etbe

work

2007-06-08T22:05:00.000+10:00

A client contacted me and said that he wants to meet me to discuss www.onsaletoday.com.au. He also said that he wanted a link to his site.

I’m not sure that he’ll get any benefits from having a link, but after past business dealings I’m happy to give him the link that he wants. I’m sure that the service will be different and interesting if the project goes ahead.

SE Linux in Debian

2007-05-20T21:53:00.000+10:00

I have now got a Debian Xen domU running the strict SE Linux policy that can boot in enforcing mode. I expect that tomorrow I will have it working with full functionality and that I will be able to run another SE Linux Play Machine in the near future.

For more information on my work on security features in Debian read the full version of this post on my new blog.

PC prices drop again!

2007-05-20T21:52:00.000+10:00

A few weeks ago Dell advertised new laptops for $849AU, this was a significant development but I didn't get around to blogging about it. Now I have just discovered that they have a special deal for $799AU for a laptop including delivery! This is an amazing deal and gives you an AMD Sempron 3500 CPU (not a really fast CPU and only 32bit, but it's faster than the 1.7GHz Pentium-M that is currently satisfying all my requirements for portable computing), 512M of RAM, an 80G hard drive and a 1280x800 display.

It's far from a high-end laptop (having a lower screen resolution and less RAM than my 3yo Thinkpad) but it will suffice for most things you might want to do on the move apart from running Xen.

The exciting thing about this is that as it's so cheap that most people will probably choose it in preference to a desktop system - the cheapest desktop system that Dell currently offers as a package is $898. The cheap desktop has a dual-core Athlon64, 1G of RAM, and a 160G hard drive. But for most tasks other than games such things aren't really required.

The rest of this post is on my new blog.

I must be famous ;)

2007-05-20T21:50:00.000+10:00

I have been "name dropped". ;)

It seems that I even beat Keith Owens (*) who works in the same office, but maybe Dave hasn't met him yet...

(*) I can name drop too!

This first appeared here on my new blog.

Planet feed polling frequency

2007-05-19T17:04:00.000+10:00

From reading my web stats yesterday it seems that one Planet has polled by blog feed 1693 times over the first 14.25 days of this month. This is about 5 polls per hour. Another Planet has polled my blog 994 times for an average of about 3 hits per hour.

How frequently does it make sense to poll blogs?

Read the rest of this post on my new blog.

priorities for heartbeat services

2007-05-19T17:02:00.000+10:00

Currently I am considering the priority scheme to use for some highly available services running on Linux with Heartbeat.

The Heartbeat system has a number of factors that can be used to determine the weight for running a particular service on a given node. One is the connectivity to other systems determined by ping (every system that is pingable can add a value to the score), one is the number of failures (every failure deducts a value from the total score), one is the weight for staying on the same node (IE if the situation changes and the current node is not the ideal node you might not want to immediately move the service to a different node as that gives some seconds of no service), and one is the preference for each node that may run the service.

The rest of this post is at this URL on my new blog.

mobile phone etiquette

2007-05-19T17:00:00.000+10:00

Paul Dwerryhouse blogs about mobile phone etiquette

In this post on my new blog I refute most of his claims regarding mobile phones being bad.

Tom's Hardware falls victim to a trojan

2007-05-18T22:18:00.000+10:00

E-Week has an article about the popular computer hardware review site Tom's Hardware (tomshardware.com) being hit by a trojan in a banner advert.

From the article it's not clear whether a criminal paid for a banner advert under a legitimate business name or compromised the advertising server run by an innocent third-party who paid for advertising on Tom's Hardware.

But really it doesn't matter very much for users. The facts that are clear are that Tom's Hardware is a very reputable site (that I personally visit regularly and recommend highly) that apparently did nothing wrong. Yet Windows users who visited the site who hadn't applied the latest patches had their systems compromised (and presumably used for other criminal activity). Apparently a month ago there was a patch released for the bug in question.

One thing that has to be noted is that large corporations often don't apply patches immediately. Spending a month testing a patch before deploying it widely is not uncommon in an enterprise environment. The general thinking in an enterprise is that the employees are almost always prohibited from visiting porn sites, and often prohibited from using forums, and webmail services. With these things prohibited the risk of attack is dramatically reduced. Now there is evidence that even the most reputable sites run by the competent sys-admins can be vulnerable to such attack.

The rest of this post is on my new blog.

career risks

2007-05-18T22:16:00.000+10:00

Paul Graham makes some interesting observations about taking risks to achieve career benefits.

One thing he doesn't mention is that the risks have to match your life situation.

The rest of this post is on my new blog.

terrorist actions I want banned

2007-05-18T22:14:00.000+10:00

The current trend in government seems to be to do whatever they want because to do otherwise invites (or fails to prevent) terrorism.

Here are some things that might be done by terrorists which governments should consider banning:

Graffiti - could be used by terrorists to mark locations for attacks or send messages to sleeper cells. It's already illegal but that doesn't seem to stop anyone. Send the graffiti "artists" to the same places that they send illegal immigrants.

Spitting in public - could be used for biological warfare (it's effective at spreading disease).

Putting feet on seats of public transport. Shoes have been used for smuggling explosives on to commercial airline flights and could be used for bio-warfare.

Sticking gum underneath chairs. This is an obvious risk for bio-warfare.

Governments and corporations are banning photography, banning prayer in airports, and speaking in languages other than English. It's about time that they banned something that is actually bad.

The main URL for this post is on my new blog.

Five ways SE Linux may surprise you

2007-05-17T22:51:00.000+10:00

Frank Mayer of Tresys has written a great article on the techtarget.com site about SE Linux.

It seems mostly aimed at managers and novice users and explains how SE Linux isn't really that difficult to use but is however a foundation technology that is needed for secure systems.

Check it out!

permalinks in wordpress, Apache redirection, and other blog stuff

2007-05-17T22:49:00.000+10:00

When I first put my new blog online I didn't think to set the custom permalinks option to avoid having /index.php in all URLs (which wastes a few bytes and looks nasty).

So I decided to change to better URLs but unfortunately many people have already bookmarked the bad URLs. I wanted to give a HTTP 301 redirection when someone uses the old index.php version (so that bookmarks get updated) and then redirect to the PHP file. Unfortunately having a redirection from ^/index.php to a version without it and then a local rewrite to include index.php again doesn't seem to work (any advice would be appreciated). So I put the following in my /etc/wordpress/htaccess file (the location for such things in Debian) so that foo.php is used instead where foo.php is a sym-link to index.php. I'm wondering whether I should file a bug report against the Debian package requesting that a sym-link be in the package to facilitate such things - if it's not possible to do what I desire without the symlink.

The rest of this post is on my new blog.

lemonup.com - pirates

2007-05-17T22:42:00.000+10:00

The URL http://linuxresource.lemonup.com/ currently has a mirror of my blog. Disregarding the DMCA take-down notice I sent them a week ago (which is also mirrored on their own site) they have again copied the content from my site without permission (I only allow non-commercial use). But this time they go even further and claim copyright over my text!

See the rest of this post on my new blog.

school rating

2007-05-04T22:08:00.000+10:00

The web site http://au.ratemyteachers.com/ allows Australian students to rate their teachers. Ratings are anonymous and give teachers a score out of 5 as well as allowing students to comment on teachers.

The Sydney Morning Herald has an article about the site that describes the actions that the NSW Department of Education and the NSW Teachers Federation are taking to block the site.

The solution to this however is really quite simple. There needs to be a formal method for students to rate their teachers which will be used when it comes time to give pay rises to good teachers and dismiss or transfer to non-teaching duties the teachers who can't do their job.

I encourage students to submit essays and debate topics about the anonymous news-papers published in the Soviet Union and other repressive states, why they were necessary (because criticism of the government was prohibited) and why they were morally right (a system with no method of correction will inevitably do bad things). Then teachers will have a choice of supporting the actions of the Soviet Union or the use of ratemyteacher.com, it will be interesting to see which option they choose. I think that it's most likely that they will take the hypocritical path and support anonymous newspapers in the Soviet Union while attacking such free speech in supposedly free countries.

It's interesting that an article on the failures of Mentone Grammar has just been published. Maybe if Mentone had been listed on the ratemyteachers.com site the Taylor's would not have made the mistake of sending their son there. Or maybe if the Mentone senior staff had been reading that site they would have been able to correct the problems before they became cause for a legal dispute.

The original URL for this is on etbe.coker.com.au.

DMCA etc

2007-05-04T22:06:00.000+10:00

A few days ago I wrote my first DMCA take-down notice, I followed the instructions on the Wikipedia page. The reason for this was that someone was mirroring my blog and putting google adverts on the copy. Before I started putting Google adverts on my web sites I wouldn't have been bothered about this. But now that I'm making a small amount of money from Google advertising I don't want someone else just mirroring my content and taking the money away from me.

The person who managed the site in question took a surprisingly large amount of time to comply with the request (a discussion of several messages plus a couple of reminders over the course of a few days).

The most recent news about DMCA abuse is the case of trying to prevent the distribution of a code used for decrypting DVD-HD. It is widely believed that copyright was used to prevent the distribution. Strangely many people who otherwise have a good understanding of technology have been saying "you can't copyright a number". What precisely is a program binary if not a long series of numbers (or a single large number depending on how you look at it)? For that matter a JPEG file or the ASCII representation of a book is also either a very large number or a series of small numbers. Also apparently it's not protected under copyright but under the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA.

If it was a matter of copyright it would not be an issue of whether a number can be copyrighted, but what defines such a number. One criteria for copyright is that it has to be on something non-trivial (EG I couldn't copyright the use of "a few days ago" as an introduction) so length is a criteria. Another is that it has to be a creative expression (so an encryption key can't be copyright). However in many jurisdictions there are separate laws regarding distributing passwords without permission, such laws are designed for preventing people from granting unauthorised access to computers but I believe that they can be used more generally (I have been advised that such laws exist in the state of Pennsylvania in the US - I'm not sure what the law is in other regions but expect that something so useful would be copied).

