FOSDEM is over. Was fun. Nobody booed too much during my keynote. I am not putting up my slides, since they're useless without the actual talk. However, I've put up the text I prepared for the talk, which is approximately what I actually talked, in case anyone wants to read rather than watch the video whenever it gets released.

06 Feb 2012 12:03pm GMT

I Shall Wear Midnight is the 38th Discworld novel and the fourth following the story of Tiffany Aching, young witch of the Chalk.

Reading modern Pratchett, I'm sadly, acutely (and morbidly) aware that, as he succumbs to Alzheimer's disease, these are the likely to be some of the last Discworld novels written. With the last few, this observation has been entirely external to the novel. With Midnight, however, I got the impression that the awful disease has finally started to affect the prose itself.

I could just be jumping at shadows, but I got the impression that he repeated himself a tad more often than usual. With such a long series of books, an author has the difficult job of balancing new and established readers in the same text: as such, as an established reader, you get used to having some back-story with which you must be patient. This necessary background could have contributed to the impression of repetition, but I'm fairly sure doesn't explain all of it.

An enjoyable story, and possibly the one to bring the Aching arc to a conclusion. She stands on her own two feet, proving herself a a capable Witch. There weren't any earth-shattering new concepts or new characters or unexplored areas of the Disc for fans to map out with their minds; non-the-less it was a satisfying read.

06 Feb 2012 11:19am GMT

Yet another FOSDEM is behind us and I'd like to thank all people organizing it. It was a great event as usual.

This year there were some changes - the conference grew and there was an extra building. This is great, but on the other side, there were more tracks to follow and occasionally I wanted to be in four places at once, what is of course not manageable.

Combined with quite freezing weather (well it was still much warmer than it is now in Prague), moving from one side of campus to another was not that comfortable as in last years, but there is not much man can do with that.

And the biggest change for me - I did not manage beer event this year. We enjoyed great team dinner on Friday evening and while it ended, I was too lazy to move to crowded beer event and rather enjoyed bed in my hotel.

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06 Feb 2012 7:45am GMT

dpkg was uploaded to experimental a few times lately, let's sum it up quickly:

1. It started with my NMU on 2012-01-31, since I hadn't received any reasons not to upload (except "NACK", which doesn't count as such in my book).
2. It got reverted a few minutes after that.
3. Since this was getting nowhere, the Debian Technical Committee finally got involved, and voted in a few days only (wow, thanks!) for an "it's time to experiment" decision.
4. A new dpkg upload to experimental finally happened. One shall note the prominent "This is a WIP release, command line interfaces will change." notice.

I've updated my previous dpkg with multiarch page accordingly, only keeping the interesting bits.

Playing around with grep-aptavail -F Multi-Arch $i -sPackage (with $i being same or foreign), I found some bugs:

• #658792: libstdc++6-4.6-dbg: libstdc++.so.6.0.16-gdb.py is not an ELF file
• #658793: libisl-dbg: libisl.so.8.0.0-gdb.py is not an ELF file

Also, some wishlist bugs (keeping the prominent notice in mind):

• #658794: apt-file: Please implement multiarch support
• #658795: reportbug: Please report foreign architectures

Finally, one dpkg improvement and one possible dpkg bug:

• #658812: dpkg: Please add a hint in arch_remove about installed foreign packages
• #658814: dpkg: Inconsistent installation state with buggy multiarchified packages?

06 Feb 2012 4:40am GMT

A very useful little book from various developers and others: things they wish they'd known before starting out. A very sensible contribution from Debian's own Evan Prodromou amongst other names I knew and recognised and some interesting folk I'd not heard of.

http://open-advice.org/Open-Advice.pdf is the downloadable PDF although source and so on is also available. There are likely to be forums for comments and improvements.

