Tech

I very much like that it is so easy to extend PostgreSQL in various ways, including adding server-side languages (for triggers and other stored procedures) as dynamically loadable modules. But somehow the thought that some people actually seem to use PHP as a server-side language, or consider making it possible to use JavaScript, makes me very afraid (recent discussion on the general pg mailing list.) Should PostgreSQL have a “taint” flag like the kernel?

(Admittedly JS is a side effect of also enabling Lua and Scheme, which may make more sense.)

Update 20100618: Added Debconf info.

The famous Debian Umbrellas (big picture) have finally arrived, so I'm keen to get rid of them. Order yours now!

Information about Debconf: I'm not coming to Debconf. But Luca Capello was friendly enough to offer to carry some umbrellas. Coordination via the wiki, orders need to be placed before June 27th.

Probably it's just a question of me not paying enough attention to the news... So: pointers welcome.

There are quie a few shiny new filesystems for local storage, like btrfs or HAMMER (and nilfs, Tux3, ext4, Reiser4...)

It seems the distributed storage side is covered as well, with ceph being merged recently. There are other systems (like, for example, Lustre), but they haven't appeared much in the news channels I tend to read. What I'd be curious is if any of these support hierarchical storage architectures like pushing out rarely used data to tape libraries. (But this is just idle speculation, I don't need this anywhere.)

But what I would really need is a replacement for NFS (v3): a classical client-server filesystem. I'm not sure NFSv4 is the “right” solution (where I'd use it, I currently can't because we rely too much on POSIX ACLs there, making the transition to NFSv4 quite a chore.) I think POHMELFS might be a solution in the long term, or CRFS, but I'm not sure how much progress there is on these; apt-cache search is silent, not a good sign. There's Samba 4 — I guess I'll have to look at it, since it's supposed to be much cleaner and nicer to use than its predecessors and might be a good solution even if no Microsoft systems are involved. Is this what small environments (a fileserver and 100 clients or so) will want to use? Comments are very welcome.

The joys of a new employer ... only 5min by bike to the office instead of 1h by train. And, of course, we're using Debian a lot, and I may do the odd bit of Debian work on company time. Like, right now, working with Klaus Zerwes on getting JWhoisServer uploaded. I hope more opportunities come up.

Ok, here we go: It seems that I'll receive the umbrella (big picture) in the first week of June, so I'm taking orders now. Please read this posting carefully if you want a Debian umbrella.

Update III 2010-06-25: It was discussed on the mailing list a long time ago, but I completely forgot to tell the world in my various announcements... It's a collapsible umbrella and thus it's quite small when closed. A few people where surprised when they got it.

Update II 2010-06-15: I'm sorry to say that I made a mistake calulating the shipping price and neglected the fact that the cardboard envelopes weigh as much as they do. 4 Umbrellas in an envelope is exactly 1030g. Arrgh. Adjusted the conditions below.

Update 2010-06-15: The Debian Umbrella is now available. Please email me your shipping address (or details on where/when we should meet) after you've sent the money, I'll send out the umbrellas as soon as I get the money in my account. Remember: a part of the money also goes to the Debian project.

Update 2010-05-31: I just phoned up the manufacturer, “end of may/beginning of June” has unfortunately turned to “mid-June”. I'm still taking orders, and I will confirm by email when I get the money (but I probably won't check every day), and of course I'll keep you all informed as soon as I start shipping... (And, in response to Hideki Yamane: there is no deadline. Right now I've got lots of umbrellas to sell. I'll update this posting if the situation changes.)

First: I only take orders of three umbrellas or more (pick up excluded.) Both because shipping is not exactly cheap, and to reduce the work I have to do. Also, I require payment in advance, so the process for mail ordering is this:

1. Calculate the price for your order; see below.
2. Then, send me an email to umbrella@fortytwo.ch, indicating the number of umbrellas, the amount and the shipping address. If you know of anything special I need to wriite on the customs declaration that'd be helpful as well. Please wait for my confirmation before paying.
3. Pay the money to Swiss Postfinance account 30-232922-1 (IBAN CH13 0900 0000 3023 2922 1; BIC POFICHBEXXX; Adrian von Bidder, Spalentorweg 55, 4051 Basel, Switzerland.) I can only take payments in CHF (Swiss Francs; currently 1.42 CHF == 1 EUR and 1.15 CHF == 1 USD); be sure to include your name and ideally email as a remark in the payment. I expect that I'll usually get the sender address on the pament notice, but better be sure.

