Older blog entries for ctrlsoft (starting at number 68)

UDS and Barcelona

I'm in Barcelona, attending the Bazaar sprint, which happens to be cohosted with the Ubuntu Developer Summit. I attended half a day of the UDS in Sydney a couple of years ago, so I had some idea of what I was in for already. It's a lot of fun, and having the two events at the same place at the same time was really worthwhile :-) I finally got to meet some of the Ubuntu server people in person.

I flew here a couple of days early so I could do some sightseeing, never having been in Barcelona (or Spain) before. The city was much nicer than I had expected, and we had some great weather. The timing was great, too: we we were there during the Cycling Tour of Catalonia and F.C.B. won both the national title and the European champions league (I hope I got that right, the important bit was the large amount of people partying outside :-).

During the first day of the summit I gave a short plenary talk on the Samba packaging in Ubuntu. Other than that I spent most of the time during the day switching back and forth between the Bazaar sprint room and the various break-out sessions. The main topics in the Bazaar world were the 2.0 release, and what had to be done to get it out of the door.

Syndicated 2009-05-29 21:45:00 from Stationary Traveller

Sightseeing Paris

Following SambaXP I'm spending a couple of days in Paris. There was a surprisingly good train connection, we left Göttingen a bit before midnight and arriving in Paris around 8 the next morning, without any transits. The plan is to walk around a bit tomorrow and maybe visit the Louvre with Andrew, Kirsty and Julien. I guess I should've known this already, but Paris is expensive. Forgot to look at the menu card in advance the other day and ended up having a 8 euro (special) beer.

I'm staying a couple of days after Andrew and Kirsty travel on to England, so I can visit some friends and family before I head back. There might also be OpenChange hacking involved.

Syndicated 2009-04-25 00:36:00 from Stationary Traveller

SambaXP 2009

Last week most of the Samba team met again for our annual conference in Göttingen. It was nice seeing everybody again, specially the folks I hadn't seen since the last one.

Together with Andrew and his wife Kirsty I took the train from Amsterdam into Germany a couple of days early and we did some sightseeing together with Anatoli and Nadezhda during the weekend. There's still plenty of things to discover in Göttingen for me, even though I've already been there about two dozen times. We did a tour of the city walls, visited some of the churches and
climbed the tower.

Julien's talk about OpenChange was interesting and humorous as always. Volkers' tutorial on asynchronous programming in C. Even though I've spent quite some time working with and looking at these API's it was nice going through them step by step once again. It's a strange thing to wrap your head around.

Andrew and I also gave our yearly "State of Samba 4" talk again. As I've mentioned in other places, I'm really excited about the social effects of the Franky project. Once again I was reminded that giving a talk the morning after the conference party (this year in the "Oriental Lounge") is a bad idea.

Several of my fellow Debian Samba maintainers made it to SambaXP, it was nice to see Christian, Luk, Michael and Noël there. We made some decisions about the direction of the Samba packages, and a plan to allow the Samba 3 and Samba 4 packages to be installed on the same system. Unfortunately I had to miss Christian's talk because it was in the same timeslot as Jeff's talk about the CIFS kernel module.

Syndicated 2009-04-20 00:27:00 from Stationary Traveller

Finally a DD!

After spending a little bit more than three years in the Debian New Maintainers queue, I finally became a Debian Developer.

Many thanks to the various people who have helped me through NM and have sponsored me over the past few years.

Syndicated 2009-01-15 20:53:20 from Stationary Traveller

bzr-builddeb FTW

% bzr branch deb:line6-usb-source debian
Retrieving Vcs locating from line6-usb-source Debian version 0.7.4-1
Branched 354 revision(s).
% bzr merge-upstream https://line6linux.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/line6linux/driver/trunk
All changes applied successfully.
Using version string 0.7.4+svn511 for upstream branch.
The new upstream version has been imported. You should now update the changelog (try dch -v 0.7.4+svn511-1 "New upstream snapshot."), resolve any conflicts, and then commit.
% dch -v 0.7.4+svn511-1 "New upstream snapshot.
% bzr builddeb
Building using working tree
Preparing the build area: ../build-area
Purging the build dir: ../build-area/line6-usb-0.7.4+svn511
[...]
Placing result in /home/jelmer/bzr/line6-usb/result
% ls ../result
line6-usb_0.7.4+svn511-1_amd64.changes line6-usb_0.7.4+svn511-1.dsc
line6-usb-source_0.7.4+svn511-1_all.deb
line6-usb_0.7.4+svn511-1.diff.gz line6-usb_0.7.4+svn511.orig.tar.gz