[UPDATE - I've just had a go at the training exercises listed at openhatch.org which are linked from the site. Not a bad revision on patching/SVN/git and generally using the tools needed initially to contribute to FLOSS. A good job well done]

05 Feb 2012 9:31pm GMT

ZDNet has an insightful article by Robin Harris predicting the demise of RAID-6 due to the probability of read errors [1]. Basically as drives get larger the probability of hitting a read error during reconstruction increases and therefore you need to have more redundancy to deal with this. He suggests that as of 2009 drives were too big for a reasonable person to rely on correct reads from all remaining drives after one drive failed (in the case of RAID-5) and that in 2019 there will be a similar issue with RAID-6.

Of course most systems in the field aren't using even RAID-6. All the most economical hosting options involve just RAID-1 and RAID-5 is still fairly popular with small servers. With RAID-1 and RAID-5 you have a serious problem when (not if) a disk returns random or outdated data and says that it is correct, you have no way of knowing which of the disks in the set has good data and which has bad data. For RAID-5 it will be theoretically possible to reconstruct the data in some situations by determining which disk should have it's data discarded to give a result that passes higher level checks (EG fsck or application data consistency), but this is probably only viable in extreme cases (EG one disk returns only corrupt data for all reads).

For the common case of a RAID-1 array if one disk returns a few bad sectors then probably most people will just hope that it doesn't hit something important. The case of Linux software RAID-1 is of interest to me because that is used by many of my servers.

Robin has also written about some NetApp research into the incidence of read errors which indicates that 8.5% of "consumer" disks had such errors during the 32 month study period [2]. This is a concern as I run enough RAID-1 systems with "consumer" disks that it is very improbable that I'm not getting such errors. So the question is, how can I discover such errors and fix them?

In Debian the mdadm package does a monthly scan of all software RAID devices to try and find such inconsistencies, but it doesn't send an email to alert the sysadmin! I have filed Debian bug #658701 with a patch to make mdadm send email about this. But this really isn't going to help a lot as the email will be sent AFTER the kernel has synchronised the data with a 50% chance of overwriting the last copy of good data with the bad data! Also the kernel code doesn't seem to tell userspace which disk had the wrong data in a 3-disk mirror (and presumably a RAID-6 works in the same way) so even if the data can be corrected I won't know which disk is failing.

Another problem with RAID checking is the fact that it will inherently take a long time and in practice can take a lot longer than necessary. For example I run some systems with LVM on RAID-1 on which only a fraction of the VG capacity is used, in one case the kernel will check 2.7TB of RAID even when there's only 470G in use!

The BTRFS Filesystem

The btrfs Wiki is currently at btrfs.ipv5.de as the kernel.org wikis are apparently still read-only since the compromise [3]. BTRFS is noteworthy for doing checksums on data and metadata and for having internal support for RAID. So if two disks in a BTRFS RAID-1 disagree then the one with valid checksums will be taken as correct!

I've just done a quick test of this. I created a filesystem with the command "mkfs.btrfs -m raid1 -d raid1 /dev/vg0/raid?" and copied /dev/urandom to it until it was full. I then used dd to copy /dev/urandom to some parts of /dev/vg0/raidb while reading files from the mounted filesystem - that worked correctly although I was disappointed that it didn't report any errors, I had hoped that it would read half the data from each device and fix some errors on the fly. Then I ran the command "btrfs scrub start ." and it gave lots of verbose errors in the kernel message log telling me which device had errors and where the errors are. I was a little disappointed that the command "btrfs scrub status ." just gave me a count of the corrected errors and didn't mention which device had the errors.

It seems to me that BTRFS is going to be a much better option than Linux software RAID once it is stable enough to use in production. I am considering upgrading one of my less important servers to Debian/Unstable to test out BTRFS in this configuration.

BTRFS is rumored to have performance problems, I will test this but don't have time to do so right now. Anyway I'm not always particularly concerned about performance, I have some systems where reliability is important enough to justify a performance loss.

BTRFS and Xen

The system with the 2.7TB RAID-1 is a Xen server and LVM volumes on that RAID are used for the block devices of the Xen DomUs. It seems obvious that I could create a single BTRFS filesystem for such a machine that uses both disks in a RAID-1 configuration and then use files on the BTRFS filesystem for Xen block devices. But that would give a lot of overhead of having a filesystem within a filesystem. So I am considering using two LVM volume groups, one for each disk. Then for each DomU which does anything disk intensive I can export two LVs, one from each physical disk and then run BTRFS inside the DomU. The down-side of this is that each DomU will need to scrub the devices and monitor the kernel log for checksum errors. Among other things I will have to back-port the BTRFS tools to CentOS 4.

