It's (yet again!) been a while since I blogged last, sorry...
After discussions with a few companies, I decided to accept an
interesting-looking offer from a Norwegian company called Pexip. My good friend Vince had been raving
for a while about how much he enjoyed his job there, which was a very
good sign! He works from his home near Cambridge, and they were very
happy to take me on in a similar way. There will be occasional trips
to the UK office near Reading, or to the Norway HQ in Oslo. But most
of the time I'll be working in my home office with all the home
comforts and occasionally even an office dog!
As is common in the UK for senior staff, I had to give 3 months
notice with my resignation. When I told my boss in Arm
way way back in February that I had decided to leave,
I planned for a couple of weeks of down-time in between jobs. Perfect
timing! The third week of May in Cambridge is the summer Beer
Festival, and my birthday is the week after. All was looking good!
As the "novel coronavirus" swept the world, countries closed down
and normal life all-but disappeared for many. I acknowledge I'm very
lucky here - I'm employed as a software engineer. I can effectively
work from home, and indeed I was already in the habit of doing that
anyway. Many people are not so fortunate. :-/ In this period, I've
heard of some people in the middle of job moves where their new
company have struggled and the new job has gone away. Thankfully,
Pexip have continued to grow during this time and were still very keen
to have me. I finally started this week!
So, what does Pexip do? The company develops and supplies a video
conferencing platform, mainly targeting large enterprise customers. We
have some really awesome technology, garnering great reviews from
customers all over the world. See the website for more information!
Where do I fit in? Pexip is a relatively small company with a very
flat setup in engineering, so that's a difficult question to answer!
I'll be starting working in the team developing and maintaining PexOS,
the small Linux-based platform on which other things depend. (No
prizes for guessing which distro it's based on!) But there's lots of
scope to get involved in all kinds of other areas as needs and
interests arise. I can't wait to get stuck in!
Although I'm no longer going to be working on Debian arm port
issues on work time, I'm still planning to help where I can. Let's see
how that works...
Preseeding is a very useful way of installing and pre-configuring a
Debian system in one go. You simply supply lots of the settings that
your new system will need up front, in a preseed
file. The installer will use those settings instead of asking
questions, and it will also pass on any extra settings via the debconf
database so that any further package setup will use them.
One complaint I've heard is that it can be difficult to work out
exactly the right data to use in a preseed file, as the format is not
the easiest to work with by hand. It's also difficult to find
exactly what settings can be changed in a
preseed.
So, I've written a script to parse all the debconf templates in
each release in the Debian archive and dump all the possible settings
in each. I've put the results up online at
my debian-preseed site in
case it's useful. The data will be updated daily as needed to make
sure it's current.
My first talk was to provide background on Free and Open Source
Software. I started with the history of software in the 1950s, working
forwards through the events that sparked the FLOSS movement. I spoke
about the philosophical similarities and differences between Free
Software and Open Source, and how FLOSS has grown to a state of
near-ubiquity. Several of the students are already involved in some
existing FLOSS projects, so I was clearly preaching to the choir! I
hope I managed to interest the rest of the audience too; I certainly
had a warm welcome! Slides
are here,
for reference.
Next up was my specialist subject: Debian! I gave a brief
introduction to Debian, covering what we do, how we do it, and why we
do it. I covered important things like our Social Contract and the
DFSG, and how Debian's thousands of contributors work together to
package many thousands of disparate software projects into the large,
stable Debian operating system that we all know and love. I was even
brave enough to give a brief demo, showing a simple package update for
a bug I'd prepared earlier! Slides
are here,
for reference.
In both talks, I was keen to point out the many good reasons for
contributors to get into the FLOSS world, using my own personal