Another breaking story is that the RIAA has created an organisation with a US government mandate to collect royalties on ALL music that is played over Internet radio. This includes music for which the copyright owner is not an RIAA member and does not consent to have the royalties applied. You can create your own music, grant free access to everyone out of philanthropy, and then have the RIAA tax the music!

It's unfortunate that only the down-side of this dramatic change in copyright law has been discussed. Compulsory licenses have a lot of potential in other areas of copyright material. Recently people have been complaining that government sponsored scientific research is often only published in journals that cost large amounts of money. Why not have a compulsory license for journals at a fair price that everyone can afford? Software is often unreasonably expensive (Windows Vista with the latest version of MS Office can cost up to twice as much as a new PC), let's have compulsory licenses for software at a reasonable fee! Software vendors often cease selling old versions of software to force customers to upgrade, a compulsory license scheme would permit us to buy MS-DOS 3.30 at a reasonable price regardless of whether MS wants to sell it.

Finally there is at least one evil cult that claims it's "religious" texts are copyright as a way of preventing the public from seeing what a drug-addled second-rate sci-fi author produces. Let's have a compulsory license for them so everyone can read them!

The only thing that's wrong with the RIAA scheme is that there is no option for copyright owners to directly license their material to the users (including granting a free license if they so desire). The up-side of this is that it proves beyond all doubt that the RIAA is not representing copyright owners.

Update: I initially accepted the claims about the DMCA take-down notices being based on copyright rather than anti-circumvention. Since learning of my mistake I modified this post to reflect the fact that it was not a copyright issue.

The original URL for this is on etbe.coker.com.au.

LUG talks today

2007-05-01T22:31:00.000+10:00

Today I gave three talks at my local LUG. The first was my latest SE Linux talk (I’ll put the notes online soon). The second was a talk about voting.

I asked for a show of hands, who has already decided which party they will vote for at the next federal election (about 12 people put their hands up). I then asked people to put their hands down if they were not a member of the party that they intend to vote for, including myself there were only two raised hands in the room (including mine)!

...

The final talk I gave was about getting speakers for Linux Users’ Groups.

The full post is here.

more about Heartbeat

2007-05-01T22:28:00.000+10:00

In my new blog I've just made a lengthy post about Heartbeat.

comment spam

2007-04-30T21:45:00.000+10:00

The war on comment-spam has now begun. It appears that Blogger might have some anti-spam measures of which I was unaware. Otherwise it’s a strange coincidence that I get a huge number of comment spams for extremely hard-core porn from the Ukraine so soon after starting a Wordpress blog.

About 24 hours before the spam attack there was a strange blog comment that linked to google (with no offensive or spammy content). It appears that leaving it online was my mistake, when I left that online for a day the spammer decided that I might also leave porn spam online. I arrived home this evening to find almost 100 spams in the form of comments and track-backs, and more arriving by the minute. So I used iptables to block a /20 related to the spam and things are quiet now.

The moral of the story is to delete anything unusual ASAP in case it encourages the idiots.

I’ve also tightened the anti-spam measures on my blog too.

new blog

2007-04-28T00:56:00.000+10:00

I am starting to move my blog to my own Wordpress server. Here is the new URL for my main blog (feed), and here is the new URL for my Source-Dump blog (feed) which is now named just "dump".

Wordpress gives me the power to change all aspects of my blog's operation (including adding plug-ins). It also allows me to correctly display greater-than and less-than characters (the Perl script I use for converting them is at this post - it's short now but will probably grow).

Hopefully the new blog will also solve the date problems that some Planet readers have been complaining about.

I will briefly put the same content on both the old and new blogs, when I'm fully confident in the new blog I'll stop updating the old one and try to get all Planet installations changed. Anyone who wants to convert their Planet installation to my new blog now is welcome to do so.

paper about ZCAV

2007-04-26T21:03:00.000+10:00

This paper by Rodney Van Meter about ZCAV (Zoned Constant Angular Velocity) in hard drives is very interesting. It predates my work by about four years and includes some interesting methods of collecting data that I never considered.

One interesting thing is that apparently on some SCSI drives you can get the drive to tell you where the zones are. If I get enough spare time I would like to repeat such tests and see how the data returned by disks compares to benchmark results.

It's also interesting to note that Rodney's paper shows a fairly linear drop of performance on higher sector numbers (while he notes that it would be expected to fall off more quickly at higher sector numbers). One of my recent tests with a 300G disk showed the greater than linear performance drop (see my ZCAV results page for more details). It might require modern large disks to show this performance characteristic.

I also found it very interesting to see that a modified version of Bonnie was used for some of the tests and that it gave consistent results! I assumed that any filesystem based tests of ZCAV performance would introduce unreasonable amounts of variance into my tests and instead wrote my ZCAV test program to directly read the disk and measure performance.

It's times like this that I wish for a "groundhog day" so that I could spend a year doing nothing but reading technical papers.

MySQL security in Debian

2007-04-25T15:09:00.000+10:00

Currently there is a problem with the MySQL default install in Debian/Etch (and probably other distributions too). It sets up "root" with dba access with no password by default, the following mysql command will give a list of all MySQL accounts with Grant_priv access (one of the capabilities that gives great access to the database server) and shows their hashed password (as a matter of procedure I truncated the hash for my debian-sys-maint account). As you can see the "root" and "debian-sys-maint" accounts have such access. The debian-sys-maint account is used for Debian package management tools and it's password is stored in the /etc/mysql/debian.cnf file.


$ echo "select Host,User,Password from user where Grant_priv='y'" | mysql -u root mysql
Host    User    Password
localhost       root
aeon    root
localhost       debian-sys-maint        *882F90515FCEE65506CBFCD7

It seems likely that most people who have installed MySQL won't realise this problem and will continue to run their machine in that manner, this is a serious issue for multi-user machines. There is currently Debian bug #418672 about this issue. In my tests this issue affects Etch machines as well as machines running Unstable.

booting from USB for security

2007-04-24T09:11:00.000+10:00

Sune Vuorela asks about how to secure important data such as GPG keys on laptops.

I believe that the ideal solution involves booting from a USB device with an encrypted root filesystem to make subversion of the machine more difficult (note that physically subverting the machine is still possible - EG through monitoring the keyboard hardware).

The idea is that you boot from the USB device which contains the kernel, initrd, and the decryption key for the root filesystem. The advantage of having the key on a USB device is that it can be longer and more random than anything you might memorise.

In my previous posts about a good security design for an office, more about securing an office, and biometrics and passwords I covered some of the details of this.

My latest idea however is to have the root filesystem encrypted with both a password that is entered and by a password stored on the USB device. This means that someone who steals both my laptop and my USB key will still have some difficulty in getting at my data, but also someone who steals just the laptop will find that it is encrypted with a key that can not be brute-forced with any hardware that doesn't involve quantum-computing.

Also coincidentally also on Planet Debian in the same day Michael Prokop documents how to solve some of the problems relating to booting from a USB flash device.

free laptop

2007-04-23T23:46:00.000+10:00

Jesus Climent writes about donating laptops.

Free Thinkpad

I have a Thinkpad 385xd laptop to give away for free. It has a PentiumMMX-233 CPU, 96M of RAM, a 3.2G IDE disk, and a 800x600 display. As of my last tests it works well and is currently running an old version of Debian.

The power connector on the laptop is a little broken (it takes a bit of work to plug the cable in) and the cable is also broken (I think that some of the wires are broken and it gets hot when used for a while). Probably the best thing to do would be to solder the cable from the PSU onto the motherboard.

If anyone has a good use for such a machine that benefits a free software project and can arrange to collect it from Melbourne Australia then let me know.

Also I can bring it to any conference that I attend.

Note that I will delete this post once the laptop is taken. So if the Planet link doesn't resolve then someone else got in first.

first look at CentOS 5 Xen

2007-04-23T23:01:00.000+10:00

I have just installed a machine running CentOS 5 as a Xen server. I installed a full GUI environment on the dom0 so that GUI tools can be used for managing the virtual servers.

The first problem I had was selecting the "Installation source", it's described in the error message as an "Invalid PV media address" when you get it wrong which caused me a little confusion when installing it at 10PM. Then I had a few problems getting the syntax of a nfs://1.2.3.4:/directory URL correct. But these were trivial annoyances. It was a little annoying that my attempts to use a "file://" URL were rejected, I had hoped that it would just run exportfs to make the NFS export from the local machine (much faster than using an NFS server over the network which is what the current setup will lead people to do).

The first true deficiency I found with the tools is that it provides no way of creating filesystems on block devices. The process of allocating a block device or file from the Xen configuration tool is merely assigning a virtual block device to the Xen image - and only one such virtual block device is permitted. Then the CentOS 5 installation instance that runs under Xen will have to partition the disk (it doesn't support installing directly to an unpartitioned disk) which will make things painful when it comes time to resize the filesystems.

When running Debian Xen servers I do everything manually. A typical Debian Xen instance that I run will have a virtual block device /dev/hda for the root FS, /dev/hdb for swap, and /dev/hdc for /home. Then if I want to resize them I merely stop the Xen instance, run "e2fsck -f" on the filesystem followed by "resize2fs" and the LVM command "lvresize" (in the appropriate order depending on whether I am extending or reducing the filesystem).

Xen also supports creating a virtual partitioned disk. This means I could have /dev/lvm/xenroot, and /dev/lvm/xenswap, and /dev/lvm/xenhome appear in the domU as /dev/hda1, /dev/hda2, and /dev/hda3. This means that I could have a single virtual disk that allows the partitions to be independently resized when the domU in question is not running. I have not tried using this feature as it doesn't suit my usage patterns. But it's interesting and unfortunate that the GUI tools which are part of CentOS don't support it.

