Planet Debian

Frank Lichtenheld: Moving a mailing list from SF.net to another Mailman instance

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:07:58 -0700

I had to move a mailing list from SourceForge to a self-hosted Mailman instance while preserving all the user options. Since one has no shell access to these SF's Mailman I decided to extract the information from the Web-Interface, which sadly enough is no easy task. There is no complete list available but only chunked by starting letter and in groups of 30 addresses or less.

Since the mailing list in question had about 1500 subscribers manual transcription was really no option. So I wrote a small script that automatically extracts all the information and outputs it in a CSV-like format.

I've also hacked Mailman's add_members script to set all these options from this format.

In case someone finds this useful, both are available on my git server under free licenses:

grab-subscribers.pl: Extract subscriber information from Mailman Web-Interface with LWP.
add_members: Use the information extracted by grab-subscribers.pl to populate a Mailman mailing list.

DISCLAIMER: This is hacked together really quickly and was used exactly once. Don't expect too much.

Gustavo Noronha Silva: 7 Aug 2008

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:07:47 -0700

So it is currently possible to use simple library calls in glib-based code to run something as root, by taking advantage of the gksu policykit mechanism:

GksuProcess* gksu_process_new(const gchar *working_directory, const gchar **arguments); gboolean gksu_process_spawn_async(GksuProcess *process, GError **error);

The DBus service already works; it is able to setup the environment and X authorization correctly. There is still lots to do; startup notification is still not handled, and dealing with the application’s stdandard output and error messages, as well as providing a way for the caller to send stuff into the processe’s standard input. It is already possible to start an application and know that it has been finished, though.

As for the code:

$ git clone git://kov.eti.br/srv/git/gksu-polkit.git/

Criticism is welcome!

In other news… I’d like to ask our dear lazy web if anyone is using some nice way of providing only posts tagged in specific categories in a feed in wordpress. I’d like to use that to provide my posts to planet debian from my wordpress install.

Junichi Uekawa: gettext locale bug.

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:08:01 -0700

gettext locale bug. I debugged 492907 today. Contrary to my initial impression, it looks like a bug in libgettext-ruby1.8. charset for cs_CZ is ISO-8859-2, but ruby thinks it is UTF-8.

Stefano Zacchiroli: yay from debcamp8

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:08:01 -0700

DebCamp8, shakiness, planes, `python-debian`

Well, not unexpected news, but since I've been rather quite lately it is worth reminding that I'm now at DebConf8, enjoying the DebCamp. I've arrived today after a quite long trip made of unexpected extra plane stops in Madrid (thanks Iberia for not declaring it and letting me ponder about how can it possibly take 16 hours from Barcelona to Buenos Aires, now I know the reason ...) and shaky bus hours.

First tiny teeny achievement of DebCamp (among a handful of beers already) is an upload of python-debian 0.1.11, implementing among other things support for parsed dependencies and a major overhaul changelog parsing (thanks to James Westby). Unfortunately we are going to miss Lenny with this release, but after all it is a package mostly meant for Debian Developers, so it is probably not a big deal.

Jaldhar Vyas: 6 Down 999,999,994 To Go

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:08:01 -0700

Congratulations to Kartik who finally became a Debian Developer

There is definitely a lot of interest in Debian in India—even more if you count Ubuntu. Unfortunately interest is not translating into participation. Why are we seeing so little involvement in the project from Indians? What can we do to convert "users" to "builders"?

If you have any thoughts on the matter I would like to hear about them.

Junichi Uekawa: Ubuntu kernels not working with qemubuilder.

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:08:01 -0700

Ubuntu kernels not working with qemubuilder. I've seen reports that Ubuntu kernels don't work because they have /dev/sda instead of /dev/hda for IDE devices. I'm not entirely sure that's a clever thing to do, but I'm not entirely sure if it's a clever thing to hardcode /dev/hda for i386/amd64 qemu architectures.

MJ Ray: RFID Security and Stability

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:08:01 -0700

While developing an RFID extension for the Koha library catalogue system over the last few months, I’ve learned a lot about I-Code tags and security systems, but I’ve not yet looked into Mifare yet, which is the other big RFID product line from NXP. I have been seeing several reports of problems with Oyster (which is Mifare-based) and a crack to be published.

