SmoogeSpace

FUDCon Day -2->1

2012-01-14T15:56:00.001-07:00

So I have been at FUDcon the last couple of days, but forgetting to blog as much as I should about things.

Day -2
I had flown in the day before from New Mexico to South Carolina. Nearly didn't as we found that Denver was on a multi hour delay and I would miss my connecting flights somewhere along the way. However SouthWest flight attendants found me an alternative route with 2 plane changes which I made and got to South Carolina. The last 10 minutes were fun as I was watching the clouds outside and seeing a lot of weird colours. However there were no bumps and it looked like the pilot was an ace as he got us down between tornadoes or something. My Dad picked me up and I got to spend my night in the house I grew up in while it rained and howled outside.

Day -1
Woke up to blue skies and low winds, so worked on a couple of things from the house until my Dad said "Are you leaving or not.." Forgot about the 2 hour time difference that my computer wasn't showing me. So we loaded up the car with lots of old equipment that had run Linux back in the day (really one of the boxes was the alternative build box from Red Hat Linux 4.2) Dad and I then went up the back roads from SC and got onto the Interstates without having to drive through Charlotte or some other congested areas.. We got into Blacksburg around 4 o'clock and found the hotel. It is a very nice hotel so we had a steak dinner and sat around talking with various other Fedorans that evening. Got a large hug from Maria 'tatica' which I got a ribbing from my dad on. I can never tell when he is joking still.

Day 0
The weather changed overnight and it got very very cold and windy. Found the conference area, checked in and realized that the dinner from last night had worn out. Bought a bunch of egg mcmuffins from McDonalds and shared them out to people around the meetings. Then sat in on a long meeting with the rest of Fedora Infrastructure about how to make workflows work. It took a while for everyone to get their various says out but I think in the end we have a better idea of what we want to do next week. Went back to the hotel to get the car and some grub, but crashed in a chair and found out it was 3pm. Went back and talked with some more people then met up with Valdis Kletnieks and Russ Herrold after 10+ years of knowing each of them. Had a good dinner with them but Russ's foot was killing him from the weather changes and I needed to fix a bunch of scripts for Dennis. Dad and I brought in the ancient hardware and got lots of ooohs and awes from people who had not been born when the scsi array had been built. Got started working on the maps when I found that my quiet spot ended up with a lot of Red Hat old-timers.. spent the evening talking and never getting to the items. Went to bed around midnight

Day 1
Slept in a lot later than I expected due to setting the alarm clock for 7pm and not 7am. Went over to the meetings and sat in the end of a couple of barcamps. Talked with Greg dk for a short while but lunch started getting served so I ended up letting him do that (I don't know I guess food is important to people.) Spent some time with Pam Chestek and found out my Dad and her went to competing High Schools. Spent the afternoon working on some scripts and being reminded by Dennis that I needed to fix the maps. The raspberry pi demonstration was full up so I decided to walk dad back to the hotel so we could find some headache medicine for him. He ended up sleeping and I realized I needed to blog about all this. People are headed to FUDpub and such so I will continue in another blog in a bit.

Wednesday/Thursday 2011-12-14

2011-12-15T21:15:00.001-07:00

Woke up in the morning, on the wrong side of the bed. Tried to feel better but drank coffee instead.

Brainstormed with the rest of the IT crew on how to deploy community systems (as in fedoraproject.org/community and NOT fedoracommunity.org) and then started building a special box for it. However after a lot of fights with my own syntax skills I got a preliminary version proxy working. Now its up to the real programmers to do their part :).

My Opinions on Voting

2011-12-14T13:00:00.000-07:00

I usually don't blog politics, but since it comes up with my opinions on Fedora lack of voters and some other items... I figured I should just go ahead and do it. Today I received a couple of emails from relatives and such trying to explain how bad the US budget is, and why it should be explained easier as that of a family. One set went to blame the politicians, another set blamed the special interests (tax and spend liberals, cut and spend conservatives). In the end, they both neglected to point out who the real culprits are.. the absentee landlord of the United States, the voter.

Look at the following revenue amounts.

Tax Revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
Fed Budget: $3,820,000,000,000
New Debt: $1,650,000,000,000
National Debt: $14,271,000,000,000

Now some people will cut off the zeros and then compare it to a family budget... or some will go on long screeds blaming the politicians or special interest groups. That misses the important part of democracy. In the end, the politicians are a proxy. They may be influenced by "monied" interests but the special interest they aremostly interested in is the voters who every 2-6 years say whether or not they will get to serve again.

To make this fair, let us change out the regular blamees to the people who actually are supposed to be responsible whether they like it or not.

Amount majority of US Voters Want to be taxed.
Amount majority of US Voters Want to spend.
Amount they are happy to borrow.
Amount the taxpayers has to pay back plus a lot of interest we didn't calculate.

Notice, I don't put in voters in the bottom. People who don't vote and most non-citizens in this country pay taxes so they get stuck with the bill whether or not they vote.

If you are outraged about the amount spent versus the amount taxed.. you need to do the following:

Register to Vote.
Research the candidates who will either up the amount taxed, lower the amount spent, or a combination of the two.
When the election occurs, vote for the candidate that fits your needs best. Remember always that there is no perfect candidate, you will have to make do with what you can get.
Watch whoever gets elected and ask why they voted for this or that. Keep them on their toes. People who know that they are watched are psychologically more likely to be honest and dependable. They are also more likely to follow the social norms of the people watching them. Most politicians get in trouble because the only people watching them are other politicians.
If you don't like how things occurred, vote for someone else the next time.
Talk to your neighbours and find out why they don't vote. Get them to register and vote too. They don't have to vote for the person you voted for, but they need to watch the elected just the same as you.
Keep at it. It took 20+ years to dig this whole, it will take 20+ years to dig out of it.

If you aren't registering to vote, you have lost any right to be taken seriously.

You can sit in a park, you can show up at the IRS office with bags of tea at the IRS office, or you can email me pithy statements about how horrible everyone else is, but you have given up your most important voice.. and the only one I will give credence to, the vote.

[PS Take the above as my opinion and my default answer when you email, blog, facepoke, etc about the dire straights of a nation. In my limited and very biased view, the above can be used for most nations.. the amount that people will happily borrow because they want it and don't want to save for it will always be larger than it should be. I don't have much sympathy for a bond market that doesn't take that into account in the interest rates and fees they initially charge.]

Monday/Tuesday 2011-12-13

2011-12-13T18:59:00.000-07:00

Ok the weekend was a blast playing Minecraft with my kid. My wife says we sound like a bunch of dwarves and should beware. I then play Gimli quotes on Youtube for fun.

Monday

Email not as bad as last couple of weeks
Worked on pass phrase tool.
Worked with Seth on known_hosts item
Worked with Kevin with collab change
Spend the evening going over password entropy and to see if we can run a password checker against our old passwords. [Mainly to get an idea of how many weak ones there were so we can be better informed in the future.]

Tuesday

Work inside of RH on DNS nameservices. Find out that our registrar doesn't do IPv6 yet. WHEEE
Weekly phone call with RHIT.
Remove old collab servers.
serverbeach03 goes whacky when trying to decommission it.
Wrote a HOWTO on travelling to the colo.
Dealt with zones we knew nothing about.. it would seem there are quite a few hanging out there that showed up after top level registrar was updated.
Rebuilt smtp-mm03
Sync'd over data to archives for F14.

Friday 2011-12-10

2011-12-09T10:27:00.001-07:00

Spent the evening with kid playing mindcraft. Was told by kid that I couldn't take a sick day for him and me and play today... "Dad I don't want to go to truancy court." Sigh.. ok well then off to work it is

Talked with some people on Google+ about running email oneself versus using a service. I used to have all my email go to my private SMTP server where I could filter spam, ham, lamb, etc however I wanted. At some point in 2000 I just got burned out by it. I think it was because it was my day job and that pretty much made any problem at home more work versus fun. Oh well.. I can take Parental Computing for a while longer.

Discovered the Piano Guys this week. They have some seriously cool music they make per day. I really love Cellos (though I find the Viola de Gamba for some reason nicer to my ear [And yes that is a joke on multi layers].)

Wondered if Santa Claus would get me a computer... looked at the one system76. Santa says I have not been good enough this year for that though.

Wednesday/Thursday 2011-12-07-> 2011-12-08

2011-12-08T12:52:00.001-07:00

Spent most of Wednesday tracking down issues with ipv6 and Linux network bridges. Somehow, somewhere we finally stomped it out... but I will admit that by the end of it I was tired and using a hammer to put in screws... One of the following fixed it:

Different kernel
Removing an ipv6 address from the bridge or its parent ethernet port.
Some changes in guest network drivers
2 pints of Marble Red Imperial Ale. [Ok I don't drink, but I really really wanted to after the mysterious "it works, but no new ips are allowed.. now it doesn't work.. now it does." ]
Magic pixie dust (it takes 8 pixies to make an ounce of dust.. and man are those things hard to catch.)

A lot of email was dealt with during the day. And then I made the fatal mistake at 10pm of putting stuff in the bin without thinking about what i had selected.

Thursday morning and afternoon was dealing with the fact that 2 weeks of email had been deleted and I needed to figure out which ones I really cared about. Wheee. Thankfully I hadn't emptied the bin but there was still a lot of emails that needed to be sorted out from all the stuff I had deleted earlier.

And then I got a ring of the doorbell. And there was a box on the doorstep. And the box had another box in it, and that box had this

and all my cares went away. Now to see how much it would cost for us to make say 20 of these for Fedora for next release.

Worked to move a DNS server from one colocation to another. Found out that the IPs couldn't be routed as easily as first claimed. Moving to plan A. (Plan B was doing this after we were told they could reroute at the border.) Then spent the day looking at what would be needed for updating our server at internetx01 to rhel6.

Tuesday 2011-12-06

2011-12-06T13:22:00.001-07:00

Looked at desktops this morning. It would seem that there is a constant rule about computers and me. The computer I would like to have is about $5000.00. I think it has been that way since 1994 and I first tried to come up with what my home linux box should be. In the end, the computer I end up is usually 1/10th of that.

I can see that the US Thanksgiving holiday is over and people are gearing up for various end of the year holidays.. the email volume of patches and such have gone up. Thankfully most of the arguments seem to have gone down for a while.

Monday 2011-12-05

2011-12-06T09:17:00.001-07:00

It is snowing quite alot around where I am living. Sadly, I seem to live in a heat bubble of some sort, we ended up with a 1-2 cm while most of the state seems to have gotten from 12 to 25 cm.

Most of the weekend was spent playing minecraft with my son. I put a server on a box and then we played for more hours than we should have. This originally was meant to be a study of how simple graphics can make for a playable game.. i think the 14 hours I played shows that it can be for certain audiences.

Spent most of the day catching up with email. Worked on getting a new DNS nameserver at Peer1 ready for us this week. Saw that the Fedora elections ended with not a lot of people voting. I wish voting was mandatory at times.

Friday 2011-12-02

2011-12-02T10:17:00.001-07:00

Had to get off the computers early last night due to a heavy windstorm which had 80 mph gusts. The internet went up and down for a bit but I did get to watch some "How Things Are Made" on Netflix.. don't ask me why but I find the show fascinating.

Fedora Elections are going on without a lot of fanfare this cycle. Larry Cafiero, Bob Jensen AND Christopher Wickert are running for the board. That should make for some excitement. Spent part of the day hacking on a version of the javascript password generator.. hope to ahve a test page on Monday.

2011-12-01 - Thursday

2011-12-01T11:51:00.001-07:00

This week has been a mass of emails mostly about doing anything. If anything I have learned that some set of people and I are never going to agree (or it seems to move towards seeing each others point of view.) It is probably just better to put their emails in the "Read When I am NotDepressed" folder. I guess they do that to mine :).

It looks like there will be a snow fall of some sort this weekend in New Mexico... everything from storm of the decade to minor puffs of snow. I stocked up on Hobnob cookies and canned soup so will be able to make it through the day. That and a large generator should allow me to keep the laptops going while I play minecraft.

Putting a redundant power supply into a system caused it to crash out badly. Glad we had a redundant powersupply to fix that (thanks to AdamW for giving me that one). Then putting in cleaning tapes but forgetting to eject the tape in the drive already... just makes the day go round.

The day got crappy enough that the music went from Classical to the Doors to Evanescence to Metallica.

Wednesday 2011-11-30

2011-11-30T08:36:00.001-07:00

Started off the morning with page storm caused by a xen domU jumping ahead 30 minutes and then time stopping on it. This of course caused all kinds of problems with encryption and such. System could not be rebooted and had to be destroy/created.

Went Middle School shopping with the wife. I think we have found a good one, and will look more into it over the next couple of weeks. Had tea at Satellite Coffee.

Getting excited to be in Blacksburg Virginia for FudCon. One, I am bringing my dad. My passion for computers would not have been as wide and strong if my dad had not introduced me to a Heathkit 8008 system. I was told I couldn't get a bigger computer until I programmed it.. which I spent a whole summer getting it to do a little light show. My dad's friends would have these MicroVaxes running this thing called Unix (because VMS was for accountants as I was told at the age of 10 or so). He had a great time at SELF last year and Mom wants a weekend to herself so up we go.

Second, Blacksburg Virginia is home to Blacksburg Tactical Research Center which had some of my most favourite gaming supplements. Well it was 20 years ago. Now to see how their Open Gaming Supplement system works.

Tuesday 2011-11-29

2011-11-29T14:29:00.001-07:00

Last week was mainly taken up with little tasks to make sure Fedora IT would survive American Thanksgiving break, which it seems it did. Yesterday was decommissioning some servers that were not properly configured originally. Tomorrow will be fixing their replacements I guess.

Spent today working out how to end of life mediawiki 114 and 115. I will be end of lifing mediawiki116 as soon as the reviews for 117 and 118 are submitted and fulfilled.

Not much else on the list of things.. my head feels like someone took a 2x4 to the left of it for some reason.

Monday 2011-11-21

2011-11-21T15:38:00.001-07:00

Most of the weekend turned into a blur of things I can't remember exactly what I was doing. I thought I was going to read some comic collections of Schlock Mercenary and Sheldon the Kid. Instead they were quickly taken by my son to his room where giggles and saying of gag-lines kept echoing out of. I thought he was done with them yesterday as they had reappeared on the coffee table, but they quickly went back as "I wanted to read them again." Since I have not seen our Calvin and Hobbes in years.. I expect I will have to order another set. [On the other hand, for all the other comic collections we have that don't get boggarted like that.. it is a fine complement.]

