KPN is nice, NLUUG is fun (and a couple of funny phone calls)
May 16th, 2008 00:25 by BugBlue
It was a nice day again. Just traveled 28km to ede and 25 back by bike home just to visit the NLUUG conference.
It was possible thanks to KPN. Since they broke a very large part of the dutch internet (many private networks, many DSL networks and everything else you can imagine which runs over ATM) much of our customers didn’t call us if something broke but just blamed KPN (it was propably right too, after all they did break a lot for about 3 days long and it’s still not fixed!).
I got 3 nice phone calls today:
- “hello this is the dutch railways, we need a photo from <person1>” (not so nice)
- 20 minutes later: ”hello this is the dutch railways, we need a photo from <person2>” much more funny
- Somewhere in the afternoon: “Hello I like maps, you know touristic maps and so on do you make them?” “No we don’t” “Yeah I searched kaarten (dutch for maps) somewhere on the internet and I find your page” “That’s just our own route information. Please go to the nearest bookstore, buy a map and call the maker of that map if you want to order maps”.
- This evening: “Hello I just bought a laptop, I don’t have internet and I found your number in the old fashioned phonebook, and it has windows vista on it. But I was just reading the license agreements I have to click trough.” “Ok….” “I heard something about Linux, where can I find that company, I want that I guess” “Please go (or call them first) to an academic bookstore and buy your distro of choice”.
The last one was very happy that I could help him.
It was a nice day. Ohw and not to forget: I did get permission to attend to the speakersdinner (an expensive, free and nice dinner for people who give lectures at the NLUUG conference) although I wasn’t a speaker. (Getting the permission is nice enough, I didn’t have time to go :))
Soleus - a little something about our VPS association (”vereniging”)
May 14th, 2008 18:50 by murf
After almost 5 months of operation I thought it was time to write a little article about the VPS (Virtual Private Server) association ("vereniging") I'm involved in, Soleus.
Soleus is a group of *nix enthousiasts, nerds if you like, all professionally involved with *nix and with a deep passion for *nix and a need. A need for a (virtual) server 24/7 online in a proper datacenter with a reliable power supply and network connections.
But Soleus is a little more than that. You can get a VPS on every corner of the internet for the same or less as we provide it and still don't get the same as you get with us. Because with us you get the chance to be involved in a group of people who like to share, exchange knowlege and build on Soleus together. Actually, the community we started is quite active and grows quite fast and has the will to grow further in the future. (We expanded from 3 members in januari this year to 8 at the time of writing.)
At the moment we have 3 core members and 5 regular members, our current server has a limit of around 12 members with their own VPS-ses and little more if some people like to share a VPS. For sure we will expand to a second server as soon as there is need (and money) for it.
We don't do Windows, we don't do MacOS-X (unless you can find an image which works under Xen), but we do every flavour of Unix you like as long as it's capable of running under Xen.
And what do you get, next to a nice community? Well, just what you get almost anywhere. 25GByte of storage, 512Mb memory (you pay for that yourself but we'll provide it), 400GByte datatraphic per month (shared with all of us). We do overbook a little on our harddisks if needed (U300 SCSI disks are NOT cheap), but fair chance you won't fill your full 25GByte. We even do monitoring and backups for you if you like. (Well, we DO monitor the server and we DO monitor the services-hosts, but monitoring and backup up the internals of your VPS is of course entirely optional.) And yes we do ask a nominal fee for all that, running hardware costs money, we can't do anything about it.
And our hardware? Not the worst you can get. At the moment we're running on a IBM x-Series 345 running with 2 dual-core Xeon 2.4GHz CPU's and 6GByte of memory in total. (The 6GByte will be 8GByte within a week or so, to accommodate our newest member and provide room for a few members more.)
And what if you don't want a VPS? Well, no problem, we still have a shared-environment which you can use and get root on. In that case you don't pay for the memory (we already provided the shared-VPS with 512MByte) and you share the VPS with others.
Oh yes, we do expect a little in return from you. We are a community. So it's more or less expected that you are willing to be active in the community and help us setting up the server and infrastructure.
We do have a nice Solathon within a couple of months where we'll all get together and basically hack all weekend long to fix all last bits on our server, change lots of things we're not entirely happy with right now and get ready for the future. But that's just the start. This is definetely not a project we'll end within a year or 2, we plan to stay alive for the next decade, or two, at least.