I thought Mifare was meant to be a much tougher product than I-Code. I’m surprised and disappointed that NXP’s reaction to a hack was to try to prevent publication. I haven’t heard from any suppliers about vulnerabilities, so I doubt that NXP are passing the message on to all Mifare-operators yet. They should tell Mifare operators so that they can protect themselves. It looks like the head-in-sand approach to security, which is very worrying.

At least one of our RFID systems is Mifare-capable (which is why I think we should have been told about this vulnerability), so I’ll look into that when I get some spare time (March 2012 perhaps?) unless someone points me at a link with juicy details.

Russell Coker: A Basic IPVS Configuration

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:08:01 -0700

I have just configured IPVS on a Xen server for load balancing between multiple virtual hosts. The benefit is not load balancing but management. With two virtual machines providing a service I can gracefully shut one down for maintenance and have the other take the load. When there are two machines providing a service a load balancing configuration is much better than a hot-spare, one reason is the fact that there may be application scaling issues that prevent one machine with twice the resources from giving as much performance as two smaller machines. Another is the fact that if you have a machine configured but never used there will always be some doubt as to whether it would work…

The first thing to do is to assign the IP address of the service to the front-end machine so that other machines on the segment (IE routers) will be able to send data to it. If the address for the service is 10.0.0.5 then the command “ip addr add dev eth0 10.0.0.5/24 broadcast +” will make it a secondary address on the eth0 interface. On a Debian system you would add the line “up ip addr add dev eth0 10.0.0.5/24 broadcast + || true” to the appropriate section of /etc/network/interfaces, for a Red Hat system it seems that /etc/rc.local is the best place for it. I expect that it would be possible to merely advertise the IP address via ARP without adding it to the interface, but the ability to ping the IPVS server on the service address seems useful and there seems no benefit in not assigning the address.

There are three methods used by IPVS for forwarding packets, gatewaying/routing (the default), IPIP encapsulation (tunneling), and masquerading. The gatewaying/routing method requires the back-end server to respond to requests on the service address. That would mean assigning the address to the back-end server without advertising it via ARP (which seems likely to have some issues for managing the system). The IPIP encapsulation method requires setting up IPIP which seemed like it would be excessively difficult (although maybe not more than required to set up masquerading). The masquerading option (which I initially chose) rewrites the packets to have the IP address of the real server. So for example if the service address is 10.0.0.5 and the back-end server has the address 10.0.1.5 then it will see packets addresses to 10.0.1.5. A benefit of masquerading is that it allows you to use different ports, so for example you could have a non-virtualised mail server listening on port 25 and a back-end server for a virtual service listening on port 26. While there is no practical limit to the number of private IP addresses that you might use it seems easier to manage servers listening on different ports with the same IP address - and there is the issue of server programs that are not written to support binding to an IP address.

ipvsadm -A -t 10.0.0.5:25 -s lblc -p
ipvsadm -a -t 10.0.0.5:25 -r 10.0.1.5 -m

The above two commands create an IPVS configuration that listens on port 25 of IP address 10.0.0.5 and then masquerades connections to 10.0.1.5 on port 25 (the default is to use the same port).

Now the problem is in getting the packets to return via the IPVS server. If the IPVS server happens to be your default gateway then it’s not a problem and it will already be working after the above two commands (if a service is listening on 10.0.1.5 port 25).

If the IPVS server is not the default gateway and you have only one IP address on the back-end server then this will require using netfilter to mark the packets and then route based on the packet matching. Marking via netfilter also seems to be the only well documented way of doing similar things. I spent some time working on this and didn’t get it working. However having multiple IP addresses per server is a recommended practice anyway (a back-end interface for communication between servers as well as a front-end interface for public data).

ip rule add from 10.0.1.5 table 1
ip route add default via 10.0.0.1 table 1

I use the above two commands to set up a new routing table for the data for the virtual service. The first line causes any packets from 10.0.1.5 to be sent to routing table 1 (I currently have a rough plan to have table numbers match ethernet device numbers, the data in question is going out device eth1). The second line adds a default router to table 1 which sends all packets to 10.0.0.1 (the private IP address of the IPVS server).