When I finally got to run the install process it had a virtual graphics environment (which is good) but unfortunately it suffered badly from the two-mouse-cursor problem with different accellerations used for both cursors so the difference in position of the two cursors varied in different parts of the screen. This was rather surprising as the dom0 had a default GNOME install.

lemonup and blog license

2007-04-23T08:23:00.000+10:00

I have just updated my previous post about licenses and also explicitely licensed my blog. Previously I had used a Creative-Commons share-alike license for lecture notes to allow commercial use and had not specified what the license is for my blog apart from it being free for feeds (you may add it to a planet without seeking permission first).

Unfortunately the operators of a site named lemonup.com decided to mirror many of my blog posts with Google AdWords. The site provides no benefit to users that I can discover and merely takes away AdWords revenue from my site. It has no listed method of contacting the site owner so it seems that blogging about this and letting them read it on their own site is the only way of doing so. :-#

I'm happy for Technorati to mirror my site as they provide significant benefits to users and to me personally. I am also happy for planet installations that include my blog among others to have a Google advert on the page (in which case it's a Google advert for the entire planet not for my blog post).

Also at this time I permit sites to mirror extracts of my articles. So for example the porn blogs that post paragraphs of my posts about topics such as "meeting people" with links to my posts don't bother me. I'm sure that someone who is searching for porn will not be happy to get links to posts about Debian release parties etc - but that's their QA issue not a license issue. I am aware that in some jurisdictions I can not prevent people from using extracts of my posts - but I permit this even in jurisdictions where such use is not mandated by law.

Lemonup: you may post short extracts (10% or one paragraph) of my posts with links to the original posts, or you may mirror my posts with no advertising at all. If those options are not of interest to you then please remove all content I wrote from your site.

the Right to Fork

2007-04-22T22:51:00.000+10:00

Leon Brooks blogged about the Right to Fork (an essential right for free software development) but notes that governments of countries don't permit such a right.

One of the criteria for the existence of a state is the ability to control it's own territory. Lose control of the territory and you lose the state, lose some of the territory and the state is diminished. Therefore preventing a division of the territory (a split after a civil war) is the primary purpose of a state. The other criteria of a state are the ability to tax the population, impose civil order, and to administer all other aspects of government. All of these operations are essential to the government and lead to the destruction of the state if they are lost.

It's not that governments want to prevent forking, it's the fact that the existence of the state (on which the existence of the government depends) demands that it be prevented in all but the most extreme situations.

With free software forking is not a problem as multiple groups can work on similar software without interference. If someone else works on a slightly different version of your program then the worst that they can do is to get the interest of more developers than you get. This competition for developers leads to better code!

With proprietary software the desire to prevent forking is due to the tiny marginal cost of software. Most of the costs of running a software company are in the development. The amount of work involved in development does not vary much as the user-base is increased. So doubling the number of sales can always be expected to significantly more than double the company's profit.

One thing that would benefit the computer industry would be to have all the source to proprietary programs put in escrow and then released freely after some amount of time or some number of versions have been released. If Windows NT 4.0 was released freely today it would not take many sales from the more recent versions of Windows. But it would provide significant benefits for people who want to emulate older systems and preserve data. I expect that current versions of MS-Office wouldn't properly read files created on NT 4.0, I'm sure that this is a problem for some people and will become more of a problem as new machines that are currently being designed are not capable of booting such old versions of Windows.

praying for rain

2007-04-22T00:36:00.000+10:00

Paul Dwerryhouse posted a comment about the Prime Minister asking people to pray for rain. I don't think that Johnny is suggesting this because he's overly religious (compare his actions with the New Testament of the Bible). The fact is that the Australian government has no plans to deal with global warming, the inefficient distribution of water, and the large commercial farms that produce water inefficient crops such as rice and cotton in areas that have limited amounts of water. This means that small farmers should pray, no-one else will help them!

I wonder if the farmers will ever work out that the National party is doing absolutely nothing for them by it's alliance with the Liberal party. Maybe if farmers could actually get a political party that represents their interests then things would change.

a Heartbeat developer comments on my blog post

2007-04-19T11:44:00.000+10:00

Alan Robertson (a major contributor to the Heartbeat project) commented on my post failure probability and clusters. His comment deserves wider readership than a comment generally gets so I'm making a post out of it. Here it is:

One of my favorite phrases is "complexity is the enemy of reliability" . This is absolutely true, but not a complete picture, because you don't actually care much about reliability, you care about availability.

Complexity (which reduces MTBF) is only worth it if you can use it to drastically cut MTTR - which in turn raises availability significantly. If your MTTR was 0, then you wouldn't care if you ever had a failure. Of course, it's never zero

But, with normal clustering software, you can significantly improve your availability, AND your maintainability.

Your post makes some assumptions which are more than a little simplistic. To be fair, the real mathematics of this are pretty darn complicated.

First I agree that there are FAR more 2-node clusters than larger clusters. But, I think for a different reason. People understand 2-node clusters. I'm not saying this isn't important, it is important. But, it's not related to reliability.

Second, you assume a particular model of quorum, and there are many. It is true that your model is the most common, but it's hardly the only one - not even for heartbeat (and there are others we want to implement).

Third, if you have redundant networking, and multiple power sources, as it should, then system failures become much less correlated. The normal model which is used is completely uncorrelated failures.

This is obviously an oversimplification as well, but if you have redundant power supplies supplied from redundant power feeds, and redundant networking etc. it's not a bad approximation.

So, if you have an MTTR of 4 hours to repair broken hardware, what you care about is the probability of having additional failures during those four hours.

If your HA software can recover from an error in 60 seconds, then that's your effective MTTR as seen by (a subset) of users. Some won't see it at all. And, of course, that should also go into your computation. This depends on knowing a lot about what kind of protocol is involved, and what the probability of various lengths of failures is to be visible to various kinds of users. And, of course, no one really knows that either in practice.

If you have a hardware failure every 5 years approximately, and a hardware repair MTTR of 4 hours, then the probability of a second failure during that time is about .009%. The probability of two failures occuring during that time is about 8^10-7% - which is a pretty small number.

Probabilities for higher order failures are proportionately smaller.

But, of course, like any calculation, the probabilities of this are calculated using a number of simplifying assumptions.

It assumes, for example, that the probabilities of correlated failures are small. For example, the probability of a flood taking out all the servers, or some other disaster is ignored.

You can add complexity to solve those problems too ;-), but at some point the managerial difficulties (complexity) overwhelms you and you say (regardless of the numbers) that you don't want to go there.

Mangerial complexity is minimized by uniformity in the configuration. So, if all your nodes can run any service, that's good. If they're asymmetric, and very wildly so, that's bad.

I have to go now, I had a family emergency come up while I was writing this. Later...

End quote.

It's interesting to note that there are other models of quorum, I'll have to investigate that. Most places I have worked have had a MTTR that is significantly greater than four hours. But if you have hot-swap hard drives (so drive failure isn't a serious problem) then having machines have an average of one failure per five years should be possible.

2 node vs 3+ node clusters

2007-04-18T21:08:00.000+10:00

A comment on my post about the failure probability of clusters suggested that a six node cluster that has one node fail should become a five node cluster.

The problem with this is what to do when nodes recover from a failure. For example if a six node cluster had a node fail and became a five node cluster, then became a three node cluster after another two nodes had failed, then you would have half the cluster that was disconnected. If the three nodes that appeared to have failed became active again but unable to see the other three nodes then you would have a split-brain situation.

As noted in the comment the special case of a two node cluster does have different failure situations. If the connection between nodes goes down and the router can still be pinged then you can have a split brain situation. To avoid this you will generally have a direct connection between the two nodes (either a null-modem cable or a crossover Ethernet cable), such cables are more reliable than networking which involves a switch or hub. Also the network interface which involves the router in question will ideally also be used as a method of maintaining cluster status - it seems unlikely that two nodes will both be able to ping the router but be unable to send data to each other.

For best reliability you need to use multiple network interfaces between cluster nodes. One way of doing this is to have a pair of Ethernet ports bonded for providing the service (connected to two switches and pinging a router to determine which switch is best to use). The Heartbeat software supports encrypted data so it should be safe to run it on the same interface as used for providing the service (of course if you provide a service to the public Internet then you want a firewall to prevent machines on the net from trying to attack it).

Heartbeat also supports using multiple interfaces for maintaining the cluster data, so you can have one network dedicated to cluster operations and the network that is used for providing the service can be a backup network for cluster data. The pingd service allows Heartbeat to place services on nodes that have good connectivity to the net. So you could have multiple nodes that each have one Ethernet port for providing the service and one port as a backup for Heartbeat operations, if pingd indicates that the service port was not functioning correctly then the services would be moved to other nodes.

If you want to avoid having private Heartbeat data going over the service interface then in the two-node case you need a minimum of two Ethernet ports for Heartbeat and one port for providing the service if you use pingd. If you don't use pingd then you need two bonded ports for providing the service and two ports (either bonded or independently configured in Hertbeat) for Heartbeat giving a total of four ports.

When there are more than two nodes in the cluster the criteria for cluster membership is that a majority of nodes are connected. This makes split-brain impossible and reduces the need to have reliable Ethernet interfaces. A cluster with three or more nodes could have a single service port and a single private port for Heartbeat, or if you trust the service interface you could do it all on one Ethernet port.

In summary, three nodes is better than two, but requires more hardware. Five nodes is better than three, but as I wrote in my previous post four nodes is not much good. I recommend against any even number of nodes other than two for the same reason.

failure probability and clusters

2007-04-15T20:18:00.000+10:00

When running a high-availability cluster of two nodes it will generally be configured such that if one node fails then the other runs. Some common operation (such as accessing a shared storage device or pinging a router) will be used by the surviving node to determine that the other node is dead and that it's not merely a networking problem. Therefore if you lose one node then the system keeps operating until you lose another.