experience as a guide. I've been working in this world for many years,
and it's been a very important part of my life and career.
After lunch and some fun conversation with Charles and some of his
students, I was given the grand tour of the department. Charles is
working with a large group of people doing research in agricultural
robotics and autonomous vehicles. I got to see lots of interesting
projects and meet lots of cool people from amongst his students and
colleagues. They're doing some amazing work on things that might soon
be key in making agriculture more efficient: autonomous systems to
identify and automatically remove weeds from wheat fields, to robotic
systems designed to help with growing, monitoring and harvesting soft
fruit like strawberries. Totally outside my field, but it was
fascinating stuff!
I had a fun day in Lincoln, talking to lots of people and hopefully
spreading enthusiasm for FLOSS and Debian in particular. Charles and I
chatted about how his students might get involved in our world. You
might get to meet some of them at upcoming Debian events!
Wow, we had a hot weekend in Cambridge. About 40 people turned up
to our place in Cambridge for this
year's OMGWTFBBQ. Last
year we were huddling under the gazebos for shelter from torrential
rain; this year we again had all the gazebos up, but this time to hide
from the sun instead. We saw temperatures well into the 30s, which is
silly for Cambridge at the end of August.
I think it's fair to say that everybody enjoyed themselves despite
the ludicrous heat levels. We had folks from all over the UK, and Lars
and Soile travelled all the way from Helsinki in Finland to help him
celebrate his birthday!
Lars made pancakes, Paul made bread, and people brought lots of
nice food and drink with them too.
Many thanks to a number of awesome friendly companies for again
sponsoring the important refreshments for the weekend. It's
hungry/thirsty work celebrating like this!
I was lucky enough to meet up with my extended Debian family again
this year. We went back to Brazil for the first time since 2004, this
time in Curitiba. And this time I didn't lose anybody's clothes!
:-)
I had a very busy time, as usual - lots of sessions to take part
in, and lots of conversations with people from all over. As part of
the Community Team (ex-AH Team), I had a lot of things to catch up on
too, and a sprint report to send. Despite all that, I even managed to
do some technical things too!
I ran sessions about UEFI Secure Boot, the Arm ports and the
Community Team. I was meant to be running a session for the web team
too, but the dreaded DebConf 'flu took me out for a day. It's
traditional - bring hundreds of people together from all over the
world, mix them up with too much alcohol and not enough sleep and many
people get ill... :-( Once I'm back from vacation, I'll be doing my
usual task of sending session summaries to the Debian mailing lists to
describe what happened in my sessions.
Of course, I could't get to all the sessions I wanted to - there's
just too many things going on in DebConf week, and sessions clash at
the best of times. So I have a load of videos on my laptop to watch
while I'm away. Heartfelt thanks to our always-awesome video team for
their efforts to make that possible. And I know that I had at least
one follower at home watching the live streams too!
This has taken a while in coming, for which I apologise. There's a
lot of work involved in rebuilding the whole Debian archive,
and many days spent analysing the results. You learn
quite a lot, too! :-)
I promised way back before DebConf 18 last August that I'd publish
the results of the rebuilds that I'd just started. Here they are,
after a few false starts. I've been rebuilding the archive
specifically to check if we would have any problems building
our 32-bit Arm ports (armel and armhf) using 64-bit arm64 hardware. I
might have found other issues too, but that was my goal.
for reference. See in particular
for automated analysis of the build logs that I've used as the basis
for the stats below.
As far as I can see we're basically fine to use arm64 hosts for
building armel and armhf, so long as those hosts
include hardware support for the 32-bit A32 instruction set. As
I've mentioned
before, that's not a given on all arm64 machines,
but there are sufficient machine types available that I think we
should be fine. There are a couple of things we need to do in terms of
setup - see Machine configuration
below.
I (naively) just attempted to rebuild all the source packages in