Interested? Just drop me a note on harmen@murf.nl or join our irc channel #soleus on oftcnet. (irc.oftc.net)
Cheers!
Harmen
The InterNot! It works!
May 14th, 2008 11:54 by Faragon
CEST 2008 May 13 01:36:19
-!- Faragon [~faragon@83.68.0.49] has quit [Ping timeout]
May 14 10:10:34 coffee spamd[722]:
spamd: connection from localhost [127.0.0.1] at port 3622
A total downtime of approximately 1 day, 8 hours and 34 minutes. (If you take into account that I “normally” receive spam every second, and 15 seconds, but who’s counting? Mind you, then I should also calculate how long the timeout for the ping was, so let’s just keep it at 32,5 hours of downtime)
From what I heard, the problem was so obscure, engineers had to be flown into the country to fix it. Mind you, kudos to the brave men (and possibly, hopefully also women) who sacrificed their sleep, and quite possibly sanity to fix this malfunction.
If I ever find out who fixed it, I’ll make sure they get some sort of recognition here :-)
Some Notes on the OpenPanel Architecture
May 14th, 2008 08:10 by exel
I’m a strong believer in systems that are easily discoverable, where the structure of the files that make up the system communicate something about the application’s internal structure to the outside world. I tried to do much of the same thing with OpenPanel, but at the end of the day there’s still a lot to go around, so perhaps now’s a good time to write up a bit about the thinking and architecture behind OpenPanel and its components.
When we started the design, we wanted to focus on the following demands:
- OpenPanel should be modular, and modules should not be restricted to any specific language
- There should be elementary protection against security defects in module code
- There should be a possibility of multiple user interfaces (at the very least both a GUI and a command line tool)
- The system should anticipate the possibility of remote control and clustered integration
- Configuration provided by OpenPanel should follow the standard configuration practices for the programs involved — no funky business relying on access to a MySQL database
- It should be possible to dedicate an installation to a single purpose (like mail) without requiring unrelated services (Apache, MySQL) through dependencies
What we came up with, is a design that could best be explained as a domain-specific object database that reflects changes into the configuration of outside programs. The opencore daemon implements this abstraction. At the bottom it has an sqlite database that stores object and class data. Modules are implemented as directories inside /var/opencore/modules that define object classes for the database and the program that executes the necessary changes to outside configuration related to objects of those classes. A JSON-based RPC interface accepts requests through HTTP. This backend port is also used to serve static files related to the web-based GUI.
Obviously, accepting remote RPC requests is something you don’t want to combine with root privileges. Also, since we wanted to keep a low number of privileges exposed directly to module code, running the back-end programs/scripts for module actions was definitely not something we felt should be done as the root user. This is where the authd daemon comes in. It accept requests on a unix domain socket that is only accessible to the opencore daemon. Whenever opencore runs a module program, it will fork to a new process, open a socket to authd, tell authd which module will be executed and drop the privileges needed to open any new connections to authd. The unprivileged module can talk to authd on fd 3, but will be restricted to those privileged actions defined in its module.xml file.
Documentation for the Module API and the RPC Interface is on our site, but some of it may still be a bit rough around the edges.
Buiten westen met een rubber hamer
May 12th, 2008 23:29 by murf
Een vraag die vanavond opeens om geheel (on)willekeurige redenen in me op kwam was:
Hoe hard moet je iemand meppen met een rubber hamer om diegene buiten-westen te krijgen?
Ofwel, welke grond van waarheid zit er achter het cartooneske buiten-westen-meppen-met-een-rubber-hamer dat je altijd in tekenfilms en in strips terug ziet? (Dat je het beter niet met een ijzeren hamer kunt doen lijkt me obvious, ws sla je iemand een gat in zijn hoofd ver voor 'ie buiten westen is.)
meerkoet in de aanval
May 12th, 2008 22:38 by burne
Zoals de afgelopen jaren zit ook dit jaar het meerkoeten-stel weer op z’n vaste plek in de vijver achter bij m’n moeder, en zoals ieder jaar is papa meerkoet superaggressief. Alles wat in de buurt komt wordt weggejaagd. Eenden, zwanen, reigers, wandelaars met honden, en zelfs enge nerds met fototoestellen:
