Mandriva

Since about 1 year, I'm using asterisk in production for a Call Center with 54 SIP phones. All the computers ( workstations and servers ) are running Mandriva Linux. Except my NFS issues, the only issue I have in this call center is ... Asterisk :(

Indeed many times I experienced regressions with Asterisk. At first it was ChanSpy which was broken ... Now it's MixMonitor which is recording too fast ( bug #42566 ). In others words, since about 1 week, all our recordings are somewhat useless. This is really annoying to see so big regressions in a stable release for a software supposed to be used in critical missions. I do hope that this bug will be fixed shortly. However I will have to find a way, in the future, to be able to revert back to a previous version, or to test the main features before updating to a new version.

Now people will ask why am I using Cooker for my Asterisk server ? It's because I need to use the latest versions in order to have ChanSpy fixed, and presently there's no backport version of asterisk.

Omdat niemand anders in de groenlinkse blogosfeer het aan de orde gesteld heeft, doe ik het maar even: de bekentenis van Wijnand Duyvendak betreffende een inbraak bij het ministerie van EZ in 1985.

Ik ken de feiten en omstandigheden niet goed genoeg om daar direct een oordeel over klaar te hebben. Soms kan burgerlijke ongehoorzaamheid noodzakelijk zijn om een verandering ten goede te bewerkstelligen. Moet je je 23 jaar na dato hier nog over opwinden? Aan de andere kant is inbraak bij de overheid natuurlijk een serieus misdrijf.

Los daarvan doet hij prima werk als Kamerlid. Maar wat ik me echt afvraag, is of Duyvendak de diverse kandidatencommissies hierover heeft ingelicht voordat hij in de Kamer terechtkwam. Met de affaire Pormes in het achterhoofd zou je anders toch haast gaan denken dat dit Wijnands manier is om de politiek gedag te zeggen.

Update: de kandidatencommissie was dus op de hoogte. Zie ook de bijdragen van Paul, Arnoud en Selçuk. Blijft voor mij staan de vraag of het Congres (en daarmee de kiezer) niet op de hoogte had moeten zijn toen de kandidatenlijsten werden vastgesteld. Dan hadden de leden hun eigen afweging kunnen maken wat betreft het actieverleden van de betreffende kandidaat in plaats van daar achteraf mee geconfronteerd te worden.

Voor wie er geen genoeg van kan krijgen: Sargasso’s Duyvendak-poll en de discussie op het GroenLinks Forum.

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Dear TrueCrypt Developers

I hate you all. You’re a bunch of asshats.

Apparently, the good name of TrueCrypt is so incredibly valuable that you can’t possibly permit anyone to redistribute it with the tiniest of modifications under the same name.

The minor problem with that is that it completely fucks things up for distributions. We really can’t package just about anything without modifying it. For TrueCrypt that involves a small patch to fix your ridiculous system of having your users provide the source tarball for wxgtk and building an internal copy of it; the patch simply lets us build against the system wxgtk, as nature intended. It also involves, y’know, *putting it in a package* (which is a modification under your license), adding a menu entry and consolehelper stuff to let normal users run it - you know, all the simple stuff that people actually want.

So the TrueCrypt package we want to ship with Mandriva has been ‘modified’. And according to your ridiculous license, that means we can’t call it TrueCrypt. It can’t identify itself as TrueCrypt anywhere. It can’t use any of the original graphics you ship it with, and it has to include some specific bits of boilerplate text and specifically *exclude* some others.

This is bad enough. Yet you can’t even make it easy for us, can you?

If you’re going to require anyone who modifies your application in the tiniest of ways to rename it, you could at least MAKE IT EASY TO RENAME. Y’know, have the name be a variable defined once in one file; then we could simply change that and we’d be done. But no. The name is hardcoded in several dozen places and there are *several* variables in which it crops up. All of which needs to be changed. We can’t even just do s/truecrypt/somethingelse/ on the entire source tree because that would change it in some places where the license specifies it *shouldn’t* be changed. VERY FUCKING GOOD, THANK YOU.

If you’re going to require certain boilerplates be changed when the package is ‘modified’, at least make this easy. It could perfectly simply just be a build switch. But no, I have to go into random source files where the original boilerplate is hardcoded, and change it by hand. Awesome. Thank you once more.

And finally, if you’re going to require that no original graphics be used, you could at least MAKE THE FUCKING THING BUILD WITHOUT THE GRAPHICS FILES. It’s not like they’re vital to functionality; it could just display a blank grey space or whatever. No functionality would be lost. But no, if I just remove the files, the build breaks. So I have to manually replace every single bleeding graphic with a stupid GIMPed up replacement. Awesome.

So in summary your ridiculous license wasted eight hours of my life and results in a much uglier and more modified package than would be necessary if you didn’t have such insane terms in the first place. Way to shoot yourselves in the foot, guys.