unstable main, at first using pbuilder to control the build process
and then later using sbuild instead. I didn't think to check on the
stated architectures listed for the source packages, which was a
mistake - I would do it differently if redoing this test. That will
have contributed quite a large number of failures in the stats below,
but I believe I have accounted for them in my analysis.
I built lots of packages, using a range of machines in a small build
farm at home:
using my local mirror for improved performance when fetching
build-deps etc. I started off with a fixed list of packages that were
in unstable when I started each rebuild, for the sake of
simplicity. That's one reason why I have two different numbers of
source packages attempted for each arch below. If packages failed due
to no longer being available, I simply re-queued using the latest
version in unstable at that point.
I then developed a script to scan the logs of failed builds to pick
up on patterns that matched with obvious causes. Once that was done, I
worked through all the failures to (a) verify those patterns, and (b)
identify any other failures. I've classified many of the failures to
make sense of the results. I've also scanned the Debian BTS for
existing bugs matching my failed builds (and linked to them), or filed
new bugs where I could not find matches.
Almost half of the failed builds were simply due to the lack of a
single desired build dependency
(nodejs:armel,
1289). There were a smattering of other notable causes:
Considering the number of package builds here, I think these
numbers are basically "lost in the noise". I have found so few issues
that we should just go ahead. The vast majority of the failures I
found were either already known in the BTS (260), unrelated to what I
was looking for, or both.
The armhf rebuild showed broadly the same percentage of failures,
if you take into account the nodejs difference - it exists in the
armhf archive, so many hundreds more packages could build using
it.
Again, these small numbers tell me that we're fine. I liked to 139
existing bugs in the BTS here.
Machine configuration
To be able to support 32-bit builds on arm64 hardware, there are a
few specific hardware support issues to consider.
Alignment
Our 32-bit Arm kernels are configured to fix up userspace alignment
faults, which hides lazy programming at the cost of a (sometimes
massive) slowdown in performance when this fixup is triggered. The
arm64 kernel cannot be configured to do this - if a
userspace program triggers an alignment exception, it will simply be
handed a SIGBUS by the kernel. This was one of the main things I was
looking for in my rebuild, common to both armel and armhf. In the end,
I only found a very small number of problems.
Given that, I think we should immediately turn off
the alignment fixups on our existing 32-bit Arm buildd machines. Let's
flush out any more problems early, and I don't expect to see many.
To give credit here: Ubuntu
have been using arm64 machines for building 32-bit Arm packages for a
while now, and have already been filing bugs with patches which will
have helped reduce this problem. Thanks!
Deprecated / retired instructions
In theory(!), alignment is all we should need to worry about for
armhf builds, but our armel software baseline needs two additional
pieces of configuration to make things work, enabling emulation
for
SWP
(low-level locking primitive, deprecated since
ARMv6 AFAIK)
CP15
barriers (low-level barrier primitives,
deprecated since ARMv7)
Again, there is quite a performance cost to enabling
emulation support for these instructions but it is at least
possible!
In my initial testing for rebuilding armhf only, I did not enable
either of these emulations. I was then finding lots
of "Illegal Instruction" crashes due to CP15 barrier usage in armhf
Haskell and Mono programs. This suggests that maybe(?) the baseline
architecture in these toolchains is incorrectly set to target ARMv6
rather than ARMv7. That should be fixed and all those packages rebuilt
at some point.
UPDATES
- Peter
Green pointed out that ghc in Debian armhf is definitely
configured for ARMv7, so maybe there is a deeper problem.
- Edmund
Grimley Evans suggests that the Haskell problem is coming from
how it drives LLVM, linking
to #864847 that he
filed in 2017.
Bug highlights
There are a few things I found that I'd like to highlight:
- In the glibc build, we found an arm64 kernel bug
(#904385) which has
since been fixed upstream thanks to Will Deacon at Arm. I've
