2632 libswfdec-
0.6-
90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
2633 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
2634 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
2635 sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
2636 totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
2639 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p>
2642 gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
2645 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p>
2651 <p>This is for KDE:
</p>
2653 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p>
2656 autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-
4.3 dcoprss
2657 edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
2658 ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
2659 gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
2660 kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
2661 kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
2662 kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
2663 kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
2664 kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
2665 kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
2666 kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
2667 kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
2668 killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
2669 kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
2670 ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42
.0
2671 libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
2672 libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
2673 libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
2674 libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
2675 libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
2676 libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
2677 libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
2678 libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
2679 libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
2680 lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
2681 openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
2682 parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
2683 pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
2684 speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
2688 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p>
2691 amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
2692 dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
2693 kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
2694 kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
2695 keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
2696 kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
2697 kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
2698 klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
2699 kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
2700 kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
2701 kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
2702 ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
2703 ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
2704 kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
2705 kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
2706 libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
2707 libavahi-core5 libavc1394-
0 libbind9-
50 libbluetooth2
2708 libboost-python1.34
.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
2709 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
2710 libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-
0 libicu38
2711 libiec61883-
0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
2712 libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
2713 libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
2714 libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
2715 libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
2716 libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
2717 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
2718 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-
8 librss1 libsensors3
2719 libsmbios2 libssh2-
1 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libswfdec-
0.6-
90
2720 libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
2721 mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
2722 texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
2723 ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
2726 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p>
2729 dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
2730 kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
2731 kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
2732 kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
2733 netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
2734 xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
2735 xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
2738 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p>
2741 kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
2748 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>.
2753 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2757 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd
</a>
2764 <a href=
"http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
2765 call from the Gnash project
</a> for
2766 <a href=
"http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot
</a> slaves to test the
2767 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
2768 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
2769 Debian/Squeeze. I hope this can help the developers in getting new
2770 releases out more often.
</p>
2772 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
2773 I have considered setting up a
<a
2774 href=
"http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd
</a>
2775 machine as well. I have also considered using the kfreebsd
2776 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the
5
2777 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video. Because of this, I
2778 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
2779 kfreebsd. Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
2780 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
2781 screen at random locations). Have not gotten very far with the
2782 testing. Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
2783 fatal problem. Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
2784 useful as a file server for NUUG. Will try to find time to set up a
2785 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.
</p>
2791 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>.
2796 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2800 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in
3D
</a>
2806 <p><img src=
"http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
2808 <p>3D printing is just great. I just came across this Debian logo in
2810 <a href=
"http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
2811 thingiverse blog
</a>.
</p>
2817 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>.
2822 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2826 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates
2010-
10-
24</a>
2832 <p>Some updates.
</p>
2834 <p>My
<a href=
"http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge
</a> to
2835 raise money for the project is going well. The lower limit of
10
2836 signers was reached in
24 hours, and so far
13 people have signed it.
2837 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
2838 how far we can get before the time limit of December
24 is reached.
2841 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
2842 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
2843 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
2845 <a href=
"http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov
</a>,
2846 and can be used using
<tt>kcov
<directory
> <binary
></tt>.
2847 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
2848 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
2849 libglib2.0-dev. Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
2850 solvable. I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.
</p>
2852 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for
<a
2853 href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
2854 new alpha release of Debian Edu
</a>, and just published the second
2855 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
2856 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
</a>
2857 release. Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
2858 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
2859 client servers and diskless workstations. A nice touch added
2860 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
2861 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.
</p>
2867 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>.
2872 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2876 <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>
2882 <p>In the
<a href=
"http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
2883 popularity-contest numbers
</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
2884 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian. The sixth
2885 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla. This is a clear indication that
2886 working flash is important for Debian users. Around
10 percent of the
2887 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
2890 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August
2008
2891 («
<a href=
"http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
2892 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
2893 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs
</a>»), one of the most important problems
2894 schools experienced with
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
2895 Edu/Skolelinux
</a> was the lack of working Flash. A lot of educational
2896 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
2897 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
2898 good reason to stay with Windows.
</p>
2900 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
2901 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
2902 everything you told him but could work fairly well. This was a
2903 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
2904 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
2905 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
2906 example Internet Explorer
6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
2907 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
2908 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
2909 pages they want to visit.
</p>
2911 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
2912 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
2913 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
2914 Video to working out of the box. For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
2915 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
2916 the new release
0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
2917 unstable. The new version work with more sites that version
0.8.7.
2918 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
2919 release team have not had time to reply to it yet. I hope they agree
2920 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
2921 accept the new package into Squeeze.
</p>
2927 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>.
2932 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2936 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery
</a>
2942 <p>I discovered this while doing
2943 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
2944 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze
</a>. A few packages
2945 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
2946 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
2947 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.
</p>
2949 <p>An example is from todays
2950 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
2951 of KDE using aptitude
</a>. In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
2952 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade. The cause is simple. If a
2953 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
2954 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
2955 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
2956 because its dependencies are unavailable.
</p>
2958 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:
</p>
2961 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
2962 perl-modules depends on perl (
>=
5.10.1-
1); however:
2963 Version of perl on system is
5.10.0-
19lenny
2.