cp: Phideaux - Microdeath Softstar

Syndicated 2008-11-07 18:01:30 from Stationary Traveller

Ubucon.de

I just got back home after spending the weekend in Goettingen at Ubucon.de. The conference was very nice and well organized. Since the talks were mainly user-oriented, I didn't attend a lot of them but spent most time working with the other Samba developers on Franky and (trying to) talk to other people. That last bit was a harder than I thought since my German seems to be a bit rusty when it comes to speaking; listening is usually fine.

We made a lot of progress on the merged build; we're getting close to having about half the code shared between Samba 3 and Samba 4.

cp: Van der Graaf Generator - The Least We Can Do Is Wave To Each Other

Syndicated 2008-10-21 11:36:30 from Stationary Traveller

The Kerberization continues

It took a while, but I've now got Kerberos authentication working for most services.

Done:

• IMAP (Dovecot, Evolution, Thunderbird, Mutt)
• SMTP (Postfix)
• NFS (NFSv4, Linux)
• SMB (Samba, CIFSFS)
• HTTP (apache, firefox, epiphany)
• FTP (kftp, heimdal ftp server, bzr)
• IPP (CUPS, GTK+)
• XMPP (Jabberd2, pyxmpp, gossip/telepathy, gajim, BitlBee)
• LDAP (OpenLDAP)
• SSH (OpenSSH)
• libvirt
• DNS (bind, for dynamic updates)
• Subversion

Todo:

• IRC using SASL?
• bzr smart server
• VNC
• X11
• LDAP GSSAPI authentication in Evolution
• Thunderbird MANAGIESIEVE extension

It's still a lot more work to set this sort of thing up then it should be. Mac OS X and Windows are way ahead of any of the Linux distributions in this area.

cp: Cynic - Veil of maya

Syndicated 2008-09-19 20:01:15 from Stationary Traveller

Reconciling the Samba 3 and Samba 4 source code trees

While a few of us have been working very hard on Samba 4 to allow it to rock your socks off as an Active Directory Domain Controller, some of the other Samba developers have been working just as hard on improving the existing Samba 3 codebase and adding features to that. This situation has caused tension between developers as well as technical problems in the past - code with the same purpose is being developed in parallel, libraries diverge because features are only added in one branch and not in the other, one codebase is considered "obsolete" by some and the other is considered only a playground for experimental features by others.

As of yesterday, we now have the two codebases living in one and the same git branch. This should make it a lot easier for the two to use the same libraries. Better yet, it should allow us to reconcile the copies of various libraries that exist in both codebases, all of which have diverged to some degree in the last few years.

After a few problems came up merging the two branches the easy way (they both have a directory called "source" and git doesn't deal well with renaming them to "source3" and "source4" respectively), we decided to replay the history of both branches . This has the disadvantage that all existing branches that are based on the Samba 3 and Samba 4 branches will have to be rebased against the new master branch, but it also means we keep the ability to run "git log" inside of our source directories and having it work right.

Other than the fact that this makes it possible to share more code between the two codebases, one of the ideas we have is also to see if it is possible to provide an Active Directory DC by glueing the best bits of Samba 3 and Samba 4 together (aka "Franky") before they are eventually merged completely.

cp: Phideaux - Formaldehyde

Syndicated 2008-09-15 22:05:14 from Stationary Traveller

Because KISS is the way to NIH

I wish SASL was more like GSSAPI. Sure, GSSAPI is horribly overengineered, way too generic and too complex but at least that scares people away from going NIH on it.

The fact that everybody has their own SASL implementation is not really a problem by itself, but most of the implementations only cover a few of the wide range of SASL mechanisms (PLAIN and DIGEST-MD5 usually) that are standardized. There's also tiny bugs that spring up because the implementations differ; for example, inserting whitespace between the elements in a DIGEST-MD5 challenge breaks some clients.

Syndicated 2008-08-07 19:12:53 from Stationary Traveller

Oxegen '08

Oxegen was a bit expensive but awesome. Irish people rock.

Syndicated 2008-07-16 13:28:07 from Stationary Traveller