Matt's blog

Enabling IPv6 Privacy Addresses

2011-12-15T12:00:00.000-05:00

At the last UDS, we once again discussed the state of IPv6 support in Ubuntu. We're in the process of making Ubuntu really rock with IPv6, and this comes with decisions and hard work.

One of these decisions was to enable IPv6 Privacy Extensions by default. In other words, rather than having an IPv6 address that is derived directly from your network device's MAC address, you'll now have that, but supplemented with time-based temporary addresses, randomly created, used to establish outgoing connections to systems. This leads to higher privacy; because it makes it harder for an eavesdropper to identify whether different addresses really refer to the same node (that's because the *prefix*, which network you come from, would change, but never the last part of the address, unless using privext). How all of this works is described in more details in RFC 4941.

And leading to this, the hard work. We've recently enabled IPv6 privacy extensions through a new file shipped by procps: /etc/sysctl.d/10-ipv6-privacy.conf. Sysctls are parsed early on in the boot process, but perhaps not early enough; which lead to an issue: on some systems, one would see some interfaces with privext enabled, and some others without. This appears to be because some interfaces (eth0 on my system) are initialized early enough in the boot process that it comes up before the sysctl settings are applied.

With this, another issue: there are three types of sysctl settings for ipv6: default, all, and per-interface entries. According to kernel documentation and help strings; default is meant as the ... default for future interfaces that would get created. At least, that's how I get it. Per-interface entries are obvious: you're just changing the setting for that particular interface. But what about all?

Well, it turns out net.ipv6.conf.all.anything doesn't really do anything, except for forwarding and disable_ipv6. These two options are already handled specially by kernel code. The particular setting that interested me was use_tempaddr though, and isn't being propagated (to the per-interface entries) or use globally to enable privacy addresses on all interfaces; which is something you'll likely want if you are looking to enable privacy extensions at all. Take this example: if you're using a mobile system, you might have wired and wireless connected at the same time, and may want to get up, unplug wired, and move around to a different spot, with or without suspending. While NetworkManager will in time allow toggling privacy extensions per connection, you shouldn't need to manually change this for a default install, on a typical, mobile worker day.

So I started writing my first ever kernel patch: having the net.ipv6.conf.all.use_tempaddr sysctl propagate its value to all the other interfaces already present on the system when the value is changed. It's currently being reviewed before I work towards having it included in the kernel proper. Reviews for that patch are welcome on the kernel-team mailing list.

I've now tested that this solves the issue of applying that particular sysctl at boot time; much like it appears to be expected to work by just about everyone if I'm to believe research I've done on the web on that subject. If there are brave souls wanting to test this, head over to my NM PPA. You'll need to be running Precise, and the package you'll want is linux 3.2.0-4.11~mtrudel2. Since this is a custom hacked up kernel package (but I tried hard to follow the Kernel Team's procedures), standard warnings of caution and the usual "if your system gets broken you get to keep both pieces" apply... but I'm running that package too ;)

Ubuntu Global Jam event in Montreal

2011-08-31T14:58:00.000-04:00

With the Ubuntu Global Jam fast approaching, the Ubuntu-Quebec community is once again organizing an event to get together, find, track down and fix bugs, in Montreal (and inviting anyone interested in helping out to join us). The event will take place Saturday and Sunday, September 3 & 4, 2011, starting around 9 am.

Many thanks to komputes for doing the work of organizing the event and getting everything ready.

This time, our local Global Jam event will be hosted at the Canonical offices here in Montreal! Huge thanks to management for allowing us to use the office.

So if you're in or around Montreal, come join the local Ubuntu-Qc members and let's make Oneiric really rock! Just so we know what to expect, please make sure you register your presence on the LoCo directory event page. You can also watch our wiki page for more information.

Canonical Canada Limited
4200, boulevard Saint-Laurent
Suite 1200 (12e étage)
Montréal, QC
H2W 2R2
Canada

Avec le Global Jam qui arrive à grand pas, l'équipe Ubuntu-Québec récidive et organise une fois de plus un événement à Montréal et invite ses membres (et tous les intéressés!) à se réunir pour trouver, rapporter et régler des bogues. L'événement se tiendra les Samedi et Dimanche, 3 et 4 septembre 2011, à partir de 9 heures.

Un gros merci va à komputes pour le travail d'organisation de l'événement.

De plus, on tient à remercier Canonical pour avoir accepté d'héberger l'événement!

Si vous êtes dans la région de Montréal, vous êtes donc invités à vous joindre aux membres d'Ubuntu-Qc et nous aider à rendre la version 11.10, Oneiric Ocelot, vraiment parfaite!

Pour nous permettre de savoir combien de personnes sont attendues, n'oubliez pas de signifier votre présence sur la page à cet effet sur le LoCo directory. Vous pouvez également obtenir plus d'information sur notre page wiki.

Voir ci-haut pour l'adresse ;)

Hacking on usb-modeswitch, part 1

2011-06-18T15:29:00.000-04:00

Lately I've been spending time porting the usb_modeswitch_dispatcher tcl script from the usb-modeswitch package to C.

While being a great exercise at both my knowledge of Tcl (almost non-existent) and my knowledge of C; it's also been very interesting so far to look at how things were being done to "switch" USB devices from a storage mode into modem mode.

One of the problems I'm hitting now is balancing between performance and disk space usage. In an attempt to cut down on installed space, usb_modeswitch data has been all compressed into one tarball, comprising 162 small text files with the necessary vendor and product IDs expected before, after switching and the magic message to do the actual switch (see Debian bug 578024 for the rationale for compressing files). Having a compressed tarball is great to save space, but would tend to cause delays at boot time when the file needs to be uncompressed (perhaps multiple times) during boot-up. On the other hand, separate files take more space, which is especially a problem for those who don't need usb-modeswitch on their systems.

I'm now working on quantifying the performance impact between compressed and uncompressed, as well as trying to figure out the actual size impact between both options for the Live CD. Theoretically, there should be little difference or even higher space usage with the compressed tarball on the LiveCD (because you can't really compressed something already compressed). I'll find out and post results here. As for the performance impact, there may not be much to look through the compressed tarball and extract one file from it, but every little bit of gain can help.

Jamming in Montreal

2011-04-03T14:55:00.000-04:00

I'll shamelessly copy Jorge's post here to present the Montreal jam:

We're doing some unity testing this weekend. We were about 11 at some point yesterday, and we're 7 this afternoon.

Sadly, we didn't happen to have our own Jason to answer user questions, so I did the best I could ;)

Global Jam in Montréal

2011-03-30T18:54:00.000-04:00

So we're doing it again!

It's obviously getting a bit on the late side to announce this, but I only got the confirmation for our location this weekend -- after work or when I had a second, I wrote the Ubuntu-Quebec mailing list invitation, dented about the event, and created the LoCo directory entry for this event already.

So once again, people wanting to help improve Natty Narwhal or who would like to know more about bugs, triaging, fixing bugs, testing the new release or even writing documentation for applications, and living around Montreal, Qc, don't hesitate to come join us at SUPInfo Montréal this weekend. The closest subway station is McGill on the green line, then about 3 minutes walking time ;)

We're holding our sessions on *both* Saturday and Sunday, from 11am to 5pm on each day.

SUPInfo Montréal
752 Sherbrooke West
Montreal, Quebec

Agrandir le plan

Idea #27250: Auto eth0 isn't very user friendly. Many people wont know what it is.

2011-03-24T12:34:00.000-04:00

The Problem

In case you didn't already figure it out, the title refers to a quite popular idea on Ubuntu Brainstorm. It also refers to a bug report against NetworkManager in Launchpad: bug #386900.

This is one issue I'd particularly like to solve soon. Although it most likely won't change for Natty (given that we're in Feature Freeze, and UI Freeze incessantly), I believe the question truly can be brought to a concensus and fixed early in the Oneiric cycle (and actually be made available upstream for everyone's benefit).

I think much of the issues coming from this bug report stem from diverging expectations of people who just care about their wired connection working and likely don't need to change it all that often, and people who actively use NetworkManager's connection profiles to achieve various things.

First, some background:

Why "Auto eth0" ?

The name "Auto eth0" comes from... well, the fact that it's a connection that was created automatically by NetworkManager with the simplest default settings (that is, just use DHCP to set an IP address), and the fact that it was created for the interface eth0. As such, people with multiple wired network cards would then get one "Auto XXXX" profile for each wired card. This profile should take care of 90% of all use cases, since most people will just want their system to be plugged in, their home router to hand over an IP address and be able to get online.

What's this with profiles ?

I just mentioned that the connection names shown are profiles. This is actually very important to me and quite a lot of people, because there are often cases where one would want to use specific network settings when at work and while at home. In other words, one could use "Auto eth0" at home with a simple setup, and benefit from a "At work" profile which sets a static IP address, or different DNS search strings (what would let your computer access "planet", instead of "planet.ubuntu.com" in Firefox, for instance).

Why so many issues ?

I guess this all falls apart when you consider that most people probably won't use alternate profiles for wired connections. DHCP tends to get most things right from the start, which make profiles not very useful unless you want to do very specific things with your connection.

Add to this the fact that not everyone knows that eth0 is what Linux calls your first wired network card (instead of say "Local Area Connection" as I believe it is on Windows), and you have a nice little mess to untangle.

Fixing all of this

I can't say I have all the answers. It's still unclear to me how much information is absolutely required, and I'm well aware that we can't really please everyone.

However, I've added a proposal to the brainstorm idea (Solution #7). It goes like this:

I'm suggesting the name of the profile to be something like "Default". It should not be tied to any particular adapter.
This way, any new connection use that profile which will have default settings to use DHCP and the usual (as Auto eth0 is set). All adapters could share it, so adding a new interface to a computer would still just "work".

For notifications, I suggest the following changes:

- The title should mention "Wired network", and probably the same of the interface (eth0 in most cases).
- The text of the notification should say:

Connection established, using profile "Default"

or whatever profile in use.

Furthermore, perhaps items in the network menu shouldn't list the full details of the network card (it's full name from udev as it does now). Instead, the interface name would be sufficient. I expect people who use multiple cards to know what eth0 and eth1 mean and refer to.

Lastly, drop the "Auto" from user-created wireless network profiles too. Since they are created by the user and carry the name of the wireless network, "Auto" is both unnecessary, and possibly incorrect (since people can change the settings after creating it).

I'd very much like anyone with an opinion on this to vote on Ubuntu Brainstorm for the idea they prefer, and comment with why my suggestion breaks things for them if it does. I certainly could have forgotten things. Comments on this blog are welcome too ;)

This weekend's GeekFest in Montreal

2011-03-09T12:44:00.000-05:00

We had a table at this weekend's GeekFest geek festival in Montreal. It was awesome! Tons of people, and even better, tons of interest about Ubuntu and our LoCo team.

We gave out CDs, stickers, some extra FSF stickers I had in my backpack, and generally told people all they wanted to know about Ubuntu, gaming on Ubuntu (we had a demo of World of Goo running on one of the laptops for a good part of Sunday), and the Ubuntu Quebec LoCo team. It was very interesting to hear people tell us they already knew about Ubuntu or used it at home, at work, etc; yet still didn't know about the local community team and the help resources we offer.

One of the things we focused on was how Ubuntu Quebec has a mailing list and forum to provide help, announce events and just generally discuss things, as well as our IRC channel on Freenode (#ubuntu-qc, for those who don't know!). Lots of people were surprised to hear of a user group for Ubuntu but very interested by it. I printed and gave out nearly 40 business cards with contact information for the LoCo team.

I am very happy to have been helped by two very active members of the team: Christian Parent (Mobidoy) and Philippe Gauthier (deuxpi), and joined on Sunday by Eric Beaurivage (sipherdee), another LoCo team member. Without them, we certainly couldn't have been able to speak to so many people, and we definitely wouldn't have had any time to visit the other kiosks (can't just stay sitting... if you hold a kiosk in a conference, just got to go see the other things!).

Christian always has very cool ideas, this weekend it was to show his new laptop sticker (a mouse pad glued to the laptop).

Some other interesting aspects:

To our right was the kiosk of devLAB, a project to start programming contests, identify new technologies, etc... Did I get this all right? Sure hope so. The great thing too is that they were interested by our Global Jam ideas, so there may be collaboration on that aspect to come for this cycle's Global Jam event in Montreal. That still needs to be discussed on the mailing list.

We met with someone from Foonzo Café, a new café in Montreal near Peel metro which runs all their systems on Ubuntu! They have some 80 seated places, so we may consider holding the Montreal release party there for Natty. Check how the discussion unfolds for this on our mailing list.

And last but not least, we met with Carlos and his brother who started "Carlito's Contraptions". They work on Nao the robot to develop applications, have it do stuff... While Nao doesn't exactly run Ubuntu (it's really a stripped down Linux with the bare minimum), their development systems are Ubuntu. They were nice enough to allow us to take action shots of Nao with a Ubuntu logo sticker. First it was on a GeekFest pin attached to Nao with sticky-tack, then they put another sticker directly on Nao's right arm. Rock on guys!

Take a look at all the pictures on my Picasa Album: "GeekFestMtl 2011".

How to contribute to NetworkManager (or nm-applet)

2011-01-12T18:32:00.000-05:00

Since NetworkManager (and all of the attached parts; VPN plugins, clients, backend...) is such a complex system, we're always looking for people to help out in whichever way they can.

One of the things I'd like to focus on this cycle (even if this announcement should have come long ago), is test cases and generally getting a good grasp of what works and what doesn't with NM, the clients, or plugins. Test cases are useful for us to know that things are performing as they should and even more important where development snapshots are involved, given the "in flux" nature of the code we're providing users. It's not that it's unstable code really (in fact, it's clearly not... 0.8 is now a stable branch that got tons of bug fixes, and seems rock solid if I believe the type and number of reports we get). Still, I'm interested to know about failures. That's partly why I wrote a number of test cases on the Desktop Testing Team tracker. There's a need for more though, and that's where the help of the community comes in.