2964 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
2965 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
2968 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
2969 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug
</a>, and will
2970 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
2971 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
2972 failures. Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
2973 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
2974 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
2975 of dependency loops.
</p>
2978 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
2979 tireless effort by Bill Allombert
</a>, the number of circular
2981 <a href=
"http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
2982 is dropping
</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)
</p>
2984 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
2985 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier
</a> and
2986 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour
</a> between
2987 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
2988 dependency. Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
2995 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>.
3000 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3004 <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>
3011 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup
</a>
3013 <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
3015 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
3016 all
</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.
</p>
3018 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
3019 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
3020 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server. The two
3021 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.
</p>
3023 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
3024 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
3025 on a Debian Edu main-server. Here is a summary.
3027 <p><strong>powerdns
</strong></p>
3029 <a href=
"http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
3030 on how to
</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
3033 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
3034 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
3035 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
3036 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
3037 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
3038 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.
</p>
3040 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
3041 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
3042 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
3043 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
3044 "dc=
2,dc=
2,dc=
0,dc=
10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
3045 "(associateddomain=
2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry. For
3046 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
3047 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
3048 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
3049 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
3050 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
3051 spfrecord and modifytimestamp. For reverse entries it is looking for
3052 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
3053 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
3054 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp. The equivalent
3055 ldapsearch commands could look like this:
</p>
3058 ldapsearch -h ldap \
3059 -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
3060 -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
3061 cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
3062 rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
3063 nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
3064 rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
3066 ldapsearch -h ldap \
3067 -b dc=
2,dc=
2,dc=
0,dc=
10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
3068 -s base -x '(associateddomain=
2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
3069 dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
3070 hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
3071 srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
3074 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
3075 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
3076 example LDAP objects used there. In addition to these objects, the
3077 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3081 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3083 objectclass: dnsdomain
3084 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
3087 associateddomain: tjener.intern
3089 dn: dc=
2,dc=
2,dc=
0,dc=
10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3091 objectclass: dnsdomain2
3092 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
3094 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
3095 associateddomain:
2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
3098 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently. When looking for
3099 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
3100 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
3101 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
3102 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
3103 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
3104 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp. For reverse entires it also do a
3105 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=
10.0.2.2)"
3106 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
3107 modifytimestamp. In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
3108 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
3111 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
3115 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
3116 '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
3117 cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
3118 rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
3119 nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
3120 rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
3122 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
3123 '(arecord=
10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
3126 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
3127 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
3128 reverse lookups.
</p>
3130 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
3131 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
3132 need to generate a DNS reply. This make it able to work with any
3133 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.
</p>
3135 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC
1274) and
3136 dnsdomain2 schemas. The latter is used for reverse entries like
3137 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.
</p>
3139 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
3140 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
3141 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain). The use
3142 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
3143 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.
</p>
3145 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
3146 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
3147 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
3148 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
3149 (zonename and relativedomainname).
</p>
3151 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
3152 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
3153 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
3154 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
3155 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
3156 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):
</p>
3159 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
3162 MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
3163 DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
3164 TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
3165 NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
3166 A6Record $ DNAMERecord
3170 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
3171 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
3172 all the attributes PowerDNS wants. I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
3173 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
3174 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
3175 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.
</p>
3177 <p><strong>ISC dhcp
</strong></p>
3179 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
3180 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want. This
3181 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
3182 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
3183 what is needed without having to read the source code.
</p>
3185 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
3186 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
3187 stored. These are the relevant entries from
3188 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:
</p>
3191 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
3192 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
3195 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
3196 configuration it need. The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
3197 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))". The
3198 search result is this entry:
</p>
3201 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3204 objectClass: dhcpServer
3205 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3208 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
3209 subtree with DHCP configuration. The DHCP configuration subtree base
3210 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
3211 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
3212 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
3213 The search result is this entry:
</p>
3216 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3219 objectClass: dhcpService
3220 objectClass: dhcpOptions
3221 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3222 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
3223 dhcpStatements: authoritative
3224 dhcpOption: smtp-server code
69 = array of ip-address
3225 dhcpOption: www-server code
72 = array of ip-address
3226 dhcpOption: wpad-url code
252 = text
3229 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time. When
3230 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
3231 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
3232 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
3233 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost. These provide options
3234 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc. Leaving out the
3235 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
3236 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
3237 related computer objects.
</p>
3239 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
3240 of the client (
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00 in this example), using a subtree
3241 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
3242 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
3243 00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00))" as the filter. This is what a host object look
3247 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3250 objectClass: dhcpHost
3251 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00
3252 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
3255 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
3256 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
3257 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure. On the
3258 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
3259 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries. The latter should make
3260 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
3261 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
3262 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
3263 structural object class.
3265 <p><strong>Conclusion
</strong></p>
3267 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
3268 to which LDAP schemas to use. While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
3269 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
3270 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
3271 in the configuration.
</p>
3273 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
3274 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
3275 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
3276 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
3277 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
3280 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
3281 this might work for Debian Edu:
</p>
3285 cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
3286 cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
3287 cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
3288 cn=
10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
3289 cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
3290 cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
3291 cn=
192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
3292 cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
3293 ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
3294 cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
3297 <P>This is not tested yet. If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
3298 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
3299 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
3300 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.