Then it SHOULD all be working, but in the network that I’m using (RHEL4 DomU and RHEL5 Dom0 and IPVS) it doesn’t. For some reason the data packets from the DomU are not seen as part of the same TCP stream (both in Net Filter connection tracking and by the TCP code in the kernel). So I get an established connection (3 way handshake completed) but no data transfer. The server sends the SMTP greeting repeatedly but nothing is received. At this stage I’m not sure whether there is something missing in my configuration or whether there’s a bug in IPVS. I would be happy to send tcpdump output to anyone who wants to try and figure it out.

My next attempt at this was via routing. I removed the “-m” option from the ipvsadm command and added the service IP address to the back-end with the command “ifconfig lo:0 10.0.0.5 netmask 255.255.255.255” and configured the mail server to bind to port 25 on address 10.0.0.5. Success at last!

Now I just have to get Piranha working to remove back-end servers from the list when they fail.

Update: It’s quite important that when adding a single IP address to device lo:0 you use a netmask of 255.255.255.255. If you use the same netmask as the front-end device (which would seem like a reasonable thing to do) then (with RHEL4 kernels at least) you get proxy ARPs by default. For example you used netmask 255.255.255.0 to add address 10.0.0.5 to device lo:0 then on device eth0 the machine will start answering ARP requests for 10.0.0.6 etc. Havoc then ensues.

Sandro Tosi: Another info source for Debian

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:08:01 -0700

It seems that #debian-devel@OFTC channel topic is used to inform for some particular situations, even grave ones (like HP Fort Collins outage of today).

But what to do if you'd like to be alerted for such situation and you can't check IRC, or you prefer different communication medium (like mails or feeds)?

There is a nice page on wiki.d.o that's been updated every time that #debian-devel@OFTC topic is changed. So, go there and simply subscribe to it (and you'll receive emails every time the page is changed). There should be a way to get an RSS feed from a MoinMoin page, but can't find a way: suggestions?

Lucas Nussbaum: Exporting logs from Suunto X6HR watches on Linux

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:08:01 -0700

I’m the happy owner of a nice geeky toy: a Suunto X6HR watch, that includes an altimeter and an heart rate monitor, which I use mainly for moutain biking and hiking.

During outings, the watch can log the altitude and heart rate every 2, 10 or 60 seconds, and the data can be transfered to a PC using a serial interface. The problem is that Suunto only provides software for Windows. I got tired of using virtualbox to connect to the watch (qemu doesn’t work, Suunto Activity Manager apparently does strange things with the serial port), so I reverse-engineered the protocol (using skimanager and Jérome Kieffer’s work as a basis) and implemented a script to fetch the logs, and export them in a format suitable for gnuplot.

Of course, Suuntux is publicly available. I’d be happy to hear from you if it works for you too. Also, if you own a Suunto X6 (similar watch, without HRM), I’d be interested in supporting it too (if it’s not supported already).

Below is a example graph, from a short mountain bike ride just before leaving for Debconf.

Aigars Mahinovs: Better now!

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:08:01 -0700

As soon as my laptop came back from repairs, I started to feel better - being back with 1920×1200 resolution is great! NVidia is much more stable than ATi and Intel wireless is just great!

And then last weekend I was in Berlin for the FFII board meeting and used the opportunity to see the city with my girlfriend. I must say that there is a lot of interesting things to see in Berlin.The things I would recommend everyone are: go to the Zoo (5-7 hours of superb fun), then take bus 100 to Alexander Platz (driving by all the main landmarks), go up on the TV tower, then come down and sometime late in the night go to ‘Weekend’ dance club.

Aigars Mahinovs: Paris Hilton

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:08:01 -0700

… I find that I am actually respecting her after this.