When you run a three-node cluster the general configuration is that a majority of nodes is required. So if the cluster is partitioned then one node on it's own will shut down all services while two nodes that can talk to each other will continue operating as normal. This means that to lose the cluster you need to lose all inter-node communication or have two nodes fail.

If the probability of a node surviving for the time interval required to repair a node that's already died is N (where N is a number between 0 and 1 - 1 means 100% chance of success and 0 means it is certain to fail) then for a two node cluster the probability of the second node surviving long enough for a dead node to be fixed is N. For a three node cluster the probability that both the surviving two nodes will survive is N^2. This is significantly less, therefore a three node cluster is more likely to experience a critical second failure than a two node cluster.

For a four node cluster you need three active nodes to have quorum. Therefore the probability that a second node won't fail is N^3 - even worse again!

For a five node cluster you can lose two nodes without losing the cluster. If you have already lost a node the probability that you won't lose another two is N^4+(1-N)*N^3*4. As long as N is greater than 0.8 the probability of keeping three nodes out of four is greater than the probability of a single node not failing.

To see the probabilities of four and five node clusters experiencing a catastrophic failure after one node has died run the following shell script for different values of N (0.9 and 0.99 are reasonable values to try). You might hope that the probability of a second node remaining online while the first node is being repaired is significantly higher than 0.9, however when you consider that the first node's failure might have been partially caused by the ambient temperature, power supply problems, vibration, or other factors that affect multiple nodes I don't think it's impossible for the probability to be as low as 0.9.

echo $N^4+\(1-$N\)*$N^3*4|bc -l ; echo $N^3 | bc -l

So it seems that if reliability is your aim in having a cluster then your options are two nodes (if you can be certain of avoiding split-brain) or five nodes. Six nodes is not a good option as the probability of losing three nodes out of six is greater than the probability of losing three nodes out of five. Seven and nine node clusters would also be reasonable options.

But it's not surprising that a google search for "five node" cluster high-availability gives about 1/10 the number of results as a search for "four node" cluster high-availability. Most people in the computer industry like powers of two more than they like maths.

Debian/Etch release party in Melbourne - Australia

2007-04-13T00:18:00.000+10:00

We are having a release party on Saturday the 14th of April. We meet at mid-day under the clocks at Flinders Street Station and then go somewhere convenient and not too expensive for lunch.

All welcome.

Update:

The event was moderately successful. There were only six people including me - that was quite a bit smaller than the Debian 10th birthday party we had in Melbourne, but it was still enough to have fun.

Everyone there had a good knowledge of Linux and Debian and many interesting things were discussed. We had lunch at a Japanese stone-grill restaurant - their specialty is serving raw ingredients along with a stone that's at 400C (or so they claim - I would expect a 400C stone to radiate more heat than I experienced on my previous visit). As it was a warm day we skipped the stone grill and ordered from the lunch menu (which was also a lot cheaper). Some of the guys had never tried Sake or Plum Wine before, they seemed to like it. Strangely the waitress always wanted to deliver alcohol to a 15yo in preference to almost anyone else.

One of the topics of discussion was Linux meetings and the ability to attend them. A point was made that if you are <18yo and rely on your parents' permission to do things then a meeting that finishes at 9PM isn't a viable option. It has previously been noted that for people from regional areas an evening meeting is also inconvenient.

Maybe we should have occasional LUG meetings on a Saturday afternoon to cater for the needs of such people?

Spooks and GConf

2007-04-11T23:38:00.000+10:00

Jeff Waugh wrote an amusing post about SE Linux and GConf support. It's good to see SE Linux being promoted to the GNOME community.

presentations about SE Linux

2007-04-11T21:59:00.000+10:00

I have just read the Presentation Zen blog post about PowerPoint.

One of the interesting suggestions was that it's not effective to present the same information twice, so you don't have notes covering what you say. Having a diagram that gives the same information is effective though because it gives a different way of analyzing the data. I looked at a couple of sets of slides that I have written and noticed that the ratio of text slides to diagram slides was 6:1 and 3:1 in favor of text, and that wasn't counting the first and last slides that have the title of the talk and a set of URLs respectively.

So it seems that I need more and better diagrams. I'll include most of the diagrams I use in my current SE Linux talks in this post with some ideas on how to improve them. I would appreciate any suggestions that may be offered (either through blog comments or email).

The above diagram shows how the SE Linux identity limits the roles that may be selected, and how the role limits the domains that may be entered. Therefore the identity controls what the user may do and in this example the identity "root" means that the user has little access to the machine (a Play Machine configuration). I think that the above is reasonably effective and have been using it for a few years. I have considered a more complex diagram with the "staff_r" role included as well and possibly including the way that "newrole" can be used to change between roles. So I could have the above as slide #1 about identities and roles with a more detailed diagram following to replace a page of text about role transition.

The above diagram shows the domain transitions used in a typical system boot and login process. It includes the names of the types and a summary of the relevant policy rules used to implement the transitions. I also have another diagram that I have used which is the same but without the file types and policy. In the past I have never used both in the one talk - just used one of the two and had text to describe the information content of the other. To make greater use of diagrams I could start with the simple diagram and then have the following slide have all the detail.

The above diagram simply displays the MCS security model with ellipses representing processes and rectangles representing files.

The above diagram shows a simplified version of the MMCS policy. With MMCS each process has a range with the low level representing the minimum category set of files to which it is permitted to write and the high level representing the files that it may read and write. So to write to a file with the "HR" category the process must have a low level that's no higher than "HR" and a high level that is equal or greater than "HR". The full set of combinations of two categories with low and high levels means 10 different levels of access for processes which makes for a complex diagram. I need something other than plain text for this but the above diagram is overly complex and a full set is even more so. Maybe a table with process contexts on one axis, file contexts on another and access granted being one of "R", "RW" or nothing?

I also have a MLS diagram in the same manner, but I now think it's too awful to put on my blog. Any suggestions on how to effectively design a diagram for MLS? For those of you who don't know how MLS works the basic concept is that every process has an "Effective Clearance" (AKA low level) which determines what it can write, it can't write to anything below that because it might have read data from a file at it's own level and it can't read from a level higher than it's own level. MLS also uses a high level for ranged processes and filesystem objects (but that's when it gets really complex).

This last one is what I consider my most effective diagram. It shows the benefits of SE Linux in confining daemons in a clear and effective manner. Any suggestions for improvement (apart from fixing the varying text size which is due to a bug in Dia) would be appreciated.

The above diagrams are all on my SE Linux talks page, along with the Dia files that were used to create them. They may be used freely for non-commercial purposes.

If anyone has some SE Linux diagrams that they would like to share then please let me know, either through a blog comment, email, or a blog post syndicated on Planet SE Linux.

Xen and SE Linux - EWeek review of RHEL5

2007-04-11T08:16:00.000+10:00

The online magazine EWeek has done a review of RHEL5. It's quite a positive review which can be summarised as "good support for Xen as service (not an appliance), better value than previous versions with the licenses for multiple guests included, and SE Linux briefly got in the way but the Troubleshooting tool fixed it quickly and easily".

The problem they had is that the SE Linux policy expects Xen images to be in /var/lib/xen/images, but the Xen configuration tools apparently didn't adequately encourage them to use that directory. They stored the images somewhere else and SE Linux stopped it from working. The Troubleshooting tool did something that they didn't describe and then it all worked.

Generally a very positive review of RHEL5 and a moderately positive review of SE Linux in RHEL5.

PS You might have to turn off JavaScript to view the link, the page has broken JavaScript code that takes an unreasonable amount of CPU time.

what is a BOF?

2007-04-10T21:21:00.000+10:00

BOF stands for Birds Of a Feather, it's an informal session run at a conference usually without any formal approval by the people who run the conference.

Often conferences have a white-board, wiki, or other place where conference delegates can leave notes for any reason. It is used for many purposes including arranging BOFs. To arrange a BOF you will usually write the title for the BOF and the name of the convenor (usually yourself if it's your idea) and leave a space for interested people to sign their names. Even though there is usually no formal involvement of the conference organizers they will generally reserve some time for BOFs. Depending on the expected interest they will usually offer one or two slots of either 45 minutes or one hour. They will also often assist in allocating BOFs to rooms. But none of this is needed. All that you need to do is find a notice-board, state your intention to have a BOF at a time when not much else is happening and play it by ear!

My observation is that about half the ideas for BOFs actually happen, the rest don't get enough interest. This is OK, one of the reasons for a BOF is to have a discussion about an area of technology that has an unknown level of interest. If no-one is interested then you offer the same thing the next year. If only a few people are interested then you discuss it over dinner. But sometimes you get 30+ people, you never know what to expect as many people don't sign up - or have their first choice canceled and attend the next on the list!

To run a BOF you firstly need some level of expert knowledge in the field. I believe that the best plan is for a BOF to be a panel discussion where you have a significant portion of the people in the audience (between 5 and 15 people) speaking their opinions on the topic and the convener moderating the discussion. If things work in an ideal manner then the convener will merely be one member of the panel. However it's generally expected that the person running the BOF can give an improvised lecture on the topic in case things don't happen in an ideal manner. It's also expected that the convener will have an agenda for a discussion drawn up so that if the panel method occurs they can ask a series of questions for members of the BOF to answer. My experience is that 8 simple questions will cover most of an hour.

One requirement for convening a BOF is that you be confident in speaking to an audience of unknown size, knowledge, and temperament. Although I haven't seen it done it would be possible to have two people acting as joint conveners of a BOF. One person with the confidence to handle the audience and manage the agenda and another with the technical skills needed to speak authoritatively on the topic.

Some of the BOFs I have attended have had casual discussions, some have had heated arguments, and some ended up as lectures with the convener just talking about the topic. Each of these outcomes can work in terms of entertaining and educating the delegates.