</p>
3302 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
3306 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3309 objectClass: dhcpHost
3310 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
3311 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
3312 associateddomain: hostname.intern
3313 arecord:
10.11.12.13
3314 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00
3315 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
3318 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
3319 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
3320 auxiliary object class.
</p>
3326 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>.
3331 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3335 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects
</a>
3341 <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
3342 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
3343 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
3344 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
3345 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.
</p>
3347 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
3348 information finally found a solution that seem to work.
</p>
3350 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
3351 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry. If
3352 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
3353 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
3354 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
3355 to a slave DNS server.
</p>
3357 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
3358 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
3359 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
3360 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
3361 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup. It
3364 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
3365 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
3366 an earlier email. The combined LDAP object will look something like
3370 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3372 objectClass: dhcphost
3373 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
3374 objectclass: dnsdomainaux
3375 associateddomain: hostname.intern
3376 arecord:
10.11.12.13
3377 dhcphwaddress: ethernet
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00
3378 dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
3382 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
3383 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
3384 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress. LTSP will use
3385 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.
</p>
3387 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
3388 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
3389 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
3390 that. If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
3391 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
3392 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
3393 content. I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
3394 might be a good place to put it.
</p>
3396 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
3397 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p>
3403 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>.
3408 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3412 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP
</a>
3418 <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
3419 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
3420 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
3421 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.
</p>
3423 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
3424 to get configuration from LDAP. The idea is to look up the MAC
3425 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
3426 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
3429 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
3430 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
3431 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.
</p>
3433 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
3434 this approach. A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
3435 need to be written. Comments, suggestions, etc?
</p>
3438 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
3440 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
3442 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
3443 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
3444 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
3446 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
3447 # existence of attribute names.
3449 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
3450 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
3451 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
3453 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
3454 # configuration settings. Something like this should work:
3456 # objectclass (
1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
3459 # MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
3461 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
3462 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
3463 LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
3464 for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $
5}'|sort -u) ; do
3465 filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
3466 ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
3467 grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
3468 # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
3469 attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
3470 # bass value on to clients
3471 eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
3477 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
3478 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
3479 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
3480 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
3481 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)
</p>
3483 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
3484 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p>
3486 <p>Update
2010-
07-
17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
3487 configuration in LDAP that was created around year
2000 by
3488 <a href=
"http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
3489 Xperience, Inc.,
2000</a>. I found its
3490 <a href=
"http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files
</a> on a
3491 personal home page over at redhat.com.
</p>
3497 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>.
3502 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3506 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI
</a>
3513 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
3514 last post
</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
3515 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma. The java application
3516 <a href=
"http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer
</a> is claimed to be capable of
3517 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
3518 authenticate using Kerberos. I have only tested the Kerberos
3519 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
3520 LDAP with my test user yet. It is
3521 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
3522 Debian
</a> testing and unstable at the moment. The only problem I
3523 have with it is how it handle errors. If something go wrong, its
3524 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
3525 and remove the failing query. Nothing big, but very annoying.
</p>
3531 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>.
3536 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3540 <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>
3546 <p>Here is a short update on my
<a
3547 href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
3548 Debian Lenny-
>Squeeze upgrade testing
</a>. Here is a summary of the
3549 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude. I'm
3550 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
3551 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
3552 (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#
584861</a> and
3553 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#
585716</a>).
</p>
3555 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
3556 complete list of the installed packages. Based on this I see these
3557 differences when I did a test run today. As usual, I do not really
3558 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
3559 publish the difference.
</p>
3561 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p>
3564 at-spi cpp-
4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
3565 libatspi1.0-
0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-
1-common
3566 libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
3567 libgtksourceview-common libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-alsa
3568 libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
3569 libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
3570 python-
4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
3571 python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
3574 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p>
3577 bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
3578 gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
3579 libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-
50
3580 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-
11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
3581 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-
6 libedataserver1.2-
9
3582 libeel2-
2.20 libepc-
1.0-
1 libepc-ui-
1.0-
1 libexchange-storage1.2-
3
3583 libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-
3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
3584 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-
0 libgksuui1.0-
1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-
2
3585 libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-
1 libgnomeprint2.2-
0
3586 libgnomeprintui2.2-
0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-
0
3587 libgtksourceview1.0-
0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
3588 libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++
10
3589 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
3590 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-
2.2 libosp5
3591 libparted1.8-
10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
3592 libpt-
1.10.10 libraw1394-
8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-
8
3593 libssh2-
1 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libswfdec-
0.6-
90 libtalloc1
3594 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
3595 libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
3596 mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
3599 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p>
3602 gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
3603 python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
3604 xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
3605 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
3606 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
3607 xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
3608 xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
3609 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
3610 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
3611 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
3612 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
3613 xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
3614 xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
3615 xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
3616 xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
3617 xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
3618 xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
3619 xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
3620 xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
3621 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
3622 xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
3625 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p>
3628 deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
3629 xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
3630 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
3633 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
3634 <a href=
"http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
3635 in git
</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
3636 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
3637 the difference somewhat.
3643 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>.
