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And the winner is…
…Oakeshott, in a landslide. 64.14% first preference, 74.38% TCP. Now for the people of Lyne to get used to having, you know, representation in Parliament.
vm.overcommit_memory = 2, vm.overcommit_ratio = 0
Do you know this experience: A program, in my case subversion, has a bug and starts to eat memory. You can not interact with your system any more, only watch the memory and swap run full (if you have a display for that). Then it takes a while, while the kernel kills the (hopefully right) program. Things start to move again, until they are fully recovered from the swap and you can continue your work. Or the kernel does somehow not kill the right program, and you are screwed. During regular work, though, your swap is hardy ever needed. Only after a while, a few megabytes of never-used RAM is swapped out, to make space for using the RAM as a file cache. I’d like to see the kernel not give out more memory to processes than there is physical memory, because that’s plenty for normal work, and if there is more requested, then that’s most likely wrong. But I still want the kernel to use the rest of the memory for caching files, and also move some unused RAM pages to the swap file. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a settings that achieves this directly. But if you happen to have the swap about the same size as your RAM, then these settings, when written to /etc/sysctl.d/vm.conf, will do the job: vm.overcommit_memory = 2 The first one is to make sure the kernel does not hand out more memory than you tell it to, and the second is to make sure that it only hands out (swap size + 0 * RAM size) to processes. Beware that things go wrong if you happen to have no swap any more for some reason, beause then the kernel will hand out zero memory! Therefore, you need to make sure that these settings are applied after swap was enabled. On a Debian machine, rename /etc/rcS.d/S30procps to /etc/rcS.d/S37procps. This would not be possible if you could also specify the ration of swap memory to be used. Then I could set that to zero and the RAM ratio to 100. If anyone knows better ways to achieve this, I’m interested to hear them. Update: For my qemu based armel package builder, this is not enough it seems. I’m now running it with overcommit_ratio = 50. Posted Fri Sep 5 17:06:44 2008
Swamp airports with trash
I am surely not the only one to complain about the ridiculous liquids restrictions for airplane travel. Since these new regulation are in place, I’ve challenged them, found holes, and compiled tips for those trying to blow up planes. I wouldn’t write another story if it weren’t for an idea I’ve had at Zurich airport on my last trip to London: let’s swamp the airports with trash so that they’ll be forced to deal with Brussels and IATA to return to normal. After checking in for my flight, I stopped by the supermarket to buy two containers of yoghurt that would make someone happy. The containers each said 150g (that’s weight, not volume) on them, and I put them into a clear, resealable one-litre bag, placed them into a tray to be x-ray-scanned separately, only to have them confiscated. After discovering (not much to my surprise) that the security staff didn’t know the difference between weight and volume, nor understood the concept of density, I got a chance to speak to the head security officer (surrounded by five police whose attention I’d gotten), and learnt that Zurich airport has one ton of trash to discard every day, Frankfurt supposedly has to deal with four. As I was walking onto my plane, I tried to think of non-recyclable containers that we could fill with liquids to bring along to increase that amount. My theory was that once the trash problem became too massive, the airports would have to deal with the authorities to resolve this liquid restriction, because it seems quite clear that normal people have no way to influence choices made that affect our “safety”. Unfortunately, I see two problems: First, we’d be dealing with trash and hence face all the environmental concerns. The airports do not recycle the millions of PET bottles they confiscate every day, so we shouldn’t make that worse. Unfortunately, I cannot think of another liquid container that wouldn’t come with similar concerns. Second, the airports might have the burden, but they won’t carry the cost of all the trash. In fact, thanks to the security theatre related to liquids, we already pay higher airport taxes and charges. Surely it can’t be in our interest to push that further up the scale. So in the end, swamping airports with trash doesn’t seem like a viable way forward, unfortunately. I wish I knew what to do. I wish that the decision makers at IATA would finally admit that they overreacted and revert to normal, with sensible security measures, which focus on fending off the real threats, not fake ones. Unfortunately, nobody likes to admit that they were wrong, especially not when the decision is heavily backed up by the lobby of vending machine companies and restaurant owners, who benefit greatly from these ridiculous liquid safety measures. NP: Pulp: We Love Life Posted Fri Sep 5 10:54:03 2008
New Zealand terrorism
Penny keeps me updated on New Zealand terrorism and it’s depressing to hear about it: 18 people detained and tried as terrorists for peace activism, protesting against environmental issues, and fighting for Māori rights. I’d like to help spread the word and hope that avaaz.org picks up this issue soon! If you would, please pass this on. NP: Stars: Set Yourself on Fire Posted Thu Sep 4 10:46:37 2008
RC bug a week - week 2
Last week I started my personal RC bug
quest, to get the RC bug counter down and Lenny released some
time this year. Sadly, a release in September 2008 is not
possible anymore.