This will be more difficult to manage than just having an LVM VG running on a RAID-1 array and giving each DomU a couple of LVs for storage.

BTRFS and DRBD

The combination of BTRFS RAID-1 and DRBD is going to be a difficult one. The obvious way of doing it would be to run DRBD over loopback devices that use large files on a BTRFS filesystem. That gives the overhead of a filesystem in a filesystem as well as the DRBD overhead.

It would be nice if BTRFS supported more than two copies of mirrored data. Then instead of DRBD over RAID-1 I could have two servers that each have two devices exported via NBD and BTRFS could store the data on all four devices. With that configuration I could lose an entire server and get a read error without losing any data!

Comparing Risks

I don't want to use BTRFS in production now because of the risk of bugs. While it's unlikely to have really serious bugs it's theoretically possible that as bug could deny access to data until kernel code is fixed and it's also possible (although less likely) that a bug could result in data being overwritten such that it can never be recovered. But for the current configuration (Ext4 on Linux software RAID-1) it's almost certain that I will lose small amounts of data and it's most probable that I have silently lost data on many occasions without realising.

• [1] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-6-stops-working-in-2019/805
• [2] http://storagemojo.com/2008/02/18/latent-sector-errors-in-disk-drives/
• [3] http://btrfs.ipv5.de/

Related posts:

1. Some RAID Issues I just read an interesting paper titled An Analysis of...
2. ECC RAM is more useful than RAID A common myth in the computer industry seems to be...
3. Software vs Hardware RAID Should you use software or hardware RAID? Many people claim...

05 Feb 2012 2:46pm GMT

For the past few years the anti-spam system I run has been based on a simplified version of something I previously ran commercially.

Although the code is similar in intent there were both explicit feature removals, and simplifications made.

Last month I re-implimented domain-blacklisting - because a single company keeps ignoring requests to remove me.

So LinkedIn.com if you're reading this:

• I've never had an account on your servers.
• I find your junk mail annoying.
• I suspect I'll join your site/service when hell freezes over.

I've also implemented TLD-blacklisting which has been useful.

TLD-blacklisting in my world is not about blocking mail from foo@bar.ph (whether in the envelope sender, or the from: header), instead it is about matching the reverse DNS of the connecting client.

If I recieve a connection from 1.2.3.4 and the reverse DNS of that IP address matches, say, /\.sa$/i then I default to denying it.

My real list is longer, and handled via files:

steve@steve:~$ ls /srv/_global_/blacklisted/tld/ -C
ar  br  cn  eg  hr  in  kr  lv  mn  np  ph  ro  sg  tg  ua  ve  zw
aw  cc  cy  gm  hu  is  kz  ma  my  nu  pk  rs  sk  th  ug  vn
be  ch  cz  gr  id  it  lk  md  mz  nz  pl  ru  su  tr  uy  ws
bg  cl  ec  hk  il  ke  lt  mk  no  om  pt  sa  sy  tw  uz  za

On average I'm rejecting about 2500 messagse a day at SMTP-time, and 30 messages, or so, hit my SPAM folder after being filtered with CRM114 after being accepted for delivery. (They are largely from @hotmail and @yahoo, along with random compromised machines. The amount of times I see a single mail from a host with RDNS mysql.example.org is staggering.).

(Still looking forward to the development of Haraka, a node.js version of qpsmtpd.)

ObQuote: "Mr. Mystery Guest? Are you still there? " - Die Hard

05 Feb 2012 1:24pm GMT

Yesterday we did held phpMyAdmin team meeting and we discussed several things for project future. One of discussed things was to move our repositories to github for easier collaboration and management of private repositories.

After some discussions we've decided to go for it. As I write this blog, all repositories are being pushed there and once all developers will get their access rights there, we will move completely.

But even right now, you can fork us on github, the code is already there and will be updated obsessionally until we fully move there.

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05 Feb 2012 9:28am GMT

Since the Lenny version of Debian Edu / Skolelinux, a feature to save power have been included. It is as simple as it is practical: Shut down unused clients at night, and turn them on again in the morning. This is done using the shutdown-at-night Debian package.

To enable this feature on a client, the machine need to be added to the netgroup shutdown-at-night-hosts. For Debian Edu, this is done in LDAP, and once this is in place, the machine in question will check every hour from 16:00 until 06:00 to see if the machine is unused, and shut it down if it is. If the hardware in question is supported by the nvram-wakeup package, the BIOS is told to turn the machine back on around 07:00 +- 10 minutes. If this isn't working, one can configure wake-on-lan to try to turn on the client. The wake-on-lan option is only documented and not enabled by default in Debian Edu.

It is important to not turn all machines on at once, as this can blow a fuse if several computers are connected to the same fuse like the common setup for a classroom. The nvram-wakeup method only work for machines with a functioning hardware/BIOS clock. I've seen old machines where the BIOS battery were dead and the hardware clock were starting from 0 (or was it 1990?) every boot. If you have one of those, you have to turn on the computer manually.

The shutdown-at-night package is completely self contained, and can also be used outside the Debian Edu environment. For those without a central LDAP server with netgroups, one can instead touch the file /etc/shutdown-at-night/shutdown-at-night to enable it. Perhaps you too can use it to save some power?

05 Feb 2012 8:45am GMT

Rain

Friday was something of a rare day for February in Kansas. Starting at about 2AM, the wind picked up, blowing so hard that our windows rattled. That part isn't so rare. Then the cold rain started, dropping almost 2.5″ throughout the day.

As I worked, I had the blinds on the windows open, but they didn't let in very much light. Still, the wind had calmed down, so the intermittent rain outside was peaceful. Jacob went out to play for a little while, so every so often I saw a warmly-dressed and excited-looking 5-year-old run past my window. A little while after he came in, I told Jacob, "I saw you playing outside." His response: "Oh good! I got wet!" Which, despite the fact that it was about 50 degrees, seemed to excite him.

After the blustery start, the calm, slow, and peaceful rain was a pleasant thing to see throughout the day.

Funeral

My great aunt Alice Goerzen passed away last Sunday. So today, for the third time in a little over a year, I was at the funeral of a Goerzen relative and neighbor. Alice's husband, Milt, passed away in late 2010, and it was while I was at his funeral that Jacob got run over by a tractor. That memory certainly came back to me today.

But I think I should set the stage and explain what funerals are like in this small, rural Kansas community.

At the church, while people file in, family and close friends - generally defined as loosely as desired - meet in some other room before the funeral. Memories may be shared, or songs sung, or maybe just a brief meditation or prayer.

Then the man from the funeral home - there's only one in town - will step in. Ivan Miller owned the business for decades, and although he's now retired, his replacement seems pretty similar. Kindly, respectful, and pretty much unchanging. This group then files into the church sanctuary to sit up front, while the rest of the congregation is standing and music is played.

We typically sing some hymns, hear memories from the family, a message from a pastor, and then do downstairs for faspa: an light meal with coffee, zwieback, "funeral cheese", and some relishes and dessert. You can, by the way, go to the local grocery store and find a product labeled "funeral cheese". It's a sharp cheddar, sliced thick and cut into pie piece-shaped wedges.

After everyone has picked up their food, microphones are passed around, and anybody that wants to can share memories and stories. These are often hilarious, or touching, and can be more random than anyone could expect.

Today we heard a lot about how Aunt Alice loved her flowers and garden. We even saw a video of her giving a tour of her garden, with Milt's mower in the background occasionally accidentally causing a distraction (or maybe it wasn't so accidental; he'd never miss an opportunity to cause some mischief…)

I tend to think of attending funerals around here as a good time. Sadness is inevitable, but there are so many amazing stories that it is hard to leave feeling sad.