backported the fix for the 4.9-stable kernel branch, so the fix will
be in our Stretch kernels soon.
- There's something really weird happening with Vim
(#917859). It FTBFS for
me with an odd test failure for both armel-on-arm64 and
armhf-on-arm64 using sbuild, but in a porter box
chroot or directly on my hardware using debuild it works just
fine. Confusing!
- I've filed quite a number of bugs over the last few weeks. Many
are generic new FTBFS reports for old packages that haven't been
rebuilt in a while, and some of them look un-maintained. However,
quite a few of my bugs are arch-specific ones in better-maintained
packages and several have already had responses from maintainers or
have already been fixed. Yay!
- Yesterday, I filed a slew of identical-looking reports for
packages using MPI and all failing tests. It seems that we have a
real problem hitting openmpi-based packages across the archive at
the moment (#918157 in
libpmix2). I'm going to verify that on my systems shortly.
Other things to think about
Building in VMs
So far in Debian, we've tended to run our build machines using
chroots on raw hardware. We have a few builders (x86, arm64)
configured as VMs on larger hosts, but as far as I can see that's the
exception so far. I know that OpenSUSE and Fedora are
both building using VMs, and for our Arm ports now we have more
powerful arm64 hosts available it's probably the way we should go
here.
In testing using "linux32" chroots on native hardware, I was
explicitly looking to find problems in native architecture support. In
the case of alignment problems, they could be readily "fixed up /
hidden" (delete as appropriate!) by building using 32-bit guest
kernels with fixups enabled. If I'd found lots of
those, that would be a safer way to proceed than instantly filing lots
of release-critical FTBFS bugs. However, given the small number of
problems found I'm not convinced it's worth worrying about.
Utilisation of hardware
Another related issue is in how we choose to slice up build
machines. Many packages will build very well in parallel, and that's
great if you have something like the Synquacer with many small/slow
cores. However, not all our packages work so well and I found that
many are still resolutely chugging through long build/test processes
in single threads. I experimented a little with my config during the
rebuilds and what seemed to work best for throughput was kicking off
one build per 4 cores on the machines I was using. That seems to match
up with what
the Fedora
folks are doing (thanks to hrw for the link!).
Migrating build hardware
As I mentioned earlier, to build armel and armhf sanely on arm64
hardware, we need to be using arm64 machines that include native
support for the 32-bit A32 instruction set. While we have lots of
those around at the moment, some newer/bigger arm64 server platforms
that I've seen announced do not include
it. (See an
older mail from me for more details. We'll need to be careful
about this going forwards and keep using (at least) some machines with
A32. Maybe we'll migrate arm64-only builds onto newer/bigger A64-only
machines and keep the older machines for armel/armhf if that becomes a
problem?
At least for the foreseeable future, I'm not worried about losing
A32 support. Arm keeps on designing and licensing ARMv8 cores that
include it...
Thanks
I've spent a lot of time looking at existing FTBFS bugs over the
last weeks, to compare results against what I've been seeing in my
build logs. Much kudos to people who have been finding and filing
those bugs ahead of me, in particular Adrian Bunk and Matthias Klose
who have filed many such bugs. Also thanks to Helmut
Grohne for his script to pull down a summary of FTBFS bugs from UDD -
that saved many hours of effort!
Finally...
Please let me know if you think you've found a problem in what I've
done, or how I've analysed the results here. I still have my machines
set up for easy rebuilds, so reproducing things and testing fixes is
quite easy - just ask!
13:57 ::
# ::
/debian/arm ::
1 comment
And lo, we sacrificed to the gods of BBQ once more
As is becoming something of a tradition by now, Jo and I hosted
another OMGWTFBBQ
at our place last weekend. People came from far and wide to enjoy
themselves. Considering the summer heatwave we've had this year, we
were a little unlucky with the weather. But with the power of gazebo
technology we kept (mostly!) dry... :-)
I was too busy cooking and drinking etc. to take any photos myself,
so here are some I sto^Wborrowed from my friends!
We continued to celebrate Debian getting old:

Photo
from Jonathan McDowell
We had much beer from the nice folks at Milton Brewery:

Photo
from Rob Kendrick
Much meat was prepared and cooked:

Photo
from Stefano Rivera
And we had a lot of bread too!

Photo
from Rob Kendrick
Finally, many thanks to a number of awesome companies for again
sponsoring the important refreshments for the weekend. It's
hungry/thirsty work celebrating like this!
03:24 ::
# ::
/debian/uk ::
0 comments
25 years...
We had a small gathering in the Haymakers pub tonight to celebrate
25 years since Ian
Murdock started
the Debian project.

We had 3 DPLs, a few other DDs and a few more users and community
members! Good to natter with people and share some history. :-) The
Raspberry Pi people even chipped in for some drinks. Cheers! The
celebrations will continue at
the big BBQ at my
place next weekend.
22:42 ::
# ::
/debian/birthday ::
0 comments
DebConf in Taiwan!

So I'm slowly recovering from my yearly dose of full-on Debian! :-)
DebConf is always fun, and this year in Hsinchu was no
different. After so many years in the project, and so many DebConfs
(13, I think!) it has become unmissable for me. It's more like a
family gathering than a work meeting. In amongst the great talks and
the fun hacking sessions, I love catching up with people. Whether it's
Bdale telling me about his fun on-track exploits or Stuart sharing
stories of life in an Australian university, it's awesome to meet up
with good friends every year, old and new.

For once, I even managed to find time to work on items from my own
TODO list during DebCamp and DebConf. Of course, I also got totally
distracted helping people hacking on other things too! In no
particular order, stuff I did included:
- Working with Holger and Wolfgang to get debian-edu netinst/USB
images building using normal debian-cd infrastructure;
- Debugging build issues with our buster OpenStack images, fixing
them and also pushing some fixes to Thomas for
build-openstack-debian-image;
- Reviewing secure boot patches for Debian's GRUB packages;
- As an AM, helping two DD candidates working their way through NM;
- Monitoring and tweaking an archive rebuild I'm doing, testing
building all of our packages for armhf using arm64 machines;
- Releasing new upstream and Debian versions of abcde, the CD
ripping and encoding package;
- Helping to debug UEFI boot problems with Helen and Enrico;
- Hacking on MoinMoin, the wiki engine we use for wiki.debian.org;
- Engaging in lots of discussions about varying things: Arm ports,
UEFI Secure Boot, Cloud images and more
I was involved in a lot of sessions this year, as normal. Lots of
useful discussion about Ignoring Negativity in Debian, and of course
lots of updates from various of the teams I'm working in: Arm porters,
web team, Secure Boot. And even an impromptu debian-cd workshop.

I loved my time at the first DebConf in Asia (yay!), and I was yet
again amazed at how well the DebConf volunteers made this big event
work. I loved the genius idea of having a bar in the
noisy hacklab, meaning that lubricated hacking continued into the
evenings too. And (of course!) just about all of the conference was
captured on video by our intrepid video team. That gives me a chance
to catch up on the sessions I couldn't make it to, which is
priceless.
So, despite all the stuff I got done in the 2 weeks my TODO list
has still grown. But I'm continuing to work on stuff, energised
again. See you
in Curitiba next
year!
16:11 ::
# ::
/debian/dc18 ::
0 comments
Let's BBQ again, like we did last summer!
It's that time again! Another year,
another OMGWTFBBQ!
We're expecting 50 or so Debian folks at our place in Cambridge this
weekend, ready to natter, geek, socialise and generally have a good
time. Let's hope the weather stays nice, but if not we have gazebo
technology... :-)
Many thanks to a number of awesome companies and people near and
far who are sponsoring the important refreshments for the weekend:
I've even been working on the garden this week to improve it ready
for the event. If you'd like to come and haven't already told us,
please add yourself to the wiki page!
03:00 ::
# ::
/debian/uk ::
1 comment
-1, Trolling
Here's a nice comment I received by email this morning. I guess
somebody was upset by
my last
post?
From: Tec Services <tecservices911@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2017 22:30:26 -0700
To: steve@einval.com
Subject: its time for you to retire from debian...unbelievable..your
the quality guy and fucked up the installer!
i cant ever remember in the hostory of computing someone releasing an installer
that does not work!!
wtf!!!
you need to be retired...due to being retarded..
and that this was dedicated to ian...what a
disaster..you should be ashames..he is probably roling in his grave from shame
right now....
It's nice to be appreciated.
22:59 ::
# ::
/misc ::
8 comments
So, Stretch happened...
Things mostly went very well, and we've released Debian 9 this
weekend past. Many many people worked together to
make this possible, and I'd like to extend my own thanks to all of
them.
As a project, we decided to dedicate Stretch to our late founder
Ian Murdock. He did much of the early work to get Debian going, and
inspired many more to help him. I had the good fortune to meet up with
Ian years ago at a meetup attached to a Usenix conference, and I
remember clearly he was a genuinely nice guy with good ideas. We'll
miss him.
For my part in the release process, again I was responsible for
producing our official installation and live images. Release day
itself went OK, but as is typical the process ran late into Saturday
night / early Sunday morning. We made and tested lots
of different images, although numbers were down from previous releases
as we've stopped making the full CD sets now.
Sunday was the day for the release party in Cambridge. As is
traditional, a group of us met up at a local hostelry for some
revelry! We hid inside the pub to escape from the ridiculouly hot
weather we're having at the moment.