Oh look this was in my drafts for some reason.. getting published.

Thursday 2011-11-17

2011-11-17T14:01:00.001-07:00

Well no one seemed to notice the Ubuntu Chuck say YEAH to the Beefy Miracle in my last post... I dodged something I guess.

Tasks

Email deluge
Learned NOT to read users@fedoraproject.org if you want to feel happy about what one does.
Found out that I broke mirroring for people getting spins from alt.fedoraproject.org due to my missing that the rsync target was called alt before and fedora-alt later.
Struggled with setting up APC power strips for remote logins. Got 2 to work. Had to get help from RHIT on the other two.
Tried to get to building those systems he started on Monday and got sucked into the morass of configs.

Wednesday 2011-11-16

2011-11-16T14:46:00.001-07:00

Tasks for today

Phone call with various people around the world on PPC systems
Thanksgiving lunch with son.
Finish off rsync's off Fedora 13 and Fedora 14 to archives. Will redo 14 after EOL. Will also work with dgilmore on a clean hardlink of the entire archive tree.
Worked a bit on the Fedora Hosted FAD.
Finished off a budget.
Took a meme too far (with apologies to my friends in Ubuntu.. who are currently looking for eyebleach. Also apologies to anyone who uses the gimp professionally.. I butchered this badly.)
Read about SOPA. Having seen how badly the current DMCA and similar rules are abused regularly.. I figure this will it even worse.
Work out which systems I would abuse tomorrow.

Tuesday 2011-11-15

2011-11-15T10:54:00.001-07:00

Today was another mass of email, but finally let up around lunch time... just in time for phone meetings. Didn't get a chance to try Bovril.. will put that on the list later.

Tasks

Fix certificates on alt and download servers.
Try to get alt and secondary to do weird stuff with URLs. [well not weird but getting puppet it to do it for me is the weird part.]
Wipe disks on serverbeach05
Sync Fedora 13 from production to archives
Sync Fedora 14 from production to archives
Try to figure out how to do spreadsheets

Music

WCPE because I need to relax or I will strangle myself on a spreadsheet.

Monday 2011-11-14

2011-11-14T11:19:00.001-07:00

Spent most of the weekend not sleeping well to this lingering cough. My mood was quite foul and rude by the end of yesterday. Broke down and got some cough medicine which helped my sleep last night quite a bit.

After extensive semi-blind testing (making identical sandwiches and then randomly eating them later in the day), I have come to the conclusion that Dennis Gilmore is correct: Vegemite tastes much better than Marmite. I think it has to do with the Malt extract in Vegemite versus "Vegetable" extract used in Marmite. Then lo and behold this evening a third contender appeared on my doorstep all the way from Shropshire England: Bovril.

Tasks today

Email catchup. Two days of email is quite a lot.
Try to figure out serverbeach routing with Kevin
More email.
Clean up old disks off of serverbeach05
More email.
Lots of tiny IRQ's all different.

[Edited 2011-11-15. I got Bovril not Marmite.]

Thursday 2011-11-10

2011-11-10T13:24:00.001-07:00

Got an extremely good nights sleep last night. Thank you Theraflu :).

Spent the morning catching up with emails from the last couple of days. I had put a pile of them on my "will read when my head isnt' spinnie" and since it wasn't, they needed to be read.

Spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how many systems we use, where and why. Not a lot of fascinating work but one of those "hmmmm".

And today I got several emails of people who say they have read my blogs and wanted to know if I could advertise for them :). The answer is no. This blog is meant for making sure I write something weekly and to let my boss know I didn't die :). I don't feel right using it to market stuff.

On other news.. we have everything ordered for Thanksgiving Dinner. I just need to finish the gaming module off.

Been sick (2011-11-02 => 2011-11-08)

2011-11-09T17:47:00.000-07:00

Tuesday night last week (2011-11-02) I got a horrible headache and went to lay down.. ended up getting some sort of "creeping crud" that was going around the neighbourhood. Spent most of Wednesday and Thursday laying in bed watching Economics lectures I had gotten earlier in the year as a present. I went to a technical school which at the time didn't have much in the way of softer sciences like Economics so it has been an area that is interesting but foreign. When Economists use the words like people are "rational actors" it means something completely different from what a psychologist would mean. I can see why it causes so much confusion with people. I also finished watching the lecture series on Chinese history, which was quite good but now I want to find out more details on various periods.

On Friday I got back to work and spent the day reading emails and getting quotes for new systems... and then spent the weekend sleeping for the most part. Went to a Magic show one day which was fun, but I was wiped out too much to try and figure out how the tricks were done. Monday was getting ready for the upcoming release. Do we have enough disk space (yes), Are permissions set correctly (yes), Did we correctly calculate the speed of a laden swallow (no). Tuesday was watching servers, going to some phone meetings, and ordering equipment I got quotes on last week. Ordered some Xmas presents for family and started to figure out what cards to send this year.

Today has been dealing with a lingering cough from the "creeping crud". It goes from just a burble to something that sounds like Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Work wise was a deluge of emails and deal with next years ordering cycle.

Finally for people looking at interesting ideas in computer games, I found this article fascinating. Glitch sounds like a game I would enjoy playing in or writing. Cooperative games have been more my pull. That said, I am actually trying to figure out the old Empire game.

Tuesday 2011-11-01

2011-11-01T17:43:00.001-06:00

Wow another November.. that means Thanksgiving is coming soon. I got to hand out some candy last night. Our street is reaching historic "dead" levels which means I may just go to some other street next year (or put up some sign "Diabetic Rush Here. Get your 5lb sugar bags!"

Tasks

Email. Not as much as normal.. Snow storm in northeast I think has hit a lot of core emailers.
Download RC3. Changes in XFCE not a lot. Not sure if we are ready for a final release though.
See that RC4 does need a bunch of retesting.. wait for it to appear so I can grab it.
Put out for various quotes.. will see if they come in the morning

Ended up with a headache in the afternoon and went to laydown. When I got up no more headache, but now I have a sore throat and thick cough. Well one of the benefits of working from home is I can't get my co-workers any sicker than they would be :).

2011-10-31 - Halloween

2011-10-31T18:04:00.000-06:00

Well today was mainly catching up with email then getting the house ready for trick and treaters tonight (I might be giving away king size candy and needed to get another crate... next year I am just going to give away bags of powdered sugar.. its easier).

Worked on getting PPC systems ready for the transfer then got sidelined by a bunch of emails about other systems. I think I have them all cleared up.. going to need to make a todo list for tomorrow:

Order tapes
Get quote for new system
Build ppc06->ppc09?
Get quote for powersupply
Get quote for sourceware systems
Get RHN for sourceware systems
Work with gnome admins on backups
Play more with FC16..

F16 RC2 is running on the spare laptop. It is running "cooler" in that the system temperature isn't pegged at 97C like it was on the beta. However I haven't had enough time to see if in my normal workflow (thunderbird, firefox, openoffice, eclipse, xchat, lots of terminals). After that it will be "can I deal with the UI" layout. [I am ok if the UI isn't for me.. lots of things aren't for me. It doesn't mean I have to swear and complain about them.]

Well the doorbell is ringing saying trick or treat.. time to publish.

Thursday 2011-10-27

2011-10-27T16:22:00.001-06:00

Today was pretty quiet which is always nice on a Freeze.

Tasks

Read email
Read LWN
Try to understand the intricacies of CSS
Download Fedora-16-Final-TC3 and see if it works OK.
Tried out the new Blogger interface. I am not liking it.. but I think it has to do with how spartan it feels to me.

Music

WCPE for most of the day.

Tuesday 2011-10-25 / Wednesday 2011-10-26

2011-10-27T07:27:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was a large number of interruptions so I didn't get this post done on the usual time.

The Fedora 16 Freeze started on Tuesday. If all goes well Fedora 16 will be out soon. Updated one laptop to whats in F16 and will have to rebuild it because somewhere in between something went fishy in my updates. Oh well. Worked on a couple of stuck servers in the morning. Looks like when I missed a dependency in mediawiki for svg (which pulls in half of GNOME (sigh)) and so I need to make some updates to packages.

Read through the whole move /usr -> / tree of emails and wondered where I had read this before.. oh yeah I joked about this a couple of years ago, but someone wants to do it seriously. Look if you are going to reinvent the filesystem layout REALLY do it, not some half donkey attempt.

Change etc to configs
Change bin to programs
Change share to data
Change home to user-stuff
Change usr to distro-stuff
Change local to local-stuff

And I want the bikeshed to be yellow too. Wednesday opened with some rain which if I lived 400 miles north would be 8+ inches of snow. Tasks

Email (lots and lots of email)
Got a hair cut (several actually)
Go over tickets for final release
Rebuild value01.stg

Music

WCPE on Tuesday
Creedence Clearwater Revival - Chronicles, Volume 2
Depeche Mode - Black Celebration
Genesis - Invisible Touch
Peter Gabriel - So

Monday 2011-10-24

2011-10-24T17:15:00.001-06:00

Friday I went to Socorro, New Mexico to attend the annual alumni event, 49'ers, at New Mexico Institute of Technology and Mining. I went to this school a while ago and learned quite a lot about computers while trying to get my Physics degree. The school has changed greatly on the outside and somewhat on the inside, but it was a fun event. The students still complained about the same things and us alumni got to chide them on how hard we had it compared to them.

Saturday was another trip to Socorro, this time with the family. The dog enjoyed the horses, and I enjoyed the old cars. They had a lot of 1929 Model A's and I had the entire engine explained to me by a fan. The best thing was the showing of how pedal UI design has changed since 1929.

Having a gas pedal in the middle seems intuitive to some, but man it is hard to go from one car to another and drive them.

Monday's tasks were pretty simple.

Tasks

Get blood taken for tests
3 days of email backlog
Wash dog which rolled in something
Get app servers have same RPMS on them
Go to library about books
Find a coffee cup I want for Xmas

Music

Blue Oyster Cult - Club Ninja
WCPE

(Edited to add: I misspelled pedal as peddle)

Tuesday 2011-10-19 / Wednesday 2011-10-20

2011-10-19T20:09:00.000-06:00

Tyr's day

So Tuesday was mainly dealing with Big Blue Room IRQ's. Termite inspection that showed house was ok. Having to deal with preteen school drama. In the end, I got another app server moved to our KVM systems and will have only 3 more to do this week. 2 are going to be harder than I wish because when bapp goes down we are SOL for a while.

Wodin's day

So today started off walking the dog and realizing that with my coat and not shaving.. I didn't look much different from the transients living in the arroyo. No wonder no one wanted to come near me. A shower and shave later.. I still need to do something about my coat (its an old cloth jacket which is super comfortable.)

Booked travel to January FUDcon. Put in the receipts and everything! Worked through a ton of email... and hit the big D quite a bit to avoid drama of various sorts. I got app02 moved over to another box.

Music

Loreena McKennitt - Elemental
Phil Collins - No Jacket Required
Rush - Power Windows
Sting - The Dream of the Blue Turtles

Monday 2011-10-17

2011-10-17T19:00:00.000-06:00

Today was mainly dealing with email. It is amazing how much piles up in 48 hours. Beyond that it was pretty quiet. I spent the afternoon getting bastion02 built as RHEL-6 on kvm. This was a lot easier than dealing with the bastion01 move.. I guess I had learned all the easy mistakes I could make.

Beyond that, I learned that changing passwords on Friday is a bad thing.. especially for passwords you only use once in a while. Sigh..

And for future reference

Apples - member of the Rose family (Rosaceae)
Oranges - member of the Ruta family (Rutaceae)

both of which are grouped one or two steps higher in the trees. So when trying to compare different things try for something like Mushrooms vs Oranges.

Thursday 2011-10-13/Friday 2011-10-14

2011-10-14T17:31:00.000-06:00

Thursday was a bunch more of not responding to emails about password changes and such. In the end. my Grandfather's words of wisdom came to me: If you haven't got anything nice to say, keep your frelling mouth shut.

Got plans in place for Januaries FudCon. I think I will fly in and drive up with my Dad. He had a lot of fun at SELF and all the ex-Navy people who were there. I think some of them will be at FUDcon also.

Saw that there was an announcement for 10,000 paid for round trip tickets to Japan. Sadly it is just an idea, and people need to be serious bloggers to get them if they do come out. I don't think that my love for Sergeant Frog and Totoro will put me in any spot of placement there.

Well hope everyone has a good weekend. I am going to spend it reading about Isometric games and CSS

Thank you Dennis Ritchie

2011-10-12T21:13:00.000-06:00

Today marks the passing of the pioneer of C and Unix, Dennis Ritchie is the R in K&R, the true C that many of us middle aged programmers grew up on. He helped author two of my need to find new copy books: The C Programming Language and UNIX Programming Manual. What I love about "The C Programming Language" was its conciseness. In this age of 400-1000 page tomes on languages, it covers pretty much everything you need to know in less than 200. If I ever write a programming language guide, I hope mine does not get longer than that.

Anyway thank you Dennis Ritchie, you have shaped my life in many ways. [Thankyou LWN for the heads up]

Wednesday 2011-10-12

2011-10-12T20:43:00.000-06:00

Spent most of the day hitting discard on posts about password lengths and things like that. Nothing I could say would help, because people are not in the mood of listening. Did spend some time going through the glibc code for md5 and sha512 password hashes. Also read the Ulrich Drepper code and first misread that there was an 80 character limit. However a rereading said that I was wrong. It looks like there are no practical limits on how long a password could be, but the worries about a DOS are overblown to any of the other input methods.

Got some disks replaced inside of one of our virtual servers. Waiting for NFS to be finished setup and then I can move the app servers around. Made Linux Weekly News quote section again.. I see someone reads these blog entries :), thanks.

Working my way through the CSS Cookbook by Christopher Schmin at the moment.. I will hopefully update my main site to beyond HTML3 soon :).

How to Create A New SSH Key

2011-10-12T14:41:00.000-06:00

Here is how you can change your OpenSSH .ssh key if you need to. On a non-shared Linux computer do the following:

$ ssh-keygen -b 4096
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/ssmoogen/.ssh/id_rsa): id_fedora_rsa
id_fedora_rsa already exists.
Overwrite (y/n)? y
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): 
Enter same passphrase again: 
Your identification has been saved in id_fedora_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in id_fedora_rsa.pub.
....

