Petter Reinholdtsen

If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd. The packages with such needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart. Because of this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d script is running under upstart, and when it is not.

With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like COLUMNS):

DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
previous=N
PREVLEVEL=
RUNLEVEL=
runlevel=S
UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
UPSTART_INSTANCE=
UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit

With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same script.

INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
previous=N
PREVLEVEL=N
RUNLEVEL=S
runlevel=S

The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from sysvinit is not set by upstart. Not sure if it is intentional or not to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.

For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used, looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good choice.

Via the blog of Rob Weir I came across the very interesting essay named The Art of Standards Wars (PDF 25 pages). I recommend it for everyone following the standards wars of today.

When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI information extracted from each machine. The script to do so is included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from the Skolelinux build servers:

maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
  vendor                    count
  Dell Computer Corporation     1
    PowerEdge 1750              1
  IBM                           1
    eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
  Intel                         2
  [no-dmi-info]                 3
maintainer:~#

The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables provided in each machine. Here there are Intel machines without model information listed with Intel as vendor and mo model, and virtual Xen machines listed as [no-dmi-info]. One can add -l as a command line option to list the individual machines.

A larger list is available from the the city of Narvik, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also provide the basic sitesummary report publicly. In their report there are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions, it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central collector.

Det står dårlig til med toget når en finner på å la det kappkjøre med sykkel... Jeg tror det trengs strukturendringer for å få fikset på togproblemene i Norge.

Mon tro hva toglinje mellom Narvik og Tromsø ville hatt slags effekt på området der?

It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled. The problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to wait.

I came across two bugs related to this issue, #583312 initially filed against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious that the nvidia drivers were involved, and #524751 initially filed against kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.

To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian distribution work out of the box for these users. The nvidia driver maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a distribution that work for them. I have no idea what the solution is, but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.

I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.

A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing. The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious issues are known and should be solved:

• The wicd package seen to break NFS mounting and network setup when parallel booting is enabled. No idea why, but the wicd maintainer seem to be on the case.
• The nvidia X driver seem to have a race condition triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect. The maintainer is on the case.
• The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users try to switch back to sysv-rc. One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make sysv-rc more robust. Will investigate some more and probably upload a workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to sysv-rc get a working shutdown.

All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem solvable before Squeeze is released. In addition to these there are some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings, which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.

If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at the list of usertagged bugs related to this.

Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.

After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally found time today to return to the project. Having to spend less time working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now, definitely helped freeing some time.

A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu. We include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to get disk and network controllers working. Without having these firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on an external medium is a support pain. Initially, I expected it to be enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get debian-installer to find and use them. This proved to be wrong. Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and /cdrom/firmware/). This also proved to not work, and at this point I found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was going to work.

The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware packages. It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other "external" media devices. Today I changed it to also look in the /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu. I also changed it to look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian Edu.

To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and run these before activating the firmware during installation. The license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.

If you want to discuss the details of these features, please contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.

For en stund tilbake kjøpte jeg en magnetkortleser for å kunne titte på hva som er skrevet inn på magnetstripene til ulike kort. Har ikke hatt tid til å analysere mange kort så langt, men tenkte jeg skulle dele innholdet på to kort med mine lesere.

For noen dager siden tok jeg flyet til Harstad og Hurtigruten til Bergen. Flytoget fra Oslo S til flyplassen ga meg en billett med magnetstripe. Påtrykket finner jeg følgende informasjon:

Flytoget Airport Express Train

Fra - Til        : Oslo Sentralstasjon
Kategori         : Voksen
Pris             : Nok 170,00
Herav mva. 8,00% : NOK 12,59
Betaling         : Kontant
Til - Fra        : Oslo Lufthavn
Utstedt:         : 08.05.10
Gyldig Fra-Til   : 08.05.10-07.11.10
Billetttype      : Enkeltbillett

102-1015-100508-48382-01-08

På selve magnetstripen er innholdet ;E?+900120011=23250996541068112619257138248441708433322932704083389389062603279671261502492655?. Aner ikke hva innholdet representerer, og det er lite overlapp mellom det jeg ser trykket på billetten og det jeg ser av tegn i magnetstripen. Håper det betyr at de bruker kryptografiske metoder for å gjøre det vanskelig å forfalske billetter.

Den andre billetten er fra Hurtigruten, der jeg mistenker at strekkoden på fronten er mer brukt enn magnetstripen (det var i hvert fall den biten vi stakk inn i dørlåsen).

Påtrykket forsiden er følgende:

Romnummer 727
Hurtigruten
Midnatsol
Reinholdtsen
Petter
Bookingno: SAX69   0742193
Harstad-Bergen
Dep: 09.05.2010 Arr: 12.05.2010
Lugar fra Risøyhamn
Kost: FRO=4

På selve magnetstripen er innholdet ;1316010007421930=00000000000000000000?+E?. Heller ikke her ser jeg mye korrespondanse mellom påtrykk og magnetstripe.

Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian Edu finally entered the Debian archive. Today, the new libpam-mklocaluser package was accepted. Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted into unstable. The pam-python package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the sssd package passed NEW on Monday. In addition, the libpam-ccreds package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.

This collection of packages allow for two different setups for roaming laptops. The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds, nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication, which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed for nscd in BTS report #485282 is implemented. The alternative setup is to use sssd with libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take care of the caching of passwords and group information.

I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related problem with the server certificate. I plan to update the Debian package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to find time to make sure the next release will include both the Debian/Ubuntu specific patches. Upstream is friendly and responsive, and I am sure we will find a good solution.

The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/ when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group memberhips and other relevant LDAP information. The libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used. To avoid confusion with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory on the home directory servers.

One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user is created. Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic message. The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is a bug in gdm. Have not investigated if there is some other message type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.

If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.

Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing. Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than expected, if I am to believe the input on debian-devel@, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen. If serious problems are detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot. The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream version.

More information about dependency based boot sequencing is available from the Debian wiki. It is currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:

CONCURRENCY=none

If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at the list of usertagged bugs related to this.