Anyway, who the hell thought such a stupid license was necessary? Why are you so special? Imagine what the Linux world would be like if everyone decided to act like you? We’d be releasing Mandriva Pinux, featuring JDE 4.1, DWARF 2.24 and AjarOffice 3.0. Actually, we wouldn’t, because we’d have wasted all our time on stupid rebranding patches and wouldn’t be able to ship anything. Everyone else seems perfectly happy to release their code under a license which lets distributors *distribute* it (this is after all our job). Get over yourselves and join them. Or hadn’t you ever wondered why major distros don’t ship your software?

For anyone actually wanting to use TrueCrypt on Mandriva - the package is called realcrypt. 6.0a will be in /backports for 2008 Spring and 2008 soon, hopefully. It’s in Cooker now.

L'une des plus grande oeuvre de science-fiction qui ait existé sera surement adapté au cinéma : Fondation ( ou plutôt le Cycle de Fondation ).. C'est tout simplement génial. Il y a eut Dune ( Herbert ), Le seigneur des anneaux ( Tolkien ), et maintenant Fondation ( Asimov ). Wow, pour moi ces oeuvres constituent des références dans leur domaine ( S-F, Fantastique ).
Bon pour ma part, je vais me replonger dans la lecture du cycle des Robots et de Fondation :) Je vais aussi voir pour découvrir cantos D'Hypérion par Dan Simmons.

The traditional method of dealing with filesystem images is to mount them as loopback devices, and that is a simple, elegant and universal way to change its contents in any way you feel fit. It has the disadvantage, however, of requiring superuser privileges — which you may not have in every host you frequent, or you wisely don’t wish to grant to anyone using your machine to develop filesystem images. Christian Hohnstädt’s e2fsimage solves the problem allowing one to copy an entire subtree into a image file, but what if you want to extract, examine or manipulate arbitrary content?

(...)
Read the rest of Faking filesystem access (319 words)

I wrote over the last couple of days, a word press plugin to publish items to blogger.com. I’ve release this now, version 0.1, available at http://www.linuxsolutions.co.nz/gdatablogger/

It’s still 0.1 because

• No validation of inputs in admin menu
• No error handling
• No nice GUI to pick tags and categories

But, it now actually does everything I want it to do, so I’ve scratched my itch, and will only build these features if I get feedback from the community that they want them., or I find myself with spare time.

Just building the admin section for my word press plugin. It loads and stores values in the word press options tables.

Only thing left to do is to make it GPL, and make the tag/category selection nicer.

On the second attempt to get my HVR900 working with Mandriva 2008.1, I’ve had success, and can now watch Freeview HD*, terrestrial on my laptop.

I have had success after some help from Steven Ellis, who knows a lot about these things, and has done a lot of the hard work of getting Freeview HD, for Linux in NZ working. The steps for Mandriva 2008.1 is actually a lot easier than the instructions for Ubuntu, as it didn’t require anything very fancy to be done with the kernel, I was able to compile the HVR900 drivers (em28xx-new) against the Mandriva laptop kernel, after downloading kernel-source-2.6.24.5-2mnb-1-1mnb1 rpm and creating a symlink in /lib/modules/2.6.24.5-laptop-2mnb to the source.

The only tricky bit was extracting the correct firmware, which required me to install a different kernel source, purely to get a perl script out of it, as it was not in the default Mandriva kernel source, although will be in future versions by the looks of things.

1. Install latest tmb source: urpmi kernel-tmb-source-latest-2.6.24.7-4mdv2008.1. This includes /usr/src/2.6.24.7-tmb-4mdv/Documentation/video4linux/extract_xc3028.pl which is needed.
2. Extract the firmware, following instructions from: http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Xceive_XC3028/XC2028
   1. wget http://www.steventoth.net/linux/xc5000/HVR-12×0-14×0-17×0_1_25_25271_WHQL.zip
   2. unzip -j HVR-12×0-14×0-17×0_1_25_25271_WHQL.zip Driver85/hcw85bda.sys
   3. perl /usr/src/2.6.24.7-tmb-4mdv/Documentation/video4linux/extract_xc3028.pl
   4. cp xc3028-v27.fw /lib/firmware
3. Download kernel source: urpmi kernel-source-latest-2.6.24.5-2mnb1
4. Create a link: /lib/modules/2.6.24.5-laptop-2mnb/source -> /usr/src/linux-2.6.24.5-2mnb/
5. Download driver source: hg clone http://mcentral.de/hg/~mrec/em28xx-new (urpmi mercurial first)
6. Compile with ./build.sh in em28xx-new. Add yourself to the video group.
7. Download and compile mplayer svn: (http://www.mythtv.co.nz/mythtv/digital-tv/dtt-debugging/ step 1). I recommend installing it in /usr/local/bin, so you can continue to use your normal mplayer.
8. download NZ channels file - see step two from above link.
9. find good reception = watch TV.
10. add some nice icons to launch mplayer.