But don't feel afraid, one of the advantages of a BOF is that it's a very casual affair, not only because of the nature of the event but also because it usually happens at the end of a long conference day. People will want to relax not have a high-intensity lecture. One problem that you can have when giving a formal lecture to an audience is nervous problems such as hyper-ventilating. This has happened to me before and it was really difficult to recover while continuing the lecture. If that happens during a BOF then you can just throw a question to the audience such as "could everyone in the room please give their opinion on X", that will give you time for your nerves to recover while also allowing the audience to get to know each other a bit - it's probably best to have at least one such question on your agenda in case it's needed.

Note that the above is my personal opinion based on my own experience. I'm sure that lots of other people will disagree with me and write blog posts saying so. ;)

The facts which I expect no-one to dispute are:

BOFs are informal
Anyone can run one
You need an agenda
You need some level of expert knowledge of the topic

a strange interpretation of the US constitution about copyright

2007-04-09T15:09:00.000+10:00

In a blog on infoworld the following strange statement appeared:

The US Constitution is clear that the reason for copyright/patent/etc. is to benefit creators of property, not users of property. I appreciate the reason: give creators a reasonable return on their investment.

Actually the US constitution seems to clearly say the opposite. Here is a link to section 8 of the US constitution. The important phrase is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries".

There is no mention of providing benefits to creators of written works and inventions. The aim is clearly stated to promote the progress of science and useful arts and the exclusive right which operates for limited times is merely a method of achieving that aim.

BSD vs GPL licences

2007-04-09T09:09:00.001+10:00

James Dumay writes about Theo's latest flame-war.

One interesting part of the debate was Theo's response to this comment:
> We can dual license our code though and that is an
> acceptable license for Linux, the kernel.

Theo:
We? Sure, you can. But Reyk will not dual license his code, and most of the other people in the BSD community won't either, because then they receive the occasional patch from a GPL-believer which is ONLY under the GPL license, and then they are no less screwed than they would be from the code granted totally freely to companies.

The difference of course is that when you give code to companies under the BSD license you will never know what is done to it, but GPL-only patches can still be used as inspiration for new code development. Sure GPL-only code can't be copied into BSD-only code, but once you know where the bugs are they are easy to fix.

Towards the end of the debate Theo asks the following question:
David, if you found a piece of your code in some other tree, under a different license, would your first point of engatement be a public or private mail?

I can't speak for David, but after reading the discussion I would probably start by blogging about such an issue.

New Debian release and new DPL

2007-04-09T08:32:00.000+10:00

Ingo Juergensmann has blogged in detail about the new release and the new DPL.

Sam Hocevar ran for DPL on a platform based on some significant new changes. It will be interesting to see what happens over the next year.

The release of Etch is an exciting milestone in Debian development. Among other things it has SE Linux working!

I'm going to try and arrange a party in Melbourne, Australia to celebrate. We also have a mailing list for Debian people in Melbourne, to subscribe send a message to debian-melb-request@taz.net.au with the subject subscribe. I'll use that list for arranging the party, send me private email if you are not subscribed but want to attend.

blogger sucks!

2007-04-09T00:50:00.000+10:00

If I enter "a < b" in blogger then it works, but if I want the < symbol to be next to some other text (EG for a #include line in C source) then it treats it as a HTML tag. The HTML code for a < symbol also doesn't work. This doesn't work regardless of whether I try entering HTML in the HTML editor or entering text in the "Compose" editor. I could deal with this problem if it forced me to strictly use one of the two editors available, but it fails in both!

Do other blog server programs have problems like this? I think that I need to change my blog server just to allow posting C source!

Also do any of the common blog servers allow a file upload? For most of my posts I do all the editing offline, so I'd rather just upload a HTML file instead of pasting the text into the blog editor (and then manually fixing the situations where it's idea of formatting differs from mine). If such an upload mode also supported getting a file via HTTP then that would be convenient too. The option of editing a file on a remote server with vi, exporting it via Apache, and then getting it to the blog server via HTTP would work well for me in some important situations.

Update: It sucks more than I thought. The feed misses the "less than" character between "a" and "b" in the above paragraph. My list of requirements in this regard now includes the ability to use such characters in a feed. Actually I want to go the whole hog and be able to include samples of HTML in my blog entries and have them display correctly in the feed.

heartbeat - what defines a cluster?

2007-04-09T00:38:00.000+10:00

In Debian bug 418210 there is discussion of what constitutes a cluster.

I believe that the node configuration lines in the config file /etc/ha.d/ha.cf should authoritatively define what is in the cluster and any broadcast packets from other nodes should be ignored.

Currently if you have two clusters sharing the same VLAN and they both use the same auth code then they will get confused about which node belongs to each cluster.

I set up a couple of clusters for testing (one Debian/Etch and the other Debian/unstable) under Xen using the same bridge device - naturally I could set up separate bridges - but why should I have to?

I gave each of them the same auth code (one was created by copying the block devices from the other - they have the same root password so there shouldn't be a need for changing any other passwords). Then things all fell apart. They would correctly determine that they should each have two nodes in the cluster (mapping to the two node lines), but cluster 1 would get nodes ha1 and ha2-unstable even though it had node lines for ha1 and ha2.

I have been told that this is the way it's supposed to be and I should just use different ports or different physical media.

I wonder how many companies have multiple Heartbeat installations on different VLANs such that a single mis-connected cable will make all hell break loose on their network...

SE Linux - not too difficult for new users

2007-04-08T10:53:00.000+10:00

At http://tanso.net/selinux/ Jan-Frode Myklebust has documented his work in creating new SE Linux policy to run Googleearth on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. He discussed this with us on #selinux in irc.freenode.net (the main SE Linux IRC channel).

One of his later IRC comments was:
btw erich, the reason for creating this googleearth module was mostly triggered by your apparmor blog entry.. I wanted to see how much more difficult it would be to create policies in selinux compared to apparmor, and must say it wasn't too hard.

"erich" refers to Erich Schubert. His AppArmor blog entry is currently the top entry in his SE Linux list.

mini-cyclone

2007-04-07T12:53:00.000+10:00

This morning after having had my car parked in the sun for a couple of hours I poured water on the rear window to cool it (as described in this post). When I did so the mist that rose up from the window spiraled up in a way that was similar to a cyclone (but on a much smaller scale).

Would this have been caused by the steam rising off my car after I poured the water on? Or might the air have been moving in that pattern before and merely have been revealed by the water vapor?

It's a pity I didn't have my camera. My phone-camera doesn't have anything close to the quality needed to make a movie of this (it would be doubtful even with my regular camera).

wikisky

2007-04-07T07:42:00.000+10:00

http://wikisky.org/ is like google maps but looking up! It's cool, check it out!

Linux Tour Bus

2007-04-06T22:06:00.000+10:00

I have seen buses used for tours that contain bunk beds. If one or more such buses were hired then a group of Linux people could go on a moving Linux conference. This would have to take place in an area with many reasonable size cities in a close area and where there is a good number of Linux people in such cities. Probably the EU is the only area.

A bus (or several buses depending on demand) would then take a group of Linux people through the major cities and have a conference in each one.

Currently there are conferences such as the Debian conference DebConf which receive sufficient sponsorship money to pay for many speakers to attend. Having a similar conference traveling around Europe shouldn't cost any more money and will give plenty of time for the people in the bus to do some coding along the way.

We already have the Geek Cruises, my idea is to do a similar thing but on the road. Also it isn't practical to transport an entire conference, so it would probably just be speakers on buses and the audiences would vary from city to city.

The Inevitability of Failure

2007-04-06T17:48:00.000+10:00

I posted the NSA paper titled The Inevitability of Failure on my source-dump blog at this URL. If you want to get the background to SE Linux then this is the paper to read.

Submitting big documents (62K) to Blogger turns out to be surprisingly painful. It's a pity that Blogger doesn't support editing sections (as MediaWiki does) so every edit requires that the entire document be transferred back and forth. Do other blog servers make this easier?

Mac vs PC

2007-04-05T21:49:00.001+10:00

For a few months I have been spending a lot of time using a Mac running OS/X for 40 hours a week. Recently a discussion started at a client site as to whether Macs or PCs should be used for future desktop machines.

The Apple hardware is very slick, everything fits together nicely and works well. For example my Apple monitor connects to my Mac via a single cable that supplies power, USB, and the video signal. My USB keyboard and mouse connect to my monitor. So my Mac has only three cables connected to it, power, Ethernet, and the monitor cable. The same thing on a PC would require an additional USB cable going to the PC and an additional power cable going to the monitor.

That is just one trivial example of how Macs are slick.

The advantage of a PC is that installing Linux is much easier and better supported (the vast majority of Linux users have PCs). The benefits of slick hardware are greatly diminished if it's only partly supported in terms of drivers and/or getting answers to technical questions on the net.

Another issue is that of software compatibility. When doing Linux work having a desktop machine that runs X is a significant benefit - even if all your work is text based. The Apple X server that I have installed never worked properly and it's a hack like the various Windows X servers. To make things worse the current versions of OpenOffice for Mac use X and therefore don't work for me - I've been told that the next version of OpenOffice will fix this.

Then there's the issue of price. For a Mac you would want to have a machine with an Intel CPU which means a recent and expensive machine. For a PC the benefits of a 64bit machine over an old P3 or P4 are very small. For all the work I do a refurbished IBM or Compaq P3 machine would provide all the performance I require, have better software compatability than a Mac, and cost only $120 for a machine.

Also I imagine that some common and cheap PC expansions (such as KVM switches) would cost a lot more for a Mac.

You can run Linux on a Mac, but what's the point? You lose some of the hardware features so the Mac becomes an expensive PC that's not entirely compatible. I'd rather have a P3 PC on my desktop than the latest Mac.