If you know of some things that are important to you in NetworkManager, nm-applet, or the VPN plugins, write test cases for them! It will help everyone make sure those remain working, iron out the small annoying bugs, and just improve on the overall usefulness of NetworkManager.

Obviously, test cases and testing isn't the only place you can help. Are you annoyed at some little thing that works, but you'd love for it to go one step further in providing an amazing experience? Then we need you.

It's also very much the way I started contributing to Ubuntu, dealing with small annoyances which would make my life easier in using the desktop every day... And it was as simple and providing support for saving group or user password for the VPNC plugin.

I can already think of a few more of these small things, such as hiding the SIM PIN when prompted for it (since it's a password)...

I've started identifying small (but important!) bugs like this in Launchpad. As for other projects, look for the 'bitesize' tag. Here's an example.
They may not all be tagged bitesize, but if there's something that almost works for you and you want to take a look at fixing it, jump in! We'll all be glad you did. The same principle applies to many of the bugs marked as Wishlist, which are good ideas, maybe some need more discussion upstream, but they are all ready to be worked on (and have varying degrees of difficulty).

If you're looking to work on NM, the first thing you may want to look at is the wiki at http://live.gnome.org/NetworkManager. It's generally also a good idea to subscribe to the mailing list (see the previous link), so you can discuss changes with the community at large. Finally, there's truly no place more useful than the DebuggingTips page even for non-technical users. It's where you can poke NetworkManager to tell you exactly what goes on. In. Details.

In the cases where changes can be reasonably integrated into Ubuntu and/or Debian directly, feel free to submit merge requests and patches. This includes helping out fixing issues in the growing indicator patch for the applet :)

Finally if you're just curious and want to help out, you should know that there is a lot of work being done at the moment to simplify NM in various ways; all of which to in time become version 0.9. If you want to know more about the plans for NM 0.9, it's here: http://live.gnome.org/NetworkManager/ApiSimplify

When I'm connected I'm always happy to answer questions and help out in any way possible, both on NM and general desktop-ish stuff. You can reach me on #ubuntu-desktop or #nm on Freenode. I'm cyphermox.

Natty nm-applet improvements

2011-01-05T16:08:00.000-05:00

As those running Natty have undoubtedly noticed (and it has been noted on the Ayatana mailing list), we currently have a stop-gap measure (until we get connman and indicator-network magic!) for an indicator for network connections being nm-applet with a big ugly patch to make it work as an indicator.

In light of the discussion I'm referring to above, as well as a number of bugs that have been reported against network-manager-applet, I've been working on fixing these issues, including making the animations work again, re-adding icons for wireless signal strength and fixing the icons when connected to VPNs.

Most of this was coming from the fact that icons could not be dynamically composited by nm-applet when using libappindicator as it used to be doing. However, it's just about ready to all be live again:

All I'm waiting for is review of a merge request to provide the new icons needed. :)

Now, there is still a number of things that need to be fixed in the indicator patch and in the look and feel of nm-applet as an indicator. While this is still meant to remain a bridge until we can switch to connman and indicator-network, I'm looking forward to getting new ideas and to know about the issues you see in nm-applet's look right now. Jump in on the ayatana list and give us your thoughts!

Supporting the Harmony 300 on Linux

2010-12-12T23:58:00.000-05:00

Today, I bought a Logitech Harmony 300 universal remote. At about 60$ CAD, it's really a bargain, and despite it's limited feature set compared to other Harmony remotes (I also have the Harmony 670, which has selectable "tasks"), it fits the use I want to make of it.

I had to use Windows. There is just no way this could be done under Linux, due to a variety of factors including lack of support in my favorite project, Concordance, and Logitech's choice to use a SilverLight application to handle configuration and authentication.

I'm pretty sad of the choices made by Logitech on this. Where all they had been doing to support a Linux community around their devices was to keep an old website working (and to this day, it's still working and fine for a large majority of the Harmony devices, usable with Concordance to configure remotes such as the 525, the 700, the 900, etc.), they chose to support this model with the new myharmony.com website which doesn't appear to expose the same level of control, and definitely complicates use in Linux. I don't think keeping the same old methods would have really meant such an investment to them, and I doubt exposing the possibility of downloading the same old EzHex files for programming would have been a cause for concern for intellectual property rights re. other manufacturers and systems designs.

Lack of understanding and basic support of Linux users by large corporations such as Logitech remains, I think, one of the key reasons why Linux has yet to reach and "stick" to a majority of everyday users. I believe that omitting to give alternative options to users who choose to work with a different operating system is not only causing harm to the Linux community, but also causing Logitech (just as an example, other companies are in the same boat) to lose potential customers. After all, wouldn't it be normal for the standard target users for home automation and function aggregation devices to be pretty close to the same group of "early adopters" as currently targetted by the Linux ecosystem?

Please, Logitech, get your act together. I've contacted you on this subject again. I'm sure others have as well. I think we understand you might not want to bother, but at least give us enough information so that we could still send you money through buying your hardware, but do our own support if you don't want to take care of it. The Concordance community will be happy, and I'm certain other groups of users of your hardware will, too. I doubt this always means going as far as sharing system schematics, full hardware specs or whatnot. It just means letting us know what we need to know to use the devices to their full potential.

Logitech and others currently have a great opportunity in doing a stellar job at fostering communities of users based around their products, which would not only serve as to possibly have more users, but also as a great example on how a company can succeed by leveraging not just the buying power of users, but also their willingness to support each other directly. Am I dreaming or at the very least, this could me relatively fewer expenses on support, with very little effort in sharing some information?

As for current solutions to accessing the website, Moonlight could have been a possibility, but under Ubuntu Natty I didn't even have that choice. I think the website bailed out just because I run Firefox 4.

Booting to ISO images from a USB key

2010-10-12T17:15:00.001-04:00

I'm pretty sure this has been done before (I recall seeing a blog post about it... if you're the one who posted on Planet Ubuntu with a similar howto, let me know as I want to talk to you, at least to say thanks), but here it is anyway:

A couple of days ago I wrote this quick script to generate a roughly correct grub.cfg from the contents of a directory filled with .iso files. The goal: generate a USB bootable key that runs GRUB and allows you to choose which ISO to boot. It could be Ubuntu desktop, netbook, etc, doesn't matter, as long as you have enough room on the key.

This is done by leveraging the loopback grub command and the isoscan parameter. But first, setting it up...

You'll need (to):

one free USB key, formatted to vfat (mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sdX1) the more space the better
create a directory called "iso" on it

install grub on it:

grub-install --root-directory=/media/MOUNTPOINT /dev/sdX

this will create the boot/grub directories and install everything grub needs

copy iso files to the iso/ directory
run update-grub.py (available in bzr branch: lp:~mathieu-tl/+junk/bootable-iso-usb) from the key's mountpoint

Careful: it's only quickly tested, and overwrites boot/grub/grub.cfg from the current working directory.

Sorry for the unimaginative naming of the script.

In short, this script attempts to guess what kind of distribution is in the ISO file. I've tested desktop and alternate with success, both seem to boot and properly get you to an install (or for desktop, "maybe-ubiquity", which means you'll get a prompt for whether you want to run the live session or just ubiquity to install). All this needed was to make use of the iso naming scheme and more importantly of the contents of the ISO files, as read by isoinfo (from the genisoimage package).

Even if it never ends up being of any use, it was at least a fun little thing to write.

Videotron Huawei E1381 USB 3G dongle

2010-09-28T22:24:00.000-04:00

I've been fortunate enough today to be lended a Huawei E1381 3G USB modem. I'm happy to report all I had to do was to plug it in to my Aspire One running Maverick UNE and confirm it was immediately recognized and available in NetworkManager.

What's more, Videotron's new 3G offering is already available from the mobile-broadband-provider-info package, so you can already plug in such a key, create a new 3G connection in NM and select Videotron as the ISP to quickly get online!

Needless to say, this is pretty good news knowing the current developments in 3G offerings in the province of Quebec; so thanks to all those involved to make this available :)

As I side note, I'll be going to UDS-N in October, and I'm very interested to know about your success stories or even failure stories about 3G modems. I can't promise anything, but I *do* think it would be great to get a good grasp of what 3G devices are supported or not. So if you own a 3G USB dongle which still doesn't work in Maverick and you are going to UDS, don't hesitate to ping me on IRC or stop me IRL so we can look into it.

I may write up a wiki page with devices which are known to work (or not to work), so stay tuned for an update on this subject.

Looking back over the past few months...

2010-09-14T15:15:00.001-04:00

I'm pretty new as a Canonical employee overall, only having been with the company for about 7 months, but I must say I'm really thrilled to be part of a large gang of people so involved in making Ubuntu great; with so much pride in all the work accomplished. If there's one thing that has been constantly motivating me, it has to be the prospect of working every day with the community and with other Canonical employees on making Ubuntu better.

Certifying hardware

In the past seven months, I've been working as a Hardware Certification Engineer in the Montreal office. What does that mean? Well it's pretty simple: testing, testing, testing, automation, testing.

Yup. Testing. The hardware certification team is pretty much the group bringing you your daily Dell deals from behind the scenes, driving the testing efforts to make sure you can get systems available from large manufacturers such as Toshiba, Dell, HP, no matter if they are desktops, laptops or server. Getting the Big Orange Stamp of Approval(tm) on these systems so that you can get them with Ubuntu pre-installed, and truly get support from our excellent Support team (many of them working from Montreal too!).

What this truly meant for me was tons and tons of learning, with lots of experience gained. I've been identifying a lot of kernel bugs, installer issues, etc. I've learned way more about casper than I had ever dreamed :)

There was obviously not just testing involved, as there were some times where I needed to track down the location of systems, deal with manufacturers on how to get a new system from them to our labs, or quickly work with the OEM teams to get new offerings (and for that, new certified systems) out of the door. We've been privileged enough to have lots of systems shipped to us, which has always been one of the most valuable things manufacturers and distributors could do to help the Ubuntu community. I hope we still get so keen support for years to come.

On top of it all was automation of various testing efforts, one of which being maintenance of the amazing piece of work Marc Tardif started with checkbox and the kickstart / preseed systems that make daily testing possible for the many systems in the Canonical certification labs.

When you look for a cool new computer to run Ubuntu on next time, make sure you take a look at the Certification website: webapps.ubuntu.com/certification. You'll undoubtedly be happy you did.

On the side

I haven't only ever been doing certification testing. Part of the real cool things about Canonical is the fact that being involved in a lot of things, being passionate about what we do, is truly encouraged. In fact, it really couldn't be otherwise.

I've done as much as I could to help with the ISO testing efforts whenever there was some free time. This has been truly a lot of fun as well, and certainly of use, since I do have an ESX server accessible for testing Server images (especially JeOS installs), some systems on which to try out Wubi, and a lot of interest in EC2 and cloud computing.

My work day rarely ever stopped when I got out of the office. Part of why I joined Canonical may have been my involvement in the Ubuntu Quebec LoCo team, organizing events and trying to motivate people to contribute to Ubuntu. I'm still as involved in the LoCo team as ever, and I'm always very happy to help people with their issues on IRC as much as on the ubuntu-qc mailing list, or even in person at the various events Ubuntu-Quebec or other Linux user groups have organized in Montreal. I've even started an Ubuntu Hour gathering in Longueuil, though to my chagrin, I've rarely had much company. I'm at least happy to have been able to use that time to get stuff done on other projects and to answer mailing list postings.

I've also been reasonably active in the Debian community, and still working towards becoming an official Debian developer (if you are a DD and would be so kind as to sign my GPG key, please ping me on IRC :). I've been maintaining concordance and congruity, two applications to control and program Logitech Harmony remotes (one CLI, one GUI), the GNU Accounting Utilities (acct), the Ethos libary (a plugin framework), as well as the Emerillon map viewer for GNOME (with the help of the Debian GNOME team. Thanks!).

And now

Those who know me well know how strong I feel about one of my favorite projects: NetworkManager. In order to further my involvement in Ubuntu and help out NetworkManager, but also other projects, and truly help making Ubuntu rock yet even more, I've just started in the Canonical Desktop team. I'm thrilled to join the others who bring you cool new toys and two (and more) awesome desktop environments with every new release.

For the future

My task won't only be to maintain NetworkManager, but also to work on maintaining ConnMan and making sure it's truly usable and useful for Ubuntu users. The rest of the stack underlying these two beasts won't be spared: I look forward to help bringing the hot new features of wpasupplicant, mobile-broadband-provider-info, isc-dhcp (version 4, nothing less!) to Ubuntu, as well as ensuring all of these won't descend in bug hell.

Another aspect of it will be helping out on the maintenance of Firefox and Chromium.

There isn't a whole lot more I can add about this, but I'm very happy I can lend a hand to Chris Coulson and the others from the Canonical Desktop Team but also everyone in the community contributing to and working on the above products. It's truly a daunting task to maintain all of these systems with so many moving parts, but I wake up every day looking forward to what I'll be doing, and certain I'll enjoy every part of it.

Broadcom driver now open source

2010-09-10T14:20:00.000-04:00

This has been brought to my attention today. I see this as a huge win for Ubuntu, since, let's face it, Broadcom devices are a large part of the WiFi device ecosystem. I'm happy to see Broadcom finally publishing some of their source code, and through this helping out Linux users of all distributions get better working WiFi. I see this as a win for Ubuntu in general because it will always make me happier to see people having fewer issues with wireless devices. This also translates to less wheel-spinning with broken drivers we could not possibly fix (since they are closed source), towards more productive work on other aspects of Ubuntu... or just a better chance of fixing driver issues :)

Of course, this is a work in progress and not all Broadcom devices are currently supported by this driver, but I believe that in due time, Broadcom could become one of the golden examples we can give to hardware manufacturers on how to provide the best kind of support they can to the Linux community.