Clint Adams: NM teaches shameful doublespeak for non-free

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 18:11:26 -0700

The worst thing an idealist can be is practical. I see this problem nearly every day when people are trying to comply with laws, rules, regulations, standards, or what-have-you. You fail to meet the objective, so you smudge reality and make compromises. Well, we cannot reasonably drive under the speed limit so let's arbitrarily make up our own limit (10 mph over) and stick to that. That way we endure the hardship of having to comply with something but not the extreme and unattainable hardship of complying with the real thing. Nevermind that some people actually obey the speed limit; that's just anecdotal evidence or a fluke or some other excuse you can use to disregard the fact that what you are claiming is impossible is actually possible.

That's an example of a rule mandated by an external power (the oppressor you theoretically owe your allegiance to or the oppressor you are on loan to). Where idealism really comes into play is when people choose their own oppression, be that a formal religion, moral code that they got from a pamphlet somebody was handing out on the sidewalk, or other voluntarily-adopted standards of behavior.

Then you end up with raw-food vegans who eat pepperoni pizza twice a week, environmentalists who drive cars, PETA members who keep pets, feminists who are lapsitters, Christians who sin, people who claim that things are best-effort, and people who claim that things that are obviously part of other things are not really part of those things.

Ingo Juergensmann: 2008 M68k Porter Meeting

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:14:24 -0700

Joey mailed lately just another announcement for the m68k port ermeeting. This year in Kiel from August 29th - 31st:

Executive summary:

2008 M68k Linux Porter Meeting
August 29th - 31st
University of Kiel, Germany

This summer we are organising a Linux porter meeting especially
targetting the m68k architecture. During the meeting current problems
of the m68k architecture, its integration in Debian, releases
etc. will be discussed.

The meeting will take place at the last weekend in August (29-31) at
the University of Kiel, Germany. Details and participants are
collected here:

This meeting is evolved from the Oldenburg porter meeting that has
started with the m68k architecture but had to stop two years ago.

Interested developers and supporters are invited to join the meeting
and help develop the m68k port of Linux.

If you are interested to attend this meeting, please drop Christian
(cts) or me a note or add yourself to the Wiki page.

Regards,

Joey

Despite all the problems the m68k faced in the last years, we're still alive and performing fine. Part of the meeting will be discussion about the current changes of the m68k port like Aranym buildds and other stuff.

So, if you're interested in the m68k port or the experience of the m68k porters for your embedded architecture, come to Kiel and visit us! :-)

Christian Perrier: Holidays report

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:14:08 -0700

Sure, that sounds fairly formal to send a report for holidays, doesn't it?

Anyway, as I have a few (often Debian/FLOSS related) friends around the world who are reading my blog entries, this might interest them so that's indeed a report..:-)...and I have time for it, so...

I'm currently going back from Cahors to Maurepas (home), on my way to Debconf. We spent 10 days in Cahors with Elizabeth and the girls, finally joined by Jean-Baptiste on Sunday. We had great time over there, enjoying the richness of Quercy:

heat (I need that before MDQ winter)
nice running spots: for once, I could run by starting from the bottom of hills, climbing *up* and finishing down. I ran a lot, sometimes on very hard tours such as 18km with 300m positive height difference. I also did a few "fast" runs ("fast" here would make a few Debian friends laugh a lot, isn't it Ralf, Dirk.....)
medieval architecture in Gourdon, Martel, St-Cirq Lapopie, Cahors...
peace of the Lot valley
Cahors wine: strong and tasty, of course
Rocamadour and Trappe d'Echourgnac cheese (I won't bring Rocamadour at Debconf as it wouldn't survive)
rest, sleep
McDonald's parking lot for network connectivity
very little hacking

So, I'm now heading back home, assemble stuff and will take off for Debconf on Thursday 7th (Paris Orly to Madrid, then Buenos Aires via Air Europa: IIRC nobody from Debconf is in the same flight).

"Assemble stuff" here also means collecting cheese for the now famous Debconf Cheese&Wine party. That one will be tricky to achieve as most of us are coming from quite far away and...there are only 6 French citizens who attend DC8..:-)). Anyway, I already know that my fellow Nicolas François (namely nominated as Assistance CheeseMaster recently) will bring some good stuff. I haven't decided yet what to bring. I might be influenced by my holidays, so cheeses from South-West France are highly probable. Cahors wine will be the choice (prepare yourself: that is strong stuff).