Due to a combination of the lack of sleep and the heat, I nearly
forgot to even take any photos - apologies to the extra folks who'd
been around earlier whom I missed with the camera... :-(
23:21 ::
# ::
/debian/releases ::
2 comments
Fonts and presentations
When you're giving a presentation, the choice of font can matter a
lot. Not just in terms of how pretty your slides look, but also in
terms of whether the data you're presenting is actually properly
legible. Unfortunately, far too many fonts are appallingly bad if
you're trying to tell certain characters apart. Imagine if you're at
the back of a room, trying to read information on a slide that's
(typically) too small and (if you're unlucky) the presenter's speech
is also unclear to you (noisy room, bad audio, different language). A
good clear font is really important here.
To illustrate the problem, I've picked a few fonts available in
Google Slides. I've written the characters "1lIoO0" (that's one, lower
case L, upper case I, lower case o, upper case O, zero) in each of
those fonts. Some of the sans-serif fonts in particular are comically
bad for trying to distinguish between these characters.

It may not matter in all cases if your audience can read all the
characters on your slides and tell them apart, put if you're trying to
present scientific or numeric results it's critical. Please consider
that before looking for a pretty font.
23:08 ::
# ::
/misc ::
2 comments
Start the fans please!
This probably won't mean much to people outside the UK, I'm
guessing. Sorry! :-)
The
Crystal Maze was an awesome fun game show on TV in the UK in the
1990s. Teams would travel through differently-themed zones, taking on
challenges to earn crystals for later rewards in the Crystal Dome. I
really enjoyed it, as did just about everybody my age that I know
of...
A group have started up a
new Crystal Maze attraction
in London and Manchester, giving some of us a chance of indulging our
nostalgia directly in a replica of the show's
setup! Neil NcGovern booked a
load of tickets and arranged for a large group of people to go along
this weekend.
It was amazing! (Sorry!) I ended up captaining one of the 4
teams, and our team ("Failure is always an option!") scored highest in
the final game - catching bits of gold foil flying around in the
Dome. It was really, really fun and I'd heartily recommend it to other
folks who like action games and puzzle solving.