Read more about this on Slashdot, OSNews, or read the annoucement on the Linux Wireless mailing list.

Thanks Broadcom!

Ubuntu Global Jam in Montreal: help testing and fixing bugs in Maverick

2010-08-25T11:06:00.000-04:00

We're doing it again!

Here in Montreal we're just about ready to start jamming this weekend. Rooms have been confirmed, and we already have a fair amount of interest from what I can see in the LoCo directory event listing! We're also happy to have been sharing ideas and plans with txwikinger who's been organizing the Global Jam event in the Waterloo/Kitchener area in Ontario.

Do you want to help make Ubuntu better?
Do you look forward to meeting some of the people who do testing, triaging and bug fixing on Ubuntu in Montreal, and maybe ask them to look at your own little pet-peeve bugs?

Then come join us at the SupInfo Montréal offices this Saturday, starting from 9am! All you need to bring is a computer and willingness to participate. :)

	SupInfo Montréal
	752 Rue Sherbrooke Ouest
	Montreal
	Canada
	http://www.supinfo.com/en/News0eaaf665-d9bf-4563-befb-ac97f8b035c2.aspx

If you choose to pass by, please let us know by registering for the event on the LoCo Directory... just so we know roughly how many people to expect.

You can get all of the information about our event on the QuebecTeam wiki: QuebecTeam/GlobalJam.

As a side note, we should have a local archive mirror, and copies of maverick and lucid ISO images. I've spent the past weeks preparing it on a portable USB hard drive, after getting some help in starting from Dustin Kirkland. Thanks Dustin!

Wubi: installing Ubuntu inside Windows

2010-06-28T14:48:00.009-04:00

Do you know about Wubi?

Wubi is a very nice tool if you want to try out Ubuntu for the first time. It allows you to install Ubuntu alongside Windows, without re-partitioning your hard-drive. All this from the CD-ROM if you load it in computer while Windows is running, or downloadable as a standalone app.

The Ubuntu QA team is always looking for help to test installing Ubuntu using Wubi. It's both a great way to try Ubuntu if you really still need to run Windows on your computer and want to help out with testing Ubuntu, or as any kind of first jump into testing and QA. Testing efforts are being tracked on the Ubuntu ISO Tracker. If you want to help, please read the documentation first.

So if you chose to download Wubi's standalone application, double-click on its icon, or load in the Ubuntu CD-ROM you may have just burned (or received from shipit or your LoCo team).

If you're using a CD-ROM, Wubi should start automatically (or in Windows 7, you should see an autorun dialog).

The install application gives you three choices. The first one being to reboot your system and use the CD-ROM directly to demo and install Ubuntu, the third sends you to the Ubuntu website.

For the purpose of this post I will instead walk you through option 2, which is to install Ubuntu alongside Windows, from within Windows.

You will then be presented with all the questions that make sure the installer knows everything it needs to know about the installation of Ubuntu you want to do. Choose your username, password, and where you want to install Ubuntu (which Windows harddrive, C:, D:, or whatever), what language you want to see Ubuntu in, etc.

If you're using the standalone Wubi app, you will need to wait a bit while the Ubuntu CD ISO image is being downloaded. The image is necessary, as the standalone app does not contain the required packages for the install.

Wubi will then proceed to the next part of the installation, which is to copy everything it needs to your hard drive in a ubuntu folder on the hard drive you selected in the preceeding screen.

Once the first part of the installation is over, select what you want to do... my preference is to reboot right away and carry on with the rest of the installation procedure.

Once your computer has booted, you will be presented with a menu. That menu will time out and default to Windows after a few seconds. Choose Ubuntu to continue with the installation.

You are now booting into the real thing: at this point you are in Ubuntu, but the installation isn't quite done yet, so grab a (quick) coffee while the last tidbits get copied and configured.

At the end of the second part of the installation, your computer will reboot again, present you again with the first menu where you will want to choose Ubuntu, and show an additional menu where you can choose to start Ubuntu in recovery mode, should you need to fix a broken installation. From there, you can also go back to Windows.

Voilà, the installation is done. At this point, all that is left to do is click on your username in the lis and enter the password you chose back in Windows during the first phase of the installation to get to the Ubuntu desktop.

HP Mini netbooks mic/headphones adapter

2010-06-15T08:55:00.009-04:00

Engineers at HP have been having these wonderful ideas in hope of saving space (I guess). On some of their netbooks, in particular the Mini 1000, there is only one 3.5mm port to be used for both the microphone and headphones.

I needed to tests this system in order to confirm the status of bug #532958. If you're like me and didn't get an adapter with the system, here is how you can make one.

Requirements:

1 cable: 3 RCA plugs to one 4-channel 3.5mm plug - costs about 2$ to 10$
2 1/8 (3.5mm) female jack, of the type you prefer (I used chassis) - cost less than a dollar each

Process:

Note the type of cable I'm using: it is somewhat important. You could of course use any type of cable with at least 3 wires, but you would then have to find a 4-channel 3.5mm plug, which is a little less easy to find. This cable already has it, so just remove the RCA plugs, and skin these ends to reveal the signal wire and ground.

You'll want to then attach the wires to the 3.5mm jacks as shown in the pictures below.

Headphone end: use the yellow and red RCA wires. Attach the colored wires to the ring and tip (the name for the metal tabs that carry actual signal when everything is connected, at the bottom of the jack), then attach both ground wires to the ground tab (the tab sticking out to the side).

Microphone end: use the white RCA wire, attach to either the ring or tip, then ground it.

Result:

If the jacks aren't properly grounded or the RCA cable you have used uses a different pinout, you will get no sound, or mono sound, or just very low volume. If so, detach everything and start over, maybe using different color mixes.

Once done correctly, you will retain stereo sound for the headphones, and will be able to use an external microphone, though the internal mic is disabled when this adapter is connected and the setting in Sound Input is at "Microphone". To use the internal microphone instead, you would want to use "Line Input"... but then you probably don't need this adapter and would be better off using standard headphones.

Note: after more research, I found out that an iPhone headset might be the easiest way to go. I however do not own an iPhone, and only found out after finishing up the adapter.

If you're filing bugs: please don't be selfish!

2010-05-18T17:13:00.005-04:00

<rant>

If you're filing bugs, I understand that you feel strongly about the issues you're seeing, and that you feel like your problem is important and deserves immediate attention. I also want "my" bugs to be dealt with as soon as possible, and as a Ubuntu contributor I also want *your* bugs to be fixed in a timely manner. However, you usually should not just add information to an existing bug because the symptoms are vaguely similar.

My point is, if you're seeing that something is wrong with your hardware (because this type of issue is quite frequent with hardware-related bugs), please don't hesitate to open a new bug. Developers will often be quite pleased that you did, and will be happy to mark something as a duplicate of another bug for you. Other bug reporters will also be happier, because it allows their own, often unrelated issue to be dealt with rapidly. Your own bug will also likely be fixed earlier, since developers need to sift through less information related to a specific issue: they then need to decide whether a specific attachment or comment is relevant in far fewer cases.

It just helps making the experience more enjoyable to everyone.

Also, if you're suggesting in a bug report against a specific package to use another package, you're not being helpful. Sure, you help the reporter by fixing their immediate problem, but you're not helping the underlying issues being resolved. What we want is to have all projects improve and squash their bugs, which cannot be done if you, say, suggest using Wicd in a bug against NetworkManager for a broken wifi driver.

I like both of these projects, I want both to succeed equally, which means that bugs need to be reported and respected so that we can fix the issues that arise and deliver a better user experience to everyone; while allowing all projects to grow and improve. This is what suggesting that project X is a failure (that's usually not the words used, but you get the idea), and that project Y is better (because it doesn't have that specific issue), will never achieve.

It all boils down to being nice to others. Nice to other bug reporters, because everyone has the same chance of getting their bugs fixed, and nice to other projects because they all get their share of bugs and success stories.

</rant>

You're invited: Montreal Lucid Lynx release party!

2010-04-27T12:05:00.005-04:00

The Ubuntu-Quebec team is having a party here in Montreal (and in other cities too!!!) once more, this time to celebrate the release of Lucid Lynx. This will once again be held at the Bar Le Saint-Sulpice:

Bar Le Saint-Sulpice
1680, Saint-Denis,
Montréal, Québec,
H2X3K6,
514 844-9458

Everyone's invited to join us there this Thursday, April 29th.

Lots of people have already either RSVP'd using the wonderful LoCo Directory event pages, and many others have confirmed their presence already...

There's going to be a couple of other parties going on this time in the province: another one in Montreal on May 20th, Dummondville and Quebec city on the 5th and 6th of May; if you want to know more, don't hesitate to visit our wiki page for the Lucid release parties organized by Ubuntu-Quebec: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QuebecTeam/LucidParty

Join us and have a chance to meet other Ubuntu enthusiasts like you :)

In retrospect: the good and the bad about the Global Jam event in Montreal

2010-04-07T17:00:00.004-04:00

Well, it's better late than never. The bad is obviously how it has taken me more than a week to get to writing this blog post about how well our Global Jam event went :)

Seriously though, I did notice there were slightly fewer people this time around, but this can be inputed to a number of variables, so I really have no reason to complain, we had a great time, found a great number of bugs that were reported (and/or triaged), and it's essentially a clear success. Thanks to all those who participated in making this a great event.

If you want to look at the pictures for our event, you can see them here. There was also a live video made by r2mxr, but I can't find the link to it anymore... I promise I will update about it soon.

Thanks to Fabian Rodriguez and David Bensimon who joined in and helped out a lot in finding bugs, testing, reproducing, and confirming bugs.

Thanks to Philippe Gauthier who did a terrific job at a number of things, including setting, at least in my eyes, the record for the quickest testing process ever. Wine with a Windows app, as well as other Linux applications installed in record time :)

Obviously, thanks to the presenters for a great time: Ronan Jouchet, Michael Faille, Jeff Fortin... You did great, and I learned a lot. I'm sure a lot of others did as well.

Thanks to the SUPInfo students for visiting, you boosted our numbers and gave us a new and different outlook on various issues, which was a clear benefit.

Thanks to ETS, and in particular to Oleg Litvinsky for doing an awesome job at the logistics. I've never seen a room get set up so fast, I felt useless :)

Finally, thanks to those who came in to join us to see presentations or help out with bugs, it was great to see you all and meet new people, or others who we discuss with on the mailing list but rarely have a chance to talk to, face-to-face.

News about the Global Jam in Montreal

2010-03-22T14:46:00.008-04:00

I'm amazed by the amount of interest we're gathering here in Montreal for the Global Jam and the new version Ubuntu in general. I'm very eager to put in lots of work on triaging and helping people understand how to create packages or prepare patches to packages, but I've been contacted by a few people and thought it would be good to share on the awesome presentations and presenters we'll be able to see here this weekend:

A presentation MythTV and video capture, by Marc-André Gingras
Club Capra / a robotics project that was migrated from Windows to Ubuntu, and how that was done, by Michael Faille
An overview of PiTiVi and video edition, by Jeff Fortin (surely along with a bug jam blitz on PiTiVi?)
A presentation on UbuntuStudio, JACK, and Ardour; by Ronan Jouchet

To get all the juicy details, check out https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QuebecTeam/GlobalJam10.03

I seriously can't wait until Friday!

A Global Jam event in Montreal again

2010-03-09T09:00:00.005-05:00

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!

2010-03-07T18:40:00.002-05:00

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

2009-12-10T09:18:00.004-05:00

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

2009-11-28T21:12:00.003-05:00

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

2009-11-12T00:03:00.002-05:00

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

2009-10-28T09:24:00.003-04:00

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

2009-10-26T23:22:00.002-04:00

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

2009-10-19T15:54:00.004-04:00

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.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://www.onlinux.ca" target="olf"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;img src="http://www.onlinux.ca/files/OLF480x60.jpg" alt="Ontario GNU Linux Fest 2009. Register Now!" &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

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

2009-10-14T20:47:00.003-04:00

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

2009-10-06T15:48:00.005-04:00

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 :)

Ubuntu Global Jam in Montreal, this weekend

2009-09-30T17:25:00.005-04:00

There's really only a couple of hours left until our Global Jam event in Montreal kicks off: a truly awesome setup, that can be run thanks to the amazing help of komputes and the rooms gratiously granted to us by the ETS (École de Technologie Supérieure), GULL-ETS, and Clod Patry. Thanks all.

So this is my official invitation: are you an Ubuntu enthusiast in the region of Montreal? Are you interested in helping out fixing bugs, getting to know more about your favorite OS or even just getting to know what all this fuss with "Linux" and "Ubuntu" is about?

Then come join us at ÉTS, for this three-day event: we've got all kinds of really cool stuff planned, as well as interesting presentations on packaging, bug triage, Asterisk, to only name a few. I'll be presenting on a couple of subjects myself, such as sysadmin tools and helping out with coding.

Here's the deal:

École de technologie supérieure (http://www.etsmtl.ca/)
October 2 (16h to 23h), and 3-4 (12h to 18h),
1100 rue Notre-Dame Ouest
Salles/Rooms A-1300 et A-1238
More information at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QuebecTeam/GlobalJam2009

Everyone is welcome!

My Ubuntu development tools

2009-09-08T22:43:00.003-04:00

This is another post about my work towards becoming MOTU.

I've been working a lot on various packages, such as network-manager, concordance, and more recently acct and acct-ng. On the way, you always get to know more, and following the spirit of open source, I've decided to share what I've learned.

Since I've started to do packaging work, I've been keeping various little configuration files around to tweak the behaviour of the various utilities we get to use daily. I've been keeping all those in a 'junk' bazaar repository, but it's getting much less like 'junk' and more like something actually usable, so I'm publishing it:

lp:~mathieu-tl/+junk/development-tools

It's a branch new branches that contains the very latest version of all the config I've been using, including some aliases I usually always have set on my systems. I will be keeping all the files up to date there from now on, so you will likely see things evolve over time.