For now, you'll need to order at least three umbrellas. I might drop this requirement in future, but shipping for one umbrella is insanely expensive in relation to the cost of the umbrella. The cost is CHF 25 per umbrella, plus shipping; shipping for three umbrellas is CHF 18 worldwide, CHF 12.50 in europe or CHF 7 in Switzerland (double this for up to 6 umbrellas). Please contact me for bigger orders, I'll work out the shipping price (one umbrella is ca. 220g, and you can look at the Swiss Post web site for pricing, but please confirm your conclusion with me.) Perhaps a wiki page for umbrella-wanting people to find each other would be an idea? Please post the link in the comments if you do do this.

Alternatively, you may of course pick up an umbrella here in Basel, Switzerland; I'm in Zürich every now and then, so that can be arranged too. Debconf: see the Debconf wiki.

About CHF 5 to 6 per umbrella will go to debian.ch (where it is held as official Debian money under the authority of the DPL.)

Update: I'm taking orders now.

I was planning to take orders for the Debian Swirl umbrella starting tonight, but a bit of research showed that shipping prices for parcels are insane (CHF 37 for europe), but it seems I can get away with sending this as a Swiss Post “Maxi Letter” instead, which would result in a shipping price of CHF 12.50 for four and CHF 24 for up to eight umbrellas (1kg or 2kg.) So now I'll go and look into getting some kind of flattish box to stay within the allowed dimensions before I can be sure this is possible. In any case, I expect the delivery in the first week of June.

Since I'll not be coming to Debconf, it would be nice if somebody could take some umbrellas to New York. I'm currently not travelling much, so I'd have to rely on a friendly volunteer. (I'm based in Basel, Switzerland; I am known to go to Zürich regularly.)

Conditions for ordering: Not yet. The umbrella will be available ca. end of May, I'll give details about ordering it then. Information so far: CHF 25 per umbrella (ca. EUR 17 / USD 23), including ca. CHF 6 donation to Debian (via debian.ch); at least at first, I plan to ship in lots of 5 or more to save postage. International travellers should coordinate... (if you're close to Basel, Switzerland, you will obviously be able to get one directly as well.)

Update 2010-06-15: I got the umbrellas now, so you can order them.

As a complete outsider and with my obvious bias as a Debian Developer: how can anybody call Ubuntu a “community distribution” when it's obvious that Canonical and Mark Shuttleworth can, and will, take decisions for reasons that are not made clear, and with only little or no community involvment?

This rethorical question refers, of course, to the current debate about purple vs. brown and the best position of the window close button (Bug report and LWN coverage.)

Conclusion? Let's be fair and call it a community support commercial distribution. Perhaps we should found a non-profit to award a (trademarked) “True Community Effort” label to operating system distributions where no commercial body has the final say?

Playing around a bit with ssh tunneling right now. When I create a kind of VPN concentrator with a few tun interfaces: is there any reason why I can't just assign the same IP on all these tun interfaces? A quick test shows this set up working nicely, with ifconfig tunX localip pointopoint remoteip (the localip part being the same) setting up the routes to chose the right tun device for all remote IP addresses, and ping worked just fine for me. Firewall rules will always have the remote IP and/or the interface name to decide when a packet applies.

Obviously setting up a listening socket at only one of these interfaces is not so trivial now since I can't just listen to the IP, but that's a restriction I'm happy with. Anything else I'm not thinking of right now?

I've had alias net-pf-10 off and alias ipv6 off in my configuration for ages, but with recent kernels, IPv6 is apparently compiled in, so my eth0 now has a (link local) IPv6 address.

... which means that I now had Java apps suddenly fail to connect to the database. Since stuff like sqlplus (Bah!) works, I didn't immediately think about a network problem and started testing various JVM versions and hunting missing libraries etc. Only, it turned out that running java with -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true is the magic bullet.

Is there a proper fix? I know IPv6 is (supposed to be) the nice and shiny future, but currently I just don't have any IPv6 connection so it just creates problems for me right now. (Ok, let's add here that I dislike Java anyway because its philosophy, or the philosophy of most software I have to deal with, is to define its own world instead of integrating nicely with the host platform. If you look at it from another direction you may think I should have titled this “I suck”)

Wow. I just stumbled over the SIL Fonts, which I haven't heard of before. Looks like an absolutely great project. Not only are these fornts released under an open license (I haven't read it myself, but many of these fonts are in Debian...), but above all I really liked the selection of supported systems with icons by each entry: The Old Windows 3.1 Windows flag stands for “tested on Windows”, the very old rainbow colored apple for “tested on Mac”, our official (and current :-) familiar swirl not only for tested on Debian, but for “Debian package available”.