In your .ssh directory you can configure a file called config to use this key when logging into fedorapeople or similar stations:

Host *fedorahosted.org *fedorapeople.org pkgs.fedoraproject.org
    User ||put your fas account name here||
    ProxyCommand none
    ForwardAgent no
    ForwardX11 no
    Port 22
    KeepAlive yes
    HashKnownHosts no
    GSSAPIAuthentication no
    VerifyHostKeyDNS yes 
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_fedora

Tuesday 2011-10-11

2011-10-11T18:41:00.000-06:00

OK so Beefy Miracle will be F17. Could we have this be the last release name, please? I am not sure that release names really fire anyone up for our release cycles as our audience is much more oriented on engineering bling than marketing buzz :). [And really how many double entendre jokes will we have to deal with this?]

Ok onto the workload for today ...

Tasks

Email
spend some time on the serverbeach05 issue
arrange for IBM to come to cage tomorrow

Music
More WCPE.

Monday 2011-10-10

2011-10-11T10:09:00.001-06:00

I spent Friday on travel to Los Alamos New Mexico. The fires in the Spring had removed more of the trees from the hills, but due to the heavy cloud cover it looked rather pretty at times (or scary in a horror movie way). Los Alamos has always reminded me a bit of Twin Peaks. I had a damn fine cup of coffee though no cherry pie.

Tasks

A lot of email to dig out of.
Work with Kevin on serverbeach05 oddity
Get info on virthost vlans
Work with IBM on how to get disk replacements

Music
Today was more WCPE. If you like classical music and like to listen on an ogg stream, you might want to listen and if you like give a pledge to them

Thursday 2011-10-06

2011-10-06T20:12:00.000-06:00

Today was split up into 3 parts:

Standard thursday items: emails, reading weekly lwn.net news, and Infrastructure meeting.
Moving proxy08 to proxy01 so that we could have RHEL-6 on our main proxy. Most of the hard stuff had been done before with the testing and setting up of proxy8. Most of my tasks were just making it think it was proxy01 and rebooting.
Moving app03 from xen04 to virthost08. In my first attempt at doing this I learned the hard hard lessson that Unix does not ask you "Do you really want to do that." If you mistype the partition you want to dd over.. you will wipe out your physical system pretty quickly.

Well with virthost08 dead, (although enough existed for dracut's rdshell to work on bootup.) I needed to rebuild it. That was just a series of setting up a proxy to the IBM's IMM card and then using the remote console to run anaconda to repartition the disks and set stuff up. All in all about an 2 hours later.. we are back in business for copying 32 GB of data across a LAN... this time making sure that the dd target is correct. Then there is a lot of fiddling of removing xen bits and making kvm ones work. In the end, I got it working at the end.

Thank you Steve Jobs

2011-10-05T18:35:00.000-06:00

Steve Jobs passed away today and I want to thank him for one important things he did. While I enjoyed the NeXT cube in my office in the 1990's and playing with the Lisa in the 1980's.. the most important thing doesn't deal Apple or Next. He kept Pixar going when most other CEO's and investors would have canned the company. That foresight brought my family many movies that have made us laugh, cry and think over the years.

Anyway thanks.

Wednesday 2011-10-05

2011-10-05T18:17:00.000-06:00

Today was spent tracking down why XFCE and Fedora beta 16 didn't work too well. In the end it turned out that Adam Williamson found the solution in 10 minutes after I found a log file which said why my systems would never log in. The solution was due to a gdm-sessions file checking for 3d effects and then trying to launch mutter whether or not it was installed. Ray Strode had fixed the issue upstream already and soon it will filter downstream.

Beyond that I now have 2 test systems installed and running. One is an "old" eMachines with a 3 GHZ Pentium 4 processor and 1 GB of ram. The other is the loaner laptop, Lenovo T61. I have a 3rd box which I know won't run anything past RHEL-2.1 so I don't put it in the pool. Test box 1 is slowly working out pi to its last digit, and the laptop is doing the same for e. [No not really.. gdm shuts down the boxes after 20 minutes whether I am remotely logged in or not :)]

On Fedora IT front, I mainly read email and stayed out of Seth's way as he updated systems. Tomorrow I will be working on Drupal7 items to learn how that will work with insight, and Friday I will be taking off for another 3 day weekend.

Remember to vote in the F17 naming. Never looks like a great name for 17... though I do have a soft-spot for Gernsback.

Tuesday 2011-10-04

2011-10-04T17:38:00.000-06:00

Today was mostly fighting one of two things: F16-beta installing on a spare E-machine and trying to get a system that had been a xen box to be a kvm one. Took a bit but I realized my problem was that console=hvc0 doesn't work well with bootup.

After that I worked on the E-machine and found that its BIOS was so old it didn't know how to deal with GPT partitioned disks. Thankfully dlehman had a update.img that fixed this issue.. yeah! Since the system has only 1GB of ram, I installed the 32 bit at first.. and am now trying the 64 bit. The box is probably at the bottom end of what Fedora can support out of the box these days or a bit faster than that.

Oh and I voted for the next release name: Go Never.

Monday 2011-10-03

2011-10-03T21:01:00.000-06:00

Missed several days of blogging due to allergies. Most of my time was spent trying to get stuff sort of working while keeping my brains from rattling too much from sneezing.

Today was a lot of catchup email and reading articles people had sent me during that time. I would like to recommend the Atlantic's article on parental computing I think it hits the nail on the head of issues with todays push towards centralized (ahem cloud) computing.

Tasks

Work through 4 days of email
Do Fedora IT tickets for release tomorrow
Try to move a xen image into a kvm image.. now where was that howto

Tuesday 2011-09-27

2011-09-27T19:42:00.000-06:00

Most of today was not taken up with PPC (only about 2 minutes while I rebooted the working hardware and it actually did that without crashing). Instead most of the day was working on Fedora 16 betaRC3 issues.

Last night while installing the system got stuck in anaconda going at 100% CPU but nothing happening. I figured letting it sit all night might get it to get to the next step. Instead this morning the laptop was very very very warm and the desk had a slight discolouration from where the T61 had sat on it. I then said "oh dear", and turned off the laptop for a while to let it cool down. I then added a metal laptop riser underneath it to allow for better airflow, and rebooted for another go at a reinstall. The install this time worked perfectly, but the kernel OOPS after reboot in firmware insertion. Ok... maybe letting it run 12 hours at 100% CPU wasn't a good idea.

Let the system cool down, and reboot. No OOPs and the system got first boot going. No problems so I create an account and log in to KDE. KDE starts up and gets a crash when I try to add another desktop... known bug but trying to do trace opened up a new weird behaviour, somewhere in the KDE stack I would only get updates to apps every 30 seconds or so. It wasn't like they were stuck, just that it takes either some sort of buffer to fill up with events or a trigger like moving the mouse to get the applications to draw new data. Running a gnome app was even weirder in that it would completely grey out during these times (however xfce apps would not have this happen).

Ok do a yum update and reboot the system. Oh look a new issue. The RHGB would draw the fedora icon and then stop. No disk activity, not accepting keystrokes to F1->F4, and not able to ping. Ok reboot again with rhgb out of the grub2. .. boot fails in fsck check with no shell fallback. Ok reboot the DVD into rescue mode and find that /home's superblock needs to be "fixed" (the journal on / was able to recover but for some reason systemd.e2fsck didn't seem to be able to do so.)

Alright system boots up after a system wide relabeling and we can log back into various shells. KDE still shows problem, GNOME does not but keeps giving me sadmac faces when trying to launch apps. XFCE works without issues. At this point I am not sure if the problem is with the hardware or not so I am going to run the IBM system check tools overnight to see if it comes up with anything.

In my offtime I got a haircut and read more of the CSS cookbook to catch up with 21st century HTML.

Monday 2011-09-26

2011-09-26T18:26:00.000-06:00

Today was mostly a catchup day. I went with the wife to early vote in our municipal elections, and then went to the book-store to look for some old sci-fi books. One of the things I learned was that living with a writer means book-stores are work and not fun.. which made my slow perusal maddening for her as she wanted to take a break.

After I got back, I learned how to do customer service by Keurig. My Keurig coffee maker had stopped working on Saturday and after trying descaling and some other things figured it was a broken pump. So this morning I expected a long phone call where I would have tobeg for a replacement. Instead I was helped by a cheerful lady "named" Dana who helped me figure out that due to the high altitudes of New Mexico, my coffeemaker was pumping grains up the "pin" causing it to block up. The fix was to use a small paper clip to clean out the tube and then run some cups through. After doing that a lot of grounds came out and I got coffee.. that made me happy. Dear Keurig, please hire more people like "Dana", she made my day. [I am not sure if she was really Dana or had a cover name.. but I enjoyed talking with her while waiting for the coffee-maker to go through the canister of water.

Tasks

Email.. lots.
Play around with zif
Download and install RC2

Friday 2011-09-23

2011-09-23T18:31:00.000-06:00

Ok so I volunteered to be a rawhide wrangler. Will see what that looks to require and will start on it Monday. What I envision it to be is that for things that are broken in rawhide but are built/working in beta channels.. I would be there to build stuff that has gotten out of sink. So if 16beta has gnome-shell-3.2.0-6 and rawhide has -2 I build the -6 version and push to rawhide. The goal will be "make rawhide consumable as much as possible."

Tasks

Try to get a vlan change for ppc11
Brick an APC power bar. Turns on you can turn on SSL before you upload any certificates.. which means it can't be logged in anymore.
Play around with zif. Don't brick the laptop this time :).

Thursday 2011-09-22

2011-09-23T09:35:00.000-06:00

For some reason I woke up at 5am convinced it was Saturday. Convinced so much that I went to bed and when the wife and child asked me to get up at 7am I put on quite a whine. Well it turns out it is really Thursday, so I am off to figure out what needs to be done for the day.

Spent my free time while waiting for techs or puppet to run .. to install Fedora Beta-RC1. Found a long list of issues:

Issues with Brc1

KDE Desktop was non installable due to digikam issues (known)
Caused a crash by selecting and unselecting repos
Restarted the install and chose a minimal install
Did a "yum groupinstall kde --exclude=digicam --exclude=kipi*" and got items installed.
Got x running and decided to switch systemd to graphical desktop. [Made sure kdm was installed
Had the system switch to run level 5 (graphical desktop) and found I had 'bricked' the box. No X started up and the system had no gettys
Trying to get grub2 not to boot into this level didn't work and I decided it was late and time to just reinstall
Did a default click through install and system seems functional. Yeah something I learned from windows works... if things stop working, just reinstall

Tasks

Got retrace02.fedoraproject.org on the net. Test day next week should be go
IBM called with new parts.. start the dance
Someone is doing a bumpkus load of reviews because my bugzilla mail is full
Fedora weekly meeting
IBM arrived and we played does this part fix the problem
Got a working PPC board and spend evening building it.
Sooooo close, and still stuck with needing to update blade bios

Wednesday 2011-09-21

2011-09-21T21:57:00.000-06:00

Last night was a string of nightmares with everything from giving a PhD thesis defense but not knowing which subject to living in a trailer after a nuclear war. Fun stuff.

Tasks

Work with IBM on PPC issue some more.
Do research on PPC server options. My google grok foo rolled a 1.
NIST papers long. Brain hurt.

MusicMore WCPE

Tuesday 2011-09-20

2011-09-20T20:57:00.000-06:00

Tasks

PPC issues
Spend a lot of time tracking down system ownership
Build bastion01 and work on moving it to production
Debug various bastion issues

Music

WCPE classical

WCPE is a wonderful OGG station so I get to listen to pretty much commercial free classical music when I want.. I just need to make sure I do a bi-yearly donation. I miss the Norwegian OGG radio stations. I was enjoying listening to the childrens radio and learning some amount of Norwegian. Its like Old English but not.

Monday 2011-09-19

2011-09-19T18:50:00.000-06:00

Today is International "Talk like a Pirate day" but my grasp of just normal English is sub-par currently. The local allergens are in full blossom and I have gotten a bad case of the ear tubes getting blocked up... so today was mainly drinking warm liquids hoping my left ear would pop open.

A quote from an article today:

The computer is a thing, but what people want is not a thing, but to do things.

Something we computer people forget all to often :).

Tasks

Get IBM technician into location for PPC replacement part N+1
Lots of Email to catchup on
And another day another dead PPC.

Music

WCPE -classical music

Friday 2011-09-16

2011-09-16T17:01:00.001-06:00

Spent most of the day working with various IBM Power PC support technicians. I will say that the IBM guys worked their hardest on trying to get one of our blades working. In the end, they had a fix-now board sent out and a technician there by 1pm. The board of course didn't work. Not sure why we are having so much trouble with JS12 blades but it really really is getting old.

Tasks

Spent talking with IBM on PPC support.
+1 Nirik's changes to VPN
Rebuild ppc12 so it can go back in production

Music

WCPE - Classical Music

Thursday 2011-09-15

2011-09-15T17:33:00.000-06:00

The Microsoft Ergonomic keyboard died last night (half the keys quit working while trying to type the last blog) so I went out and got a

Tasks

Buy a keyboard
Try to catchup with email
PPC hardware fails in new and horrible ways
Fedora Weekly Infrastructure meeting

Music

Clannad - Magical Ring
Def Leppard - Pyromania
Depeche Mode - Construction Time Again
WCPE Classical Radio

Wednesday 2011-09-14

2011-09-14T19:15:00.002-06:00

Lots of rain last night.. I slept so solidly that I didn't hear the pager go off at all. Thanks to Seth Vidal for fixing the issues we ended up with.