The mplayer command I use to play tv is:

TV one, paused for screenshot

TV one, with compiz desktop rotation

Startup Icons

1080i still does not work well, sometimes not opening at all before mplayer crashes, sometimes opening and playing for a few seconds before crashing or looking bad. I am hoping that if I stick with mplayer svn, soon this issue will be fixed.

Recording with mplayer is quite easy.. I use the following command.

I’ve noticed that even when I tell mplayer to use threads, I seem to only get load on 1 CPU at a time, it keeps jumping between cpu’s, but never do I get both CPU’s at 100%, only about 50%. I think maybe mplayer is not running on multiple threads, even with the -lavdopts fast:threads=2 option. I’ve tried -lavdopts fast:threads=4 and it seems a little better, but still does not really use both cpu’s 100%

http://www.mythtv.co.nz/mythtv/digital-tv/dtt-debugging/ - excellent information on getting this going

http://www.mythtv.co.nz/mythtv/digital-tv/ - good NZ specific information

http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hauppauge_WinTV-HVR-900 - HVR-900 information

Thanks to Steven Ellis for his excellent documentation.

I have been testing this on a dual core dell inspiron 9400 laptop with a GeForce Go 7900 GS, 256MB video card, nvidia driver version 169.12. The operating system is Mandriva 2008.1 64 bit, with Compiz fusion and KDE running.

The HVR900 I have shows up as:

– CUT –

Dmesg:

* 576i and 720p work, 1080i still has issues.

Strange things you do amidst a depressive crisis when you brain doesn’t act quite the way it should act under normal circumstances.

• You write code quickly and obsessively. (In a few days I started to write two small utilities, one to manipulate partitions in a hard disk image and other that allows userspace access to filesystem images without loop-mouting them. These can be useful for some in-house projects, so this forced recovery gave me the much sought-after time to implement them.)
  

(...)
Read the rest of Depressive smorgasboard (105 words)

Last friday, I saw an interesting program called NieuwsLLiNK on Dutch public television about life and work of news reporters in foreign countries. This edition was about Turkey. A Dutch news anchorman, Roelof Hemmen, visited the offices of the Turkish station ATV. It was recorded right at the time I was in Istanbul myself for the GUADEC conference so the Bosphorus shots look very familiar :). Altough the voice-over is in Dutch, I think it’s still interesting for non-Dutch viewers as well:

(sorry, Windows Media!)

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Related to the very funny Translate server error sign, Funda posted another link pointing some very bad translations.

The expensive sun multiples by a duty a police to buy a brigade could be a small poem but it actually tells where is the police office of Guiyang station.

This other website gives a more detailed explanation for this one: It's basically a character-by-character translation of 贵阳乘警支队: The expensive (贵) sun (阳) multiplies (乘) by a duty (??) a police (警) to pay (支) a brigade (队). What it should be: Guiyang (贵阳) Rail Police (乘警) Detachment (支队).

Even google would do better: Guiyang marshals detachment.

But at least there are the words "police" and "brigade" so someone looking for the police would find it :)

In my Living room I currently have 3 BESTÅ bookcases, and wanted to buy an additional one as they are now full.

I was very disappointed to see that IKEA France now only has the 40cm deep ones while mine are 20cm (perfect for pocket books, DVD and CD).

I could find it on their Australian website for 99 AUD which according to google is the same price I paid for mine 3 years ago, but Australia is a bit far from France, and Belgium or Switzerland don't have it. Japan and China also have it...

Should I move to Australia, China or Japan or buy a different one that would not fit ?

This past week’s Techmail was Install extra packages on the ASUS Eee PC which discusses adding extra Xandros repositories to get more packages on the Eee PC than what the standard install provides.

I have been creating a plugin for word press, that can publish certain posts to eblogger, using the gdata api. It now supports setting the published date, title, and content, formatted in HTML.

I’ve been quite pleased with it, and will be releasing it under GPL, fairly soon. I just need to build the page for changing it’s settings, which is quite simple, as it only needs the users username, password and blog id, plus a list of the categories and tags to publish.

A future feature, could loop over old posts and post them also, if they meet the criteria, but I don’t really feel it’s worth spending much time on yet.

Oh, and some of the times on older posts will be wrong, Had to setup a timezone offset, so that it got it right.

I am just starting to create a new word press plugin that publishes posts to eblogger using the gdata api.

It’s quite easy so far, and I have to say, word press is pretty nice to develop with..

And I’ve just implemented updates, as well as posting new posts.