Excitement

This afternoon, Jacob found me in the office and as he often does, said, "Dad, I want to do something with you." Usually I ask him what he'd like to do, but his first instinct is usually to ask for watching train videos on Youtube. So sometimes I make other suggestions. Today we played "hide and seek with radios," in which the person that is counting is supposed to radio to the other person when they are done. Today was the first time that Jacob came up with the trick of talking into the radio while I was hiding so he could hear where I was. I was sort of proud of him, and he failed to completely hide his smile when I told him I had to turn off my radio or else he'd find me too fast.

Then later, we played with Jacob's computer, a Linux-based command-line-only machine. I have set up a few shell scripts and aliases for him. Since it doesn't play videos, he doesn't use it as much as he does mine, but it is really fun to watch how his interaction with it changes as he gets older.

He can now read amazingly well for a 5-year-old, and is starting to learn how to spell. He loves word games, writing, and typing. I thought I would install an ASCII art program for him. I told Jacob I had some ideas for a new game, and he was irresistibly intrigued. I offered him a choice between figlet and toilet. And, as is probably no surprise to anyone with a 5-year-old, he chose toilet based on its name, Jacob and Oliver both loved typing things and seeing them displayed bigger. I showed Jacob how I could make a freight train by typing ,<@-[]-(*)-@> (that's the comma-shaped snowplow, engine, boxcar [], tank car (*), and caboose @>). Then toilet drew them big, and though abstract, caused great excitement.

I hooked up one of the speech synthesizers in Debian to a simple shell script named "talk", which is a huge hit with the boys. They enjoy typing in nonsense and hearing the funny result, or in typing in real words and hearing how the computer says them right (or doesn't). All told, we had a good hour's worth of excitement up there.

05 Feb 2012 3:11am GMT

I received an email from a service I signed up for a long time ago (but don't use anymore). Seemingly it was a newsletter, but this was the main part of the text:

Quite recently it makes it hard to do our job, when we suffer
from massive aircraft noise resulting from Frankfurt airport.

As we know for many years IP telephony users are travelling
a lot. If at all possible we kindly ask you and your fellows
to please avoid Frankfurt hub, and accordingly Deutsche Lufthansa
these days.

Almost all parts of Frankfurt/Main region, our home, are affected
by lower-lying flight paths, and a new urban runway that has been
opened in October, 2011.

We want to apologize for the inconvenience and will inform you in
our news forum as soon as the announced features become generally
available. Feel free to contact us in the forum for any questions
you may have.

I say, that's optimism.

05 Feb 2012 1:01am GMT

In playing with some tools I've run into at $work, I've tried loading in some Ubuntu datasets in some fun and interesting ways.

Today, I've chosen to map all Ubuntu Members with a public lat/lon, sized by Karma.

The sizes relate to if the Karma is greater then:

1: 10

2: 50

3: 100

4: 500

5: 1000

6: 2000

7: 7000

8: 15000

9: 25000

10: 50000

So, without further adieu, here're some maps!

04 Feb 2012 5:04pm GMT

See you there!

04 Feb 2012 3:10pm GMT

Fresh from the oven, monthly report of what I've been working on as DPL during January 2012.

---

Dear Developers,
here is another monthly report of what happened in DPL-land, this time for January 2012. There's quite a bit to report about --- including an insane amount of legal-ish stuff --- so please bear with me. Or not.

Legal stuff

• Webmaster heroes have decided to tackle the long standing issues of copyright and licensing of the Debian website. I've accepted to help them out in reaching consensus with license choice and I'm happy to report that we've managed to pick a DFSG-free license (BSD-ish) for future contributions. Webmasters will soon contact contributors to re-license old contributions (or get rid of them), so hopefully will have a DFSG-free website RSN. Many thanks go to David Prévot for successfully tackling such a can of worms.

• I've sought a second legal advice on the constraints that trademarks (might) impose on the work-flow of a distro like Debian. Luckily, it is coherent with one I've sought in the past so I'm now in condition to wrap up the "trademark vs DFSG" thread on -project with the missing legal information. Hopefully, I'll find time to do that sometime next week.