Learned also that getting used to vi keys (j,k) to move around in email is a bad thing in other readers.. spent the morning removing a lot of non-junk emails

Tasks

Junk my work email accidently. Spend time fixing
Wondered HOW THE HENRY IBM stays in business with a crappy self-service center like it has
Pain and agony.. it must be PPC

Music

Depeche Mode - A Broken Frame
Duran Duran - Rio
Fleetwood Mac - Mirage
Heart - Private Audition
Phil Collins - Hello, I must be going
Rush - Signals
Blue Oyster Cult - Tales of the Psychic Wars

Thoughts on Rawhide

2011-09-14T19:15:00.000-06:00

Currently Fedora supports in some form or fashion 4 releases at one time:

Rawhide: Meant for the cutting edge of packages. Packages here can be broken regularly so that fixes can be done as fast as possible versus waiting til more expensive times during an adoption curve.
Release+1 (16): A release that will be released soon. Branched from Rawhide and then made into release quality over a 6 month period. Problems and fixes are progressively worked on so that the software is the newest "stable" version.
Release (15): The current "release" which is meant for most users to install and run. Fixes to this release are meant to be neutral. If a newer "stable" version is released it does not mean that it is put into the Current Release but only if no fixes can be made to the version that was released.
Release-1 (14): The release which is nearing its end of life and fixes should only be done for security and critical problems

Ok using the "standard" technology adoption lifecycle, and realizing that Fedora is meant for Innovators and "Early Adopters" versus say people in the Majority curve(**).

Rawhide should be where people can experiment and break and fix stuff quickly without affecting the main population of users.On the standard technology curve this should be the furthest out innovators and developers.
Release+1 should be where things are solidifying and innovators are getting things ready for others to use.
Release should be where innovations have solidified and early adopters can try to make the various parts work for their projects.
Release-1 is where users who are not ready to move to either Release+1 or Release and may want to jump off to something more "Main Stream" like an Enterprise Linux.

The reality though is that Fedora does not seem to be able to handle this many streams at once. There have been a lot of threads about packages not getting approved for fixes in "Release" and "Release-1" that should have been, and large and long complete breaks in "Rawhide" that have not been fixed. Looking at the threads and in particular Jonathan Corbet's reply to me.

To me the original idea of "No Frozen" rawhide sounded good. I am not sure that the implementation due to the fact that developers can only focus on 1 or 2 releases at any one time. So I think we have problems that need to be addressed after this release.

Should Rawhide be usable by anyone? If people are using it should they expect any kind of timeframe for problems to be fixed?
Should we just have a way to move people from rawhide to Release+! when the alpha split occurs and stop updating rawhide til Release+1 becomes Release?
Should we just give up on the concept of this many releases being available and go for "Release+1, Release, Dooom"?
With all the other stresses should we just end Fedora on a high note, and move along to "GnomeOS-X" and "NotADesktopOS-X"?

** People who are in the majority parts of the curves prefer items where the cost to adopt is much lower and different than people who are early adopters or innovators. This is why there is such a disconnect between the "Wow this is the greatest thing since sliced bread" and "This is the most horrible change I have ever seen." groups in adoption cycles.

Tuesday 2011-09-13

2011-09-13T19:31:00.000-06:00

Stuff
I learned the following today how to retire a branch.. I think

fedpkg clone mediawiki114
fedpkg switch-branch -l
fedpkg switch-branch origin/el4
fedpkg retire
fedpkg push

Then go into fedorapackages and retire the packages there. (Or just follow the directions at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_remove_a_package_at_end_of_life

I set up a new set of packages for x86_64 EL-6 testing. Public key is in the directory.

Tasks

Learn how to get fedpkg to retire stuff
Build a bunch of fedorapkgs for testing
Had a late afternoon page fest that was weird.

Music

WCPE
Adele - 19
Adele - 21

Monday 2011-09-12

2011-09-12T18:23:00.000-06:00

Spent the weekend trying to get my old website moved to new cloud systems. The old box was a CentOS-3 system so.. its a bit of upgrade. Yes I am so far behind the curve I had a very EOL system on the internet.

Release time must be coming up because a lot of emails on lists are the "I would rather rant on someone else's broken stuff versus working on my own broken stuff" emails. I am getting better, my discard draft folder was emptied of 30 emails reminding people that "If you haven't anything gorram nice to say, then shut the frak up."

On the nice news.. IT IS FALL. The air has that nice aroma, the leaves are turning brown (we aren't New England so its Green->Brown with some Yellow for an Aspen) and I am feeling lively as a chipmunk.

Tasks

A lot of email.
Play around building audacious for EPEL-6
Update F16 box.. the box only reboots cleanly if I turn off rhgb
Got a continual crash in rhythmbox playing WCPE so time for a new player
Compile audacious for EL-6 is fun. Got it working.. yeah
Kill/maim/exterminate db01.stg
Started a thread on devel which I hope was constructive

Music

WCPE ogg (which killed rhythmbox)

Friday 2011-09-09

2011-09-09T18:30:00.000-06:00

Started the day off with finding out the change I made to DNS earlier broke the box earlier. sigh. On the other hand, the weather has become nice and cool. Today's high was 75 which is well inside my "I operate well" parameters. I woke up pretty focused and clear.

Tasks

Fix resolv.conf mess
Spent the morning learning git
Started reading through NIST and CC documents

Music

Robert Plant & Allison Krauss - Raising Sand
The Police - Zenyattà Mondatta
Phil Collins - Face Value
Blue Oyster Cult - Fire of Unknown Origen
Def Leppard - High and Dry
Rush - Moving Pictures
The Police - Ghost In the Machine

Thursday 2011-09-08

2011-09-08T20:47:00.000-06:00

Well today got off to a late start.. too many allergens and not enough benadryl. Or too much benedryl.. and not enough wakeup juice. Not sure which. When I got up I found I broke staging...

I upgraded my systems salt to 0.9.1 and ran into a long list of issues... mainly because I didn't have Cython installed and it wants it. Then some other ones that just seemed mid-devel issues.

Tasks

Get db02.stg into rotation
Break staging in new and interesting ways
Fedora Infrastructure meeting
More playing with salt.
Work on retrace server

Music

Miles Davis - Complete Birth of the Cool
Dead Can Dance - Into The Labyrinth
Bruce Hornsby and the Range - The Way It Is
Allison Krauss and Union Station - Paper Airplane
Robyn Miller - Myst
Robert Plant & Allison Krauss - Raising Sand

Books
I am currently blazing my way through "Inside the Tornado" by Geoffrey Moore.It is an interesting read and is hopefully making it better at learning how to market stuff better. The funniest part is reading it as a book written 15+ years ago. Most of the companies written are either gone or changed greatly due to market changes. It is memory lane remembering the whole "Pen Tablet" craze of the early 1990's that died. I am reading the original version and should look at the revised version afterwords. The first startup I went to work for, Spyglass, bought copies for everyone to see how we would grow in the first Internet boom of 1995-1996. We ended up trying to be a Gorilla and ended up being kicked to Monkey status by our primary customer Microsoft :).

Wednesday 2011-09-07

2011-09-07T17:44:00.000-06:00

Forgot today was Wednesday.. but my wife didn't. She snuck the human-sized cat carrier outside of the bathroom and got me locked into it before I could think what was up. Off to the doctor for me. No wonder I wasn't allowed to get anything to eat after 5pm last night. Visit wasn't too bad, usual prodding and I got a treat for not biting the doctor.

Tasks

Lots of email from lists
Spend some time setting up Salt
I'm not a real DBA, but I get to play one on Fedora Noc.

Commands I want to remember

pg_dumpall > /var/tmp/spew1
mysqldump -u username -ppassword --databases db1 db2 db3 > /var/tmp/spew2
mysql < /tmp/spew2
psql -f spew1 postgres

And xz takes forever...Music

Kate Bush - Lionheart
Pink Floyd - The Wall
The Police - Regatta de Blanc
Rush - Permanent Waves
Heart - Bebe Le Strange
Blue Oyster Cult - Cultosaurus Erectus

Setting Up Salt

2011-09-07T17:40:00.000-06:00

Salt is a remote execution manager which allows a system administrator to run multiple commands across many systems in their enterprise at once. Similar to Func, I am looking at it as a configuration tool written in python that I can grok better than I am at puppet.

To start with we worked from the central home server by installing the following rpms:

https://github.com/downloads/thatch45/salt/salt-0.8.9-1.el5.noarch.rpm
https://github.com/downloads/thatch45/salt/python-zmq-2.1.7-1.el6.x86_64.rpm
https://github.com/downloads/thatch45/salt/zeromq-2.1.7-1.el6.x86_64.rpm

$ sudo yum localinstall salt*rpm python-zmq*rpm zeromq*rpm

Now some prep work is needed here. We need to setup the hostname for the salt server in DNS and or /etc/hosts so that our clients can find it. After that we can start the master and minion on our first box.

$ sudo /sbin/chkconfig --add salt-master
$ sudo /sbin/chkconfig --add salt-minion
$ sudo /sbin/service salt-master start
$ sudo /sbin/service salt-minion start

The next clients will only have the minion added. The master will be off as we aren't ready to deal with multi-master setups. So what can we do with salt? Well we can run cmds and such

$ sudo salt '*' cmd.run "ls -l /etc/hosts"        
xanadu.int.smoogespace.com: -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 209 Sep  7 14:59 /etc/hosts
xanadu.int.smoogespace.com: 

$ sudo salt '*' user.info smooge
{'xanadu.int.smoogespace.com': {'gid': 500,
                                'groups': ['desktop_admin_r',
                                           'mock',
                                           'wheel'],
                                'home': '/home/smooge',
                                'name': 'smooge',
                                'passwd': 'x',
                                'shell': '/bin/bash',
                                'uid': 500}}
$ sudo salt '*' status.diskusage /
{'xanadu.int.smoogespace.com': {'/': {'available': 13899972608,
                                      'fstype': 'ext4',
                                      'total': 16910295040}}}

However I then ran into some limitations. I am trying to figure out what might have caused them, but they are rather interesting:

salt '*' pkg.list_pkgs
{'xanadu.int.smoogespace.com': {}}

salt '*' file.get_sum /etc/passwd    
{'xanadu.int.smoogespace.com': 'Hash md5 not supported'}

There should be quite a bit more packages there than that, and I think md5sum is supported. I am guessing there are some packages I need to install or check in the files. Will get to that in my next blog on this.

Tuesday 2011-09-06

2011-09-06T19:42:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was Labour Day Holiday in the United States so while I expected to labour through the day, I ended up playing a card game called Dominion with an old college friend. So I guess I spent the day on holiday after all.

Today is now my Monday with a 3 days of unlooked at email.

Tasks

Email, a lot of email
RHIT phone meeting
Rebuild fas01.stg
Go through security guides to try and write one for CentOS-6

Music

Rush - Farewell to Kings
Pink Floyd - Animals
Meat Loaf - A Bat Out of Hell
Fleetwood Mac - Rumours
Heart - Little Queen
Rush - Hemispheres
Blue Oyster Cult - Some Enchanted Evening
Heart - Dog & Butterfly

Friday 2011-09-02

2011-09-02T17:46:00.000-06:00

Stuff

Late start today.. the grass pollens are making it very hard to sleep at night. A sudafed with coffee seems to have gotten the day going today though.

Tasks

Email.. someone got busy with libvirt patches last night
Spend afternoon trying to build db02.stg

Music

Pink Floyd - The Division Bell
Pink Floyd - Meddle
Fleetwood Mac - Fleetwood Mac
Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
Rush - Caress of Steel
Rush - 2112
Blue Oyster Cult - Agents of Fortune
Heart - Dreamboat Annie

Thursday 2011-09-01

2011-09-01T19:41:00.001-06:00

Well today is turning into one of those "why did I get out of bed" days. I could whinge on about it for a while but what does that fix? Trying to figure out the new blogger interface which just seems odd at the moment.

I have to find a new virtual system provider. My colocated system died a horrible death last night and is down to 1/2 of a RAID and 1/2 of a DIMM. The fact that it has survived 6 years in a closet in my old bosses house in Los Alamos is a wonder.

Tasks

Lots of going back and forth between home and school today.
Not as much email since I whacked a bunch accidently
Saw how much disk space is in fedora-archive and how long it can take to do a sha256 on it
Begin list of Compass goals for the year... now what did I get done again...

Music
Not a lot listened to as I either had to answer silly phone calls from people trying to sell me stuff OR I was going back and forth to the elementary school.

Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon
Pink Floyd - The Division Bell

Books

Geoffrey Moore - Crossing the Chasm

Wednesday 2011-08-31

2011-08-31T20:18:00.000-06:00

Stuff

A bit of a benadryl haze today.. pollen is up and I have the fuzziness that goes with it.

I am trying to track down a study I remember but can't find (so it may not exist). What I remember is a study that showed sarcasm/satire had the reverse effect on "undecided" voters than expected. Basically taking a group of voters and show them something like Laff-In or today the "The Daily Show" and you would see the following effects. People who backed the people being made fun of would be offended, people who were against agreed, and people in the middle would initially agree, but would later be more likely to vote for the ones who had been made fun of. [EG an undecided voter would be more likely to vote FOR Nixon after watching the Laff-In/Smuckers Brothers versus against.]

The theory was that people have brain circuits attracted to "power" and satire/sarcasm looks to be a weapon of the weak against the powerful, and so undecided people would be influenced that X was more power than Y. The reason I remember this for some reason was it was pointed out to me multiple times why my sarcasm never got me anywhere. [Of course it could be that I am horrible at sarcasm.. I have an almost Sheldon level of not getting it from other people, but that is a different blog post.]

Tasks

Email Grind
Start arpwatch puppeting
Stop arpwatch puppeting
Try to get an idea of what to watch for from kernel.org stuff.

Music

Clannad - Clannad in Concert
Clannad - Crann Úll
Clannad - Fuaim
Clannad - Magical Ring
Clannad - Legend
Clannad - Macalla
Clannad - Sirius
Loreena McKennitt - Nights from the Alhambra

Reading

Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore,
Wastelands by Mur Lafferty,
One, Two, Three.. Infinity by George Gamov

Tuesday 2011-08-23

2011-08-31T15:20:00.000-06:00

Why is it wrong to say that the Year of the Linux Desktop (YoLD) has already happened.. its called Android? Yes it isn't "FreeLibreOpen" to the extent people expected the YoLD to be, and it is not what someone from the 1990's would call a desktop. However technology changes, and it is the primary interface that users people are getting to their data. Technology constantly changes how it presents itself as larger portions of a population use it.

Oh dear god, I think I have ranted on this before.. I must be getting old.

Learned that my phone company Qwest is being merged into CenturyLink and it has been going on for a year. I really am not connected with things.