Here's what I have in there:

A .pbuilderrc file: it allows me to specify DIST=karmic (or sid or whatever else) at the command line, and also makes use of mini-dinstall to quickly build packages and changes the packages available when running builds. As such, the following command will build a package for karmic:

sudo DIST=karmic pbuild build glittering_new_package.dsc

Just as this line will build the same package for jaunty (provided all is well):

sudo DIST=jaunty pbuild build glittering_new_package.dsc

.mini-dinstall.conf : The second part to the above. Specifies some rules for mini-dinstall (requires creating /var/cache/archive...)
.dput.cf has the last part of this stuff, or where to put packages, and how to let mini-dinstall know about them
.dput.cf also knows how to push source packages to PPAs, as well as to mentors.debian.org.
.quiltrc : to make pretty patches. Then you can make them follow DEP3 too.
.selected_editor : because I just really love vim.
.bazaar/builddeb.conf : tweaks to directories used by bzr bd.
.ssh/config : very nice and time-saving tweaks to SSH.
.shell* files : they contain additional aliases, shell functions, and variables that are either extremely useful (at least to me) or just plain mandatory for anyone serious in doing packaging, such as DEBFULLNAME, DEBEMAIL, or BZR_EMAIL.

Oh yeah, and you might want to change those last three variables to your own values in .shell_custom_vars... :)

All that includes a quick README file, but essentially it's a matter of dropping the files in your home directory and logging in and out, or closing and reopening a terminal. All the shell stuff works by including .shell_custom_start somewhere in your profile.

If you find stuff that you think is totally wrong or needs more work, please let me know. There is still a lot of room for improvement.

Mentoring + Ubuntu Developer Week

2009-08-29T10:09:00.002-04:00

Needless to say, I'm going to Ubuntu Developer Week. Sadly, this time my IRC participation will be limited given that I'll be at work, and thus unable to connect. I'm still very eager to take a look at the chat histories that will be posted after the sessions. It all sounds really interesting.

Also, timing couldn't be better for more interesting learning stuff to come up. I recently sent an e-mail to Ubuntu Mentors, asking for help in looking at different things, such as NetworkManager. It turns out that I will be working with Alexander Sack.

So far, I've been looking at two things: building the network-manager-openconnect package, and looking at network-manager bugs.

The bugs are bugging me somewhat. There's quite a lot to look at, and some of the stuff just seems so obscure. Still, I think I'm still getting better at sorting bugs.

Then there's building the network-manager-openconnect package. It seems to build fine-ish, but I get some weird errors when I try to enable a VPN connection -- but I think I'm close to figuring it out.

Ubuntu Developer Week coming up!

2009-08-17T11:06:00.003-04:00

As Daniel Holbach is announcing in his blog, an all new Ubuntu Developer Week is coming up soon. It will be held from from Monday, 31st August 2009 to Friday, 4th September 2009.

Ubuntu Developer Week is a great way to get to know more of the inner workings of Ubuntu. Plus, it's always packed with incredible talks about various subjects: check out the timetable.

You may also want to take a look at the brochure if you want to know how or where to start developing for Ubuntu.

Subjects announced obviously follow the latest developments in the community, so we'll get to know about fun stuff like Quickly, Papercuts, Mago, as well as lots about Launchpad.

Process Accounting data

2009-08-07T13:32:00.008-04:00

I've been working since yesterday on a very interesting project: dealing with process accounting data, in the context of PCI-DSS compliance.

Process accounting is quite interesting because of how it's done. Here's a gross over-simplification, so sorry if I'm explaining it all wrong: the kernel, if it has "BSD Process accounting" enabled (and/or "version 3", as it is in Ubuntu, or at least on my Karmic system), waits for a special signal for userland to turn on process accounting and start writing binary data to a file on the filesystem.

But let's back up a little. What is this process accounting stuff?

Process accounting is a feature that allows you to track every command ever run on a system by any user. As the name says, it helps to "account" for all actions on a system and potentially know about actions that should not have occurred (say, a system that was compromised), or a command that caused an outage and it must be tracked down to who was responsible for an evil evil intervention on a production system without advising anybody... it requires both a kernel piece and a userland piece.

By default, on most systems, the kernel will already have everything enabled to support process accounting. You will only need to install the userland software.

On Ubuntu, you can achieve this with the command:

sudo apt-get install acct

On Fedora system, you can get the same result with this command:

yum install psacct

Once that is done, you will run 'sudo /etc/init.d/acct start' on Ubuntu, or 'service psacct start' on Fedora to start the process accounting (give the go to the kernel to write in the data file).

This is where things get complicated. I've searched a little for newer, more versatile tools to handle the binary data spewed out by my systems. It turns out that while acct (or psacct), in other words the GNU Accounting Utilities are great, they tend to be the only option for dealing with the kernel's data, and pretty much also force you to physically connect to a system in order to search for the information you want. Needless to say, this can tend to be problematic (say the system is now completely broken... what can you do?). It also brings up the issue that in the event of a compromise of the system, you can no longer trust the system, or the files it contains -- not even the accounting data. Backups are an option, so is rsync, but we were looking for something better. Something that would send to syslog for example, to be integrated into Splunk or some alerting utilities, to both centralize and potentially render the data as read-only as it could get.

That's where my scripts come in.

I've been busy writing a replacement for the lastcomm command as well as something to grab the data from the binary file and feed it into syslog. I've called it acct2syslog.pl.

This is still very early and experimental work, but I already have a Bazaar branch for it. Check it the Launchpad page! If you're interested in helping out, feel free to send me an email or message on IRC.

Obviously, I can't account for performance at this time. I just don't know how well it will deal with a system if there are thousands of commands running really fast. :)

Ottawa Linux Symposium 2009 in Montreal - interesting tidbits

2009-06-29T12:32:00.002-04:00

Hey, it seems Canonical is a sponsor for the Linux Symposium 2009!

Thanks Canonical for helping out and contributing to events around here too!

Does that mean we'll see some Ubuntu rock stars at the conference? :)

Linux Symposium 2009

2009-06-22T12:08:00.002-04:00

Another Linux conference is coming up soon.

The famous Linux Symposium, in its 2009 edition will be held in Montreal this time, at the Centre Mont-Royal, from July 13 to July 17 2009.

It is a world-class event at which a good number of developers, especially those interested in the Linux kernel, will be present.

A lot of very interesting presentations are already scheduled, you can view the full schedule here.

There is still time to register for the conference.

I definitely know that while I'm not presenting anything and I am far from being a kernel hacker, I'm already planning to spend the entire week at the conference... I already took the days off :)

Let me quote from the website's FAQ page:

What is the Linux Symposium?

The Linux Symposium is a Linux developers conference that takes place every year in Canada. The main focus of the event is the Linux kernel and the technologies closely related to the kernel. There is no trade show floor at the Symposium and very little overt marketing presence.

I am not a kernel hacker, will I be out of place?

While the general focus of the event is the Linux Kernel all your need to take advantage of the event is a strong interest in Operating Systems technology and development. Yes many of our attendees are kernel hackers; but many are just Linux enthusiasts; userspace hackers, and system administrators.

I look forward to seeing lots of people there!

concordance now in Debian NEW queue!

2009-06-18T17:50:00.002-04:00

Hi!

For those interested, my efforts to package concordance and congruity, the CLI and GUI tools to configure a Logitech Harmony remote are finally starting to pay off!

concordance has been accepted from the Debian-mentors repo and uploaded to the Debian NEW queue! Big thanks to Patrick Matthäi for his guidance.

That said, it means that concordance will hopefully soon also be in Ubuntu. (and it was also in REVU. Thanks to all those who reviewed it and posted comments. They were all very helpful.)

Now, I'm still having some issues packaging the newest version of congruity, or more precisely getting an error in the package after it's installed. Something that I believe is related to python-wxgtk2.8-0, about 'AttributeError: 'BoxSizer' object has no attribute 'AddStretchSpacer''. I just haven't had much luck it finding out what dependency I had wrong or missing...

Fortunately, the packages are also very much reachable in case you want to try them: check out my PPA, at https://edge.launchpad.net/~mathieu-tl/+archive/ppa.

Visite du projet Byobu

2009-05-25T20:12:00.007-04:00

Si vous utilisez souvent votre système Linux en mode texte, vous connaissez probablement GNU/Screen. Il s'agit d'un gestionnaire de fenêtre texte très avancé qui permet de démarrer une session, la détacher, puis la rattacher plus tard et revenir où la session était rendue -- que ce soit directement sur la même machine, ou alors à distance. Pour plus d'information sur GNU/Screen lui-même, consultez la Présentation de GNU/Screen, par Labo Linux.

Si vous utilisez régulièrement Screen, vous serez heureux d'apprendre que celui-ci a été agrémenté officiellement depuis Jaunty d'un paquet voué à son extension: screen-profiles.

screen-profiles, créé par Dustin Kirkland, développeur pour Ubuntu, est un amalgame d'un nombre de scripts voués à rendre plus simple l'utilisation de screen, ainsi qu'à fournir à ses utilisateurs de nombreux petits outils pour simplifier la vie, et rendre la configuration de screen plus simple.

screen-profiles (et son supplément, screen-profiles-extras) peuvent être installés par la commande suivante:

sudo apt-get install screen-profiles screen-profiles-extras

Une fois installé, vous pourrez lancer screen; et après avoir choisi le profile de départ, appuyez sur F9 pour pouvoir configurer l'interface. Les deux lignes du bas servent à présenter les fenêtres possibles et les notifications.

Le menu de configuration permet d'afficher l'aide, modifier le thème utilisé, les raccourcis clavier, les notifications au bas de l'écran, les fenêtres et les paramètres de démarrage.

Par défaut, trois thèmes sont disponibles avec le paquet screen-profiles: light, dark, et black. Les thèmes additionnels présentés dans l'écran ci-dessous proviennent de screen-profiles-extras.

Après modification des options, vous devrez appuyer sur F5 puis Enter pour recharger la configuration.

Le résultat est affiché ici, avec le thème dark-blue.

Enfin, d'ici la sortie de Karmic, les paquets à utiliser seront renommés à byobu et byobu-extras suivant le changement de nom du projet screen-profiles pour byobu...

Vous trouverez la page Launchpad du projet ici: https://launchpad.net/byobu

Montreal and Quebec Release Parties

2009-04-20T20:04:00.003-04:00

If you're near Montreal or Quebec city, you're invited to celebrate the Ubuntu 9.04 release with us on April 30th.

Check out https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QuebecTeam/JauntyParty for the exact time and venues in Montreal and Quebec city!

[Sujet Avancé] Comment réparer une mise à jour ou installation brisée

2009-03-20T16:12:00.006-04:00

Deux cas récents que j'ai croisés sur la liste distribution Ubuntu-QC ainsi que dans les courriels de Launchpad Answers (étant contact d'aide via Ubuntu-QC également...) me poussent à écrire ce petit billet. Attention; il s'agit là de quelques incantations qui peuvent être grandement utiles, mais également un peu dangereuses si on ne fait pas attention -- l'idéal reste d'être au moins un peu familier avec la ligne de commande, ainsi qu'apt-get.

Les cas discutaient précisément de la marche à suivre pour réparer des erreurs de parcours au courant de l'installation de paquets. Le premier, "[Question #64628]: Comment je supprime un paquet mal installé?", et le second: "[Question #64490]: J'ai perdu KDE et GNOM, comment les retrouver". Le deuxième n'est pas complètement le même type de problème, mais assez semblable pour me faire penser à différents types d'erreur lors d'installations et de mises à jour.

Donc, pour réparer une installation incomplète, qui peut s'être mal déroulée à cause d'une mise à jour, d'un paquet défectueux, mal téléchargé, ou tout simplement critique mais pas disponible sur les miroirs, alors que apt-get ne veut plus rien savoir:

sudo dpkg --configure -a

Si vous voyez des messages d'erreurs évoquant une erreur de configuration, ou alors lors de l'installation d'un paquet, un autre (une dépendance) indique qu'il n'est pas configuré, c'est la commande dont vous avez besoin. De manière générale, cette commande s'assure que tous les paquets soient bien configurés après avoir été installés, ce qui inclue le dépaquetage de leurs fichiers de configuration ainsi que le démarrage des scripts post-installation.

sudo apt-get -f install

Cette commande vise à régler les problèmes éventuels qu'apt-get a pu rencontrer, généralement à propos de dépendances défectueuses. Souvent roulée à la suite de la commande précédente, car elle demande plus ou moins à apt-get de reprendre là où il était rendu. On peut parfois devoir donner un coup de main à apt-get en faisant manuellement un dpkg --remove d'un paquet défectueux ou partiellement installé.

Pour plus d'informations au sujets du système APT, consultez l'excellent manuel APT HOWTO (en français!) à http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/apt-howto/index.fr.html

Et juste parce que ces commandes existent:

mtrudel@athena:~$ apt-get moo
         (__)
         (oo)
   /------\/
  / |    ||  
 *  /\---/\
    ~~   ~~  
...."Have you mooed today?"...
mtrudel@athena:~$ apt-get help | grep Super
                       This APT has Super Cow Powers.

Likewise Open pour l'authentication Active Directory

2009-03-19T09:44:00.007-04:00

J'ai commencé depuis hier à travailler brièvement (à la demande de Jorge Castro) au tests de l'outil d'authentication à Active Directory distribué avec Ubuntu depuis Hardy. Les tests vont bon train, mais le plus important à y retenir est la facilité d'utilisation de Likewise pour joindre une machine à un domain Windows et bénéficier de l'authentication centralisée (et aussi d'authorisation Kerberos!)

Par exemple, une fois la machine ajoutée au domaine, qui n'est que de démarrer Likewise avec Système->Administration->Active Directory Integration et y entrer le nom du domaine, on peut facilement découvrir sur le réseau les serveurs de fichiers et postes de travail Windows disponibles, voir leurs répertoires partagés, et ce sans que le système ne demande de nom d'utilisateur et mot de passe, pour peut que vous ayez accès à ces partages.

Presque la même histoire pour ajouter des imprimantes, ou en utiliser. Le seul bémol est ici que le mot de passe est bel et bien demandé, mais avec la bonne configuration d'utilisateur déjà en place.

Il y a évidemment bien d'autres fonctions à utiliser avec AD sur un système Linux... Ce n'est qu'un exemple, et on est encore à identifier les cas d'utilisation qui seront systématiquement testés par l'équipe de QA.

Pour installer Likewise Open, vous n'avez qu'à installer le paquet likewise-open-gui, qui se chargera d'ajouter les dépendances. Il peut être installé grâce au menu Ajouter/supprimer... du menu Applications; puis chercher et sélectionner "Appartenance à un domaine Active Directory".

De plus, la version 5 de Likewise Open a récemment été attribuée une exemption au "Feature Freeze", ce qui veut dire qu'elle sera probablement incluse et également disponible, au même titre que la version 4 courante, pour l'installation une fois Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope officiellement lancé. Même histoire à ce niveau -- Je n'ai jusqu'à maintenant pas trouvé de différences visibles.

Canadian Government's RFI on Open Source

2009-02-09T08:13:00.003-05:00

Interestingly enough, the Government of Canada's Public Works and Government Services offices have posted a request for information on the MERX website. While this doesn't actually mean that they are already looking for software for specific tasks, they are definitely taking a look at comments from the industry regarding the use of open source or free software. Some of the terms in this RFI may be slightly wrong, since it mentions free (as in money) software, but not software were the source code is necessarily freely available. Nonetheless, it does show how recent efforts such as the petition that was sent to the Government of Quebec regarding its policy on open source software, as well as FACIL's lawsuit targetted at the same government have been effective.

ArsTechnica speaks more about the RFI, which is among other things a nice idea on how to deal with cutting costs in these troubled economic times.

The RFI is up on MERX and open for response until February 19th.

Thanks to the guys on the Ubuntu-Quebec mailing list for bringing this to my attention :)

New toys

2009-01-24T13:46:00.004-05:00

I bought a digital camera yesterday. The Canon Rebel XS, with a 18-55mm lens. It was a pretty nice deal from Staples, so I'm quite happy with this so far. The picture quality is impressive, and it's easy enough to use for a DSLR.

I took the first opportunity I could to take a few shots and try out this nice little program available in the repositories: Hugin. It is a very complete and pretty simple tool for compositing images and creating panoramas.

Past the first little hurdle where Hugin was trying to use 'autopano-sift', which although it seems installed since the package exists, it looks like I needed to change the configuration to just using 'autopano'. After taking four quick pictures, one with the full-automatic settings, and three more with the automatically-detected shutter speed and aperture set manually, and selecting a few common points between each pictures, I was able to get an almost-perfect panoramic picture of my street.

Some things to keep in mind: keep a somewhat constant overlap between pictures, don't trust the wizard for finding the common points -- they won't.

Sadly, I once again had issues with using just a USB cable to connect my camera to Jaunty. Same thing as with the other camera I had tried before. Fortunately, I could download the pictures directly from the SD card, and F-spot happily imported my pictures from that point.

To use hugin, you will likely want to install the hugin, hugin-tools, enblend and autopano-sift packages.

Status Update

2009-01-22T13:19:00.003-05:00

Concordance and congruity are still being worked on in terms of packaging, so if you own a Logitech Harmony remote that you'd like to be able to configure via Linux, please take a look at my PPA for updated packages! I'll definitely take any help available to help test the packages, the software, and eventually get the packages into Ubuntu.

On the same note, I've setup an ITP bug for those two packages, and I have started work on including them in Debian as well. I've uploaded the packages ([1][2]) on to REVU a few minutes ago, and hopefully can get some tips and reviews from there too.

It's like Christmas again here. I received 4 10/100 blades, as well as a new Supervisor 2 engine to put in one of the Cisco 6506's, and was able to get it to fully POST, boot, and work -- also found out in the process that the backplace of the other is likely somewhat broken. I'm guessing that it's not big news to a lot of people, but screen supports making serial-based connections to devices, so minicom is much less necessary than it used to be. The greatest thing of this, is that screen is included by default in Ubuntu, which makes it perfect for system administrators to be able to connect a serial device to just about any Ubuntu system to be able to reach a serial console. With the work currently being done by Dustin Kirkland on screen-profiles (and the fact that the package is in Jaunty!), screen is likely going to be even more awesome very soon.

More Linux-supported hardware

2009-01-17T22:29:00.005-05:00

I went to buy new USB thumb drives for work this morning, considering I've had to do some work lately that requires transferring data from highly secured machines and there wasn't really any better option...

Anyway, went to the one of the obvious places for office supplies: Staples, or actually "Bureau en Gros" here in Quebec. Found exactly what I was looking for: the SanDisk Cruzer Micro Skin is the perfect size, only very slightly larger than the actual USB connector, which makes it perfect for these thight places like the back of a server, or when connectors are too close together. It so happens that the Cruzer Micro Skin is also supported on Linux, which seems kind of obvious, but SanDisk actually took the time to show it on the packaging, which is great. Here's a shot of the relative size of the USB drive with it's protective shield and cap, and without:

And here are the pictures of the front of the packaging, the back, and a close-up of the signs on the back:

Notice how happy Tux is that his face is on hardware packaging! Also disregard the poor quality of the pictures, I'm far from good with this camera. I was pretty surprised to notice the Tux logo on the back of the packages, and frankly, although I was already sure any USB key would work, I was happy that SanDisk took the time to show it on the boxes.

On the other hand, I had quite a lot of trouble getting these pictures off the camera and on my computer. The camera's USB connection was not working properly on my desktop computer running Jaunty, so I tried on my work laptop which I had also just upgraded, but I had the same problems. I reinstalled my laptop with Intrepid to make sure things would work again properly. The exact error was about devices showing up multiple times, and the device not being loaded properly to either display reliably in the file manager with gvfs, or to be captured by F-Spot to import the pictures. The same camera and task however runs just fine in Intrepid.

That said, I very much like the new volume controls on Jaunty. They work pretty well past the initial sound level issues, and much simplify working with multiple hardware sound devices.

Cisco 6506 recovery

2009-01-06T15:40:00.002-05:00

Last night I did the bare metal recovery of a Cisco 6506 that we salvaged from an old company. I got two systems, one of them I had some trouble with, and ultimately wouldn't boot and complain about the backplane.

Trying to fix the problem, I accidentally deleted the good firmware image and the system wouldn't even boot anymore, stuck at the ROMMON prompt.

So to recovery a system from the ROMMON prompt, there's a quick way to work. Quick being a relative word, considering it still means easily half an hour to 40 minutes of work.

So, from there you just have to push a new image to memory using a serial cable. Needless to say, this is time consuming.

What I did was run the 'xmodem -cys 38400' command, put minicom from the 9600 speed to 38400, and fire away a new firmware image (CatOS 5-4-3 actually). The benefit of running xmodem with the -y and -s 38400 switches are increased speed as compared to standard xmodem (because you tell it to use the enhanced ymodem protocol) which would be forced to run at the standard console speed of 9600 for this type of system.

As an example, pushing the CatOS 5.4(3) image took roughly 30 minutes at 38400 bps. We'd be talking about easily 2 to 3 hours using 9600bps.

Once that was done, failed the first time because of bad CRC, redone, and redone a couple more times, I finally got it right: I was able to boot into a workable system, adjust configuration and download a good new image onto bootflash. Et voila, no more backplace issues, no more booting problems.

The next step will be to fix the attached MSFC1 to the SUP1A I currently have, which still refuses to boot. This is fairly straightforward, considering it's again getting into a ROMMON state, then downloading a new image for the MSFC1.

Thanks Cisco for this nice little ymodem feature, and the good documentation about recovery procedures. This was a cheap, but still really heavy and loud paperweight I had before I pushed a new configuration.

Helping out others in time of crisis

2008-12-26T12:06:00.002-05:00

Well, last night was an "interesting" night. I guess it's one way to put it.

http://lcn.canoe.ca/lcn/infos/faitsdivers/archives/2008/12/20081226-081125.html

I was with girlfriend, in her family. A fire started in the house immediately next to the one we were in -- a duplex. We evacuated.

Fortunately, everyone in our family got out, and it looks like the family in the other house got out safely too. However, it brought me to notice how nice it is to have friendly neighbors who are ready to give you a hand in those sad moments. A lot of neighbors kindly offered their help, invited us in to get warm. That was really the spirit of Christmas, helping out those in need and getting to know people you maybe see everyday, but probably only say hi to every once in a while.

For me, it wasn't too bad a night -- I mean we only moved to car to let the firefighters have some room to work, and then we had to wait about four hours for them to finish up, move the trucks and remove the safety perimeter before my girlfriend could get her boots from the house, and we could go home. However, I can imagine the distress of the occupants, who either lost everything, or came very close to.

Good news, my girlfriend's family's house had very minimal damage to the roof, and maybe to slight water issues because of the work that was done on the other side. Still, all the best for them. They've gone through a lot, and they have all our support.

Thing is, from now on I'm guessing we'll be carrying a few little supplies in the trunk of the car... A warm blanket comes to mind, and well as a first aid kit.

Why Ubuntu is important to me

2008-12-22T10:44:00.002-05:00

Well, maybe I'm a little late with all of this, but I do invite you to read Jono Bacon's great post "The Ubuntu Ethos", as well as Daniel Holbach's take on the subject: "Why I believe in Ubuntu".

As for my part, I'll have to go with the same answers as them. It's just really stimulating to see all the work that we can put together when working as a community. Sure, there is room for improvement, sometimes things are a little ugly, but overall everybody does a great job. In Ubuntu-QC for example, there is a clear motivation to help out people, and that's nice to see. Just about everywhere else, I see the same drive to make a difference, to help out those who hope for something better (by showing them about our wonderful distro!) and to support those who are just having trouble with one or two little details on their system.

I also feel that drive, and it's great to see that people are recognizing it and are happy to see our interest in their software, in Ubuntu, and in free software in general.

And even more importantly, it's nice to have a nice community you can go have a beer with every once in a while, and talk about those weird computer things that interest us.

As David Thomas so nicely put it in his post on the subject, learning about Ubuntu has been the catalyst to doing more, or at least finding out where to start. I had been wanting to participate more in free software, and as I learned about Ubuntu I also learned how I could make a difference, and found a great opportunity to contribute where it matters, where you've got a friendly atmosphere to work in, and where what you can do to help is clear and goals are attainable.

De vieilles nouvelles, mais quand même...

2008-12-10T12:18:00.003-05:00

Bon, j'avoue, c'est pas du nouveau. J'ai juste pas entendu parler de ca auparavant, et je pense que c'est quand même un bon truc à savoir.

Ici, au Québec, le gouvernement accordait directement à Microsoft, sans appel d'offres, des contrats logiciels. Deux organismes/entreprises se sont réveillés, soit l'organisme FACIL et l'entreprise Savoir-Faire Linux, pour amener un cour le gouvernement sur ce point et les réveiller un peu.

http://facil.qc.ca/fr/media/20080827-facil-conteste-les-pratiques-gouvernementales
http://www.qctop.com/actualites/logiciel-libre-cour-gouv-qc.htm

Je n'irai pas dans les détails puisqu'ils sont lisibles dans les liens ci-haut, mais c'est un excellent point à apporter, d'autant plus que le gouvernement devrait encourager l'industrie informatique locale...

Sur un autre point tout aussi "vieux" comme nouvelles, il existe un pacte signée par les députés de différents partis sur le support du logiciel libre. D'un certain côté, c'est très bien que plusieurs députés l'aient déjà signée, mais c'est quand même triste de constater que la majorités sont soit du Parti Vert, soit de Québec Solidaire. Les autres devraient peut-être se réveiller un peu... Le lien est ici: http://facil.qc.ca/fr/PacteduLogicielLibre

Il y a également une pétition, accessible à tous, pour l'utilisation du logiciel libre par le gouvernement du Québec.

Ceci dit, visitez le site de la pétition, signez-là, et tentez d'en parler avec votre député et de l'amener à la signer, ainsi que le Pacte du Logiciel Libre!

A coalition?

2008-12-02T08:50:00.003-05:00

Politics here in Canada are just really fucked up -- sorry for the wording, I can't find any better way to explain it.

So what's gotten to people and wanting to just replace the government like that? What about those who are somewhat happy with the outcome? Yes, maybe they hoped for something else, better, but the votes have brought this result.

At the same time, the Conservatives are not the actual majority: Harper was named PM because his party had more elected MPs than the other parties, but on the whole, they are still fewer than the sum of the opposition MPs if you put them all together. As such, I am supporting the coalition idea because it stands as an effort to keep the MPs representing the majority in the position of power. It's not things to be taken lightly, certainly not something that should happen too often, but it currently seems like the right thing to do. Some of the horrible, horrible moral views of the Conservatives will be kept away, and if given a chance, maybe a coalition will be able to change things for the better -- and not only economically.

And no, I certainly don't prefer Dion to Harper. The mix of ideas and views is what I'm looking for, rather than a specific party or leader. All the parties have some good ideas... just like they all have some horribly flawed views too.

Oh and please, PLEASE! Stop this madness of elections almost every year. The X just gets harder to draw every time.

The year is almost over...