At Debconf itself, we'll have a quite busy schedule. I intend to mostly work along with Felipe, Nicolas, Grisu and others on i18n.debian.net. I'll have to animate the i18n sessions for which I want to prepare some schedule instead of just "lat's gather and talk" which didn't work so well last year, IMHO.

And I have that bloody keynote lecture which, BTW, could be rescheduled if I properly read debconf-discuss as, finally 9am for keynotes seems to be considered too early for the late birds at DC8...:-)... We'll see: I will certainly have something that's not very well cooked and prepared. Expect some improvisation: this year I didn't want to stress myself with a talk, slides and blahblah.

Elizabeth will come back from Cahors on Saturday with the kids. She'll have a holiday week at her father's place whil ethe kids will....do their stuff at Maurepas (this is what happens when kids are grown up).

We'll gather together again on Aug 18th and I go back to work on 19th. Crazy, I know but I have a very busy and full work schedule for the upcoming next 2 months.

September will be a hard time to go through: Jean-Baptiste will start his "Licence Profesionnelle" in Automated and Embarked Systems. He'll do it in shared time: half-time at university for classes and half-time working in a company (which turns out to be Essilor, the world leader for progressive glasses....and the company which Elizabeth is working for). He'll stay at my sister-in-law place during the week (30km away from our place but closer from university and work).

Sophie, our 18-year old daughter, will spend the year in Toulouse, to prepare the admission in a Social Workers school. She'll have her own apartment, in the very center of the city, 20 meters away from Place du Capitole. Annoying, isn't it ? :-)

So, we'll mostly stay with our "little" Magali, our 16 y.o. who will be attending High School, on her way to Baccalauréat. Tell us about shrinking families....

Now time to work on some slides for the Debconf keynote. Damn.

Matthew Garrett

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:14:08 -0700

Testing 2.6.27-rc2 with the current released (not development) BIOS on the Foxconn G33M reveals the following:

There are no ACPI errors on boot, other than the (irrelevant) OEMB table (there are in previous kernels, stuff's clearly been fixed in .26 or so. Can't really be bothered digging through to find out what)
The system fails to reboot if it has been suspended and resumed. The fix is three lines long, one of which is a comment and one of which is blank.
The system is otherwise perfectly stable.

Summary: Almost all problems caused by bugs in Linux, one problem caused by BIOS vendors interpreting the ACPI specification differently to the Linux implementation and trivially worked around. No sabotage.

Thanks very much to Carl at Foxconn for being able to get me information about what was causing the reboot issue - I spent significantly longer putting the system together than I did fixing it.

Wouter Verhelst: Re: Akademy

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:14:08 -0700

Kris blogs about akademy being in Sint-Katelijne-Waver—which, since I moved to Mechelen, is my backyard, really—and wonders why nobody in the Belgian FLOSS community talked about it.

It's not that I didn't know; Sune Vuorela, one of our Debian KDE developers, mentioned it to me a few months ago. He knew about our office in Mechelen, since he slept there at some FOSDEM a few years back. Of course, my first reaction was "oh, you'll pay me a visit then, right?", though I quickly realized "hang on, won't I be in Argentina then?"

Turns out that's was the case. So I didn't bother blogging; perhaps I should have.

Thing is, I've always felt like the Belgian FLOSS community is somewhat disjunct. It shouldn't be; we have a bunch of healthy and working community communication things, we have timely dinner meetings and drink meetings; and we even have a big important international developers meeting in the heart of our country. Even with that, I feel that more could be done. For example, I would probably like more unorganized social gatherings (say, more "lets-have-a-beer-now" type of meetings), and other things.

Is this just me? I dunno.

Kartik Mistry: I AM DD now!

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:12:32 -0700

* I think it will take time to have updated status on my NM status page but I can’t resist myself because,

- kartik@debian.org works

- I updated db.debian.org

- Added uid in my GPG key and synchronized it with Debian Keyserver

- Updated Developers location

So, in short, all these things means:

I AM DD NOW!