But I wouldn't rule out recommending a Mac to other people. People who have no-one to help them run Linux are best advised to use a Mac. Of course Windows isn't viable due to security problems.

reviewing blog comments and links

2007-04-04T21:00:00.000+10:00

It seems that the swik.net site is mirroring all my blog posts. The site seems to be doing some good things in terms of spreading information about free software and has a good presentation that makes such information easy to read. Also having a backup of my blog posts also could be handy if blogger ever does the wrong thing.

However it is a little annoying that when I write a blog post that refers to one of my older posts it will get a link back to swik.net. This is an annoyance for readers who want to see posts that link to mine from outside my blog. So I've been deleting those links when I notice them.

Also someone from Brazil has been linking to my posts, which is a good thing. Their blog also causes my blog to list theirs as a link which is also fine. However the problem is that their blog seems to detect me as being from an English speaking country and gives me an English version of the blog (rather than the presumably Portuguese version that has the link to my article). Assuming that someone speaks English because they reside in Australia is a bad idea, and breaking links is a worse one. So I've been deleting those links from my blog as they are of no use to people who are detected as English speakers (which comprises the vast majority of my blog readers). When someone blogs about one of my posts I want to see what they wrote, even if all that I can read are the parts that are quoted from me!

Finally I've been deleting some comments containing URLs. It seems that there are quite a few people trying to advertise their businesses by posting comments that bear some vague relation to a blog post with their company's URL included. You have to try harder than that if you want to promote yourself on my blog.

cheap big TFT monitor

2007-04-03T23:09:00.000+10:00

I just received the latest Dell advert, they are offering a 22 inch monitor with 1680x1050 resolution for $499 including delivery! This is a great deal, I've got the same model of monitor at home (I paid $750 for it almost six months ago) and have been totally satisfied. The same monitor with a $499 price is amazing value.

In the past I blogged about the benefits of larger monitors for software development. Now these benefits are available to most computer users in first-world countries.

Now that 1680x1050 is commonly available I expect to see higher resolution monitors dropping in price, at the $800 and $1200 price-points there will need to be something better than that.

The next development will be new software to take advantage of this. One thing that I have heard of is a window manager that splits the display into two halves (in this case they would be 840x1050 resolution). The benefit of having this configuration (according to the people who use it) is that for maximising a window will make it take half the physical screen. This means that you could have a debugger in one half of the screen and your application in the other, to "maximise" the application would not occlude the debugger. Or you could have a web browser and a MUA each using half a screen.

Of course the same result could be achieved by getting two physical displays, but this requires a graphics card that supports "twin-head" operation, and the purchase price of two displays (which will add up to more than $500).

Splitting a screen into two virtual displays is not something that would suit my working patterns. For a lot of my work I just have a screen filled with as many Xterms as will fit. For the GUI stuff I am happy to manually resize things. Maybe a KDE addition that would allow one "Desktop" to be split while another isn't would work.

A final impediment to splitting the screen is that 840 pixels is not enough to correctly display all web sites (many of which are designed for 1024x768). Maybe if I had a split desktop with an icon on the title-bar of the window to unsplit it for one particular window then it would work.

Another use for a large display is virtualisation. I previously blogged about how to use Xephyr to run multiple X sessions on one display, as Xen is now supported in all Linux distributions and KVM and other
virtualisation technologies are also being developed there should be a lot of demand to have multiple virtual machine GUI displays on one desktop (although you could probably do this by manually sizing the windows).

These are just some wild ideas, I have no plans to write the code for any of them, so it'll be a matter of whatever is desired by the people who write the code or pay them. But one thing is certain, the low prices of such monitors will drive new research into how to use them effectively. New technology to effectively use large displays will then drive demand for even larger displays (as will the people who just want to get something better and more expansive than their neighbours). I wonder when we will get to the stage when people are satisfied. For basic office applications commodity PC hardware has far surpassed what is needed for people to do their work.

Geek Social Fallacies

2007-04-03T23:08:00.000+10:00

At my Source Dump blog I posted a copy of the Geek Social Fallacies. It's difficult to find a copy when you want it, so I think it needed to be mirrored.

live.com - malware?

2007-04-02T22:00:00.000+10:00

When looking through my Webalizer stats recently I noticed that *.search.live.com is transferring about four times as much data from my domain than *.google.com. This wouldn't concern me if I saw some people being referred to my site from live.com, however I see almost none, while google.com is responsible for referring about half the traffic to my site!

Then I looked through the aggregate stats for all web sites hosted on my ISP and noticed that live.com has three times the bandwidth use of google while not showing up in referrals.

I did a couple of test searches with live.com and it seems that one reason why I'm not getting hits is because the search engine just isn't much good. The search string "bonnie++" does not return any links to my program on the first page (maybe live.com can't handle a '+' character).

So I'm now wondering whether there is any reason to permit the live.com servers to use my bandwidth. It's costing my ISP money for no apparent good cause.

In the past there was a previous MS search engine that I had to block because it's attacks (which can not be described in any other way) were using half the web bandwidth of the entire ISP). This case is not so obviously an attack and I'm wondering whether I should permit it to continue for a while just in case they end up giving me some useful referrals.

Of course the other possibility is that if we all block their servers then the live.com results will become even more useless than they currently are and they'll give up on the idea.

I look forward to comments on this issue.

tour of the Gigabyte motherboard factory

2007-04-02T20:37:00.000+10:00

This article has some really interesting pictures of the Gigabyte motherboard and video card factory. Check it out!

buy free software developers dinner

2007-04-01T22:17:00.000+10:00

In response to my post about buying dinner for developers (as an alternative to "professional networking sessions") Kris notes that his company has been doing it for years. He goes a little further than I did in my post and advocates buying dinner for developers as a way of thanking them for their work.

I agree that buying dinner for people is a good way of thanking them for their work. I didn't suggest it in my post though because I didn't expect that there would be much interest in such things. I'm glad that Kris has proved me wrong. I'm not sure whether Kris was talking about personally buying dinner or getting his company to do so. In either case it's a really good thing, and I encourage others to do the same!

right-side visual migraine

2007-04-01T21:44:00.000+10:00

This afternoon I had another visual migraine. It was a little different from the previous ones in that it had more significant visual affects and in that it affected the right side of my vision. My central vision was OK, the left side was quite good, but the right side was mostly occluded by bright flashes. Closing my right eye seemed to make it a little better - apparently my right eye was more affected than my left. Previous visual migraines had only affected my central vision.

It happened shortly after going outside and it was a sunny afternoon, so maybe the bright light helped trigger it. The Australian optometrist chain OPSM advertise transitions - lenses that darken when exposes to UV light so they act as sun-glasses when outdoors, this sounds interesting (I don't want to have prescription sun-glasses as well as regular glasses). However there is one concerning item in the advert - "protect your eyes from dazzling sunlight, harsh artificial lighting and the glare from computer screens", I don't want my glasses to go dark when I'm looking at a computer screen (a large portion of my waking hours)!

mac vs PC vs Linux

2007-03-31T19:29:00.001+10:00

Apple has a series of funny commercials comparing the Macintosh with a PC running Windows. They are very well written and presented. I recommend viewing them for the amusement value (view them here - but you need Quicktime).

Novell has produced a few short parodies of those adverts, they don't have the same production quality but are well written and not nearly as cheesy as I had feared (view them here). Novell's ads are in OGG and MP3 format.

Update: A comment pointed me to this site which has other parodies of the Mac adverts. There is quite a bit of bad language and the parodies will offend some people in several ways. But they are amusing and do make some interesting points.

hybrid Porsche

2007-03-31T18:42:00.000+10:00

The April 2007 issue of the RACV magazine announces that Porsche is working on a hybrid vehicle. It seems that the award-winning Lexus hybrid vehicle has demonstrated the value of hybrid petrol-electric technology for performance vehicles and that Porsche want to catch up.

The trend seems to be towards all vehicles that are desirable being available in either hybrid or Diesel variants, and we'll probably see hybrid Diesel vehicles on Australian roads soon.

Trusted Solaris vs SE Linux

2007-03-29T23:45:00.000+10:00

Karl MacMillan writes an interesting review of a Sun article about SE Linux. Not only does he correct errors in the Sun article but he also summarises some of the features of SE Linux design and terminology that we use. If you are interested in computer security and want to learn some of the basic concepts then Karl's review is worth reading.

questions regarding SE Linux

2007-03-29T08:39:00.000+10:00

I just received a question about SE Linux via email. As I don't want to post private messages containing material that's globally useful I'll answer through my blog:

> other than strict and targeted policies......other policies like
> RBAC, MCS, Type Enforcement are also there....how are these policies
> implemented

The two main policies are the strict policy and the targeted policy. The strict policy is the earliest and was originally known as the sample policy (but was given the name "strict" after targeted was developed).

The strict policy aims to give minimal privileges to all daemons. The targeted policy aims to restrict the programs that are most vulnerable (network facing daemons) and not restrict other programs (for ease of use). There is currently work in progress on combining those policies so the person who compiles the policy can determine which features of strict they desire.

RBAC means Role Based Access Control. The strict policy assigns users to roles and the role then limits the set of domains that can be entered. For example the user_r role does not permit the sysadm_t domain so a user who is only permitted to enter the user_r role can not perform sys-admin tasks. Like many terms RBAC is used in different manners, some people consider that it means direct control by role (EG role user_r can not write to /dev/hda), while SE Linux has a more indirect use of roles (role user_r can not run programs in domain sysadm_t or any other domain that allows writing to type fixed_disk_device_t - the type for /dev/hda). You may consider that the strict policy supports RBAC depending on which definition of the term you use.

Generally the targeted policy is not considered to support RBAC, although if you consider a role to merely be a container for a set of accesses that are permitted then a SE Linux domain could be considered a in the RBAC sense. I don't think of targeted policy as being a RBAC implementation because all user sessions run in the domain unconfined_t which has no restriction. I think that to be considered RBAC a system must confine user logins.