I mean: while it's not uncommon today to see some kind of Linux support in software (or other downloads), explicit Debian support is not that widespread. And seeing this side by side with the two very outdated logos for the two other mainstream OSs (and Ubunut not even being mentioned on this page) is ... what, exactly? Wishful thinking? An ironic comment on how the (conputing) landscape should look like? Made me smile, in any case.

I know, preaching to the choir and all that. But this can't be said often enough (and perhaps the odd non-Debian person stumbles upon this...): Here's another example of how amazingly fast free tech support works: The newest Linux kernel (Debian package version: 2.6.32-1) wouldn't boot on my QNAP TS-419P NAS (see also my earlier posting about the device). Now, since I don't have a serial console cable, I can't really help a lot to debug this (and I am extremely happy that the people at QNAP have thought about recovery: it's trivial to just flash a working kernel or firmware image via DHCP and TFTP), bu still Martin Michlmayr immediately took the time to help me and soon could reproduce it on one of his own machines. The problem has been identified, I got a fixed kernel, and a patch is on his way to the kernel maintainers. All within literally just a few days.

Second part (and biggest in terms of space) is my new Lenovo desktop computer with a nice NEC 26" screen. The screen is quite a bit better than my bulky 19" CRT, but the story of buying the desktop was more involved.

I've read the widely reported Linux Foundation announcement about new membership benefits and promptly fell for it. Thumbs down for LF, because they absolutely failed to mention that the discounts on HP, Dell and Lenovo products are only available within the U.S. [insert here: cheap joke about U.S. Americans not knowing that the rest of the world even exists.]

Thumbs up for Lenovo, though: after a few emails with both the LF and Lenovo, I got a 40% discount on their original price for my system.

Now obviously big brand computers like these are still overpriced (or less powerful at the same price) when compared with a white box. And I almost went with a barebone, CPU, etc. because I quite like putting hardware together. On the other hand, I haven't really kept up with CPU socket types etc., and since I absolutely wanted an Intel GPU, the 36 months on site support won out. And when the new computer went beep beep beep (and dark) on the third or fourth boot, I was quite happy that I didn't go the white box route after all...

I won't bore you with installation details (I'll be getting back CHF 45 for my unused copy of Vista, of course), suffice to say that today's dual core 64 bit 3GHz / 4GB RAM machines are a bit faster than the 32 bit ca 1 GHz / 1GB RAM with mostly unaccelerated graphics from five years ago...

After I had been living with mostly the same electronic toys over the last few years (ok, I got the netbook earlier this year, but that's about it... and it might even count as a serious work tool given how much I came to use it) all the toys I've agonized over buying suddenly appeared on the doorstep within these two weeks...

First part was the QNAP TS-419P which I bought after reading about QNAP on Martin Michlmayr's blog. The decision was quick when I realized that at least part of the Debian related information was not hidden in some obscure web forums but was there on the QNAP wiki itself, indicating quite some level of support from the manufacturer. Beyond that, tbm does an awsome job supporting QNAP users like myself through his excellent QNAP / Kirkwood pages and also, since Debian installer support for the 419 is not quite finished, by email. Kudos to him!

So, once I get past some remaining obstacles (for some reason, the initrd refused to mount a raid1 root device when I tried it at first; working on that, but it's not that easy to debug without console access...) our old storage / Internet router (very old! Pentium II 350MHz with 128M RAM and its probably third internal disk, which became ridicolous to use when I bought a (big) external USB disk and realized it only has USB 1...) can be retired. Should be good for the environment, too, I should hope, in terms of power consumption even considering that I now run 3 more disks.

Just read Mark Kretschmann about application naming.

Another consideration is: will the name show up in Google? Some projects have been extremely bad at this, the prime example I'm thinking of is the KVM virtualisation module in Linux. I'm treating KVM as the name here, since the term “Kernel-based Virtual Machine” is not even a name, really... (ok, it has become popular enough so that linux-kvm.org now shows up at the top.)