Many thanks to My family (Koki, Mom, Papa, brother Rinit and Little Kavin for supporting and encouraging me during this long journey), Jaldhar Vyas for advocating my application, my AM Mohammed Adnène Trojette (adn), all kind and helpful sponsors of my n number of packages (jaldhar, mones, adn, daniel (special thanks for number of uploads), pabs, joeyh for Festival upload, rkrishnan, acid, tolimar, twerner, bubulle, nijel, bernat, marillat, akumar, hertzog and finally gwolf).

Special mention and thanks to bubulle and sam - for coming down and having nice meet at BLR during foss.in/2007, that gave my power back to continue my work when I was frustrated with certain situations.

Another special thanks to dear friends - nirav, pradeepto, tuxmaniac and atul chitnis for always encouraging me for my Debian work.

In short, you all people rocks!

Now, what next?

I will keep continue doing my packging work as it is, I have plan to get involve more in near future, but as of now - I first need give time and focus RC bugs for Lenny

David Welton: langpop.com in Tim Bray's OSCON keynote

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 10:11:56 -0700

It was neat to see "langpop.com" on the screeen during Tim Bray's talk at OSCON (contains a link to the video):

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/08/05/Annotated-OSCON-Keynote

The talk itself was an overview of the state of programming languages. However, 15 minutes is not enough time to do the topic justice, but if you're not a language geek, it's not a bad survey, and I really like his style: he's fair when he points out the good and the bad. Like him, I am sick of PHP and do not care to use it any time in the near future, but that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of good things to be said about it. In any case, I'm honored that Tim used langpop.com as a source for his talk.

Pablo Lorenzzoni: 100-thousand and counting

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 05:12:42 -0700

For those of you wondering how is the battle against the Brazilian Internet Surveillance Bill, I have to report we already got more than 100-thousand people to sign the petition. You can check the current count in the image on the right. I am updating it every 15 minutes, so you can even use its URL in another place (as are some people doing already).

The bill will be voted by the Chamber-of-Deputies any time now… We heard it would be on yesterday, but apparently it was not even enlisted for this week. This doesn’t mean much, since the Deputies can hold an “out-of-list” voting… we’ll be watching.

Meanwhile, I read an article by Sérgio Amadeu that summarizes some of our feeling about that bill. Are we in the Western World (allegedly freedom lovers) turning into control-freaks? A whole lot of people I know are not even offended by this bill! These are the same people that don’t think it’s weird that USA claimed the right to seize any storage device entering their borders, for any time they want, with no warranted privacy. Are we in a middle of a paradigm shift? Are we accepting less freedom? What would George Orwell think of that?

Maybe we got in a wormhole and ended up in 1984…

Julien Danjou: The nochange-log

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 05:12:42 -0700

Saw in base-files changelog:

base-files (4.0.5) unstable; urgency=low
[…]
* It's still soon to change /etc/debian_version. Please be patient.

-- Santiago Vila <sanvila@debian.org>  Tue,  5 Aug 2008 18:06:06 +0200

Applause.

Planet Debian

Frank Lichtenheld: Moving a mailing list from SF.net to another Mailman instance

Gustavo Noronha Silva: 7 Aug 2008

Junichi Uekawa: gettext locale bug.

Stefano Zacchiroli: yay from debcamp8

DebCamp8, shakiness, planes, python-debian

Jaldhar Vyas: 6 Down 999,999,994 To Go

Junichi Uekawa: Ubuntu kernels not working with qemubuilder.

MJ Ray: RFID Security and Stability

Russell Coker: A Basic IPVS Configuration

Sandro Tosi: Another info source for Debian

Lucas Nussbaum: Exporting logs from Suunto X6HR watches on Linux

Aigars Mahinovs: Better now!

Aigars Mahinovs: Paris Hilton

Clint Adams: NM teaches shameful doublespeak for non-free

Ingo Juergensmann: 2008 M68k Porter Meeting

Christian Perrier: Holidays report

Matthew Garrett

Wouter Verhelst: Re: Akademy

Kartik Mistry: I AM DD now!

I AM DD NOW!

David Welton: langpop.com in Tim Bray's OSCON keynote

Pablo Lorenzzoni: 100-thousand and counting

Julien Danjou: The nochange-log

DebCamp8, shakiness, planes, `python-debian`