A Global Jam event in Montreal again

It's always nice to see the amount of interest that just a simple table at say, Geekfest Montreal can generate. We gave out a couple of CDs, showed off 10.04, and generally got a very nice amount of support and interest for the Ubuntu-QC LoCo and our Global Jam event.

And about this event?

Well, preparations are going quite well. With the location secured (thanks ETS!!!) (and thus the audio-video equipment, since our rooms are already fitted with a project in one real nicely done table), we'll be ready to host a few presentations. Already one of the confirmed ones will be a student of ETS presenting a robot his team built, and how it's OS was migrated from Windows to Ubuntu.

What's left to decide is much of the little organizational details. For presentations, when will we have them? How do we deal with the fact that WiFi will probably fail? How about the relatively few power sockets available? Do we split the weekend into sessions on different tasks or subjects, and if so, how?

We've had great support from LAN-ETS last October when they helped us out immensely by lending us power bars and wicked cool ethernet cable bundles and a switch. I hope they will agree to help us out once again.

We're also in discussion to get two additional presentations going: MythTV on Ubuntu and PiTiVi. Like last time, I may give a quick crash-course on patching applications and preparing packages.

Of course, we're not just going to focus on showing stuff -- we do plan on getting much more involved than last time in triaging and patching bugs. With our success in October, I'm very confident that the Ubuntu-Quebec team will rock at the UGJ! PiTiVi is already one aspect we will most likely be looking at in detail, and I do hope there will be more: I will obviously be very happy to help out poeple (and have people help me) with giving some love to NetworkManager. I can already think of usb-creator as another pet project that will likely receive some attention.

With the responses we got from the quick installfest we set up last time, the idea of an upgrade Jam is another that seems to be a big hit for the people here. Lucid is sure to be a great release, and we're very eager to give it another big round of testing with all the cool toys people could bring to our Montreal event!

One of the big challenges this time around will be gathering more people from farther around the province. It would be great if people from Quebec city could join us, or even from Chicoutimi or elsewhere. It's also one of the reasons why we try to have as many things going around at the same time as possible, so trips to Montreal would be easier to schedule.

If you're in the Quebec province and more specifically in the Montreal region during the March 26-28 weekend, don't hesitate to come join us!

Global Jam à Montréal: on récidive!

Il me fait plaisir d'annoncer que la participation des utilisateurs Ubuntu montréalais au Ubuntu Global Jam se fera encore une fois, un peu avant la sortie officielle de Lucid Lynx (la version 10.04, présentement en développement), à l'École de Technologie Supérieure!

Les locaux ont été officialisés: du 26 au 28 mars, nous pourrons passer la fin de semaine dans les locaux de l'ETS, soit les salles de classe A-1300 et A-1238 (en haut des escaliers de l'entrée principale, puis à gauche). N'hésitez pas à consulter la page wiki QuebecTeam/GlobalJam pour l'horaire exact ainsi que les directions pour s'y rendre!

Un gros merci à l'administration de l'ETS pour bien vouloir supporter l'événement (et donc Ubuntu!), et à Clod Patry et Oleg Litvinski pour leur aide avec les détails administratifs.

Vous êtes donc invités à participer à des efforts d'identification, de tri et de "patchage" de bogues avec nous, ainsi qu'à venir poser des questions, essayer la nouvelle version "live" ou l'installer, ou même simplement essayer Ubuntu pour une première fois sur votre ordinateur, dans un environnement convivial où vous pourrez vous sentir bien à l'aise de demander de l'aide si vous en avez besoin... Où simplement venir rencontrez d'autres utilisateurs pour discuter de tout et de rien!

Quelques présentations devraient être planifiées d'ici fin mars. Entre autres, un élève de l'ETS, Michael Faille, nous fera la présentation d'un projet robotique réalisé pas un groupe de l'ETS et roulant sur Ubuntu (depuis sa migration de Windows!). On prévoit certainement encore présenter de façon survolée l'entrée de bogues dans Launchpad, ou alors le tri de ceux-ci si vous voulez aider les développeurs.

Cette fois-ci, beaucoup d'emphase sera mise sur le travail direct en équipe sur les différents bugs qui pourront avoir été soulevés. Il reste à déterminer la formule exacte, mais le but sera de démontrer l'intérêt de notre équipe dans la qualité de la distribution :)

D'ici là, il reste un tas de choses à planifier. Si vous voulez aider dans la réalisation de l'événement ou vous avez des idées, n'hésitez pas à en faire part sur la liste de distribution Ubuntu-QC ou sur notre canal sur Freenode: #ubuntu-qc.

L'École de Technologie Supérieure (ETS) est située au 100 rue Notre-Dame Ouest, soit à deux minutes du métro Bonaventure, au coin Notre-Dame et Peel.

Starting my first book review

I read a lot, that's clearly not the problem -- although sometimes I wish it was fewer technical documents and more fiction...

It somewhat surprised me when I was contacted out of the blue by someone from Packt Publishing to ask me to review a new book on Cacti: Cacti 0.8 Network Monitoring, by Dinanhkur Kundu and S. M. Ibrahim Lavlu (ISBN 13: 978-1-847195-96-8).