I just missed the biting scorn of the original show
presenter, Richard
O'Brien, but our "Maze Master" Boudica was great fun and got us
all pumped up and working together.
00:32 ::
# ::
/misc ::
2 comments
Twenty years...
So, it's now been twenty years since I became a Debian Developer. I
couldn't remember the exact date I signed up, but I
decided to do some forensics to find out. First, I can check on the
dates on my first Debian system, as I've kept it running as a Debian
system ever since!
jack:~$ ls -alt /etc
...
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6932 Feb 10 1997 pine.conf.old
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6907 Dec 29 1996 pine.conf.old2
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 76739 Dec 7 1996 mailcap.old
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1225 Oct 20 1996 fstab.old
jack:~$
I know that I did my first Debian installation in late October
1996, migrating over from my existing Slackware installation with the
help of my friend Jon who was already a DD. That took an entire
weekend and it was painful, so much so that several
times that weekend I very nearly bailed and went back. But, I stuck
with it and after a few more days I decided I was happier with Debian
than with the broken old Slackware system I'd been using. That last
file (fstab.old) is the old fstab file from the Slackware
system, backed up just before I made the switch.
I was already a software developer at the time, so of course the
first thing I wanted to do once I was happy with Debian was to become
a DD and take over the Debian maintenance of mikmod, the module player
I was working on at the time. So, I mailed Bruce to ask for an account
(there was none of this NM concept back then!) and
I think he replied the next day. Unfortunately, I
don't have the email in my archives any more due to a disk crash back
in the dim and distant past. But I can see that the
first PGP key I generated for the sake of joining Debian dates
from October
30th 1996 which gives me a date of 31st October 1996 for joining
Debian.
Twenty years, wow... Since then, I've done lots in the project. I'm
lucky enough to been to 11 DebConfs, hosted all around the world. I'm
massively proud to have been voted DPL for two of those twenty
years. I've worked on a huge number of different things in Debian,
from the audio applications I started with to the installer (yay, how
things come back to bite you!), from low-level CD and DVD tools (and
making our CD images!) to a wiki engine written in python. I've worked
hard to help make the best Operating System on the planet, both for my
own sake and the sake of our users.
Debian has been both excellent fun and occasionally a huge cause of
stress in my life for the last 20 years, but despite the latter I
wouldn't go back and change anything. Why? Through Debian, I've made
some great friends: in Cambridge, in the UK, in Europe, on every
continent. Thanks to you all, and here's to (hopefully) many years to
come!
00:17 ::
# ::
/debian/stats ::
2 comments
Time flies
Slightly belated...
Another year,
another OMGWTFBBQ. By
my count, we had 49 people (and
a dog) in
my house and garden at the peak on Saturday evening. It was excellent
to see people from all over coming together again, old friends and
new. This year we had some weather issues, but due to the delights of
gazebo technology most people stayed mostly dry. :-)
Also: thanks to a number of companies near and far who sponsored
the important refreshments for the weekend:
As far as I could tell, everybody enjoyed themselves; I know I
definitely did!
16:57 ::
# ::
/debian/uk ::
2 comments
And about time, too!
A couple of weekends back, we had an awesome time at Jonathan and
Charlene's wedding. I'd have blogged sooner, but I had to
wait for this photo of the happy couple with the Debian
gang... :-)

Unfortunately, somebody let Charlene hide at the back! Follow the
link for more photos...
14:54 ::
# ::
/misc ::
2 comments
Supporting the Software Freedom Conservancy too!

I'm happy to chip in and help the awesome folks at
the Software Freedom
Conservancy with funding for their work, standing up for
copyleft. It's clear that there are a lot of people who will ignore
the terms of Free Software licensing, whether by oversight or
deliberately, so the SFC are doing an important job working to defend
the Freedoms that lots of us are using every day as developers and
users.
It seems that some of SFC's corporate supporters have stopped
sponsorship since the beginning of
their lawsuit
in Germany against VMware for GPL violations. Maybe some folks are
happy to support SFC, but not when they really push things like
this. Let's hope that we can find many more individual supporters to
cover SFC's funding needs instead. This week, there's
an anonymous
pledge to match donations from new supporters so right now is an
even better time to sign up!
Thanks
to Paul
Wise for posting about this and indirectly prodding me to sign up
too.
21:19 ::
# ::
/debian/sfc ::
2 comments
Linaro VLANd v0.4
VLANd is a python program intended to make it easy to manage
port-based VLAN setups across multiple switches in a network. It is
designed to be vendor-agnostic, with a clean pluggable driver API to
allow for a wide range of different switches to be controlled
together.
There's more information in
the README
file. I've just released v0.4, with a lot of changes included since
the last release:
- Large numbers of bugfixes and code cleanups
- Code changes for integration with LAVA:
- Added db.find_lowest_unused_vlan_tag()
- create_vlan() with a tag of -1 will find and allocate the
first unused tag automatically
- Add port numbers as well as names to the ports
database, to give human-recognisable references. See
README.port-numbering for more details.
- Add tracking of trunks, the inter-switch connections, needed for
visualisation diagrams.
- Add a simple http-based visualisation feature:
- Generate network diagrams on-demand based on the information in the
VLANd database, colour-coded to show port configuration
- Generate a simple website to reference those diagrams.
- Allow more ports to be seen on Catalyst switches
- Add a systemd service file for vland
VLANd is Free Software, released under the GPL version 2 (or any
later version). For now, grab it
from git;
tarballs will be coming shortly.
01:44 ::
# ::
/linaro ::
2 comments