Tasks

Email Grind
Systemd Grind
More APC updates

Music

Stevie Ray Vaughn - Greatest Hits
Miles Davis Quintet - Cookin' With...
Miles Davis Quintet - Relaxin' With...
Miles Davis Quintet - Workin' With...
George Gershwin - Rhapsody in Blue
Miles Davis - Kind of Blue

Tuesday 2011-08-30

2011-08-30T20:02:00.000-06:00

Stuff

Today was pretty easy. The telemarketers didn't call as much and the 2 that did got the message. A sink in the bathroom finally decided to show its age and the faucet had to be replaced by a plumber as my attempt was not good.

Wished there was an opengl-less window manager for GNOME3 that could run the clutter CSS/javascript plugins. Looked at what it would take and remembered that window managers have driven more than one person mad.

Tasks

Keep those emails going, rawhide!
Fix virthost02-mgmt
Fix download02-mgmt
Fix bvirthost01-mgmt
Try to get new retrace server built
Todays bugs I found in F16 alpha all noted already

Music

Dead Can Dance - Dead Can Dance
Concrete Blonde - Bloodletting
Enigma - MCMXC A.D.
Clannad - Clannad 2
Clannad - Dulamin (sorry for murdering the words)

Monday 2011-08-29

2011-08-30T08:52:00.000-06:00

Daily Talk
Had a pretty uneventful weekend due to being sick. Didn't go to the local Science Fiction convention again.. but didn't pass the plague around either :). Sunday night we had a super set of Thunderstorms that went onto about 4 am this morning. I really wish the rain barrels had gotten here.. I think I would have overfilled them quite a bit.

The email over the weekend wasn't too bad. I have decided to take a break from GNOME3 for a bit and just focus on GRUB2 and systemd.

Tasks

Email catchup
Reset xen04 imm
Unable to reset ibiblio RSA2. Card reset only brings back bad

Music

Dead Can Dance - Into the Labyrinth
Bruce Hornsby and the Range - The Way It Is
Mister Mister - the best of...

Friday 2011-08-26

2011-08-26T17:28:00.000-06:00

Daily Talk

I wanted to start off that I realize a lot of issues I have with Gnome3 are my own hangups, and I don't need or want to spew those everyday. Spent the day telling telemarketers to go away, please.

Tasks

Daily Email Grind
Worked out how to do larger KVM screens.
Spent a good part of the day trying to get a PPC working the pain, the pain

Music

Apocalyptica - Seventh Symphony
Loreena McKennitt - Elemental
Loreena McKennitt - Parallel Dreams
Loreena McKennitt - The Visit
Loreena McKennitt - The Mask and The Mirror
Loreena McKennitt - Winter Garden
Loreena McKennitt - The Book of Secrets
Loreena McKennitt - An Ancient Muse

Thursday 2011-08-25

2011-08-25T17:32:00.000-06:00

I posted something like this on LWN.net earlier.. but I figured once there might as well put it here.

I am the black sheep of the family. For the 3 previous generations, everyone in my family worked on cars or motorcycles either as mechanics, chauffeurs, or even designers. My mom raced cars as a teenager, and my sister helped my dad take apart several engines. I on the other hand can't remove an oil filter without somehow cracking an engine block. However, I kind of know the culture, and what I am seeing in "modern" OS design parallels what I have seen of cars over the last 60 years (just maybe at a faster rate...)

Early cars were great to mod with. You could take apart an engine, play around with it, maybe see what happens if you mill out the piston heads a tiny bit, or change where the spark plugs were. It was a lot of fun for the people who liked to do that, and they learned quite a bit doing it by breaking things quite a bit. At some point though car design changed. It was no longer easy to take apart and change how a car worked because it had either gotten too complicated or a lot of barriers were put in the way on purpose to stop modding.

A good example of this is comparing a 1961 VW bug and a 2011 VW bug. On the outside they look similar enough. The interiors are similar in many ways also. I have even seen a 1964 bug modded out to look exactly like a 2004 bug on the inside.. However dig deeper and the differences are huge in philosophies.

A 1960's VW bug was the epitomy of the vehicle you could take apart and put together in many ways. Most of those ways would be horrible to look at but it was fun to do so. You learned a LOT from being able to break a car and make it do stuff that wasn't what it was originally designed to do, and you could always mill pieces to rebuild it (which is why there are still so many 1960's VW's on the road, because many of the parts are easily replaceable by someone with a lathe. And that was a second core point. Most any kid in high school could get the tools to rebuild a VW to what he wanted.. he just needed gumption.

A 2011 VW bug is the opposite end. (and I am not talking about the engine moving from the front to the back. I rode in a 72 beetle with an engine in the front because someone wanted to do that.) It is a very pretty car, and I will say it is fun to drive where it was designed to drive with. However it is not designed to be changed, in fact seems to have been designed in ways to make sure it wasn't changed. Trying to change it, see how it breaks, see how it can be fixed.. is much harder and more expensive. Especially since getting the tools and parts require a lot of custom items that you have to either be specifically trained in to remove bits off the car.

In the end, it just isn't as fun to play with anymore.

I think some of the frustration people are running into GNOME-3 is that lack of modification fun. It was fun to be able to throw sawmill, fvwm2, icewm, or E as the window manager while having other parts working in Gnome-1. It was still possible in part with Gnome-2 but sometimes not worth the effort. It is definitely not worth the effort in Gnome-3. Trying to get a right click working the way I want it is not really in the design goals of what the Gnome developers want. Realizing that and moving on is about all I can do in the long run.

Anyway off to my tasks and music

Tasks

Lets hunt the hidden box
Get caught up on researching IMM reset code.. miss meeting
Spot a certificate item. Turns out nothing.
Thought about buying a Chromebook. Quite taking shots of tequila and changed mind.
More javascript reading

Music

Altan - Another Sky
Altan - Horse with a Heart
Altan - The Blue Idol
Sarah Brightman - La Luna
Bonnie Rideout - Celtic Circles

Wednesday 2011-08-24

2011-08-24T19:44:00.000-06:00

Todays email train on -devel and -test were pretty crappy. I did not respond because a) both sides are impossible people, and b) there is no win beyond going the f away.

Spent most of the day with Gnome3/F16 in either a virtual system or the spare laptop. The laptop was pretty speedy bu the virtual system is just painful. I spend a lot of time trying to right click or look around for something that should be obvious but isn't. I am sure there are keyboard shortcuts but I need either them to be painted on my keyboard or some printout to remind me. After 2 days of this my brain hurts and my frustration levels have not lowered. I will see if things get better by Friday and then see what to punt to.

Systemd is uhm interesting. Yes it has a ton of options but wow its spews out more information than I need to know most of the time. Its like typing 'ls' and getting 'ls -lctZ' and not knowing why stuff is coloured and blinking when all you wanted was to see what files were in the directory. I can see us having to write a SMIT to deal with this complexity.

This grumpiness was sponsored by the letter R, Z, and the number 9.

Tasks

Morning Email Grind
Morning Fedora F16 update grind
Try to figure out if I missed some hardware somewhere

Music

Anonymous 4 - 11,000 Virgins Chants for the Feast of St Ursula
Anonymous 4 - La Belle Marie
Altan - Another Sky

Tuesday 2011-08-23

2011-08-23T18:31:00.000-06:00

First day of Fedora Alpha. Head mirrors run fine and things look good. My installed systems have over 360 updates to make. Yep smells like Fedora :).

Learned that my phone company Qwest is being merged into CenturyLink and it has been going on for a year. I really am not connected with things.

Also learned that my favourite New Mexico Apple,
the Champagne Apple, may go away. The farm has had a lot of changes which have made it unsustainable. I am not sure if the Apples can be grown elsewhere and as Melinda Snodgrass says in the article, they are ambrosia to eat.

Old Man Rant
Why is it wrong to say that the Year of the Linux Desktop (YoLD) has already happened.. its called Android? Yes it isn't "FreeLibreOpen" to the extent people expected the YoLD to be, and it is not what someone from the 1990's would call a desktop. However technology changes, and it is the primary interface that users people are getting to their data. Technology constantly changes how it presents itself as larger portions of a population use it.

Oh dear god, I think I have ranted on this before.. I must be getting old.

Tasks

Email Grind
Systemd Grind
More APC updates
Work with Nirik on getting IMM located

Music

Stevie Ray Vaughn - Greatest Hits
Miles Davis Quintet - Cookin' With...
Miles Davis Quintet - Relaxin' With...
Miles Davis Quintet - Workin' With...
George Gershwin - Rhapsody in Blue
Miles Davis - Kind of Blue

Monday 2011-08-22

2011-08-22T19:15:00.000-06:00

Good morning, Universe. I had a wonderful weekend working in the yard and visiting old friends. Didn't get much computer time which was probably a good thing.

Tasks for day

Email Doom. *1*
Get to labelling ports on our APC*3*
Deal with various APC issues
Spend the evening trying to get a system working, and decide that I am having a monday.
- my xfce settings decided not to put a window around java applet so I could move it.
- the system sees its disks in the uefi setting but does not show the LSI controller for me to edit
- for some reason the RHEL-6.x kvm keeps capturing the mouse when I am sure it didn't... and then it can't find the up/down keys when it does that.
Decided I had hit my whine quota and needed to go do something else for a while.

Music for day *2*

Sara Bareilles - Little Voice
U2 - War
U2 - The Unforgettable Fire
U2 - The Joshua Tree
U2 - Rattle and Hum
U2 - All that You Can't Leave Behind
U2 - How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb

Notes for day

Did I miss the memo that this was whinge fest weekend?
It helps to plug in your earphones when you listen to music. I had to restart the queue after 2 hours of unexplained silence
Power plugs these days are made so loose for safety reasons that I constantly have to get systems replugged in

Friday 2011-08-19

2011-08-19T20:53:00.000-06:00

Another warm muggy night so not a lot of sleep. Plus the dog decided it was wakeup time on the hour starting at 4am. Did the guard duty walk around with her and she was happy... and I got 55 more minutes sleep. Got to the computer and found the network was knocked off for a couple of hours last night.

Tasks

Read the email flux.
Spend most of the day figuring out IPMI.
- It is turned on by default sometimes
- It is turned off by default sometimes
- Sometimes its accepts SNMP traps with NULL community
- Sometimes it doesn't
Anyway a lot of tracking for not much accomplishment.
Deal with an outage of proxy servers.

Background Music

Los Straightjackets - Viva Los Straightjackets
Los Straightjackets - The Velvet Touch of...
Scottish National Pipe & Drummers - Sounds of Scotland
This Mortal Coil - It Will All End In Tears
Tish Hinojosa - From Texas for a Christmas Night
Pink Floyd - The Division Bell
Pink Floyd - The Final Cut
Queensryche - The Warning
Bonnie Raitt - Luck of the Draw
Reta Ceol - Celtic Hymns
Bonnie Rideout - Celtic Circles

By the way, dear ACM. I have asked you 4 or 5 times not to send me membership reminders. I have had SPAM organizations who have had better memories than you. Please QUIT. kthnxbye.

Thursday 2011-08-18

2011-08-18T20:12:00.001-06:00

Lots of rain last night from late monsoon moisture which cooled things down quite a bit. We also had a good thunderstorm which caused the electronic toys to burp from all the EMPs going off.

Today is infrastructure meeting day and I am going to see about getting some IBM x3650 servers reinstalled.. I spent yesterday learning about the joys of IPMI systems on a network and what they can do without you knowing it. Wheee.

Tasks

Morning crunch of emails.
Read lwn.net weekly summary
Investigate issues with IPMI
Investigate PXE configs
Infrastructure meeting
Play around with DHCP files to break them
Check permissions for Alpha16 release
Find the mirror scripts and update to 16

Background Music

Pink Floyd - Echoes (Best of ...)
Queen - Greatest Hits
Queensryche - Empire
Queensryche - Queensryche
Queensryche - Rage for Order
Queensryche - Operation Mindcrime
Bonnie Raitt - Longing in their Hearts
Dar Williams - The Honesty Room
Ventures - Greatest Hits
Los Straightjackets - Viva Los Straightjackets

Hmmm can anyone tell when I went to college?

Wednesday 2011-08-17

2011-08-17T20:23:00.000-06:00

Wow today is humid here in the desert. While 50% sounds little to the 110% I remember showing up in South Carolina as a kid.. it feels heavy and dead everywhere you walk. [I am not sure if it was really 110%.. the air was foggy and supersaturated so that if you opened up a refrigerator or freezer it would "rain" where the two airs would meet.]

Laptop running F16 alpha didn't shutdown from overheating.. so we are better with GNOME3 than we were in F15. it still runs very hot though.

Tasks for the day

Start the day with the overnight email queue..
Do my morning Astronomical Photo of the Day
Read through more javascript code
Search through DHCP logs. Your packets move, but I can't hear what they are saying.
I tip my hat to the new desktop revolution..
Fight a long fight with the qxl,vmvga, and cirrus video drivers.
Find lost IMM management cards
Spend some learning about the undocumented evils of IPMI
Looked over allura for project sources

Background Music Albums

Pink Floyd - Ummagumma (or what acid soundchecks are like)
The Who - Who's Next
Pink Floyd - Obscured By Clouds
Clannad - Clannad
Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon
Pink Floyd - Echoes (Best of...)
The Police - Synchronicity
Queen - Classic Queen
Rachael Yamagata - Happenstance

Tuesday 2011-08-16

2011-08-16T21:22:00.000-06:00

Tasks worked on:

Get kid to school at ungodly hour of 0800
Really this much email? More filters needed
Google meetup with Seth and Kevin on cloud strategies
RHIT meetup on boring old conference phone
Put up ips for PDU's.
Give a fellow employee a nickel and tell him to get a real computer.
Corporate Training.
Remember that burning cd's to dvd disks works but do not play in player.
Do evening QA while watching 2nd season Big Bang.
- Install works for default disk layout and custom packages.
- Gnome 3 does not crash immediately.
- Spock should beat lizard.
- Gnome temperature runs as hot as it did with F15. (64 Celsius vs 42 in XFCE). Non critical (except to my lap :)).

Background Music

Pearl Jam - Yield
Tom Petty - Greatest Hits
Pink Floyd - A Momentary Lapse of Reason
Pink Floyd - A Saucer Full of Secrets

Monday 2011-08-15

2011-08-15T17:34:00.000-06:00

A ton of backlog email
Try to build a past couple of weeks progress and decide to start fresh using blog like spot/rbergeron have been
Remedy my old friend, we meet again...
Learned via irc the joy of facl's
Set up meetings for next couple of days
Download F16RC4
Trying GNOME3 again... hopefully it will go better.