patch-tracking made easy
Well done,
kudos! (I noticed via 497410.)
Dear Firefox, you are unique
You are so unique! No other programme I know can suck up memory at such a steep rate as you. And not only that, you also keep it safe and secure, making sure never to release it. You’re awesome! I wish there would be more like you. NOT. Update: sorry, Firefox, you’re about to be degraded! NP: 65daysofstatic: The Destruction of Small Ideas Posted Tue Sep 2 09:24:00 2008
Does silence kill kids?
When Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, he probably didn’t expect the rise of the cellphones we’ve been seeing over the last 20 years. At first, there were C-net phone too huge to carry, but mobile still, as they communicated wireless. Then, devices became smaller, networks faster and ubiquitous, and today, the number of cellphones sold worldwide has exceeded the population. Much like everything else, “it used to be better back then”. When phone calls were still ridiculously expensive, people were able to enjoy their peace and life progressed slow for everyone to think enough, not do or say without engaging their brains. Then, when the first cellphones stuffed people’s pockets, they did their job pretty much from the start: you could make phone calls. Some genius discovered SMS as a splendid tool to rip off customers, so phones grew pager abilities, but other than that, they just worked; I remember my first phone, which didn’t break in years. Obviously, if you’re a phone manufacturer, you don’t like that, because once you sell a phone that works, the customer won’t come back to give more monies in ten years. Clever as you are, you devised two schemes to ensure your cash flow: make phones more brittle and crap, so that they break within a year, at most two; and drag ever younger people into the debt trap. For the truly stupid, sites and services offer ring tones and games and what not, and the lesser challenged you keep close by the continuous addition of new features that noone needs. So these days, almost every phone can play music files, which is mighty convenient to spice up your work commute with some tunes, but our youngsters are overburdened by that, it seems. I almost soiled myself laughing at a group of five Italians at Ezeiza Airport in Buenos Aires, who were sitting around waiting for a bus, every one of them ear plugged and grooving to the beats (you know how dorky it looks when people silently sing along rap songs?). That’s not the funny part. The funny part is that every minute, one of them would say something, which would cause the others to unplug one ear, and form their lips to bleat “what” (making sure to add just a little bit extra of the tone of general disinterest, which is “cool”). This elicited one of two responses: either the original speaker would say “oh, nothing” and everyone nodded, or he’d repeat his wisdom, causing everyone to laugh and nod… before in both cases they replugged and returned to luff themselves. I wonder how they made it to the airport themselves, and why they travel as a group. Worse than that, however, is that cellphone manufacturers remembered that their phones had speakers (for fancy ringtones) and consequently added the ability to blast tunes through them. As a result, groups of kiddies walk around or sit in trains, with one (or more) of those cellphones blaring into the environment. Apart from being generally inconsiderate, what I don’t understand is how they put up with the sound quality. It’s mostly hip-hop music — you know that genre that makes some homies out there install 5000 watt subwoofers into their cars so make sure the windows rattle with the base — but these phones have a frequency spectrum comparable in width to that of your grandfather’s, way further up the scale (meaning they just don’t do base). Playing hip-hop through those is like putting a flute concerto on a subwoofer, just worse, because high-pitch tones are harder to filter by those who don’t want to hear them. And yet, I see it all over the place, kiddies “listening” to music through cellphone speakers. Is it because silence would kill them? NP: 65daysofstatic: The Fall of Math Posted Tue Sep 2 09:20:59 2008