3648 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3652 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI
</a>
3658 <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
3659 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
3660 tool to browse the LDAP tree. The only one I was able to find in
3661 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
3662 <a href=
"http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA
</a>, which has proved to
3663 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
3664 populated by default in Skolelinux. Thanks to it, I have been able to
3665 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
3666 objects. It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze. If you
3667 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)
</p>
3669 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
3670 the BTS yet. There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
3671 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
3672 Debian submenu in KDE. I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
3675 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet. I would
3676 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
3677 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet. So in the mean time, I use
3678 <a href=
"http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi
</a> for that.
</p>
3680 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
3681 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p>
3683 <p>Update
2010-
06-
29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
3684 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq
</a> package as a
3685 useful GUI alternative. It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
3686 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze. Unless that
3687 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.
</p>
3693 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>.
3698 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3702 <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>
3709 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
3710 about the fact
</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
3711 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
3712 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.
</p>
3714 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
3715 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
3716 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
3717 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.
</p>
3719 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
3720 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
3721 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
3724 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
3726 <a href=
"http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
3727 schema
</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
3728 available today from IETF.
</p>
3731 --- dhcp.schema (revision
65192)
3732 +++ dhcp.schema (working copy)
3734 objectclass (
2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
3736 DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
3740 MAY (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
3741 X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
3744 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
3745 Edu/Squeeze. We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
3746 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.
</p>
3748 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
3749 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p>
3755 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>.
3760 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3764 <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>
3770 <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
3771 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run. Until now,
3772 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
3773 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
3774 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
3778 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
3779 tasksel --new-install
3782 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
3783 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
3784 any output what so ever.
3786 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
3787 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
3788 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
3789 happen. Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
3790 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
3791 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run. I ended up using
3795 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
3796 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
3800 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "
<tt>aptitude -q
3801 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
3802 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
3803 ~pimportant
</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
3804 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
3805 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
3808 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
3809 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
3816 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>.
3821 <div class="padding
"></div>
3825 <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>
3832 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html
">testing
3833 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
3834 finally made the upgrade logs available from
3835 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/
">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
3836 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
3837 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting. This time
3838 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
3840 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
3841 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze. The
3842 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
3843 xserver-xorg-video* drivers. Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
3844 sure why. When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
3845 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
3846 longer needed. Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
3847 I do not know. Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
3849 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
3850 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
3851 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
3854 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
3855 and avoided, and perhaps others as well. Here are the complete list
3856 of planned removals. The complete logs is available from the URL
3857 above. Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
3858 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
3859 conffile questions. No idea why. I worked around it by using
3860 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
3863 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
3864 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
3865 gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
3866 iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
3867 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
3868 nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
3869 serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
3870 xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
3871 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
3872 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
3873 xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
3874 xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
3875 xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
3876 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
3877 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
3878 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
3879 xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
3880 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
3881 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
3882 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
3883 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
3884 xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
3885 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
3886 xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
3887 xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
3888 xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
3889 xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
3890 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
3891 xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
3892 xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
3894 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
3896 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
3897 djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
3898 gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
3899 gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
3900 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
3901 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
3902 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
3903 libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
3904 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
3905 libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
3906 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
3907 libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
3908 libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
3909 libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
3910 libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
3911 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
3912 libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
3913 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
3914 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
3915 libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
3916 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
3917 libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
3918 libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
3919 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
3920 openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
3921 python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
3922 python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
3923 python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
3924 swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
3925 xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
3926 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
3929 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
3931 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
3932 kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
3933 kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
3934 kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
3935 kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
3936 libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
3937 xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
3938 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
3939 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
3940 xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
3941 xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
3942 xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
3943 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
3944 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
3945 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
3946 xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
3947 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
3948 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
3949 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
3950 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
3951 xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
3952 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
3953 xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
3954 xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
3955 xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
3956 xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
3957 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
3958 xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
3960 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
3961 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
3962 djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
3963 ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
3964 kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
3965 kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
3966 kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
3967 kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
3968 kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
3969 kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
3970 kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
3971 kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
3972 klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
3973 kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
3974 krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
3975 ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
3976 kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
3977 kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
3978 libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
3979 libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
3980 libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
3981 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
3982 libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
3983 libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
3984 libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
3985 libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
3986 libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
3987 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
3988 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
3989 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
3990 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
3991 libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
3992 openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
3993 superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
3994 texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
3995 xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
3996 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
4004 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>.
4009 <div class="padding
"></div>
4013 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html
">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
4019 <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
4020 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly. A few bugs
4021 have been discovered and reported in the process
4022 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/
585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
4023 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/
584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
4024 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/
584861">#584861</a> in
4025 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
4026 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
4028 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
4029 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
4030 it. To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
4031 script is inserted. To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
4032 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
4033 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
4035 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
4036 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
4037 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
4038 is created. The bug report
4039 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/
566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
4040 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
4041 to make sure the upgrade go well. Testing on virtual and real
4042 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
4043 do the trick in such settings anyway. This is a
4044 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-
26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-
804130/
">known
4045 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
4046 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
4047 working with old kernels or something like that. I really wish the
4048 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
4049 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
4050 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
4053 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades. This test
4054 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
4072 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
4073 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
4075 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
4076 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
4077 cat
> $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
<<EOF
4081 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
4085 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
4086 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
4087 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
4089 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
4091 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger. It need the test scripts
4092 # to return the correct answers.
