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...

Influenza A H1U1

I've come to the conclusion that Ubuntu development is like a disease. Contagious, it has specific symptoms... and fortunately can't be treated just yet :)

Don't start the spambots just yet, I'm actually getting to a positive point here.

What brings me to that point? Well some tend to say every once in a while that open source development (in general, since my point applies to any FOSS project) is much like an itch to scratch. And I can observe that in my own workflow -- my work on NetworkManager stems from some little things I wasn't happy with the VPNC plugin, my work yesterday on a telepathy-butterfly bug came from my inability to connect to MSN using Empathy in some specific network environments. I (and many others) scratch itches that irritate me, and in the process manage to help out others as the fixes are published and distributed.

There are other symptoms too, and those are more specific (or at least, I'm more familiar with that strain...) to Ubuntu. Developers are happy, helpful people. When you want to help, you're definitely not send away. People want you to learn, and want to help you help yourself and the community in general.

Which brings me to the fact that Ubuntu development is contagious. When people you know personally or from your LoCo, an IRC channel or forums is contributing, you just might catch the virus too and want to help out, scratch your own itches.

And well, if you're feeling a little weird after reading this, maybe you've caught the virus too. Want to help out? Multiple projects are clearly in need for some love. Just pick an area that interests you, or one piece of software that works for you, but is missing just a little something to let you really appreciate using it, and write a patch. I'm sure you'll be surprised at the kind of support you will have.

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 :)

Ontario GNU Linux Fest is this weekend

Awesome! Back from vacation and started work today, and I've registered and booked everything already to go to Ontario GNU Linux Fest at the end of the week. Girlfriend will be there too. At the very least, it's going to be an interesting little trip to Toronto for the weekend.



It's obviously still not too late to register, and there will be lots of very interesting talks :)

Can't wait 'til Friday...

Debian/Ubuntu package for emerillon

Following the (very) recent release of emerillon 0.1.0, I'm pleased to announce that emerillon has a debian package created, and now available in my PPA for Emerillon:

https://edge.launchpad.net/~mathieu-tl/+archive/emerillon

If you use Ubuntu Karmic 9.10, almost all dependencies are already available... Except libethos.

For libethos, you will also need, for now, to add the PPA for audidude (Christian Hergert):

https://edge.launchpad.net/~audidude/+archive/ppa

This is until I have the time to rebuild the packages for that library and publish them to my Emerillon PPA.

There's already work started to include it into Debian, but it still requires packages that aren't ready yet. Same idea for Ubuntu. One of the major blockers are libethos, but I will discuss its inclusion with the upstream maintainer (who is audidude, in any case), and hopefully get it included very soon. From then, emerillon should be fairly easy to upload to Debian.

For the curious, Emerillon is a map viewer for GNOME, very nicely designed, which uses OpenStreetMap maps to allow you to search, add placemarks, etc. Think of it as a Google Maps for your computer, but fully open :)

For more information about Emerillon, see the Launchpad project page: https://edge.launchpad.net/emerillon

Happy mapping!

Pictures from the Global Jam in Montreal

Well, it's obviously never too late to report back on the fun we've had this weekend with the Global Jam. There was a constant attendance of a good number of people throughout the weekend, which I am particularily happy about. Lots of interest in the development and contribution aspects, as well as a couple of others who were curious about Ubuntu and wanted to know more. Overall, a great success!

We've touched a great number of subjects, including the obvious bug reporting and triaging, as well as the French translations for a number of utilities and some fixes for bugs that were discovered during the Jam.

Thanks to the École de Technologie Supérieure for hosting us in great and really well equipped rooms. Thanks to LANETS for providing us with a really kick-ass wired network rig, and thanks to Guillaume Grasset and Clod Patry for helping out with the administrative portion of getting the rooms :)