I love Cacti, it's clearly one of those network monitoring tools that are both easy to implement and easy to configure, and does a terrific job at aggregating historical information on what happened on machines. I had it implemented on roughly 200 systems with sometimes easily 40 graphs per system (switches, firewalls, etc), and although speed can be an issue, it is one that can be easily solved with Spine.

Back to the book: at first glance, it looks well written. I can't speak for its physical aspect since Packt won't ship to Canada, but it seems clear and to the point, with a good amount of background information on SNMP, which is often just what someone will be lacking when first trying out monitoring and Cacti. I'll write of my final opinion after reading the book in full though ;)

If there's at least one very good point: anyone could start with just this and a Ubuntu or Debian system and very quickly get rolling, since it mentions all the prerequisites of a Cacti install and the basic tricks on how to deal with installing, patching, and upgrading Cacti.

Expect my full report on it in a later post!

Update: I forgot to mention you can also check out this free chapter excerpt: http://www.packtpub.com/files/5968-cacti-sample-chapter-4-creating-and-using-templates.pdf

Intro, B-Sides release

Hi!

I'm a new Ubuntu member since the November 18th meeting of the America's Membership Board. It's an honor to be part of this awesome project that is Ubuntu! Not much to say except that I'm from the Quebec LoCo team, and interested and taking part in a number of things, including the NetworkManager team, B-Sides maintainers, and Ubuntu AMI testing. I'll often blog here about the stuff I work on, as well as stuff I learn about in my 'adventure' to join the MOTU team.

Today, I am pleased to announce the first "official" release of the B-Sides project, with version 0.9.5 of B-Sides available from the B-Sides maintainers' PPA. Fresh out of the buildds :)

Ubuntu B-Sides is a project that aims at bringing to you the "rest of the disc", a number of great applications that couldn't make it to the default Ubuntu desktop (by that, we mean directly off the official CD), but nicely complement it. We do this by adding applications and not replacing those that are provided by the release, and without breaking the "one application per task" rule... Which means you shouldn't expect to see alternate browsers or MP3 players, but will still see a lot of really cool apps such a Gwibber, pitivi...

You can see the full list of applications here: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~b-sides/b-sides/trunk/annotate/head:/minimal-all

Server FAIL

Wow. BIG Fail for the IBM xSeries X306. Its hard drive setup is the worst I've seen in a long, long time.

Trying to kickstart an old X306 we had, to still use good-ish hardware for stuff that can make use of it. At first, it doesn't detect the disks... Me and Michel are all "what the hell could be wrong with this system?".

Looking through the ventilation holes, I see a little sticker that essentially says "do not pull without disconnecting inside" in some weird (and pretty bad, actually) translation by one of our coworkers.

Obviously, that's what Michel had done a little earlier, without expecting the kind of SNAFU we were seeing to really be possible. Of course, I'd probably have done the same. You work long enough with good HP servers to come and expect hard, well engineered connectors inside a server to plug in the disks. You kind of expect it with IBM servers too, seeing as other, bigger systems don't pull that kind of crap...

Nope. It seems hard connectors were too hard.

Instead, the IBM xSeries X306 has some kind of IDE-like ribbons and connectors to the disks, cables that are short as hell, attached to the front-accessible (hot-swap? (probably not)) disks. When you pull on the disks, the ribbons obviously eventually detach (or rip something out, YMMV there...), but as you insert the disks you'll end up with major problems -- ribbon is at the end, you need to open the top of the server to kind of wiggle the ribbon and power cord into submission and insert them into the back of the disk, with less than an inch of room for itself, the disk, and your fingers.

IBM, you really could have done better on that one. On lots of things on many server systems in the xSeries actually, including the RSA remote access stuff...

Checklist announcement

I've been running EC2 AMI tests for a little while now, and it quickly became apparent
that many if not all of the tests could be automated and would then probably be much more
interesting to run -- that, and just the automation process is really interesting to work on.

At the moment, it's only a branch that I've registered in its own
project: lp:checklist. Its project page is here: https://edge.launchpad.net/checklist

You can get started using checklist by grabbing it from Bazaar (since there is no official
release yet):

bzr branch lp:checklist

It's possible that a lot of the work I've done could just as well have been included into other
tools, like checkbox, but for starters, I was mostly interested in getting some basic stuff to
work, and worrying about the other details later.


At this point, checklist is able to run commands over ssh, locally, and the most interesting
feature is that it can also create EC2 instances (using python-boto), which it would then ssh
onto to run a testcase.

Checklist also is all configured using an easy to use configuration file format: ini files. It
can look at the stdout and stderr of the commands run in order to check for success or failure
using regexes, which will give a fairly high level of control to someone writing special tests.

Thinking about it more, I'm also going to be using it to remotely verify machines that have been
kickstarted to make sure the unattended installs run properly and do everything required. The
fact that it can run tests on a remote machine is definitely a plus when trying to test
kickstarted systems from an isolated network.

Don't hesitate to branch checklist and provide me with patches :)

Ubuntu-QC Karmic Release Party

The Ubuntu-QC LoCo will be hosting a release party on October 31th, 2009, to celebrate the launch of the latest Ubuntu release. If you're in or near Montreal, come join us at Bar St-Sulpice, at 17pm.

For more information, consult our wiki page!

As usual, there will also be a party held at Taverne Urbaine MO, in Quebec city; you can also get more information about that party on the link above.

Here is the official invitation text :)