4093 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
4094 chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
4096 # Include the desktop and laptop task
4097 for test in desktop laptop ; do
4098 echo
> $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
<<EOF
4102 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
4105 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
4106 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
4107 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
4108 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
4110 echo deb $mirror $to main
> $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
4111 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
4112 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
4113 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
4117 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
4118 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
4119 differently so far. I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
4120 regularly and post the result on the web. The Gnome upgrade currently
4121 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
4122 kdebase-workspace-data
</p>
4124 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
4125 (KDE
167 KiB, Gnome
516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
4126 post, so I will refrain from trying. I can report that for Gnome,
4127 aptitude report
760 packages upgraded,
448 newly installed,
129 to
4128 remove and
1 not upgraded and
1024MB need to be downloaded while for
4129 KDE the same numbers are
702 packages upgraded,
507 newly installed,
4130 193 to remove and
0 not upgraded and
1117MB need to be downloaded
</p>
4132 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
4133 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
4134 booting without a hitch. Was unsure if there were still bugs with
4135 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
4136 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
4143 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>.
4148 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4152 <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>
4158 <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
4159 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
4160 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd. The packages with such
4161 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
4162 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart. Because of
4163 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
4164 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.
</p>
4166 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
4167 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
4176 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
4178 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
4181 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
4185 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-
2.88
4192 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
4193 sysvinit are not set by upstart. Not sure if it is intentional or not
4194 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.
</p>
4196 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
4197 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
4204 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>.
4209 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4213 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...
</a>
4220 <a href=
"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
4221 of Rob Weir
</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
4222 <a href=
"http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
4223 Standards Wars
</a> (PDF
25 pages). I recommend it for everyone
4224 following the standards wars of today.
</p>
4230 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>.
4235 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4239 <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>
4245 <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
4246 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
4247 information extracted from each machine. The script to do so is
4248 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
4249 the Skolelinux build servers:
</p>
4252 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
4254 Dell Computer Corporation
1
4257 eserver xSeries
345 -[
8670M1X]-
1
4263 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
4264 provided in each machine. Here there are Intel machines without model
4265 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
4266 machines listed as [no-dmi-info]. One can add -l as a command line
4267 option to list the individual machines.
</p>
4270 <a href=
"http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
4271 city of Narvik
</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
4272 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly. In their report there
4273 are ~
1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
4274 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
4275 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
4282 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>.
4287 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4291 <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>
4297 <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
4298 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled. The
4299 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
4300 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
4303 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
4304 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#
583312</a> initially filed
4305 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
4306 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
4307 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#
524751</a> initially filed against
4308 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.
</p>
4310 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
4311 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
4312 distribution work out of the box for these users. The nvidia driver
4313 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
4314 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
4315 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
4316 distribution that work for them. I have no idea what the solution is,
4317 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.
</p>
4319 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.
</p>
4325 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>.
4330 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4334 <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>
4340 <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
4341 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
4342 issues are known and should be solved:
4346 <li>The wicd package seen to
4347 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting
</a> and
4348 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup
</a> when
4349 parallel booting is enabled. No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
4350 seem to be on the case.
</li>
4352 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
4353 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition
</a>
4354 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect. The
4355 maintainer is on the case.
</li>
4357 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
4358 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
4359 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back
</a> to
4360 sysv-rc. One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
4361 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
4362 sysv-rc more robust. Will investigate some more and probably upload a
4363 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
4364 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.
</li>
4368 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
4369 solvable before Squeeze is released. In addition to these there are
4370 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
4371 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.
</p>
4373 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
4374 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
4375 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
4376 list of usertagged bugs related to this
</a>.
</p>
4378 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.
</p>
4384 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>.
4389 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4393 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer
</a>
4399 <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
4400 found time today to return to the project. Having to spend less time
4401 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
4402 definitely helped freeing some time.
</p>
4404 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu. We
4405 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
4406 get disk and network controllers working. Without having these
4407 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
4408 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
4409 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
4410 an external medium is a support pain. Initially, I expected it to be
4411 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
4412 debian-installer to find and use them. This proved to be wrong.
4413 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
4414 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
4415 /cdrom/firmware/). This also proved to not work, and at this point I
4416 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
4419 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
4420 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
4421 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
4422 packages. It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
4423 "external" media devices. Today I changed it to also look in the
4424 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
4425 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu. I also changed it to
4426 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
4427 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
4428 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
4431 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
4432 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
4433 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
4434 run these before activating the firmware during installation. The
4435 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
4436 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.
</p>
4438 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
4439 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.
</p>
4445 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>.
4450 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4454 <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>
4460 <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
4461 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
4462 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
4463 expected, if I am to believe the
4464 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
4465 on debian-devel@
</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
4466 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
4467 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen. If serious problems are
4468 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
4469 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
4472 More information about
4473 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
4474 based boot sequencing
</a> is available from the Debian wiki. It is
4475 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
4476 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:
</p>
4482 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
4483 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
4484 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
4485 list of usertagged bugs related to this
</a>.