Type enforcement is the primary access control mechanism for SE Linux. Every object that a process may access (including other processes) has a type assigned to it. The type of a process is known as a domain. The system has a policy database which for every combination of domain, type, and object class (which is one of dir, file, blk_file, etc - all the different types of object that a process may access) specifies whether the action is permitted or denied (default deny) and whether it is audited (default is to audit all denied operations and not audit permitted operations).

MCS is a confidentiality protection mechanism where each file has a set of categories assigned to it. The set may be empty, may contain all 1024 categories, or any sub-set. Each process has a set of categories that determines which files it may access. File access is granted if Unix permissions allow it, if the domain-type model allows it, and if MCS allows it (on an MCS system). I have just had an article on MCS published in Linux Journal.

MCS is an optional feature for people compiling Linux from source or for distribution vendors. For Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and Debian the decision was made to include it, so the strict and targeted policies for those distributions include MCS.

There is another policy known as MLS. This is a policy build that comprises the strict policy plus Multi-Level Security. Multi-Level Security aims to give the highest confidentiality protection and comply with the LSPP (Labeled Security Protection Profile - roughly comparable to B1) Common Criteria certification. It would be possible to build a targeted policy with MLS but that wouldn't make sense - why have the highest protection of confidentiality with anything less than the highest protection of integrity?

As for how the policies are implemented, I'm not about to write a tutorial on policy writing for a blog post, I'm sure that someone will post a link to a Tresys or Fedora web page in the comments. ;)

> there r some packages of linux in which some changes has been made
> to support linux......for eg:- coreutils, findutils

That is correct. Every program that launches a process on behalf of a user at a different privilege user (EG /bin/login, sshd and crond) and every program that creates files for processes running in different domains (EG logrotate creating new log files for multiple daemons) needs to be modified to support SE Linux. Also ls and ps were modified to show SE Linux contexts as well as the obvious programs in coreutils.

> 'Z' is the new thing that have been added to most of the
> utilities......wherever I search I get the changes made only in few
> utilities like ps, mv, cp, ls
>
> Can u help me by giving all the changes made in each of the utilities.....

Unfortunately I can't. This has been identified as an issue and there is currently work in progress to determine the best way of managing this.

death threats against Kathy Sierra

2007-03-28T22:17:00.000+10:00

The prominent blogger and author Kathy Sierra has recently cancelled a tutorial at a conference after receiving death threats.

Obviously this is a matter for the police to investigate - and the matter has been reported to them.

It's also an issue that is causing a lot of discussion on the net. The strange thing is that a large portion of the discussion seems based on the idea that what happened to Kathy is somehow unusual. The sexual aspect of the attacks on Kathy is bizarre but campaigns of death threats are far from unusual in our society. The first post I saw to nail this is the I had death threats in high school blog entry. Death threats and campaigns of intimidation are standard practice in most high schools. After children are taught that such things are OK for six years straight it's hardly a surprise that some of them act in the same manner outside school!

But I don't expect anything to change. Columbine apparently didn't convince anyone who matters that there is a serious problem in high-schools, I don't expect anything else to.

I can clearly remember when I first heard about the Columbine massacre, a colleague told me about it and explained that he barracked for the killers due to his own experiences at high-school. While my former colleague probably had not given his statements much consideration, any level of support for serial-killers is something to be concerned about.

This is not to trivialise Kathy's experience. But I think that discussion should be directed at more fundamental problems in society instead of one of the symptoms. If the causes are not addressed then such things will keep happening.

Xen and eth device renaming

2007-03-27T07:52:00.000+10:00

Recently I rebooted one of my Debian Xen servers and suddenly all the Ethernet devices which used to be eth0 in the domU's became eth1.

vif = [ '', 'bridge=xenbr1' ]

I used to have the above as the interface definition and for domU's that had only a single interface that worked well (if there is only one interface then it should be eth0). However in a recent etch update this changed, so I had to use ifrename as documented in my previous blog post. It's annoying when things break because a reasonable assumption which previously worked suddenly stops working.

Even if the bug in question (if it is regarded as a bug) is fixed I'll keep using ifrename, it doesn't do any harm.

Save Babe

2007-03-26T22:51:00.000+10:00

There's an advertising campaign at the moment opposing cruel treatment of pigs, the web site is at http://www.savebabe.com/ . They have rented advertising space at train stations to publish the URL.

One thing that they don't mention is the health issues related to factory farming. It makes sense to concentrate on one message at a time and they are concentrating on animal cruelty. But probably more people will be concerned with the risks of disease, parasites, and anti-biotic resistant bacteria present in meat produced from the factory farms.

Also wild boar tastes better!

google-bank

2007-03-25T08:09:00.000+10:00

Currently many people have Google advertising on their web sites, it may even be that a majority of the serious Internet users host Google advertising. Given that Google is already writing a cheque every month to many people, it wouldn't be difficult for them to change the amount in response to a funds transfer request. Depositing a cheque in a foreign currency can incurr $25 in bank fees (that's what the Commonwealth Bank of Australia charges me), this is a great impediment to international trade in small values. When Google already has an office in a country and writes cheques in the local currency it would be very easy to have that cheque include funds transfers too.

One significant advantage of Google payments would be the fact that Google doesn't write cheques for less than $100, so someone who earns $2 per month through Google adverts will be waiting a long time before they get a cheque - but if someone has an item that costs a small amount of money (EG an online service that costs a few dollars a month) then the user would be enticed to use it.

Currently many people don't place Google adverts because they believe that it would take them an unreasonably large amount of time to reach $100US. But if they could spend the money in small increments on other online services then it would be more enticing.

It seems to me that Google is the only organization that is both capable of running an International online small-payments system and which would be trusted by most people.

If you like this idea please post a comment.

images for a web site

2007-03-24T04:22:00.000+11:00

When I first started putting pictures on my web site I used to delete the originals (at the time I only had a 3.2G hard drive in my main machine and used CDs for backup so I didn't feel inclined to waste too much space). The problem is that I optimised the images for viewing on displays of the day (when 1024x768 was high resolution and I tried to get pictures down to 800x600 or less whenever possible). Also the program I was using at the time for scaling the images didn't do it nearly as well as the Gimp does now.

Now when putting pictures on my web site I keep the original JPEG's in a safe place so that if there are future changes to common display technology, net connection speed (particularly the speed of my server) or of technology for scaling and compressing images then I can re-do them to get a better result.

When saving images with Gimp I enable "Advanced Options", this allows me to set a floating-point DCT method this saves about 400 bytes on disk and apparently gives a better image quality too - it's not noticably slow on a Pentium-M 1.7GHz so they should probably make it the default. The next "Advanced" option to change is to turn off "Save EXIF data" (saves 1.9K) and "Save thumbnail" (can save almost 5K depending on the image).

The next thing to do when saving a JPEG is to enable the "Show Preview in image window" setting. This allows you to adjust the image quality while seeing the resulting image as well as the size, so you can determine which combination of file size and image quality is best for you. This is much easier than saving
a file and then running an image viewing program to inspect it!

As an aside, it would be convenient if the Gimp would reposition it's "Save as" dialogue to not occlude the image window and would enable the preview option by default on machines with reasonably fast CPUs.

power saving

2007-03-22T21:09:00.000+11:00

Adrian von Bidder made an interesting post in response to my post about Spanish wind power. He correctly points out that power sources that have seasonal variations and which may vary during the course of a day can not be used as the sole power source.

The ideal design would be to have wind power stations that are designed to have a peak power that is greater than the expected use for the country. Then when wind power is slightly below peak the entire use for the country could still be satisfied.

There are a number of power sources that can quickly ramp up, this includes hydro-electric and gas-fired power stations. Such forms of power generation could be used as backup for when wind and solar power are limited. Incidentally one thing to note about Solar power is that it is most effective during the day in summer - which is when there is the highest demand for electricity to run cooling systems. There is also an option for having the sun heat up rocks which can be used for generating electricity at night or at periods of peak demand. So eventually we could have all our energy needs supplied by solar and wind power.

If wind power was designed to exceed the demand at windy times there are a number of ways that it could be used. The first thing to do is to implement billing systems that vary the cost according to the supply. This information could be provided to customers via X10 (or a similar technology). Home appliances could take note of this information and perform power-hungry operations when it's cheap. Your freezer could cool itself to -30C when electricity is cheap and allow the temperature to rise to -5C when it's expensive. You could program your washing machine to start when electricity becomes cheap - usually a few hours delay before starting the washing is no inconvenience.

Ideally home power generation from solar and wind sources would be used. There is significant loss in the power lines that lead from power plants to the consumer, so there are efficiency benefits in generating power locally. A wind turbine for a home will give highly variable amounts of power, and the electricity use of a home also varies a lot. So batteries to store the power are required. When you have local battery storage you could use your batteries to power your home when electricity is expensive and use mains power when it's cheap. Also if it was possible to feed power back to the main grid then home battery systems could be used to help power the main grid at expensive times (if the electricity company reimburses you for putting power back in the grid then you want such reimbursement to be done at the highest rate).

Adrian also mentioned turning devices off when leaving home. It is common practice in hotels that when entering your room you will insert your key in a holder by the door which acts as a master switch for all lights and some other electrical devices (such as the TV).

This same idea could be adopted for home use, not based on key storage (although this would be an option) but instead on a switch near the front door. Push a button and all lights turn off as do human-focussed appliances such as the TV and DVD player turn off (not the VCR), etc. There could also be a night option which would turn off the TV, DVD player, and most lights. Obviously at night you want bedroom and bathroom lights to still work but many things can be turned off.

This is all possible with today's technology, small changes to usage patterns, and spending a little more money on technology. Currently you can get a basic solar power system for your house for about $10,000. That isn't much when you spend $300,000 or more buying the house!

thinkpad back from repair

2007-03-22T08:56:00.000+11:00

On Tuesday my Thinkpad was taken for service to fix the problem described in this post.