2008-11-27T12:26:00.002-05:00

I read Stephan Hermann's post today on his blog, that I saw on Planet Ubuntu. I think he pretty much hit the nail right on the head, especially with his quotes from Tom Limoncelli's excellent book: Time Management for System Administrators (ISBN-10: 0-596-00783-3 / ISBN-13: 978-0-596-00783-6)

I won't re-copy the excerpts he quoted, but it essentially stood for saying that system administrators, at least in the majority, are tinkerers, and have a hard time separating work from personal life -- everything seems to blur into one major problem-solving challenge, just endless puzzles from the point you wake up until when you go to sleep. In any case, it is the case for me. I'll just work my full day, solving different usual or just completely new problems, only to come back home to tackle on some open source project that fascinates me, or to play on my computer. I've even witnessed the same kind of thing happening when some friends come over with laptops, or when me and my SO just sit in bed with our netbooks, chatting or, in my case, working away at something that caught my attention on that day.

Anyway, I already started, last year, to pay more attention to time management, and having read the book, there's many tricks I still haven't applied to my life. It's great because each work independently, but I'm still going to give it more effort and integrate some of the really nifty little ideas to managing my time more effectively for the upcoming year.

As for giving out details on my other plans for 2009:

In company life, I've been at my current workplace for nearly 4 years now. I still very much enjoy everything I do, especially when I consider that not all places are necessarily as open, as stimulating and interesting to work in, and always full of totally new projects to tackle. It seems like here, things are ever-changing and there's always something new to learn. That's great: I love to learn. For the upcoming year, looks like there are still more new interesting projects to come, and I also have ideas of my own. I want to improve the network in a large scale, especially from the aspects of monitoring and administration tools.

In terms of my personal life, little has changed for a while now -- things are going on just fine, and it's especially great to have been able to re-unite with an old friend, and learn that he's a hardcore geek too ;)

In opensource, thanks to this "new" old friend, I'm planning on spending a lot of time on various little projects. One that should take a good amount of my time is to build a point-of-sales system for the KDE platform -- the details aren't set in stone yet, we're still looking at bringing in ideas, finding out what are the best tools for the job, etc.

I'm also still spending a good amount of time on NetworkManager, and I like to play around with Terminator too. Terminator was a fun little project to look into, and as I stated in a previous post, I was able to adapt a cool feature from a previous version in someone's Bazaar branch, bring it in my own, and make it work with Terminator's latest source (again from bazaar). That was a great new crutch for improving my understanding and skills in Python.

From reading Stephan's blog post, it seems I may need to look into Leonov as well. Looks like a very nice tool, also in Python, so I will definitely at least give it a test run. Maybe I can even find some cool ways to contribute to it too, even with my somewhat limited knowledge of Python.

Ah, and thanks to Fabian Rodriguez for creating a new team specifically for the Ubuntu Quebec Launchpad Answers contacts. It's true that we were getting a lot of messages from Launchpad Answers, and I'm guessing that not everyone wanted to have to deal with this. Anyway, I've already applied and I've been accepted to join that team, and I'll still do my best at answering any questions that come up. So if you're using Ubuntu, have questions about a feature, or how to do something (especially if you want to ask it in French!), drop by Launchpad and ask away! There's lots of very talented and understanding people ready to help you out.

Un nouveau blog?

2008-11-26T18:28:00.003-05:00

Intéressant. Le CTO de la compagnie où je travaille vient de lancer un nouveau blog. C'est pas mal, reste à voir si il y aura des mises à jour...

En tout cas, c'est certainement un pas dans la bonne direction, si on peut avoir davantage de détails sur les idées des hauts dirigeants de l'entreprise, sur leurs perspectives de la situation économique, et de ce qui se passe du côté de la direction générale que prend l'entreprise. Le blog n'est pas public, seulement accessible (du moins pour le moment), aux employés via un site Intranet. Ca m'a fait un peu penser aux weblogs, par exemple, de Mark Shuttleworth (CEO de Canonical) ou Jonathan Schwarz (CEO de Sun), qui ont aussi des weblogs, pour ne nommer que ceux que j'ai bel et bien lus.

Ce qui me surprendrais, mais me donnerais vraiment un boost de motivation par contre, ce serait de voir qu'on a un "militant" du logiciel libre parmis la direction, ou la haute direction... Ceci dit, je suis pratiquement certain que ce n'est pas le cas. :)

Status update

2008-11-14T21:12:00.002-05:00

Not much to say here. I've been working for some time at the adaptation of a patch to Terminator (a GNOME terminal wrapper that supports panning), and quite a lot of time on NetworkManager's VPNC plugin still, which seems to still give me some issues. The goal is mostly to adapt the plugin to mimic some of the features of the OpenVPN plugin, where the auth dialog goes to read some GConf keys, but so far I seem to run into ugly SegFaults, or other errors, and I'm still kind of tracking them down, although I haven't spent too much time on that, since I've bought an Xbox. Fixing those should be done fairly soon, and there should be a nice update to network-manager-vpnc on my PPA (and some of the still-broken code is already on my Bazaar branch). As for Terminator, my bazaar branch already has the fix committed, and my PPA has it packaged:

terminator - 0.11-2ubuntu2~ppaintrepid1

Assassin's Creed and Crackdown do seem to steal quite a lot of time from me, but it's a fun way to finish a forced vacation from work ;)

Intrepid OpenWeek day 1

2008-11-03T16:55:00.004-05:00

This OpenWeek started off really well. An incredible amount of really interesting information, supplemented with very good questions from the audience -- truly stimulating.

I especially liked the Reporting and Fixing Kernel Bugs, Report bugs about Ubuntu, and Bazaar: Beyond The Basics talks. Not that the others didn't contain useful information: they did, and I still learned quite a lot, but the kernel, bugs, and bazaar stuff was just closer to what I had been doing recently, and answered my questions. Anyone wanting to join the MOTU team and missing these would probably look at the IRC meeting logs at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MeetingLogs.

Given that I've started to push my work to Launchpad, for the packaging efforts and soon my patches to Network Manager, the Bazaar tips and tricks really filled a hole in my understanding of the tool, especially the difference between some of the commands I was using. I only wish there had been more information about how it ties in to packaging specifically, like more about using bzr-buildpackage, keeping debian directories or full packages in Launchpad bazaar trees, etc. I've read the documentation, but there's nothing like getting feedback from other's experiences.

Thanks to Jorge Castro and Jono Bacon, and all of the others who participated so far to realizing this great first day of OpenWeek. I can't wait for the next sessions!

MOTU bookmarks

2008-11-01T20:29:00.004-04:00

Just because it's there and really useful, here's a great page that was put together by Tiago Faria, who is also the mastermind behind Ubuntuweblogs.org: a list of links to interest to anyone wishing to join MOTU, develop on Ubuntu, or help out with triaging, testing, or confirming bugs: http://goukihq.org/misc/bookmarks/insipid.cgi?tag=motu

Montreal Intepid Ibex release party + Ubuntu OpenWeek

2008-10-30T19:47:00.003-04:00

Wow. Great stuff. I'm at the release party in Montreal, and there's a lot of people... Okay, by the standards of other places, we're probably just a handful at 40 people, but at least we're filling the room :) Fortunately, we've got the great talents of some support people from Canonical, as well as the guys from FACIL making CDs for people to install Intrepid on their systems. Beer is flowing too, so that's always good news :)

So, thanks to MagicFab, Drago, Etienne, Saïd, Yannick... am I forgetting anyone? For throwing this great party!

Also, thanks to Oguz Yarimtepe (I've noticed his post on Ubuntuweblogs.org) for bringing this to my attention. There's a LOT of really interesting subjects that will be discussed for openweek, and thankfully, in my timezone, all of them are at a time I can easily follow and take part in the discussions -- So I really intend to follow as many as possible of the classrooms, especially what touches to Bazaar and packaging, since those are definitely very interesting subjects to me.

Intrepid Ibex release parties

2008-10-28T12:33:00.002-04:00

With the release of Intrepid Ibex in just two days (at the time of this writing), come the inevitable release parties.

If you're from Montreal, or the province of Quebec in general (or even if you live elsewhere and feel like meeting the people here!), feel free to show up at the Montreal Intrepid release party, which will be held on October 30th, 2008; at Bar St-Sulpice in Montreal, starting at 18h00. You'll be able to meet the people who make the Quebec (and Canada) Teams work. We can all have a beer and celebrate the truly outstanding work that's being done to bring to an unsuspecting world another great release!

And if you're from Quebec city, you should know that there is also a party there, same date and time, at Bistro Zonorange.

While you're at it, if you're from Quebec why not join the Quebec Team on Launchpad? Moreover, if you would be interested in finding a way to get.. maybe a plugin for the SRC (Radio-Canada) much like the Totem plugin for the BBC, or some other way of getting easily accessible information and broadcasting on Linux, don't hesitate to subscribe to the Ubuntu-QC mailing list.

Also, the global Ubuntu community always needs new people to help with bugs, answer questions, or document stuff.

call for testing: network-manager-vpnc update

2008-10-22T03:03:00.000-04:00

I've been working on a patch to network-manager-vpnc to better support one-time-passwords (OTP), as suggested by Dan Williams on the NetworkManager discussion list:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/networkmanager-list/2008-October/msg00094.html

If anyone is a little familiar with NetworkManager, and more specifically connecting to VPNs (using the VPNC plugin), then I'd really appreciate if you could test the two updated packages I've built for Intrepid; network-manager-gnome and network-manager-vpnc. Using OTPs to connect to the VPN is a plus.

Some of the major changes are in the vpn connection configuration dialog, where you can setup the type of password to use for the user password and for the group password. The options in both cases are either "Default", for the standard behavior, or static passwords that can be saved to the gnome keyring; "OTP", for one-time-passwords which will be prompted for at every connection (technically saved in the keyring if you choose to do so, but ignored and reprompted every time), or "Unused", for a password that's not actually being used in a particular connection type (I may have missed something there, this is also a case I'd like to test more thoroughly).

Along with the changes above, the authentication dialog only shows the passwords that are OTP or not in keyring, unless it is a "reprompt", in which case even known passwords are shown again, to get a chance to fix spelling mistakes.

The packages are found on my PPA, can be retrieved by using the following lines in /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mathieu-tl/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/mathieu-tl/ubuntu intrepid main

And can be downloaded separately:

network-manager-applet - 0.7~~svn20081020t000444-0ubuntu2~ppaintrepid1 (i386)
network-manager-vpnc - 0.7~~svn20081015t024626-0ubuntu2~ppaintrepid1 (i386)

If you'd prefer to apply the patches yourself, I also have them available on Launchpad, in my bzr code branch shortly: lp:~mathieu-tl/+junk/patches. I'll check it again later, bazaar is still giving me trouble.

Thanks to anyone who comments and gives me constructive criticism... :)

network-manager-vpnc regression

2008-10-07T23:49:00.000-04:00

I may or may not have blogged about this in the past, but given the nature of my work I use network-manager, vpnc, and network-manager-vpnc a lot. I noticed recently that there was no longer an option to save the group password only in network-manager-vpnc's authentication dialog, something I had already worked on to some extent.

So I looked at it again.

This time, it's been a little more complicated. Given that the current version of network-manager-vpnc comes out of SVN, there has been major changes from 0.6.x which have forced me to revise quite a few parts of the initial patches I had found on FC8. After about 3 and a half hours of work, I can finally say that it works -- and I'm happy about it too, because I see it as a pretty nice accomplishment given that I'm a novice at tackling bugs, far from used to the way code works in Gnome, and much less in a system as complex as NetworkManager.

For those who are actually interested in the results, my patch is up on the gnome bug #363918, and also on the relevant Launchpad bug #262191.

A working (based on the tests I did, anyway) package is up on my PPA, too.

How-to fix SVN's bug 160004: corrupted file system.

2008-10-07T13:57:00.001-04:00

My notes on the subject... The idea is generally to revert to the last sucessful commit, then work from there. It's less than ideal, but at least it's relatively safe to do, and easy.

First, find the commit that broke things:

svnlook youngest /path/to/repository

Next, check whether the commit was successful, and proceed on backwards in revision numbers until you find one that works:

svnadmin dump /path/to/repository -r rev_number_from_svnlook --incremental > /home/mtrudel/rev_dump.svndump

If it works, you're stuck. If it fails, and it should, continue on to the previous build (current_build - 1), if it succeeds, you can do the following:

Edit /path/to/repository/db/current, change the first item (revision number) to the revision that works.
Try to checkout -- things should work.
Try to checkin changes -- things should work.

You should obviously do this with exclusive access to the SVN repository you're trying to fix, *just in case*, so shutdown Apache, svnserve or whatever else may be publishing the repository.

Other details:

svnadmin verify is a bad idea on repos with a large number of commits, if resolution time is critical and the information in the last commit is not too important.
Take backups of any files you modify.

Automatic mounting of Samba shares

2008-10-03T20:13:00.000-04:00

Here's a nice complement to using Likewise, which is in the Ubuntu repositories, to handle among other things, the mounting of Samba shares on logon: pam_mount. This article assumes that you've already done everything necessary to make Likewise work properly in your environment.

Sadly, there was a lot of documentation about earlier versions of pam_mount, and very few (or few that I could find) about this newer version packaged in Ubuntu. Hopefully this will help people who have been struggling with making it work properly on their installs.

Pam_mount is easy to install:

sudo apt-get install libpam-mount

Once installed, you will want to edit /etc/security/pam_mount.conf.xml to uncomment a line:

<luserconf name=".pam_mount.conf.xml" />

And perhaps the debug line just above it if you need to troubleshoot potential issues.

Then, create a file in your home directory: .pam_mount.conf.xml. Here is mine, for example:

<pam_mount>
<volume user="*" fstype="cifs" server="fileserver1" path="share34" mountpoint="~/share34" options="iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0700,dir_mode=0700,nodev,nosuid" />
<volume user="*" fstype="cifs" server="fileserver1" path="share35" mountpoint="~/share35" options="iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0700,dir_mode=0700,nodev,nosuid" />
</pam_mount>

Once you've enabled pam_mount by adding it in common-session and common-auth with the following line, this file will allow mounting on login \\fileserver1\share34 and \\fileserver2\share35 in ~/share34 and ~/share35 respectively, without having the enter your password if you were already using Likewise as an authentication mechanism. One interesting detail is precisely the tilde in the mountpoint path, since in the case of full paths and the pam_mount $(USER) variable for example, you may be catching other issues, such as how to transform a DOMAIN\user name in a /home/DOMAIN/user path. The good old '~' takes care of that issue. At the same time, 'user="*"' seems to resolve to the currently logged in user, so if you were deploying multiple systems from a kickstart or cloning; or keeping a generic .pam_mount.conf.xml in /etc/skel for mounting public shares, you can keep only one file that works for everyone. Keeping the generic volume tags in the main /etc/security/pam_mount.conf.xml can also be a good idea.

So far, the tests we've been doing at work seem to indicate that these lines needs to be added in common-session and common-auth, though maybe it's possible to do it with fewer changes, or a slightly different line:

For common-session, around the top, I guess:

session optional pam_mount.so nullok try_first_pass

For common-auth, around the end, so that it's evaluated at the very least after pam_lwidentity.so:

auth optional pam_mount.so nullok try_first_pass

I'm fairly confident that "nullok" could be omitted on both lines, since empty passwords are probably not allowed in your Windows domain.

Also, pam_mount can also handle mounting different types of filesystems, such as truecrypt filesystems :)

One other little known command

2008-09-26T08:18:00.000-04:00

Do you know about "join"? It's a nice little utility that comes from the "coreutils" package, which means that it's there by default on most, if not all Unix/Linux distributions. What this does is join (duh) two files, based on the values in fields.

For example, the other day I had to correlate Apache requests from the logs on one Apache server acting as a proxy, with the logs of another Apache server used as a backend. Because of missing configuration, the proxy Apache had public IP addresses, but didn't have domain names (virtual hosts), and the backend had domain names but only the private IP addresses from the proxy systems. So, I took copies of the two Apache's combined_logs, and awk'ed them to only keep the IP, URI requested, and domain name requested (this was necessary because it's better to have clear field numbers with join, and Apache can, if configured to do it, log the UserAgent of a client, which spans multiple fields if you field separator is space).

With the logs doctored as required to be easy to handle with join, you can just run the command:

join -1 2 -2 2 -o "1.1 0 2.3" log_proxy.txt log_backend.txt

What this will do, is tell join to use the second field from the first file (-1 2, aka log_proxy.txt), the second field from the second file (-2 2, aka log_backend), and join the data together to form a new file, outputted to standard output, following the format stated in -o: first file's first field (the public IP), the join field (0, or the URI in this case, which appears in both files), and the third field in the second file (the virtual host domain). You can obviously adjust the field numbers if necessary, or change various settings such as the field separator (default is space), which is all very clearly documented in the man page.

On other news, I seem to have because fairly well know in my workplace to be the Ubuntu wizard... Maybe the Ubuntu laptop bag helps? Anyway... Friday I was asked by Marc about installing Ubuntu on a Lenovo T60, and yesterday I was asked about my thoughts and experiences with Intrepid by Richard. I've already managed to get one Ubuntu machine in use as a server, and hopefully there will be more to come in the future.

Planet Ubuntu Meme (aka I am so unoriginal)

2008-09-14T22:31:00.000-04:00

My computers are named with the names of Greek/Roman dieties, and more specifically some that I've also seen in the songs of my favorite band, The Cruxshadows.

So far, I have:

eurydice : my openwrt router
orpheus: my main desktop computer (currently offline because of some issues though)
icarus: my work laptop. It also obviously has a name for the office.
daedelus: used to be my palm pilot.
cerberus: my EEEPC.
persephone: my jailbroken iPod Touch.

Hopefully there will be more to come.

Dropbox was released today

2008-09-11T20:08:00.000-04:00

Dropbox was released in Public Beta today. Yay!

As soon as I got to my email with the invite, I installed the 8.04 version of the Dropbox package from the website on my primary system (running Intrepid). It worked perfectly, installed without a glitch, and I can now happily synchronize files between machines.

Oh, and I subscribed to identi.ca today. I'll attempt to regularly post something there too... I just need to find a good way of doing these posts easily and without always logging in to the website.

More network-related tools: Network Discovery

2008-09-07T00:54:00.000-04:00

I've found out about this other really nifty tool for networks. It's called NeDi (for NEtwork DIscovery), and is used to inventory devices connected to a network, the ports available on network devices, routes, modules, and other kinds of details that are just fun to have, or really useful to refer to from a central repository. It's nice too because it installs extremely well on Ubuntu; a wiki entry even exists to give a quick how-to on the installation and configuration process: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NediHowTo.

Once you've gone through the steps described in the wiki entry, and run your first nedi.pl -cob (and waited the a minutes if you've happily asked it to map your whole corporate networks (oops!)), you can access the web interface and view all the information that was gathered, such as devices routes, firmware versions, models, serial numbers, and what end-user devices are connected where.

NeDi is also apparently part of the GroundWork OpenSource products, which is a pretty interesting suite of software if you want to roll out systems monitoring in your location.

Two useful network-related commands

2008-09-05T10:06:00.000-04:00

mtrudel@laptopl-mtrudel:~$ sudo ethtool eth0
[sudo] password for mtrudel:
Settings for eth0:
Supported ports: [ TP ]
Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
1000baseT/Full
Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
Advertised link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
1000baseT/Full
Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
Speed: 100Mb/s
Duplex: Full
Port: Twisted Pair
PHYAD: 1
Transceiver: internal
Auto-negotiation: on
Supports Wake-on: pumbag
Wake-on: g
Current message level: 0x00000001 (1)
Link detected: yes

ethtool is a command that gives you information on the capabilities of your network card, and the network that it is connected to. The most interesting things are the Speed and Duplex lines, which are somewhat useful when diagnosing some very specific problems. Some people may already know of mii-tool which is also available on default installs of ubuntu, however, you should know that mii-tool doesn't support Gigabit ethernet, and as such may give you weird results in that case. ethtool, on the other hand, works fine on gig.

Another cool command I found out about recently, is an implementation of a CDP listener on linux: cdpr. cdpr is available with a simple sudo apt-get install cdpr. cdpr listens for CDP advertisements coming from Cisco hardware, which will let you know what switch you are connected to, some additional information about the switch, and more importantly, which port you are connected in. That's pretty neat for large offices, especially if you're not sure where all the wired are going, and which is which when in a wiring cabinet. To use cdpr:

mtrudel@laptopl-mtrudel:~$ sudo cdpr
cdpr - Cisco Discovery Protocol Reporter
Version 2.2.1
Copyright (c) 2002-2006 - MonkeyMental.com

1. eth0 (No description available)
2. tun0 (No description available)
3. any (Pseudo-device that captures on all interfaces)
4. lo (No description available)
Enter the interface number (1-4):1
Using Device: eth0
Warning opening device (arptype 65534 not supported by libpcap - falling back to cooked socket)
Waiting for CDP advertisement:
(default config is to transmit CDP packets every 60 seconds)
Device ID
value: switch4529
Addresses
value: 192.168.45.29
Port ID
value: FastEthernet0/33

Now I'd just need to walk over to that switch to do whatever I may need to do directly on it... or telnet, ssh, or point a browser to it if I needed to change the configuration.

An education issue? + Yay for the Intrepid user switcher and shutdown/logoff window

2008-09-03T22:28:00.000-04:00

Talking to my father tonight, helping him with some computer tasks and advocating free software in the process, I've come for myself to the realization of what many may already know, but anyway... the use of free and open-source software is an education issue. What I mean by that is that if we want FOSS to be adopted in a more widespread fashion, if we want projects to succeed (and FOSS-focused companies to succeed), we need to make sure that people know that alternatives exist. We need to let people know too, that the alternatives are legit -- because I think that this may actually be a problem too. Maybe people are accustomed to paying for software that has very specific capabilities, or lots of features, or for operating systems, and from that habit they are inferring that whatever is not being charged for is like the today sadly common pirated software? Is anybody else noticing this kind of thing?

As such, I think that is really is important to support projects like Fabian Rodriguez' Ubuntu In Libraries, that promote availability of open-source software, education of potential users on the fact that legit, free, and working software actually exists, and that it can replace other software with fewer features that you could potentially pay a lot more for.

Extending this, I also think that Ubuntu should be advocated in a more overt manner in schools. I'm often somewhat shocked at the fact that teachers will encourage students to procure themselves extremely specialized and pricey software like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator (which tend to be somewhat out of most students' budgets, especially living on their own... and usually also out of their parents' budgets!), when viable alternatives like GIMP or Xara Xtreme, which could not only do the same work in many cases, but benefit from the additional user base while helping these new users by adding features. If there is demand for something, it has more of a chance to be added to a software project. At the same time, from my experience with the commercial and free alternatives of graphics tools, I see that a lot of things are done exactly the same way, with very similar menus or icons for the same tasks. I'm no expert, but wouldn't that still be good if students are taught the theory basis, and can then transport, transfer that knowledge to whatever different tool they use to do the job? At the very least, I say thanks to Ubuntu for making some of the finer of these alternative programs easy to install or even available by default in new installs (I'm thinking OpenOffice.org).

Intrepid Ibex on a Lenovo T60

2008-08-31T16:27:00.000-04:00

Think of this post as somewhat of a response, or extension to Pavel Rojtberg's post regarding the need for closed-source drivers for the T60, that I've found on UbuntuWebLogs.org (posted August 30th). I'm also keeping this as install notes for when I will have to reinstall my laptop.

It seems that it is indeed no longer necessary to use closed-source drivers at all for a Lenovo T60 on Intrepid. On hardy, I also used to be forced to run the closed-source FGLRX drivers to handle advanced things like OpenGL (gaming and nice screensavers), dual-head setups, etc.

I've recently setup my work laptop to run Intrepid (alpha 4), and as such I did happen to notice this pretty nice change. So far, it works like a charm. A few notes I'd add however, is that the dual-head setup is slightly complicated if you want to not have to edit xorg.conf too much (since the possibility of running without the file is one of the features of Intrepid). So, here are my notes:

Don't even think of installing fglrx at all if you want the open-source drivers to work. The fglrx install (both from apt and from the ATI website) changes a lot of things, including the location of some libraries, it seems. If you install the driver, make sure you take all the steps to be really certain it's completely removed. If you're at the point that you think it's removed and you are now running on radeon or ati, and when you run glxgears or glxinfo it ends with a Segmentation fault, then it is VERY likely that it isn't completely removed yet. My guess would be to look in /usr/lib/xorg for the libGL libraries, and to remove the package that relates to these files (I'm not sure which one yet).
Go slowly, and if you're unsure, get rid of xorg.conf to start from scratch.
Don't trust the failsafe X configuration wizard too much, do the very basic, get back to some single-headed working config that pleases you and work from there.
If you want to run dual-head with a resolution any higher thant 800x600 (which I'd guess most people will want to do...), at this point in time you WILL need to slightly modify your xorg.conf file manually and add a Virtual line in the "Display" subsection of the "Screen" section to support your higher resolution, as described here, but you will NOT need the "MergedFB" option, since that will be taken care of by Xrandr. Hopefully the hard limitation of 1600x1600 as a Virtual resolution will be increased by the time Intrepid is released, but for now it blocks you completely from using xrandr right away to setup dual-head, and forces you to modify xorg.conf manually.
If you are like me and use a similar dual-head setup at work and at home with your laptop (but with different monitors), be ready for some minor modifications to xorg.conf. In my specific case, I found that modelines from my work secondary screen (a Samsung SyncMaster something 940a, 17inch), and my home secondary screen (Acer AL1716, 17inch), didn't always match. If I setup the dual-headed config with the failsafe wizard at work, and bring my laptop home, the modelines for work will not allow me to use my home screen, but if I do the config the same way at home, the modelines will still allow me to use my work screen. The modelines were of course completely handled by the failsafe wizard, I didn't have to edit xorg.conf.
Don't hesitate to break xorg.conf with some weird config (like refering to the fglrx driver when it isn't installed) to get in the failsafe X wizard if you need to... I don't know of a simpler way to get to it, but I admit I didn't really check.
Mind the command: "sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg" to build for you a base xorg.conf file, if you want to start over with a clean config that will work quite nicely for single-screen setups.

The only slight annoyance I can think of, it that the gnome panels show up on my secondary screen every time I boot, but I'm thinking of trying it out like that for a little while.

As for the ath9k drivers, I'm not sure if they are already being used or not, and haven't had a change to look and make sure.

I learned a new command today

2008-08-27T13:14:00.000-04:00

Let's make it simple, it's pretty self-explanatory. Since I'm a netadmin, every little thing can help, and this is no exception. It should make my life MUCH easier.

sudo apt-get install sipcalc

And then:

mtrudel@icarus:~$ sipcalc 10.10.0.0/21
-[ipv4 : 10.10.0.0/21] - 0

[CIDR]
Host address - 10.10.0.0
Host address (decimal) - 168427520
Host address (hex) - A0A0000
Network address - 10.10.0.0
Network mask - 255.255.248.0
Network mask (bits) - 21
Network mask (hex) - FFFFF800
Broadcast address - 10.10.7.255
Cisco wildcard - 0.0.7.255
Addresses in network - 2048
Network range - 10.10.0.0 - 10.10.7.255
Usable range - 10.10.0.1 - 10.10.7.254

-
mtrudel@icarus:~$ sipcalc 10.10.9.9
-[ipv4 : 10.10.9.9] - 0

[CIDR]
Host address - 10.10.9.9
Host address (decimal) - 168429833
Host address (hex) - A0A0909
Network address - 10.10.9.9
Network mask - 255.255.255.255
Network mask (bits) - 32
Network mask (hex) - FFFFFFFF
Broadcast address - 10.10.9.9
Cisco wildcard - 0.0.0.0
Addresses in network - 1
Network range - 10.10.9.9 - 10.10.9.9

-

Beautiful little program, gives you all kind of useful information, and it's free!