• I've restarted discussions with the Debian France association so that they can become a Debian Trusted Organization (as per Constitution §9.3). Members of the board of the association seem to be interested and I'm positive it could happen fairly soon. The importance of this is that we could use a back-up association in Europe to hold Debian assets, to complement the services that FFIS are already offering us.

• Thanks to the contributions of Benjamin Mako Hill and SPI lawyers, I've now what I consider a final draft of a trademark policy for Debian trademarks. Before proposing it to you, I'm waiting for some feedback from another umbrella organization for Free Software projects, that is working on a trademark policy for all their associated projects. As many Free Software projects are seeking trademark protection these days, I see benefits in having uniform (and sane!) policies. I hope to be able to gather the feedback I still miss this week-end at FOSDEM, and let you know shortly after that. Once this is done, we'll also be able to (finally!) relicense all kinds of Debian logos under a DFSG-free license.

  On this front, I've also updated http://www.debian.org/trademark with the information needed to contact us about trademark usage; hopefully it'll reduce the burden of answering to such inquiries.

• With the help of Kenshi Muto, Fumitoshi Ukai, Ishikawa Mutsumi, Shuzo Hatta, and Yasuhiro Araki we've started the process to move the Debian trademark in Japan from individuals (who are present or past members of the Debian JP association) to SPI. That would help dealing with these matters, as well as ensure that important Debian assets are held by Debian Trusted Organizations.

• I remind you that we've an ongoing complaint with the current registrant of debian.eu, domain that we believe Debian should legitimately own. Lawyers at SPI has now formally contacted the current owner and hopefully we'll be able to solve the issue amicably in the next months.

• Some of the past legal advice I sought for PPA came handy in a discussion on the legal risks of running a service like mentors.debian.net, hopefully addressing part of the issues in turning that into mentors.debian.org

• Patent policy for the Debian archive is now ready as well and I also have a patch for the website ready to be merged. I'm just waiting for the final blessing from SPI (lawyers) to go ahead and publish it.

Most of the above wouldn't have been possible without the precious help of folks at SFLC working for SPI and Debian. Be sure to thank SFLC for what they're doing for us and many other Free Software projects.

Coordination

Nobody stepped up to coordinate the artwork collection for Wheezy I've mentioned last month, so I've tried to do a little bit of that myself. The -publicity team is now preparing the call for artwork and hopefully we'll send it out RSN. In case you want to help, there is still a lot of room for that; just show up on the debian-desktop mailing list.

Sprints

A Debian Med sprint has happened in January, and Andreas Tille has provided a nice and detailed report about it. Some more sprints are forthcoming this spring, how about yours?

Money

• We got from SPI a prepaid and rechargeable credit card that we can use for expenses or other kind of guarantees. Many thanks to Michael Schulteiss, SPI treasurer, for his help with that. Using it, we've redeemed 10k$ of credits offered to us by Amazon, that (thanks to ongoing work by Lucas Nussbaum) we're going to use to make our QA rebuilds independent from the underlying computing infrastructure.

• Thanks to the help of Luca Capello, we advanced quite a bit on forming the Debian Event Box kit that should make it easier to set up Debian booth at FOSS events. We bought the machine for it (for about ~755 CHF) and the box to contain it will soon be on its way as well. If you're at FOSDEM, tend to the Debian booth to check it out (and possibly help out with the technical setup).

• We've got quite a bit of donations during the December holidays. I've took the chance to thank donors, discuss what we do with donations and the status of publishing periodic Debian budgets.

• Pinged by Yves-Alexis Perez, I've now properly documented the fact that DDs are welcome to apply for hardware sponsoring, in case the hardware can be used to help/improve their Debian work. As suggested by Yves-Alexis, you can also advocate other DDs for hw sponsoring.

• Given hardware invariably age and that we can afford it, I've prodded DSA to prepare a general hardware replacement plan for our machines. Planning will go on this week-end and FOSDEM (thanks to Martin Zobel-Helas and Faidon Liambotis for their presence here) and I hope to have an approved machine replacement plan well before the end of the current DPL term (although I'm usually optimist...).