Background albums today

Simon and Garfunkel - [just one song]
Grateful Dead - American Beauty
Grateful Dead - Workingman's Dead
Alanis Morrisette - Jagged Little Pill
Alanis Morrisette - Under Rug Swept
Pearl Jam - 10
Pearl Jam - Vs

Living in the Past

2011-08-08T14:55:00.000-06:00

Read through Bradley Kuhn's article on Living in the Past. I think it pretty much says many of the things I have said before, though maybe more eloquently. While I have pretty much converted to XFCE in the last 3 months, I can appreciate that GNOME is working towards a different audience set. I also agree with Bradley that ranting about it doesn't make anything better.. it just makes people more entrenched which clearly makes things work less. So I am happy to use XFCE and will work in whatever way I can to "make it a stepup from GNOME-2.32" for Linus and the like.

Moving from rawhide to F16alpha

2011-07-31T12:16:00.000-06:00

Well the test laptop was stable until today when updates seem to have caused all kinds of issues.. and then I realized the issue was that rawhide moved from F16->F17. I think I am going to reinstall the laptop to being F16 alpha later this week and see how it progresses over the span of the week. Once we get to the betas I will jump back to rawhide to see if I can cause the laptop to burn out again :).

Currently the 3.0 kernels and systemd are fighting over system locks. As can be seen by this bugzilla, I am not sure who is winning.

Boot Times are Important.. sort of

2011-07-25T18:14:00.000-06:00

Adam W was at CLS and has been going over ideas he ran into. One of them was a talk by Dan Allen of Mojave Linux on speeding up boot times of Jboss.

While I agree that starting times do matter for laptops and such.. for servers they are really a joke. Mainly because all of Linux could start up in 10 seconds, but the real wait is all the BIOS/EFI startups which Linux has no power over. Two weeks ago, I spent the week with Kevin Fenzi inventorying old hardware and installing new hardware at the Red Hat/Fedora Phoenix bunker. Most of our time was spent waiting.. (average of 4 minutes per server.. the newer the server, the longer the time) for a tiny period of time when we could enter a keystroke to enter some BIOS menu. Go too soon and they keyboard buffer is overrun, wait to long and you have 1-3 more minutes waiting until you can press it. For one server, we spent close to an hour trying to get all the menus gone through so we could actually get to the point of running Linux on it. And even after going into the menus and turning on "fast" boot options, the servers still take 2-4 minutes to get to a grub prompt.

And yes during those times we were going on yak shaving expeditions or trying to figure out how many prime numbers were below a googol.. but for the most part an even long RHEL-5 boot time with all the trimmings is stunningly fast compared to getting the server to booting. Until that problem is really solved, I think most boot time arguments are going to just go over server administrator heads.

This slowness is a primary reason why Infrastructure uses virtual machines everywhere. We can reboot a virtual machine in far less time than it takes for the real hardware version to think about rebooting. In the virtual server case, slow services are more detectable. I can no longer reboot a box, get in the car, go the coffee house, come back wait for the coffee to cool and then be at a Grub prompt. I might get to the door when the prompt is waiting for me.

Updating to rawhide (part trois)

2011-06-27T18:50:00.000-06:00

The title turns out to be an unintentional pun. I spent the weekend at my first comic convention ever, the Albuquerque Comic Expo, and met Marina Sirtis who played Deana Troi on Star Trek: The Next Generation. But I digress.

After spending a lot of Friday and some of Monday trying to figure out how to capture the boot problem with kernel-3.0, I finally got lucky and saw that the watchdog occurred right as systemd mentioned that smartd was starting. Aha Data (who wasn't at the comic expo). Turning off smartd with a systemctl --disable smartd.service was able to allow for a boot to occur. Now I need to figure out how to capture the oops correctly and we should be go for opening a bugzilla report.

The other issues dealing with gdm etc are still being worked on by Adam Williamson's blog so I will wait to move out of runlevel 3 to runlevel 5. [Then again I am wondering.. why did I really ever stop using startx?]

[On a side note, the comic expo was fun. I got to meet my favourite Ghostbuster, Ernie Hudson, and geeked out speechless at meeting Jill Thompson (of various Endless comics and Scary Godmother). I also got to buy a comic I had been looking for 36 years... Thanks to all the people who were there. ]

Updating to rawhide (part deux)

2011-06-21T20:57:00.000-06:00

Continuing from yesterday's travails of having a desktop running rawhide.

Let the system cool down for a couple of hours and try to boot again.
Download and run the Lenovo diagnostics for the system. Everything passes except for the battery and printer port (turned off in BIOS). Both were known issues. Fans and memory say they are ok.
Boot into rescue mode. The rpm database seems rather hosed that even doing the standard chicken foot fixes of rm /var/lib/rpm/__*; rpm --rebuilddb does not fix. Decide that trying to recover the database at that point was not worth it.
Nuke from orbit (its the only way to be sure.) Make tar file backups of /home (but forget to backup /etc/ssh and other files.) and then reinstall
Decide that installing Fedora 15 i686 makes more sense than x86_64. The box only has 2 gigabytes of ram so not gaining much for 64 bit.
Do a custom install of the system and then afterwords install various fonts, eclipse, javascript, and emacs packages I want. Do not install everygame this time, just the few I know will get played.
Put the system into runlevel 3. This will get past any yum update issues to rawhide that kill X etc (ok more chickenfoot voodoo, but been burned too many times. Plus being in run level 3 seems to make the system a lot cooler which I figure might have been problem also.
Do a yum --disablerepo="*" --enablerepo="rawhide" --skip-broken update. After 3 minutes of dep-checking, there are 1651 packages out of 3536 installed packages to update.
After about 2 hours of downloads and updating, box finishes updates. Commands work and its time to see what breaks.
Found first breakage: yum. The first time I ran it I got a traceback.. by doing a yum clean all this removed that issue Doing a yum update again though just gave me a long list of packages that supposedly needed to be updated but conflicted with the packages that I just had updated.
Time to reboot and see if I have something workable. systemd and plymouthd seemed to spend a long time trying to shut the box down. (I could see this via a shell I had on the box via ssh.. but after 4 minutes it finally killed the sshd daemon.)
Go for a walk, come back and reboot the system the old fashioned way. System reboots into plymouth and stops halfway through the building the icon. Oook gets out hammer.. and boots system into rescue mode again.
Remove quiet rhgb from grub.conf. Turn off hiddenmenu so I can type in options if needed. Make the timeout longer than 0 seconds.
Boot my first 3.0.0 kernel.. and watch the bootup output like God intended us to. See a long pause due to the fact that I ran rescue mode on the system and a restorecon is needed. See a string of errors from the bind mounted directories. Watch a looooong relabel happen. Go for another walk.
Found what the freeze was. A watchdog reset on the kernel which crashes it at "Starting Configure read-only root support". What part of the oops I can get onto the screen has to do with modprobe.
Ok lets see if a single gets past this. If it does then we can work around with an update afterwords... nope. This is before single comes into play.
Now its time to try the pre 3.0-rc3 kernel. The box does boot up but gdm dies for some reason leaving just the login background of the doves and the mechanical bird. Logging into a console gives me the ability to set the system into init 3. Oh boy we can go old school with startx.
Next bug.. startx doesn't. Ooooh gnome doesn't like things. Looking at the log file, I see a lot of javascript exceptions "FIXME: Only supporting fixed size ARRAYs".

yum update still doesn't work but in new weird ways:

Error: Package: ghc-tar-0.3.1.0-11.fc16.i686 (rawhide)
           Requires: libHSold-locale-1.0.0.2-ghc7.0.2.so
           Removing: ghc-old-locale-1.0.0.2-16.3.fc15.i686 (@updates/15)
               libHSold-locale-1.0.0.2-ghc7.0.2.so
           Updated By: ghc-old-locale-1.0.0.2-26.fc16.i686 (rawhide)
               Not found

but it is there.. so I am confused. A --skip-broken doesn't fix the issue either.

Ok lets go ask Seth Vidal. And yes.. somehow asking the expert makes it work when he asks me to repeat the steps I have done before. We have a system with console and if I pull back into the hinterland of knowledge before gdm and such.. there was .xinitrc. Set that to
```
exec startxfce4
```
and I have a working X session after a startx.
Change the run level so when it reboots to runlevel3.target and time for bed. Wait a reboot sits around trying to stop syslogd.
```
Unit systemd-kmsg-syslogd.service entered failed state.
systemd-kmsg-syslogd.service: main process exited, code=exited, status=218
```
Over and over again... looks like the reboot is killing syslogd, and systemd thinks it should still be up so it starts it up only to kill it again.. or something like that.. it is the reason for a reboot needing a power-off versus working.

Well after a lot of steps.. I have a system that boots. I relearned a lot of tech support skills and various things like rhgb is bad for testing systems when they dont work :). Now to work with Lennart on why syslogd is whacked and with others on why kernel-3.0rc3 kills my box.

Updating to rawhide is harder than I thought.

2011-06-20T16:46:00.000-06:00

So with my work done with the Fedora Board, I have decided to spend more time on things I can fix (technical things) versus those I can not (human interactions). One of those things, was to use more of the Rawhide release because if I can earn LWN.net weekly quotes of the week, I should endure the pain that Jonathan Corbet goes through every day. Hopefully it will also get F16 to be better.

Ok steps to do this:

Install a laptop with Fedora 15.
This was pretty easy as I am just using the laptop I built for SELF that just has a bunch of development things and a lot of games for the kid (ok me) to play when bored.
Update to rawhide.
Not as easy as I thought. I figured, hey lets just do a

yum --enablerepo=rawhide update

Which gave me after 2 minutes a long list of broken dependencies and such. Hey no problem.. I ran into this with the Fedora 15 betas.. use --skip-broken.

yum --enablerepo=rawhide --skip-broken update

This went along a lot further, but died due to packages with the same name installed multiple times. Ok let us get around that.

package-cleanup --cleandupes

Tada.. we can now get to our next error: "Protected multilib versions". For some reason various packages are protected from being updated even when the update is showing x86_64 to x86_64. Ok.. maybe this is an error fixed in yum.

yum --enablerepo=rawhide --skip-broken update y*

Oh lookie.. I have updated yum.. that was easy. Too easy.. I forgot to update python also. Running yum now gave me a huge traceback:

--> Processing Dependency: libstartup-notification-1.so.0()(64 bit) for gnome-desktop3-... Traceback (most recent call last): ... pkgtup = (nevra_dict['name'], nevra_dict['arch'], TypeError: tuple indices must be integers, not str

Ok maybe an updated python will fix this. Turns out that yum update python worked.. but it didn't fix the issue.. ok time to see if I can work around it in parts. Caveman Oook says to do a

yum --enablerepo=rawhide --skip-broken update [xyz]*

and back away down the alphabet over time. Why? Because it is a magic chicken foot that used to work in the days before yum when rpm -Uvh *rpm was used.
Watch laptop catch on fire.
Well not exactly but the /proc/acpi/ibm/thermal showed the temps over 100C which is quite hot. The system no longer was responsive and trying to log in as root would not work with messages about audit backlog limit exceeded. Turning off the system was about the only hope and turning it back on resulted in a blinking cursor in the left hand corner.

An interesting experiment.. a bit worse than my "Doing and Everything Install" but interesting. Will see if the box will come back after an hour cooling period.

Things I learned at SELF this year.

2011-06-16T11:45:00.000-06:00

I would like to thank the people at SouthEast LinuxFest for allowing me to speak about "How to Train Your Users". It was a last minute addition to replace my talk on "How to Fork Fedora for Fun and Profit" since I ran out of Fun and Profit in getting that ready. I would also like to thank the people who sat through my presentation. It was the first one I have given in years and really need to work on it. I do apologize for not bringing a true User Attention Reset Tool, but after being told by several people that many staff were packing ... bringing a knife to a gun fight was ill-advised :).

I had intended to spend Friday at the talk, but spent the day working on the last parts of my paper and getting Fedora 15's Libre Office working in presentation mode. The Friday night dinner was fun to swap .com war stories with people.. learning the sins that Spot had to pay for by working Red Hat Technical Support was quite interesting. Saturday was a lot of fun as my dad and I spent the entire day there going to various talks and seeing how much swag he could fit in a tiny bag.

Once I got to my talk.. I learned the first lesson of presentation: USE the equiptment they set up versus your own. All my work with Libre Office failed and people got a tiny little slide on the screen. However my going over proper methods of tasers and quicklime with users seemed to cover that. On Sunday, we came again but most of the places were shut down for Sunday services and I couldn't find the drupal class I wanted to sit on.. so we went to Kings Mountain which was a nice hike in 95 degree heat. Monday was supposed to be a trip to Pisgah mountain but I ended up doing tech support and the next thing I knew it was Wednesday on a plane.

Other things I learned:

Navy people will swap stories on the drop of a dime. I would like to thank Sparks and various other Navy guys on keeping my dad entertained for the weekend. He had a great time and will be going next year. I also want to thank the Marine for laughing along nicely when father told "Ship-going bellhop" stories.
3-d printers are really cool. The maker lab from Greensboro or Winston-Salem made multiple penguins which made for my wife to want to build her own printer, and my kid to want to make a board game from the figurines.
Sudo make coffee makes good coffee, but it takes a special grind to make it work in a peculator. I learned that you can make a fair imitation of Turkish coffee though.
GNOME 3 has one major issue that needs to be worked out. It makes a video card very hot which in a laptop means I ended up with some interesting lap red marks. [Pictures redacted for the sake of sanity.] I ended up switching to XFCE which cooled the laptop down quite a bit.
The Ubuntu Women's table could have been better placed, but I learned how to spin wool and read a presentation on a computer screen I enjoyed.
I got a lot of DVD's and my dad is installing them on his laptop this week to play with. He is learning Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuSE and PC-BSD. That should keep him out of Mom's hair for a week or so.

Anyway, it was a good week and I learned some new things I hope to use in the next year. I also hope to improve my talk and see how it goes down at other talks. Thank you all for feeding and putting up with me.

Say goodnight, gracie.
Goodnight gracie.

WARNING: Fedora Project Contributor Agreement deadline is June 18th.

2011-06-02T14:48:00.000-06:00

One of the items that every Fedora contributor has signed is some version of the Fedora Individual Contributor License Agreement. There were various long discussions about it over the years, and about 1.5 years ago a process was put together to get feedback and improve the language. In May of this year, the process of getting people to sign the new agreement was put in place. On June 18th the process will end, and those people

From an email sent to many people who have not signed the contributor agreement yet:

Dear Fedora Contributor,

Recently, we announced that Fedora is in the process of retiring our old
"Individual Contributor License Agreement" (also known as the ICLA or
CLA) and replacing it with the new Fedora Project Contributor Agreement
(FPCA).

All Fedora contributors with accounts in the Fedora Account System
(https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts) who have agreed to the old
CLA *MUST* agree to the new FPCA by June 17, 2011 to continue
contributing to Fedora.

At this point in time, you have not yet agreed to the FPCA. If you do
not agree to the FPCA soon, you will be removed from "cla_done" and lose
access to any groups that depend upon "cla_done", including "packager",
"ambassador", Fedora People, and some Fedora Hosted projects.

To avoid this, just login to the Fedora Account system and agree to the
FPCA. Here is how you do it:

1) Login to the Fedora Account System:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts
2) Once logged in, click on the "My Account" link in the blue box on the
left side of the window.
3) On the page that loads, you will see a section labeled "Account
Details". Look for the line that says "Contributor Agreement". On that
line, you should see a new section that says:

"New CLA Not Signed - We need contributors to sign the new Contributor
Agreement(Complete it now!)"

Click on "Complete it now!" and follow the prompts.

*****

More information about the FPCA, including the final FPCA text, can be
found here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Fedora_Project_Contributor_Agreement

If you have any additional questions about the FPCA or the re-signing
process, please feel free to email me directly at legal@fedoraproject.org.

Thanks,

Tom Callaway, Fedora Legal

To sign the agreement go to Fedora Accounts. Go here for the complete text.

What happens if you don't sign the agreement?

You will lose fedorapeople access
You will lose your foo@fedoraproject.org email address
You will lose access to most of the fedora groups you are in.

If somehow you do miss the deadline, you can log in afterwords and accept, however you will need to work on getting re-sponsored in any groups you were previously in.

Doing an Everything Install

2011-05-31T20:55:00.000-06:00

A long time ago, far far away there was an Operating System named Red Hat Linux. In that Operating System there was an installer which had an option called "( ) Install Everything". Now "( ) Install Everything" was a wonderful tool for QA a release because one could get everything onto one system and find all the problems people could run into (oooh need more than 8GB to install stuff, oh look package XYZ conflicts with ABC, oh hey this package if installed will reboot your system.). It was also a bane of developers because people by their nature will install everything and then open bugs because one really only wanted Reboot-My-Box-Daily-0.1.rpm installed if you knew what you were doing. And because so many people would install everything and complain about things like "My goodness Red Hat Linux is bloated! It takes over 8 GB to install now.", it was decided to remove it.

The feature would get removed in betas, people would complain and it would show up again.. until finally late Red Hat Linux or early Fedora release it was removed for good. This fixed various issues, but for those of us who like to have broken systems (I am looking at you Jonathan Corbet of LWN.net), it made things harder to find. This last weekend I decided to install a box and see various things:

Can someone do an everything install using the installer or yum ?
How much diskspace does an "everything install" take these days ?
What problems will I run into trying to do this?
Will a system work after I have done this install?

Well here are the answers to the questions with tl;dr; answers in bold.

Can someone do an everything install? No, no they can't.
Fedora 15 is HUGE. After a lot of conflict fixing, problematic packages and such, I ended up with 18586 packages taking up 76GB.

While one can click on every option in anaconda or try a "yum install *" on the command line after the install, they will run into multiple problems. First there are outright conflicts like generic-release conflicts with fedora-release (there are 45 conflicts I found of this type). Then there are multilib issues yum will point out where xyz-1.0.i686 won't install with xyz-1.0.x86_64. And finally we have file system level conflicts that have somehow creeped into the repository (33 packages came up as conflicting here). Eventually I ended up with a long "yum install --exclude="*.i686" --exclude.. --skip-broken '*'" that worked (sort of).
How much diskspace does an everything install take? Over 76 GB.
While installing packages I kept running out of space early on. I forgot that I had installed yum plugins which stored every download in a _local database.. this uhm made my disk space usage larger than expected. But cleaning that out got me going again. I still needed more disk space for the remaining ~5600 packages I could not install.
What problems will I run into trying to do this? Lots. Between dealing with php-pear packages hanging for no known reason, packages that would fire off cron jobs every hour, and various other issues, this was a long labour of getting the system into a very broken state.
Will a system work after I have done this install? No. First off installing upstart and systemd on the same system makes a broken box PERIOD. It took several reboots into rescue mode and removing all packages labeled upstart to get the system working. After that there is dealing with all OLPC/Sugar. These packages are meant to work on a dedicated system and I had to remove various ones to get the box to "boot". Following that you will need to deal with interactions with bootchart and grub+grub2. This took even more reboots into single usermode. After 2 days of futzing I am at the point where I can get into runlevel 3... sort of.

All in all, it has been an interesting experience. It should be clear to people lamenting the loss of "( ) Install Everything" that adding it would currently not work in any shape or form. If it were ever to return, a lot of stuff would need to be removed or repackaged in order for it to "work". It also showed that the vastness of Fedora currently has many many types of conflicts that aren't taken into account for just by "yum".

GNOME3 versus GNOME2 debates

2011-05-09T12:28:00.000-06:00

tl;dr version: These "wars" are no different from many other UI debates in the past.

In the past couple of months, I like many others have been caught up in the GNOME3/Unity changes and the various debates of "are they good, are they evil." I have continually had this case of deja-vu as if the words being said were ones I had heard before but maybe slightly different. While having deja-vu a couple of times is normal, having it constantly means I am probably "Forgetting History" and "Doomed to Relive It" (or some variant of the quote.)

And then this morning it hit me while reading some long equally pro/con thread at work. The conversations aren't any different from the "use a TTY" vs "use a GUI" from the late 1980's and early 1990's. Then there was a constant debate of which one was best ("the TTY of because it required mental aptitude and knowledge of systems" or "the GUI because it allowed one to easily switch between tasks and use a more intuitive layout"). I have no idea how many megabytes of storage were used up in USENet posts in those days... but in general the gist was GUI's were the purview of Tech Writers and AOLers and TUI's were where the real engineers lived. I got caught up in it a bit (ok there are probably several megabytes of me parroting other posts about why TUI's were better.) but was brought out of it once when one of my university mentors (John Shipman) reminded me that this discussion was no different from ones in the past.

In the olden days the hard-wire people had gone through the same culture shock when software was introduced. Sure software allowed you to do different things, but really do you really know how a computer works? And how much time are you spending because a compiler is making mistakes. Later the punch card people would say similar things to those people using TTY's. Sure you can type faster, but you really have to code better on punch cards since it might be days before you can run a compile again. And all the radiation you are getting from the monitors... it will kill you. The TTY'ers were replaced by the various GUI's (*and the flame wars between GUIs*). But in general what happened was a small population of people who have been there, find themselves surrounded by a new population who do not speak the same language, don't seem to know things and whatever they are doing freaks out the old population.

The wars getter tougher and uglier as each of the supplanted populations get bigger with more and more "rules" put in place to try and keep the old generation in power and the new generation "assimilated" to what the old generation thinks is best. [Hey its just like Political Studies but with computers!] Each time it eventually fails and the new generation becomes the new paradigm.

And in each case the important thing is to remember that these are all tools. Use the tools that you know to the best of your ability, and always learn new tools because its the only way to have fun in life.

[Thanks John and sorry it took 20+ years to learn it.]

Fedora Advisory Board Nominations soon

2011-05-05T19:41:00.000-06:00

With Fedora 15 coming out soon, new Fedora Advisory Board elections are to be held soon. There will also be 2 appointed advisory seats coming up, one of them being mine.

I will say that working on the board has been different and has helped stretch and grow my people skills somewhat. I have tried my best to listen to the various Fedora groups and bring up their points of view at meetings. I know I have not always done so and hope that the next appointed person will be able to do a better job.

Being on the board is not about changing fedora. People running for election in order to change "How Fedora is done" are often up for disappointment. For the most part the Board's job is to listen when people disagree and see if we can get people to start listening and not shout past each other. It doesn't always work but that is how things go.

Dungeons and Dragons needs to reset their currencies :)

2011-05-02T16:36:00.000-06:00

So in Dungeons and Dragons there is a standard set of prices for various metal coins (copper, silver, gold, platinum in the latest, electrum was in various prior editions). Also depending on the edition the rate of 1 troy oz coins (a troy ounce being different from an English ounce by being 1.333333333x heavier, or for those of us who like the metric system, 1 english ounce equals 28.3503 grams and 1 troy ounce seems to equal 28.8004 grams.) In the 3rd edition of Dungeons and Dragons, the ratio of coins is 1 platinum coin = 10 gold coin = 100 silver coins = 1000 copper coins with all the coins being the same weight (to help figure out other things).

Anyway, in looking at doing a math game I wanted to check up what prices would be these days and what the ratios would be.

Metal	Price/troy oz (2011-05-02)
Platinum	1875.70
Gold	1557.10
Silver	44.01
Copper	0.12
Tin	1.21
Nickel	1.01

This leads to more made up ratios of "1 platinum = 1.2 gold = 42.6 silver = 15,630 copper pieces (and about 1500 tin pieces and 1875 nickel pieces)." Now somewhere in here I have somehow lost what I was originally working on which was a math game of dealing with different commodity prices at different places being paid in different coins... now hopefully I will be able to get that dealt with soon.

FudCON NA: Blacksburg, Va

2011-05-02T14:53:00.001-06:00

So it looks like the North America FUDcon will be in Blacksburg Virginia, the site of Virginia Tech. It is close to Roanoke and 2 hours away from the place that I am seriously jonesing for, Mitchie Tavern. As a child, my grandfather would drive down from Pennsylvania and sometimes stop by Monticello. But the real reason for going was to have lunch at Mitchie Tavern... mmmmmmmm. I will definitely have to see about driving up one day of FUDcon to eat there.. even if it is 2.5 hours away.

Blacksburg FUDcon info

Long time no blog

2011-04-28T13:47:00.000-06:00

Well it has been over a month from my last blog which in internet years usually means I have died and will never blog again. Thankfully I have just been off dealing with lots of little Real Life(TM) issues and just not wanting to blog because I am just really disappointed in Fedora people lately.

[Large section deleted of whinging about Fedora email threads which are the bane of my existence. Why because it wasn't doing anything but being more poorly written soap opera drama. ]

The one lesson I have had to teach myself over and over again is that spending all my time being unhappy about what other people are doing and saying does not make one thing better. Only by DOING does anything change (and to be blunt, emails are not doing anything. Heck even this blog post is not doing anything beyond laying out why I am spending the next year working on things I want to work on versus getting caught up in empty email threads.)

Four things you can do if you don't want to help test a Fedora alpha

2011-03-08T19:34:00.001-07:00

Figure out what you can positively help out with and just concentrate on that. I have found that in the past this is what I needed to do when I was sure that something was going the wrong way.
Sit this release out. If testing isn't what you want to do, then stick with Fedora 14 til 16 comes around and you can help out there. Sometimes taking a vacation from things can make you really aware of what you want to work on and what you don't.
Choose or make a different desktop. If Gnome 3 is not what you want to do, there are multiple other desktops to try and work with...
Choose or make a different distro. There are multiple ones that may fit your personality and wants better.

Any of these are positive things you can do to make your life and others better.

[Edited to make the title clearer]

Resetting expectations: Fedora Infrastructure Changes

2011-02-17T20:56:00.000-07:00

Over many years, I have found that Infrastructure is very much like a rose garden. Roses grow fairly well by themselves, but soon can entangle up with each other into quite a knotted patch (judging from the garden I have left to its own devices for the last 4 years). I have very pretty flowers all spring, summer and fall long, but every now and then you have to do a large amount of pruning or it all falls apart as things age out. The amazing thing with roses is you can prune them down to the bare essentials and in a season they will be producing flowers again.

To continue the analogy, my current job is to be the temporary head gardener while we look for someone who can do the job as well as the last fellow. The garden has grown from having good volunteer gardeners come in and put in various plants. Now sometimes the gardener then has to go somewhere else, and sometimes the plant gets away from them. In either case, we have a bunch of plants that look pretty but are taking too much time in how they are currently planted. And so its time to prune them so that they can either grow anew or something better can be planted in its place.

In order to prune stuff, I have looked at the following:

Do we currently have experts inside of the project working on the software to make it better.
Is there someone doing this better than we can do on our own using the same criteria we use (FLOSS software, open development, etc).
Is keeping it in-house pulling away from core Fedora services and tasks we would like to accomplish.
There is nothing wrong with paying others who do great stuff with FLOSS software especially when paying supports those projects.

This came up with a list of items that we have but aren't getting much love, require a lot of work (eg volunteer help has to be supplemented by full-time people), and could be better housed somewhere else:

translate.fedoraproject.org. Transifex software is what is used there, and has a very active upstream at transifex.net. Currently the version we are using is considered dead-software and the version we have slowly gotten onto our staging servers is soon to be dead soon. With many other projects already moving their documents to the upstream servers, transifex.net, this looks to be a good candidate to move out of our infrastructure.
blogs.fedoraproject.org. The blogging software we are using is Wordpress-MU which again has an active upstream that we are multiple versions behind (Ricky Z spends his time back-porting security fixes). The service also does not get that much use and the blogs there would be better off at WordPress.
talk.fedoraproject.org. The asterisk server gets about 8 phone calls a month. It is a very ancient version and it seems a continual effort to keep up with the upstream.
zarafa. While housing email and calendering for various sub-projects does have value... it also brings up all kinds of security and compliance issues (compared to dealing with email lists).
various mailing lists. There have been a lot of projects with a lot of mailing lists opened. But they haven't taken off and are just waiting for some sort of spam agent to sign up and use us to drop links. This one is easy for us to deal with. We can contact owners and close off lists that aren't in use anymore.
cleaning out old system administrators. We have had a lot of good people come into infrastructure and then that cruel mistress, Real Life, has at some point taken them away again. Removing people from system administration groups who have not logged in for 60 days is a way to make sure we lower security risks.

Now usually after a post like this occurs, we get a bunch of volunteers who will say "We can take this over." I am asking people not to do this, because frankly volunteering under pressure usually means leaving when the pressure is gone. We have gone this route several times before, and its not something I think is sustainable.

We will look for volunteers who can replant the services, document them, build out a staging and production service and train OTHER volunteers on them so that any replacement service has a chance of lasting.

Resetting expectations: Fedora Edited Planet Feed

2011-02-16T14:44:00.000-07:00

It would seem that somehow people are misunderstanding the intent of the edited planet.

It is not replacing the regular planet feed.
There is no requirement that a Fedora user HAS to be on the edited feed. I am not.
This is not a top-down mandated item but very much bottom up.

A contributor (averi) wanted to know why we didn't have a focused on Fedora feed like other organizations. We don't because no one has stepped up to do so. Averi volunteered to do this and did all the grunt work to set it up.

And in less than a week it has become some sort of conspiracy removing the voice of Fedorans and various other bull.. I am upset and angry and really just tired of it all.

Good night.

Thankyou tatica

2011-02-07T14:31:00.000-07:00

If all goes well, then I will have my first hackergotchi. It was taken by the very talented tatica. I am going through her blip tv blogs so I can learn gimp photo editing. Hopefully it will get my lego-video jump started.

Watch Darth McGrath become a true Sith (or an Eminem clone.. not sure which).

FUDcon NA 2011 ... Post thoughts

2011-01-31T20:05:00.000-07:00

So my part of FUDcon is over, and I want to thank our hosts at the Arizona State University and our co-ordinators Robyn Bergeron and Ryan Rix. At the end of the talks and meetings I ended up with a lot of lose ends.

There were several questions I was asked at my short term lightening talk about the Monday security item. I had to run to another item and did not find them afterwords to discuss better why the reporting method was used and what was told. I apologize and will try to find out who you were to talk later.
Somehow I not only left my coat at FUDcon but also the new long-sleeved Mr Hot Dog shirt I had bought from Brand X shirts 20 minutes before.
I get cranky a lot more than I should be around people after 3 days of no sleep.

FUDcon {Day -4 => Day 3 }

2011-01-30T19:29:00.000-07:00

Sunday: Work over what netapp infrastructure changes need to happen on Monday.

Monday: Help a user with an account issue. Clean up and find various items. Spend Monday night moving to new Netapp infrastructure. We have lots more fast storage.

Tuesday: Go through audit logs (selinux + auditd for the win). Centralized logging of items really helps.

Wednesday: Pack. Try to decide if I want to blog about detrimental blog posts. Decide that lack of sleep has made me rather hostile and peeved.

Thursday: Try to fly out but have to wait for snow bound plane to get things done. Get to Phoenix and find that servers knew I was coming. Spend afternoon and night fixing boxes.

Friday: Go to collocation. Prove that IBM Power computers HATE me. Long story short... Power system A has never worked. Power system B stops working. Power system A starts to work and I am so happy. Try to fix system B and system A stops working. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Saturday: Lots of cool talks. All of the ones that I wanted to attend keep getting done at the same time. But I have lots of fun. Spend evening trying to find vegetarian food for other people. FUDpub was fun but I am not really good with crowds anymore so spent evening working out items.

Sunday: Got to morning presentations and found that many of the items I wanted to do were all at the same time. Ended up doing a quick infrastructure meeting and a talk on Fedora Engineering next big things. Then spent a but load of time working on what blue sky governance issues we could deal with.. [this was started by Toshio and it was cool that a lot of things I wanted were similar. After we got 10 other people on it though we ended up with something else.. but ok.] Spent the evening reading/writing infrastructure issues and then playing some board games.

To Do Monday: Hope to meet with Cristoph Wickert to clarify communication problems I have had and clarify points. Got 1 infrastructure meeting, 1 board meeting, and 3 other meetings. My luck they will all be at the same time.

Thank you to Google and RackSpace for providing various events. It really helped get me working on 2-4 hours sleep.

Things I wish I had time to do:

Learn scribus
Learn gimp (tatica did a cool tutorial.. will have to watch the video)
Learn inkscape
Figure out how to fix EPEL.

American Generations

2011-01-24T18:24:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I wake up at 2 am, and can't get back to sleep because of some silly question my brain has posed. This week was "What is Generation X really versus the Baby Boomers... and should they really be X or should we be Y or U." I guess it came from all the press coverage that people born from 1946 til 1964 were Baby Boomers and after that were Generation X. Now the name "Generation X" seems to have been chosen out of the air but is it appropriate and what years would it cover.

Now first off, I think Generation X etc is silly because we should start counting back to when people came over the Bering Straights N thousands of years ago. But since this Generation thing is "American European based" I will focus on that.

Actually what I will do is say every generation lasts 18 years, and that baby boomers were generation W, then generation X, then Y. Backing up we get a list of the alphabet like this.

Generation:  A 1550 -> 1567
Generation:  B 1568 -> 1585
Generation:  C 1586 -> 1603
Generation:  D 1604 -> 1621
Generation:  E 1622 -> 1639
Generation:  F 1640 -> 1657
Generation:  G 1658 -> 1675
Generation:  H 1676 -> 1693
Generation:  I 1694 -> 1711
Generation:  J 1712 -> 1729
Generation:  K 1730 -> 1747
Generation:  L 1748 -> 1765
Generation:  M 1766 -> 1783
Generation:  N 1784 -> 1801
Generation:  O 1802 -> 1819
Generation:  P 1820 -> 1837
Generation:  Q 1838 -> 1855
Generation:  R 1856 -> 1873
Generation:  S 1874 -> 1891
Generation:  T 1892 -> 1909
Generation:  U 1910 -> 1927
Generation:  V 1928 -> 1945
Generation:  W 1946 -> 1963
Generation:  X 1964 -> 1981
Generation:  Y 1982 -> 1999
Generation:  Z 2000 -> 2017

This does work because the "first" generations of children being born in European colonies (that lasted) in North America are known to have been after 1560. Now the question is what to call the generation after 2017? AA?

Anyway.. I think I can get a good nights sleep finally.

FUDcon NA 2011... Gaming

2011-01-18T12:39:00.000-07:00

So today I was reminded that FUDcon was 10 days from now. WHAT 10 days?!?!!?!

Last year I ran a D&D event on the last night of the Con which went ok.. but I really wanted to do better this year. I have had all these ideas in my head about what to do, but it would seem putting them off for other things. [And spending 2 hours learning the Neverwinter Nights editor to map out the town doesn't really count because I just went and played NWN instead.] Ok so what to do, what to do...

Well first thing, what is the idea? Since it will be all levels of players I would like a prewritten module in the style of the ones that I played as a youth.

A4. In the Dungeons of the Slavelords
T1. Village of Hommlet.
U1. Sinister Secret of Saltmarth

And secondly, about the game systems.. there are several "open source" games but none that I am really familiar with enough to teach others with. Plus the fact as a game designer, I am always ending up fiddling with the bits here and there. Of the semi-open source games, D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder seems to be the best out there. [I doubt the OGL could pass the Debian legal test so I figure it is semi-open.] So the module will be written up using the D&D 3.5 SRD and some mayonnaise from Pathfinder.

Then I remembered.. hey wait... I need players and they might want to play something specific... so its time to ask. [It puts me off writing anything for another 24-48 hours :).]

New Year, No Radio [And a DNS troubleshooting included too]

2011-01-03T14:13:00.000-07:00

So I went on break at the end of the year, and when I come back few of my Internet radio stations are working or even exist it would seem.

Norway's NRK seems to have dropped their ogg streams for MP3 ones (this looks like it happened sometime late last month before I went on break). So most of my channels are now giving me the "Searching for MP3 plugin" which they won't find unless I get an updated fluendo software package.

But worst of all audio-ogg.ibiblio.org was "gone". Not even 404, it is

$ host audio-ogg.ibiblio.org
Host audio-ogg.ibiblio.org not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

This however turned out to be bad DNS. [Every couple of lookups showed a NXDOMAIN and I had filled the negative cache with requests :)]. So how to track it down.

[ssmoogen@ponyo ~]$ dig +trace audio-ogg.ibiblio.org
....
;; Received 441 bytes from 192.112.36.4#53(g.root-servers.net) in 74 ms

ibiblio.org.            172800  IN      NS      ns.unc.edu.
ibiblio.org.            172800  IN      NS      ns2.unc.edu.
;; Received 81 bytes from 199.19.54.1#53(b0.org.afilias-nst.org) in 95 ms

audio-ogg.ibiblio.org.  86400   IN      CNAME   sopwith.metalab.unc.edu.
sopwith.metalab.unc.edu. 600    IN      A       152.46.7.128
metalab.unc.edu.        600     IN      NS      ns.unc.edu.
metalab.unc.edu.        600     IN      NS      dfranklindns.its.unc.edu.
metalab.unc.edu.        600     IN      NS      ns1.int.ibiblio.org.
metalab.unc.edu.        600     IN      NS      dmanningdns.its.unc.edu.
metalab.unc.edu.        600     IN      NS      fasterpass.net.unc.edu.
metalab.unc.edu.        600     IN      NS      ns2.unc.edu.
;; Received 315 bytes from 152.2.21.1#53(ns.unc.edu) in 90 ms

I used to have a shell snippet that would take that "IN NS" section and query by each to show which ones weren't working.. but I lost it during a bad set of backups and never rewrote it. So I go by hand. We end up with 3 bad DNS servers responding with no sopwith.metalab.unc.edu or 50% of the time getting no WCPE.

metalab.unc.edu.        600     IN      NS      dfranklindns.its.unc.edu.
metalab.unc.edu.        600     IN      NS      ns1.int.ibiblio.org.
metalab.unc.edu.        600     IN      NS      dmanningdns.its.unc.edu.

Well off to let ibiblio people know but no idea about NRK. [I will miss Super.. I was beginning to learn some Norwegian I think.]

Cleaning out old email

2010-12-20T15:44:00.000-07:00

Well I ran out of email space at google... which means I had somehow collected 8GB or mail from lists, attachments and such. Looking at what I have kept over the last 8 years.. there is a lot of stuff I am wondering.. why am I keeping especially since most of it email kept on various mailman's and then replicate through many gmanes and such.

So it is time for the great email cleaning. If I somehow delete your email.. sorry. Happy end of the year clearance time everyone.

Things to remember

2010-12-01T19:16:00.000-07:00

1) People are not rational creatures. We like to believe we act rationally but we usually just use rationality to excuse us not thinking in the first place. The primary thing we use rationality is to say "I THOUGHT OF THAT MYSELF"

2) People are social herd creatures. We end up saving 'energy' by making decisions based on what other people are doing. When you see every other organization doing something your brain gets stressed about "WHY AREN'T YOU DOING IT TOO!"

3) Marketing and sales is all based on using 1 and 2 in conjunction to get someone to do what you want them.

You can have the best widget in the world, but if not enough of the Herd is using it.. then "no-one" will use it. Not sure what this means.. but it been swimming around in the brain all day so I am writing it down.

Peeved off board member

2010-11-10T17:46:00.000-07:00

Dear Fedora Community

Why is it that for 4 months, I kept asking "How are things going?" and people kept saying "Everythings fine.. heck things seem to be mellow?" And once the release is done every problem that could have been dealt with in the last 4 months comes out of the wood work with "Oh my god the sky is falling intensity."

To quote Matt Domsch as he said it better than me:

And this is my concern with the Fedora Community today. Rather than
assume good intentions and put the best construction on everything, it
seems that people actively _want_ to be offended (even when no offence
was intended), people _want_ to look for hidden agendas and
conspiracies (even when none such exist), people _want_ to find a
reason to be argumentative rather than constructive, and, IMHO, people
want to be armchair quarterbacks, suggesting how things should be
done, rather than actively being the agent that _does_ it.

I've never seen anyone, in any office or role, actively set out to
destroy the Community, or other individuals' involvement, or ramrod
some unspecified corporate agenda down the throats of contributors.
I've only seen people _who actually do stuff_ run for office with the
best of intentions, only to get tired of the above when _doing stuff_
seems to hack people off at every turn. Maybe that's why so many of
our long-standing contributors are finding other ways to spend their
time now.

I am seriously really tired of it. If you really have a problem do something beyond arm chair bossing:

Find a part of the project and make it better.
Find people who agree with you and make a remix that shows how things should be done.
Find or create a project that better fits your needs.

I say this as someone who has done all of the above at various points in my life. It is not as hard and scary as people make it out to be.

Helping other Linux people.

2010-10-29T16:12:00.000-06:00

While our various Linux sub-communities may snipe and bad mouth each other quite a bit, there is a lot that ties us together. For many of us it is helping others when they are in need.

Ubuntu community member Amber Graner's and family suffered a tragedy earlier this week when their house burnt down. Fellow Ubuntu community member Rikki Kite has set up a ChipIn site to allow them to afford clothing and food until any insurance comes through.

It would be nice if those who can help, do so.

"Let us be kind, one to another, for most of us are fighting a hard
battle." -- Ian MacLaren

F15 Elections

2010-10-27T18:35:00.000-06:00

F15 elections for FESCO, Fedora Advisory Board and F15 name are either in the voting stage, the nomination stage, or just some other stage.

For names, I voted for Blarney. I like its whimsical nature and the fact that Irish Pandas would be cool for a March 17th release :).

For nominations, I am still a board member (though only appointed) and will just wait til next May's elections.

Due to the fact that we only get 100->200 people out of a possible several thousand, I am still working on a mandatory voting policy. I am trying to figure out how to have "None of the above" as a candidate and make it enforceable :).

Fedora Spin Issues

2010-10-19T19:39:00.000-06:00

It would seem that the Fedora Spins SIG is in 'bad shape'. From information posted to the Fedora Advisory Board it is clear that it is running on too few people and too many demands.

I do not believe that having some people volunteer at this time would be beneficial if underlying issues are not first found out and fixed.

How are Spins helpful for Fedora project?
Does that help match the extra work required?
Are Spins more or less helpful than 'Remixes'
What kind of skills are required to maintain Spins?
how much time is required?

I realize some of the questions may be more provocative than they should be but I am tired.