Intrepid's install takes a bus ride-long

2008-08-25T21:05:00.000-04:00

I installed Intrepid Alpha 4 on my work laptop tonight. It's pretty nice -- it took the time of the bus ride home from work, plus a little more time.

So far, I'm not sure how well things go, but there has already been some small issues: failure on my first install try with full-disk encryption w/ LVM. Shortly later, some video corruption in usplash (and kept up if switching from X to consoles).

Other than that, there's been one instance where the Graphics submenu stayed open, wouldn't close (even if I clicked on an application -- nothing would happen), so I had to restart X.

Mostly however, it seems so far like it's stable enough to do actual work -- quite unlike Hardy's alphas which kept freezing my poor Thinkpad T60. VPNs work with vpnc, and ... not sure yet if they work through network-manager: network-manager-vpnc wouldn't enable the Add button, and I haven't had a chance to reboot yet.

Other than that, I like the NewHuman theme a lot ... not surprising given that Darklooks was already my favorite.

Evolution used to work, and now somehow tries to connect to the wrong Exchange server, although it doesn't hold its name anywhere in the config that I give the Exchange plugin -- maybe it tries to read domain information somewhere, but that doesn't seem quite ready yet.

Ah, I can't even think of other things to try anymore... Maybe more in a new post. I've got to check if a lot of bugs are opened yet.

And the bus ride... it takes about half an hour. Not bad, but that's definitely something that will need to be worked on.

UDF 2.5 support in Ubuntu, new network-manager

2008-08-23T23:46:00.000-04:00

For the past week and half, I've been using the new network-manager packages from the network-manager team's PPA. My understanding was that these packages are pretty close to what will be included in Intrepid, while they seem to me like they have the benefit of being stable enough to be usable (and quite efficiently too!) on my work laptop... which needless to say, needs to be totally stable. I initially ran into small issues with password prompting for VPNs, but those have been resolved for a little while now. Anyway, here is the line you'll need to add to your sources.list file if you wish to try out the new network-manager packages:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/network-manager/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/network-manager/ubuntu hardy main

One of the great things about the new packages is the possibility of running multiple connections concurrently (for example, both wireless and wired connections at the same time), and, in my opinion, much cleaner handling of multiple connection profiles -- for when you want to use static IPs for some place, DHCP elsewhere -- perfect for the mobile worker!

Also, I've struggled the other day with reading a UDF volume I created on my girlfriend's computer running Vista. Not expecting any issues with a newly burnt DVD, I happily chose to write the data in Vista's UDF format, only to notice that the specific format that is used is not recognized by Ubuntu, at least not in kernel 2.6.24-19. To add support for UDF 2.5, you will need to patch your kernel as directed in this fine Ubuntu Forums post:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=718744

Happy hacking!

More packaging fun

2008-08-13T21:06:00.001-04:00

After a little break for vacation (and an awesome trip to Quebec city!), I'm back at working on the two packages I'm trying to get included in Ubuntu: congruity, and it's dependency; concordance.

Today, I've learned to clean up my debian/rules file (and got nice errors when I got too enthusiastic at it), and creating watch files.

The watch file stuff is quite interesting. It is quick, and efficient... If you want to learn how to use this to keep your packages up to date with the upstream (for example, a sourceforge project!), consult the very complete wiki entry about it at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PackagingGuide/Howtos/DebianWatch.

Watch files basically contain lines of strings to parse in order to let utilities like uscan and uupdate download any new updated build tarballs from upstream.

OpenChange: a nice boost for Linux adoption in the enterprise?

2008-08-12T22:14:00.001-04:00

Since I'm already a happy user of Linux at work and fortunate enough to have other means to access email, calendar, and other services traditional on a Windows infrastructure through workarounds and generally complex tricks, I'm quite interested in the developments on offering support for the Windows infrastructure in Linux.

I found out today about OpenChange a somewhat new project to deliver MAPI support in various tools by implementing MAPI in a library. Although this is still fairly new and probably not yet ready for any kind of production use, I'm definitely going to give this some effort and try to have it run... perhaps even contribute code to it?

In my opinion, OpenChange brings a promising "outlook" for the future to enterprises wishing to migrate desktops to Linux, without necessarily going through the lengthy and complicated process of migrating Active Directory domains, Exchange servers with millions of messages, and other features in use immediately. For enterprises, although Linux desktops seem a good idea for, among other things, alleviating licensing costs; most are not yet ready to scrap complex Windows-based architectures, and will instead wish to make good use of them until upgrade (or migration) is no longer avoidable.

On the bright side, although OpenChange is not quite ready, Evolution at least has come a long way since previous versions provided on Ubuntu repositories. Since Hardy, it crashes less often, and you can even actually see free/busy information for other AD users, when Evolution decides it wants to cooperate :)

On the same subject, now that Active Directory integration is available through the use of Likewise Open on Hardy, joining a machine to a Windows domain is easier than ever. The constant state of progress I'm noticing from all distributions, but especially Ubuntu on the subject of Windows integration definitely gives me a lot of hope for the future.

RSA SecurID integration

2008-08-03T22:04:00.000-04:00

Short rant here... Why is it that GNOME or KDE don't support using SecurID (or OTP or anything like that that could potentially display a prompt other than "Password: ") ? To me, it is a fairly important requirement, if not for server applications, at least for the interfacing between servers and Ubuntu desktops.

We use RSA SecurID to control access to systems. If you try to use the new PAM module provided by RSA, and attempt to connect to a system using, for example, sFTP, you will notice that nautilus or dolphin will just hang there, waiting indefinitely for something, and eventually time out. This is annoying, I feel like it could be something relatively simple to fix, and I am certain it would help not only Ubuntu, but just about any distribution to see more interest from large corporations, only because the security they use is supported, and does not pose a usability problem.

Interestingly, Dolphin in KDE4.1 seems to respond a little better, and actually displays a "OpenSSH" window with a PASScode prompt... However, it then complains immediately that it cannot grb the keyboard, and even if you type something it will not be used... and the prompt will still reappear 5 times :)

I will probably take a second attempt at fixing the issue, or at least finding where the problem starts, at least in nautilus. Is there anyone who knows that could point me in the right direction?

Encrypting data in Hardy...

2008-08-03T17:12:00.000-04:00

Think of this post as a more or less of a response to David Thomas' post about how to encrypt data in Ubuntu... However, as a little warning, this has the potential to cause you issues depending on where you are travelling, what is the political climate like where you are going, or if your country has regulations about using encryption. I'm thinking France here, for example, where if I'm not mistaken you are not allowed to use specific encryption algorithms like 3DES or AES? If I'm mistaken, please let me know.

As for me, I'm only using it as a theft protection device, don't want people to have access to sensitive data that could be on my drive if I forgot my laptop somewhere or had it stolen.

Anyway, so you can encrypt your whole disk in Ubuntu. This feature has been available since Gutsy in the installer, where it will permit you to partition your whole disk using LVS and LUKS or some other system. You could also do the partitioning yourself, provided you remember to create the partition for "physical volume for encryption" first, and then use that as a "physical volume for LVS"... You'll also need to have /boot separate, unecrypted. Here's a nice overview of using the installer to encrypt the whole drive: http://learninginlinux.wordpress.com/2008/04/23/installing-ubuntu-804-with-full-disk-encryption/

Also, you can use another very nifty tool called TrueCrypt. Sadly, while some GUI (or so they seem, at first glance) tools exist in the repositories to interface with Truecrypt, the actual software still doesn't appear to be available. You can however get it here, on the official TrueCrypt website.

To setup a truecrypt drive, plug a USB key for example, run truecrypt, select the device and options and follow the directions. I've found that they are all pretty clear. I personally use this to secure my GPG key and lists of contacts... Oh, and my hackergotchi too :)

TrueCrypt happens to have this interesting feature where you can hide an encrypted volume inside another one, and thus benefit from "plausible deniability", since if only the outer volume was decrypted, the data contained (which would effectively be your inner encrypted volume) would not be distinguishable from random data -- still, I probably wouldn't let my life depend on people's lack of curiosity.

Anyway, using these two options, and strong passphrases, you would be able to deter most attempts at reading your personal, sensitive data, and you won't have to worry about the proprietary company information you were carrying to be viewed by your laptop's thief.

For now though, there's still nothing more secure than keeping sensitive data in your head only. Encryption can always, given enough resources thrown at it, be cracked, so this just one more thing to ... keep in mind.

My first actual REVU contribution

2008-07-31T17:54:00.001-04:00

Since I've been playing a lot with my new Harmony remote lately, and had to package the two programs that I found that could handle this on Linux, I figured I might as well also upload it.

From my upload to my PPA, I've been lucky enough to have a lot of functionality pointers from my friend John... Anyway, thanks for that.

Since neither Debian nor Ubuntu contained the packages, I've also uploaded them to REVU, to get reviews from MOTUs, and hopefully have my packages included to the universe repository.

In the meantime, if someone who has reviewer access be nice enough to review concordance and congruity, I'd be very thankful for any and all input to improve my packaging skills :)

And of course, thanks to the developers of concordance and congruity for making something easy to work with.

My next tasks: getting my workplace to adopt Ubuntu as an operating system for some workstations, and fixing some of the issues I'm still running into with KDE4.1.

Finally, thanks to Tom Dyer for his post about KDE4.1 (found it on ubuntuweblogs.org; was very useful to start fixing the horrendous issues that previous version had, at least on my system.

Update: Congruity & Concordance, packages on PPA

2008-07-26T23:58:00.000-04:00

As promised in previous post, the packages for congruity and concordance (the libraries congruity depends on, and a command-line interface) are now available on my PPA:

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

If you're using the current Ubuntu version, Hardy, the easiest way to get those is to add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mathieu-tl/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/mathieu-tl/ubuntu hardy main

Or, for the previous Ubuntu version (gutsy):

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mathieu-tl/ubuntu gutsy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/mathieu-tl/ubuntu gutsy main

Then sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get install congruity. This will install all of the required packages to run the graphical version of the Logitech Harmony remote configuration tool, congruity, version 8.

Using the Logitech Harmony 670 remote on Linux

2008-07-22T13:43:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I bought the ONE remote to RULE them all. Seriously. The best 100$ investment ever (was on sale).

Anyway, so I brought home my acquisition, proceeded to program it to handle all my electronic equipment in the living room. The only issue was to setup my computer to be able to program the remote. This is how I did it:

Make sure you've got libusb (on Ubuntu, sudo apt-get install libusb-0.1-4) installed. Might also need libusb-dev.

Downloaded two packages:
- congruity-8.tar.bz2
- concordance-0.20.tar.bz2

Setup concordance first, for the libconcord library as well as the python bindings for using congruity:
1. Under the concordance tarball directory, in libconcord/: ./configure --prefix=/usr
2. Then, make and sudo make install to build the library and install it to /usr/lib
3. Cd to bindings/python, run python setup.py build and sudo python setup.py install

Now, you can go in the extracted tarball directory of congruity, and run sudo ./congruity. You'll notice that it fails, expecting to be passed a filename on every run. You'll need to go on the members.harmonyremote.com website, create an account (if you don't have one already), then proceed through the various steps. When the site expects you to download an EZHex file, save it and manually start congruity (with sudo or as root, as always), or setup your browser to open the files using something like a little wrapper script that would call, for example, gksudo congruity.
Optionally move the congruity-8 directory (the extracted tarball stuff) to someplace where it can live indefinitely, perhaps somewhere in the path?

The rest of the usage should be pretty straightforward. Once the remote is programmed for your devices, point and click :D

I'll probably be building Ubuntu packages for concordance and congruity, so when those are done I'll write a new post with the links. In the meantime, check my PPA page occasionally at https://launchpad.net/~mathieu-tl/+archive, or in sources.list: http://ppa.launchpad.net/mathieu-tl/ubuntu.

Installer UT2003 sous Linux

2008-05-23T15:34:00.000-04:00

L'installation de UT2003 sous Linux, tel que vous le savez probablement, est assez facile, il suffit d'utiliser le CD 3 et démarrer l'installeur. Cependant, sous Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04, les choses se compliquent: des erreurs d'assertion et des problèmes de son dès le démarrage du jeu. Voici comment régler ces problèmes:

Pour les erreurs "xcb_lock... Assertion failed":

Faire une copie de sauvegarde du fichier libSDL-1.2.so.0 du répertoire System du jeu.
Créer un symlink de /usr/lib/libSDL-1.2.so.0 dans le répertoire System, pour remplacer le fichier existant.
Si le fichier n'existe pas dans /usr/lib, s'assurer d'avoir installé le paquet libsdl1.2debian.

Pour les problèmes de lag de son:

Faire une copie de sauvegarde du fichier openal.so du répertoire System du jeu.
Créer un symlink de /usr/lib/libopenal.so.0 dans le répertoire System, pour remplacer le fichier openal.so.
Si le fichier n'existe pas dans /usr/lib, s'assurer d'avoir installé le paquet libopenal0a.

Voila. Le jeu devrait démarrer sans problème, et rouler à une vitesse très acceptable. :)

SSH X11 forwarding for other users

2008-05-14T17:54:00.000-04:00

Forwarding X11 requests from a remote machine to your workstation is often very useful, especially if you have the habit of using graphical clients, or if you're just forced to use a tool that expects a X server to exist. Yet, when you change to a user other than root, the forwarding will most likely fail. Here's how you can fix this:

Connect to the remote system.
xauth list
Select the line outputted by xauth, copy it to buffer... If there are multiple lines, use the one that related to your session -- or try xauth list $DISPLAY
Su or sudo into the other user.
xauth add (paste the line from xauth)

From there, you'll be able to run just about any program. If you have errors, or the command hangs there, verify that the DISPLAY variable is properly set.