T-5d
Five days until the by-election. Things are still looking OK for Oakeshott, but I’m still really annoyed with the way Rob Drew and the Nats are campaigning. Just got yet another mailout today, again using the ’strong message to Rudd’ theme. Do the Nats think we’re stupid or something? First-time Opposition backbencher sending a strong message to Rudd? I don’t think so. Oh, and like all politicians, he claims he’ll fix Australia and make the world a better, more happy place to live, but he doesn’t have much to back that up with. I find it suspicious that the Nats have chosen green and yellow as their colours. I wonder if there’s been any research into the effects of ‘patriotic’ colours in advertising. Anyone in Lyne: http://www.new.facebook.com/group.php?gid=62596290396
Recovering a lost default route
Tired and under the influence of beer, I tried to remove the currently broken IPv6 default route from my primary mailserver via an SSH connection and accidentally executed instead:
Unfortunately, I didn’t immediately realise what I had done, and then it was too late. Robert Collins told me that I could have saved the session because even without a default route, packets still reach the machine. Unfortunately, due to Nagle’s algorithm, you pretty much only have one shot, so the next time this happens to me (or you), quickly type
into a separate window, then copy and paste it into the SSH session and you may get lucky. Update: one lesson I learnt from this is to add specific routes for at least the IPv6 tunnel peer, and possibly another machine (or two) under my control out there. I now have that in place on all machines I own. NP: The Phoenix Foundation: Pegasus Posted Sat Aug 30 14:06:56 2008
Debian on Zonbu mini PC
I had bought a Zonbu mini-pC and had barely used it until recently. I have started over, and decided to install a Debian lenny distro over it. The installation went quite well, but requires the use of a
bootable USB key Debian installer (see reference here and here). I had to use the Warning : this article is a work in progress : I noted various bits elsewhere and need to complete the reference info (URLs), and other missing bits. But still, I hope it's useful. Once installed, several things need to be tweaked to get it fully operational :
TODO :
Note also that I found out that the hardware I bought from Zonbu actually seems to be a MSTI eBox 4854 system. Posted Fri Aug 29 20:46:07 2008
Amanda backups to VFAT partition on external (USB) drive on Debian
I have setup a mini-PC on which I have installed my network backup infrastructure, using Amanda. In this post, I try to summarize some useful options and links... to be improved, of course : comments most welcome. It has a big disk (500 Gb) connected through USB (previous attemps at using the same disk as a NAS (with something like this) were not so much succesfull), which is formatted as a big VFAT partition. So Amanda must be configured to use virtual tapes to save on the disk, but with specific tuning so that :
I was using ?BackupPc for quite some time, but it takes resources (CPU mainly) out of one of my desktop PCs and don't want it to eat my CPU on that one. And moving it to the small mini-PC is not valid I think... moreover, it wouldn't work with a VFAT partition as a backend, I think. I hope amanda will be cool CPU-wise in the new setup. Here are bits of my configuration :
tapecycle 25 tapes # 25 tapes rotation... not so sure of that one...
runtapes 10 # won't be able to save more than 50 Gb in one run
holdingdisk hd1 {
directory "/mnt/nas/AMANDA/holdingdisk"
use 50 Gb # won't be able to save more than 50 Gb in one run
chunksize 4095 Mb # preserve VFAT filesize limit
}
tpchanger "chg-multi" # the tape-changer glue script
tapedev "/dev/null" # the no-rewind tape device to be used
rawtapedev "/dev/null" # the raw device to be used (ftape only)
changerfile "/etc/amanda/DailySet1/chg-multi.conf"
changerdev "/dev/null"
tapetype HARD-DISK
define tapetype HARD-DISK {
comment "Dump onto hard disk"
length 5Gb # arbitrary size of my virtual tapes (directories)
}
define dumptype global {
comment "Global definitions"