</p>
4491 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>.
4496 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4500 <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>
4506 <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
4507 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
4508 system
</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
4509 network. Each machine will automatically report its status to the
4510 central server after boot and once per night. The network setup is
4511 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
4512 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines. This is useful
4513 to update the DHCP configuration.
</p>
4515 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
4516 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary. Run
4517 this on the collector host:
</p>
4520 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
4523 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
4524 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.
</p>
4526 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
4527 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
4528 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
4529 tables in LDAP using this information. Such tool is unfortunately not
4536 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>.
4541 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4545 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart
</a>
4551 <p>The last few days a new boot system called
4552 <a href=
"http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd
</a>
4554 <a href=
"http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced
</a>
4556 to the free software world. I have not yet had time to play around
4557 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
4558 <a href=
"http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart
</a>, and might prove to be
4559 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
4560 based boot system. Tollef is
4561 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process
</a> of getting
4562 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work. I
4563 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
4564 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
4565 at the moment do not.
</p>
4567 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
4568 platform support. It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
4569 some new kernel features enabled to function properly. This means
4570 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
4571 system. Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
4574 <p>In the mean time, based on the
4575 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
4576 on debian-devel@
</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
4577 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
4578 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
4579 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies. A
4580 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
4581 already in experimental. If all go well, Squeeze will be released
4582 with parallel booting enabled by default.
</p>
4588 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>.
4593 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4597 <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>
4603 <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
4604 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
4605 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies. If you want
4606 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
4607 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
4608 based boot sequencing
</a> is enabled, and add this line to
4609 /etc/default/rcS:
</p>
4612 CONCURRENCY=makefile
4615 <p>That is it. It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
4616 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
4617 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
4618 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts. Startpar is configured
4619 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
4620 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
4621 make this happen.
</p>
4623 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result. If some services
4624 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
4625 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
4626 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies). Report bugs and get
4627 the package maintainers to fix it. :)
</p>
4629 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
4630 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct. I
4631 expect we will get there in Squeeze+
1, if we get manage to test and
4632 fix the remaining issues.
</p>
4634 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
4635 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
4636 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
4637 list of usertagged bugs related to this
</a>.
</p>
4643 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>.
4648 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4652 <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>
4658 <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version
2.87dsf-
2,
4659 and the upload of insserv version
1.12.0-
10 yesterday, Debian unstable
4660 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing. This
4661 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
4662 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
4663 installation. Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
4664 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.
</p>
4666 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
4667 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
4668 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.
</p>
4674 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>.
4679 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4683 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development
</a>
4689 <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
4690 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
4691 take over the package and become the new upstream. The number of
4692 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
4693 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
4694 the package up to date.
</p>
4696 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
4697 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman. About
10 days ago, I made
4698 a new upstream tarball with version number
2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
4699 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
4700 distributions. We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
4701 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge. Since the
4702 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
4703 upstream project at
<a href=
"http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah
</a>, and continue
4704 development there. The project is registered and currently waiting
4705 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
4706 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
4707 working on the future release.
</p>
4709 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
4710 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.
</p>
4716 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>.
4721 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4725 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker
</a>
4731 <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
4732 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
4733 could find more ways to speed up the boot system. This was an Ubuntu
4735 <a href=
"https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
4736 gathering
</a>. It was quite productive. We also discussed the future
4737 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
4738 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
4739 asynchronous and event base. The Ubuntu approach using udev and
4740 upstart might be a good way forward. Time will show.
</p>
4742 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
4743 process in Debian. All of these should be applied to get a quick
4748 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.
</li>
4750 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
4751 clock is in UTC.
</li>
4753 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
4754 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
4755 based boot sequencing
</a>, and enable concurrent booting.
</li>
4759 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
4760 <a href=
"http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
4763 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
4764 unstable yesterday. When we tested it, we were able to cut
6 seconds
4765 from the boot sequence. It depend on very correct dependency
4766 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
4767 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
4770 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
4771 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
4772 startup speed as well. Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
4773 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
4774 possible to run a of them in the same process. A quick way to test
4775 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
4776 insserv'. Will need to test if that work. :)
</p>
4782 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>.
4787 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4791 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/BSAs_p_stander_om_piratkopiering_m_ter_motstand.html">BSAs påstander om piratkopiering møter motstand
</a>
4797 <p>Hvert år de siste årene har BSA, lobbyfronten til de store
4798 programvareselskapene som Microsoft og Apple, publisert en rapport der
4799 de gjetter på hvor mye piratkopiering påfører i tapte inntekter i
4800 ulike land rundt om i verden. Resultatene er tendensiøse. For noen
4802 <a href=
"http://global.bsa.org/globalpiracy2008/studies/globalpiracy2008.pdf">siste
4803 rapport
</a>, og det er flere kritiske kommentarer publisert de siste
4804 dagene. Et spesielt interessant kommentar fra Sverige,
4805 <a href=
"http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.229795/bsa-hoftade-sverigesiffror">BSA
4806 höftade Sverigesiffror
</a>, oppsummeres slik:
</p>
4809 I sin senaste rapport slår BSA fast att
25 procent av all mjukvara i
4810 Sverige är piratkopierad. Det utan att ha pratat med ett enda svenskt
4811 företag. "Man bör nog kanske inte se de här siffrorna som helt
4812 exakta", säger BSAs Sverigechef John Hugosson.