Important stuff going on

Other important stuff has been going on in various area of the project in January. I'd like to point your attention to a couple of things:

• People active on debian-mentors have proposed an improved work-flow to deal with sponsoring/mentoring requests, based on the usage of a new pseudo package "sponsorship-requests". Thanks to Ansgar Burchardt, Jakub Wilk, Arno Töll, and Gregor Herrmann for working on this.

• Raphael Hertzog has kickstarted work on DEP-2, as a way to rationalize the flow of package-related information that (co-)maintainers get. Discussion about the idea are ongoing on the debian-qa mailing list.

Miscellanea

• Work has further progressed in reaching out to companies with an interest in giving support for, and contributing to Debian. Thanks to Alexander Wirt the technical work is now done and some sort of governance policy has been decided. Further step for me is to announce it properly hoping to reach out to as many interested companies as possible. I hope to finalize that in the next month. (If you're working for such a company and you happen to read this, feel free to reach out to me already.)

• I've completed an old todo item setting up and documenting titanpad.debian.net, service that has been requested for collaborative work during various kinds of online events. Help is welcome to help administering the service (see doc).

• SPI has clarified the role of project representatives and, as a consequence of that, I (as DPL) no longer receive SPI board discussions addressed to board@spi. That is good not only for the sanity of my inbox, but also because it puts all projects affiliated to SPI at the same level of communication within SPI. Thanks to Robert Brockway for his work on this.

In the unlikely case you've read thus far, thanks for your attention! Happy Debian hacking.

---

PS as usual, the boring day-to-day activity log is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.*

04 Feb 2012 1:51pm GMT

I imagine my readers (except those from India) : "Kannada, WTF"?

No, this is not about D-I being translated into the variants of English and French spoken with a funny accent in a very big country located north of the United States of America, where they play ice hockey against mooses, wearing red policemen suits, with fur hats and drinking maple syrup.

Kannada is the official language of the state of Karnataka, in southern India. The state that has Bangalore, the IT-leading city in India as capital.

Kannada is spoken by about 45 million people, roughly the population of Spain.

And, since yesterday, thanks to a local group lead by Vikram Vincent, Debian Installer is fully translated to Kannada.

As of now, this is the 5th complete language of India along with Gujarati (46M speakers as first language), Hindi (180M, though some references mention 550M), Marathi (68M) and Tamil (62M).

Other supported languages of India are Telugu (99% translated, 70M), Bengali (95%, 71M plus 110M in Bangladesh), Punjabi (91%, 28M) and Malayalam (86%, 36M).

As you see, translators in India are really incredibly active and the free software community over there deserves some big light. We don't have many opportunities to meet up as traveling is not easy for contributors in India because, among other problems, of visa regulations for Indian citizens in many so-called western countries. So, really, I wanted to thank them again for this work.

04 Feb 2012 12:40pm GMT

I am happy to announce that finally we managed today to wrap up and publish the third beta version of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze. If you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with out of the box PXE configuration for running diskless machines and installing new machines, check it out. If you need a software solution for your school, check it out too. The full announcement is available on the project announcement list.

I am very happy to report these changes and improvements since beta2 (there are more, see announcement for full list):

• It is now possible to change the pre-configured IP subnet from 10.0.0.0/8 to something else by using the subnet-change tool after the installation.
• Too full partitions are now automatically extended on the Main Server, based on the rules specified in /etc/fsautoresizetab.
• The CUPS queues are now automatically flushed every night, and all disabled queues are restarted every hour. This should cut down on the amount of manual administration needed for printers.
• The set of initial users have been changed. Now a personal user for the local system administrator is created during installation instead of the previously created localadmin and super-admin users, and this user is granted administrative privileges using group membership. This reduces the number of passwords one need to keep up to date on the system.

The new main server seem to work so well that I am testing it as my private DNS/LDAP/Kerberos/PXE/LTSP server at home. I will use it look for issues we could fix to polish Debian Edu even further before the final Squeeze release is published.

Next weekend the project organise a developer gathering in Oslo. We will continue the work on the Squeeze version, and start initial planning for the Wheezy version. Perhaps I will see you there?

04 Feb 2012 12:25pm GMT