# This is quite useful for setting global parameters, so you don't have
# to type them everywhere. All dumptype definitions in this sample file
# do include these definitions, either directly or indirectly.
# There's nothing special about the name `global'; if you create any
# dumptype that does not contain the word `global' or the name of any
# other dumptype that contains it, these definitions won't apply.
# Note that these definitions may be overridden in other
# dumptypes, if the redefinitions appear *after* the `global'
# dumptype name.
# You may want to use this for globally enabling or disabling
# indexing, recording, etc. Some examples:
index yes
# record no
# split_diskbuffer "/raid/amanda"
split_diskbuffer "/mnt/nas/AMANDA/diskbuffer"
fallback_splitsize 64m
tape_splitsize 4095 Mb # preserve VFAT limit for tapes chunks (files)
}
The rest of the chg-multi is pretty standard, wrt the HOWTO. Note that until recently, the chg-multi wouldn't work in Debian lenny... but since bug #486384 I had spotted was fixed, it's usable again. Posted Fri Aug 29 20:46:07 2008
One RC bug per week
Probably still affected by jetlag, I've decided at the end of
last week while going through my Debian mailinglists backlog, to
(try to) fix one RC bug per week from now on until Lenny is
released. I guess I was also influenced by
Neils talk about Lenny at ?DebConf8
Got myself an Eee PC 701
I'm back from my vacations, and there's lots of stuff I want (and
will) blog about. But this one had to be now: I got myself a new
Eee PC! Well, as a matter of fact both me and Paula wanted an Eee
PC, so this one is from and for us both (even if the possibility of
getting another one was already discussed). As you might have
noticed thanks to the previous
blog posts I made about ASUS EEE PC, which made several people
think I already had one, I really fancy this cute little laptoy. I
only have it for a couple of hours, and the time with it is between
me and Paula, so I still didn't have the time to play with it as
much as I wanted to: I built a backup USB stick and a backup of the
system as it was, fiddled a little with settings and preferences,
played with some of the software it has (which includes playing
?OpenArena and hedgewars O:-)), and got
it connected to the internet via Kanguru (3G service). And I had to
do this blog post using it, the same
as I did when I got my blackberry phone
![]() The next step is already decided: install Debian here! And for those wanting pictures... Well, I'm sure that either me or Paula will be uploading some of those in the near future
Posted Sat Aug 23 15:05:00 2008
DebConf8 video prereleases available for download
All "low quality" videos (which in fact have better quality than
the streams had) from ?DebConf8 are now available for download
at the
usual location. Enjoy!
Custom Debian Distributions shall now be called...
Debian Integrated Solutions. (DIS, pronounced "dish".)
Towards more CAS-related packages in Debian (SSO for web apps)
We have setup a collaborative maintenance project named
The goal is to have more packages available in Debian to be able to use the CAS SSO (Single Sign On) framework for web applications. More details at : http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianCASPackaging Feel free to join ! Posted Wed Aug 20 14:46:41 2008
Thanks to the videoteam!
So, DebConf8 is over
(currently we have three machines left in the network, the video
storage server, the video encoding server and my laptop...) and IMO
it rocked! I really enjoyed being here, meeting many many known
faces and getting to know quite some new ones and learning a bit
here and there, even though I was mostly doing videoteam work
How to use your blackberry as a modem in Debian
[ATENTION: this blog post was updated!]
After aquiring a ?BlackBerry cellphone, I wanted to use it as a modem for my laptop, running Debian. I still didn't figure how to use it via bluetooth, but here's how to do it via USB: I recommend you read all this procedure before starting
And you're on! Yeah, but how to install ?XmBlackBerry?Here are the steps to install ?XmBlackBerry: * get and install libmotif 2.3.0 debian packages here * aptitude install xaw3dg-dev xorg-dev x11proto-print-dev autoconf libtool libopensync-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev * As root, run ln -s /usr/include/X11/Xaw3d /usr/include/X11/Xaw * Install Xlt (tested with 13.0.13): get it here, untar it and, in its directory... *
* Install ?XmBlackBerry:
And how to install Barry?In Pearl's case you need CVS version of it. * Install barry: cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@barry.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/barry loginPosted Sat Aug 16 17:33:00 2008
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