Server consists of: rsync, cpio. - it should only have copies of the latest rpms on it. It does not need the other ones to create diffs, as that is done on the client. When server gets a request, it extracts the rpm, if not already extracted, into a temporary store. Then sets up an rsync server for the client. It also has a file with the md5sum’s of all the files, the pre and post scripts, and rpm info.

Client:

• compares rpm file database of md5sums against copy on server.
• copies files that are different into tempory spot
• rsyncs the modified files from the server to the client.
• gets the new pre and post scripts, updated md5sum list and info
• builds itself a new rpm based on the contents of the old one, plus the changed files.
• uninstalls the old rpm and installs the new one.

This should save significant bandwidth, be easy to implement, and use existing technology.

Yup, installed Mandriva 2008.1 cooker (rc nearly 2) on my eee pc, and it mostly works, although I do have a few emails to send to cooker about problems, like the default selection of packages on CD1 for i586.

Compiz works ok, yet to find out how to allow windows to be moved upwards, as they tend to be too big for the screen.

Well, just had a rather nasty experience.

After rebooting my computer, because I put a new fan in it, as it started up, I saw it fail to start /dev/md4 and /dev/md5 raid0 devices. This then resulted in not being able to start any volumes within my other volume group. Nasty!. So, of course /storage could not be mounted.

So, TO WORK…

After some careful investigation, /proc/mdstat showed that /dev/md4 only had once device, (hda8), and not hdb8. It showed md4 as inactive.
and dmesg shows:

md: array md4 already has disks!
md: array md5 already has disks!

Very strange. Becuase it show have shown sometime like this:

md4: setting max_sectors to 128, segment boundary to 32767
raid0: looking at hda8
raid0: comparing hda8(49150720) with hda8(49150720)
raid0: END
raid0: ==> UNIQUE
raid0: 1 zones
raid0: looking at hdb8
raid0: comparing hdb8(49150720) with hda8(49150720)
raid0: EQUAL
raid0: FINAL 1 zones
raid0: done.
raid0 : md_size is 98301440 blocks.
raid0 : conf->hash_spacing is 98301440 blocks.
raid0 : nb_zone is 1.
raid0 : Allocating 8 bytes for hash.

lvs showed that it could not find all the physical volumes to start the “other” volume group.

So, I stopped the device:
mdadm -S /dev/md4
Then reassembled it, using:
mdadm -A /dev/md4 /dev/hda8 /dev/hdb8

This then started fine, and showed it as clean.

So, an
lvchange -a /dev/other/storage
had me back in business.

Well, over the last 15 hours or so, I’ve broken stuff twice, inside of a VM thankfully.

I’ve been trying to do some testing to ensure that the pvmove command is going to work ok on my main system, so thought I would test this first within a vm. First test went just fine. Thought I’d test another pvmove as well, so did, and while I was doing that, decided to put a little disk load on the system by copying the /lib/modules/kernel files. All was going sweet.. So I decided to remove that files again, however, being inside a vm, it has the occasional issue with keyboard repeat, or something, anyway, long story short, ran rm -rf / mytestkernel modules. See the mistake! an extra space. It killed the system pretty quick.. oh, and pvmove fails if you trash /dev and /proc while it’s running… not really surprising!

So, lucky it was a VM.. unlucky, I didn’t have a snapshot. So, in the morning rebuilt a new vm, ready to try the test again.. Now, on my new vm, updated it, and created an LVM with a raid1 disk. Then added a raid0 device and rebooted. Ouch… did not reboot. I got an interesting message tho: “lvm locking type 1 failed”. After much playing, booted from a rescue cd and tried to mount up the filesystems.

Anyone booting from a rescue cd should know the drill: bring up the raid, using mdadm –assemble –scan if needed, modprobe dm-mod dm-mirror dm-zero, vgs, vgchange -a . mount /dev/system/root /mnt/root

chroot /mnt/root

now, an interesting problem I had, but found the solution to is: how to run mkinitrd from inside a chroot. Every time I’ve tried it, I would mount /prod, run it. it would use 100% cpu and go very slow. I found out why. you need to mount /sys within the chroot also. this can be done using mount -t sysfs /sys /sys

then mkinitrd will run. however, I am getting ahead of myself. The problem, I discovered was that the raid0 module was not in my initrd, so when I booted, my raid0 device would not come up, which resulted in lvm not having all it’s physical volumes, so it would not start, so it could not operate properly.

The solution I used before finding this out was to just remove my raid one device which did not have any extents allocated to it from the volume group.. When I did this, the system booted fine.

So, end story was to run mkinitrd on the system after starting a raid0 device. This works because mkinitrd looks at the modules loaded in the running kernel and included them if it finds they are needed.

oh. and have now made a snapshot, so can go break some more stuff!

Peazip — much better than winzip, and cross platform.. LGPL

Keepass -> also pretty damn good.