4815 <p>Mon tro om de er like metodiske når de gjetter på andelen piratkopiering i Norge? To andre kommentarer er
<a
4816 href=
"http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/comment/2242134/bsa-piracy-figures-shot-reality">BSA
4817 piracy figures need a shot of reality
</a> og
<a
4818 href=
"http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3958/125/">Does The WIPO
4819 Copyright Treaty Work?
</a></p>
4821 <p>Fant lenkene via
<a
4822 href=
"http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/17/1632242">oppslag
4823 på Slashdot
</a>.
</p>
4829 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>.
4834 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4838 <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>
4845 <a href=
"http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10216873-16.html">interessante
4846 tall
</a> fra IDG om utviklingen av linuxservermarkedet. Fikk meg til
4847 å tenke på antall tjenermaskiner ved Universitetet i Oslo der jeg
4848 jobber til daglig. En rask opptelling forteller meg at vi har
490
4849 (
61%) fysiske unix-tjener (mest linux men også noen solaris) og
196
4850 (
25%) windowstjenere, samt
112 (
14%) virtuelle unix-tjenere. Med den
4851 bakgrunnskunnskapen kan jeg godt tro at IDG er inne på noe.
</p>
4857 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>.
4862 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4866 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kryptert_harddisk___naturligvis.html">Kryptert harddisk - naturligvis
</a>
4872 <p><a href=
"http://www.dagensit.no/trender/article1658676.ece">Dagens
4873 IT melder
</a> at Intel hevder at det er dyrt å miste en datamaskin,
4874 når en tar tap av arbeidstid, fortrolige dokumenter,
4875 personopplysninger og alt annet det innebærer. Det er ingen tvil om
4876 at det er en kostbar affære å miste sin datamaskin, og det er årsaken
4877 til at jeg har kryptert harddisken på både kontormaskinen og min
4878 bærbare. Begge inneholder personopplysninger jeg ikke ønsker skal
4879 komme på avveie, den første informasjon relatert til jobben min ved
4880 Universitetet i Oslo, og den andre relatert til blant annet
4881 foreningsarbeide. Kryptering av diskene gjør at det er lite
4882 sannsynlig at dophoder som kan finne på å rappe maskinene får noe ut
4883 av dem. Maskinene låses automatisk etter noen minutter uten bruk,
4884 og en reboot vil gjøre at de ber om passord før de vil starte opp.
4885 Jeg bruker Debian på begge maskinene, og installasjonssystemet der
4886 gjør det trivielt å sette opp krypterte disker. Jeg har LVM på toppen
4887 av krypterte partisjoner, slik at alt av datapartisjoner er kryptert.
4888 Jeg anbefaler alle å kryptere diskene på sine bærbare. Kostnaden når
4889 det er gjort slik jeg gjør det er minimale, og gevinstene er
4890 betydelige. En bør dog passe på passordet. Hvis det går tapt, må
4891 maskinen reinstalleres og alt er tapt.
</p>
4893 <p>Krypteringen vil ikke stoppe kompetente angripere som f.eks. kjøler
4894 ned minnebrikkene før maskinen rebootes med programvare for å hente ut
4895 krypteringsnøklene. Kostnaden med å forsvare seg mot slike angripere
4896 er for min del høyere enn gevinsten. Jeg tror oddsene for at
4897 f.eks. etteretningsorganisasjoner har glede av å titte på mine
4898 maskiner er minimale, og ulempene jeg ville oppnå ved å forsøke å
4899 gjøre det vanskeligere for angripere med kompetanse og ressurser er
4906 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>.
4911 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4915 <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>
4921 <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
4922 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
4923 do not yet know them.
</p>
4925 <p>The first one is
<a href=
"http://valgrind.org/">valgrind
</a>, a
4926 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
4927 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
4928 and it will report any problems on stdout. It is even better if the
4929 program include debug information. With debug information, it is able
4930 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
4931 occurs. It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
4932 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
4933 'using uninitialised value in control logic'. This tool has made it
4934 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
4935 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
4937 <p>The second one is
4938 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity
</a> which is
4939 a source code checker. It is able to process the source of a program
4940 and find problems in the logic without running the program. It
4941 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
4942 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel. It is now a commercial tool
4943 and the company behind it is running
4944 <a href=
"http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service
</a> for the
4945 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
4946 their source checked for free. Several thousand defects have been
4947 found and fixed so far. It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
4948 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
4949 Y lines O to P can never be executed'. The projects included in the
4950 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
4951 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.
</p>
4953 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
4954 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
4955 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
4956 surrounded by today.
</p>
4962 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>.
4967 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4971 <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>
4978 <a href=
"http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
4979 patch is better than a useless patch
</a>. I completely disagree, as a
4980 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
4981 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
4982 time on fixing it. No patch do not provide any of these positive
4989 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>.
4994 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4998 <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>
5004 <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
5005 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure. It is the
5006 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
5007 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
5008 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
5009 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
5010 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
5013 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
5014 independently of the server applications. One can even allow users to
5015 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
5016 protocol and format. In the normal case, only one client application
5017 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
5018 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
5019 blocked from doing so.
</p>
5021 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
5022 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
5023 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
5024 requirements change.
</p>
5026 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
5027 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
5028 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.
</p>
5034 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>.
5039 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5043 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering
</a>
5049 <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
5050 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering. I got a bit done tuning the
5051 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
5052 implementation avahi. It look like it could be useful for us. Almost
5053 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
5054 get to know the Skolelinux system. Walter Bender, involved in the
5055 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
5056 also helped me improve my OLPC installation. He also showed me that
5057 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
5058 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian. As a
5059 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu. We also
5060 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
5061 proved to be too hard for us. The application seem to need more work
5062 before it is ready for me. I look forward to getting home and relax
5069 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>.
5074 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5078 <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>
5084 <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
5085 optimal. There is RFC
2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
5086 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC
2307bis, with
5087 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory. The RFC
5088 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
5089 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.
</p>
5091 <p>In
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux
</a>,
5092 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
5093 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
5094 and LTSP configuration in LDAP. These objects have a lot in common,
5095 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
5096 object per entity. For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
5097 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
5098 DNS information and another with DHCP information. The schemas
5099 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
5100 object. In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
5101 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
5102 It just do not scale. I believe it is time for a few RFC
5103 specifications to cleam up this mess.
</p>
5105 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
5106 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
5107 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
5108 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.
</p>
5110 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
5111 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.
</p>
5113 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
5114 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up. Time to start a
5115 new IETF work group?
</p>
5121 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>.
5126 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5130 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Endelig_er_Debian_Lenny_gitt_ut.html">Endelig er Debian Lenny gitt ut
</a>
5136 <p>Endelig er
<a href=
"http://www.debian.org/">Debian
</a>
5137 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090214">Lenny
</a> gitt ut.
5138 Et langt steg videre for Debian-prosjektet, og en rekke nye
5139 programpakker blir nå tilgjengelig for de av oss som bruker den
5140 stabile utgaven av Debian. Neste steg er nå å få
5141 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
</a> /
5142 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu
</a> ferdig
5143 oppdatert for den nye utgaven, slik at en oppdatert versjon kan
5144 slippes løs på skolene. Takk til alle debian-utviklerne som har
5145 gjort dette mulig. Endelig er f.eks. fungerende avhengighetsstyrt
5146 bootsekvens tilgjengelig i stabil utgave, vha pakken
5147 <tt>insserv
</tt>.
</p>
5153 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>.
5158 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5162 <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>
5168 <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
5169 Oslo. Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
5170 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
5171 LTSP installation. LTSP now work out of the box on the
10-network.
5172 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
5173 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box. Was working on getting the
5174 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
5175 finish it before the weekend was up.
</p>
5177 <p>Did not find time to look at the
4 VGA cards in one box we got from
5178 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
5179 development gathering. Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
5180 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
5187 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>.
5192 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5196 <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>
5202 <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
5203 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
5204 default in Debian Edu. We need an embedded video playing plugin with
5205 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
5206 all the multimedia content available on the web. The test results and
5207 notes are available on
5208 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
5209 Debian wiki
</a>. I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
5210 fill this need. My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
5211 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages. A lot of the MIME
5212 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
5213 video/ogg), just do not work. And simple formats like the
5214 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
5215 totem and vlc plugins. I hope the situation will improve soon. No
5216 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.
</p>
5218 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin. It seem to
5219 be the only one fitting our needs. :/
</p>
5225 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>.
5230 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5232 <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)
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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>
5387 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (
5)
</a></li>
5389 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (
12)
</a></li>
5391 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (
2)
</a></li>
5393 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (
65)
</a></li>
5395 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (
118)
</a></li>
5397 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (
9)
</a></li>
5399 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (
7)
</a></li>
5401 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (
4)
</a></li>
5403 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (
171)
</a></li>
5405 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (
21)
</a></li>
5407 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (
12)
</a></li>
5409 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (
10)
</a></li>
5411 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (
9)
</a></li>
5413 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (
32)
</a></li>
5415 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (
17)
</a></li>
5417 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (
8)
</a></li>
5419 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (
6)
</a></li>
5421 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (
1)
</a></li>
5423 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (
25)
</a></li>
5425 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (
219)
</a></li>
5427 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (
148)
</a></li>
5429 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (
6)
</a></li>
5431 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (
2)
</a></li>
5433 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (
41)
</a></li>
5435 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (
61)
</a></li>
5437 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (
1)
</a></li>
5439 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (
11)
</a></li>
5441 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (
2)
</a></li>
5443 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (
6)
</a></li>
5445 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (
1)
</a></li>
5447 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (
4)
</a></li>
5449 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (
2)
</a></li>
5451 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (
28)
</a></li>
5453 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (
4)
</a></li>
5455 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (
4)
</a></li>
5457 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (
39)
</a></li>
5459 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (
3)
</a></li>
5461 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (
5)
</a></li>
5463 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (
12)
</a></li>
5465 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (
1)
</a></li>
5467 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (
7)
</a></li>
5469 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (
35)
</a></li>
5471 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (
4)
</a></li>
5473 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (
26)
</a></li>
5479 <p style=
"text-align: right">
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