The problems I described were overheating, wear on the keyboard (from a minimum of 8 hours a day 7 days a week use) and a missing rubber foot on the base. The statement of work includes a replaced system-board, keyboard, CPU fan, and "cover(s)" (not that I can see any difference in that regard). No new rubber foot. Also they upgraded the BIOS.

It's interesting to note that in the list of "diagnostics performed" they listed "HDD" - of course I removed the hard drive before giving it to them.

Anyway 2 days turn-around is pretty good service and I'll ask them to post me a new rubber foot so I can stick it on myself.

Update:
The IBM support team were quite helpful about this and now have a set of misc small parts being couriered to me - it may arrive tomorrow or Monday.

It's a minor annoyance that they didn't fix everything when they had it, but shipping me a set of small parts is great service. With a bit of luck I'll get some other parts that will be useful to me at some future time too. ;) My Thinkpad leaves warranty in a few months and I'll be on my own for all future repairs.

For the first time I am actually considering paying for extra warranty support. I think that I'm one of the more expensive IBM customers in terms of warranty support. I typically go through one keyboard and one system-board per Thinkpad that I own. I guess that IBM make the most money from managers who have laptops always sitting on their desk. People like me who take their laptops everywhere, use them extensively, and wear things out (doing what laptops are designed to do) would be less profitable.

Spanish wind power

2007-03-21T22:38:00.000+11:00

The latest news is that Spain has wind power as it's main source of electricity. The second largest source is nuclear and the third is coal. This is due to some particularly windy weather recently, but Spain is also a world leader in both manufacture and installation of wind power systems.

Other countries should follow their lead. Wind power is very cheap once it's installed, there are minimal ongoing costs and when things go wrong the scope of the problem is very small (unlike nuclear power plants which have the potential to contaminate large areas).

Sorry no link, this news is too new to be indexed by google.

mixing CPUs

2007-03-21T22:15:00.000+11:00

Recently I bought a HP DL385 Opteron server at auction. It has an Opteron 265 1.8GHz dual-core CPU and is designed for SFF (Small Form Factor) SAS disks.

A friend told me that S-ATA disks would work in it and so would a faster Opteron CPU. I bought 3 S-ATA disks which work fine in a RAID-5 array. Unfortunately when I tried booting with the second CPU installed the BIOS said that it detected a CPU speed mismatch and would halt.

If anyone knows of a way of swapping Opteron 265 CPUs so that I can get a pair at the same speed then please let me know. I'd prefer to swap the 1.8GHz one for a 2.2 GHz one if possible, but the other way is also an option.

Debian and Google Summer (Winter) Of Code

2007-03-18T20:33:00.000+11:00

Debian is participating in the Google Summer Of Code (or Winter if you are in the southern hemisphere).

It would be good if we could get a SE Linux related project in. If you are interested in doing some SE Linux work (or other security related work) in this regard then please let me know. I'm interested in helping mentor for such projects.

BLUG

2007-03-18T14:26:00.000+11:00

This weekend I went to the Ballarat install-fest, mini-conf, and inaugural meeting of the Ballarat Linux Users' Group (BLUG).

This was the second install-fest, the first one was quite successful so it was decided that there was demand for a second. I suggested that what we should do is get some of the more experience members of LUV to attend and give talks about their areas of expertise and make a mini-conference. I also suggested that we
hire a large vehicle to take a number of people to the meeting. Both my suggestions were accepted.

So on Friday evening I was in a Kia XXX with five other people from LUV on our way to Ballarat.

On Saturday we had the install-fest. We started at about 10AM, there were about a dozen people getting help installing Linux and many more attending the mini-conf and just hanging out. For lunch we had a BBQ. In the afternoon I gave a talk on SE Linux and then a brief impromptu talk on Poly-Instantiated Directories while the next speaker was setting up their laptop.

At the end there was the inaugural meeting of BLUG. The president was appointed, and there were some brief discussions about when to schedule meetings. I suggested that BLUG meetings should be either the day before or the day after LUV meetings to increase the incidence of speakers from other regions attending both meetings, my suggestion was being seriously considered at the time the meeting adjourned - LUV is a larger group and has better ability to get speakers from other regions. It was also agreed that a
weekend combined LUV and BLUG meeting would be arranged twice a year.

I traveled back to Melbourne by train which was cheap at $9 and comfortable. There was even a power point in the carriage (which I didn't use as my laptop was charged and the location was not convenient). For the next such event I'll try and arrange a group to travel on the train together.

The next thing to do is to find other regional centers in Victoria where we can do the same thing. Bendigo might be a possibility.

Also if you are a member of a LUG in a city please consider the possibilities for helping form a LUG in a regional center that's nearby. I would be happy to provide whatever advice I can to help people replicate this success in areas surrounging other cities, so please email me if you have any questions.

fluorescent lights and why it's worth saving resources

2007-03-17T13:53:00.000+11:00

A common criticism of fluorescent lights is the inability to use dimmers, as mentioned in Julien Goodwin's blog.

However with some thought at the time the lights are installed this problem can be solved. The first thing to keep in mind is that an infinite number of levels of illumination (analogue scale) is not really required. In most cases two or three levels should do.

If you have two compact fluorescent lights that use 5W and 10W then you have the options of 5W, 10W, and 15W. If you have a large room to light (such as a lounge room) which needs 30W of fluorescent lighting for full illumination then you could have six 5W globes dispersed and have anything from one to six of them turned on to give different levels of illumination.

Of course if you don't plan electrical work then it's easiest to just use incandescent lights in those areas. As long as the areas that use the most light for the longest time have fluorescent lighting it shouldn't make too much difference.

In response to a post on Planete Beranger, saving energy DOES matter. Sure you saving a few KWh isn't going to make much difference on it's own, but when a million other people do the same it all adds up.

The lack of public transport in the US causes more problems for the country than just environmental damage. It hurts the economy by making it more difficult for people to get to work. It will hurt the defence forces in the (unlikely) event of an invasion (trains are the best way of moving large numbers of troops, heavy weapons, and military supplies. It also hurts the national interest in decreasing the ability to react to civil emergencies. For example the entire population of New Orleans could have been evacuated in time using a single platform of a European station. If every city had multiple stations that had a reasonable number of platforms and multiple redundant train lines then evacuating civilians and bringing in emergency equipment and workers would be very easy. In the Netherlands train lines often run on top of dikes, this means that the dikes are very strong (if they can sustain the weight of a freight train then they aren't going to be washed away by a wave) and that trains can still operate while flood waters are rising. If New Orleans is to be rebuilt to it's former glory then the Americans should consider a similar design.

Large cars are a temporary issue. As fuel prices rise people will choose smaller cars. Also hopefully people will start to realise that 4WD and SUV vehicles are actually less safe than cars and stop buying them for perceived safety.

The Chinese government doesn't worry about the same environmental issues, however they have more agressive targets for renewable energy use than most countries. It's not a matter of being nice (they aren't), but of looking out for their own self interest. It's a pity that the governments of the US, Australia, and EU countries have not yet done the same - but it will happen eventually.

As for supermarkets using open fridges, if the vent the heat outside the building then it will be just part of the building air-conditioning system. Every adult dissipates about 100W of heat when at rest, when shopping it would be more than 100W. Get 100 people in a supermarket (not the peak business time) and 10KW would have to be removed by the A/C system without counting heat from lights (fluorescent lights dissipate about half their energy as heat, they are much more efficient than incandescent lights but much less than LEDs),
and heat from other machinery.

Finally, if you want to see changes in government policy then join your local Green party!

are Thinkpads meant to run 24*7?

2007-03-16T03:44:00.000+11:00

My Thinkpad has started to run hot recently. If I do anything CPU intensive then it will heat up to >80C and then turn itself off. When idling it seems to stay at about 60C when the ambient temperature is about 24C.

It used to not be like this, a couple of years ago I cracked a GPG pass-phrase by using my Thinkpad (as well as a few other machines) to run a brute-force attack lasting a few months. So a couple of years ago I could run at 100% CPU time for months on end and now I can only do that for a few minutes.

It seems that my Thinkpad may have accumulated dust in it's fan from years of running 24*7. I run my Thinkpads 24*7 so that they can download email and large files while I'm asleep, because Linux suspend options have been lacking until recently, and because I use my laptop for a large portion of the day.

The problem I am having is similar to what I had with a previous Thinkpad. Are Thinkpads unable to handle 24*7 operation?

worse than fossil fuel?

2007-03-15T23:41:00.000+11:00

I just read an interesting blog post from December 2005 about the environmental impact of bio-fuels. It makes some really good points that should be studied by everyone who is interested in protecting the environment.

However this doesn't mean that bio-fuels are inherently bad, just that some methods of production are bad.

The blog claims that reusing oil that had been used for frying would cover 1/380 of the fuel used for road transport in the UK. There are some technologies that have been recently invented to process farm and industrial waste into oil, some of which are already in production in the US. The volume of farm waste (and equivalent waste from restaurants) would significantly exceed the frying oil from restaurants and converting waste plastic into fuel would add even more. I'm sure that these sources of fuel from waste would add up to at least 1% of the current transport fuel use.

A better train system has the potential to halve the use of fuel for transport (or better), when living in Europe I never considered owning a car, the trains were so good and the car parking was so bad that it wasn't worth doing. A combination of less cars and the cars being driven less would significantly reduce fuel use.

Hybrid vehicles and vehicles with smaller and more efficient engines could halve the use of fuel again (or better). Diesel hybrid cars that are currently being tested use as little as 1/4 the fuel of current petrol cars. Add further technological improvements such as the six-stroke engine and we could be looking at something better than four times the current fuel economy of cars.

I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that a combination of a good public transport infrastructure, fuel efficient vehicles, and government incentives for using both could reduce the transport use of fuel by a factor of 8. This would mean that fuel produced from restaurant, farm, and plastic waste (which I conservatively estimate at four times the volume of used frying oil) could account for more than 8% of the fuel supplies. The EU wants to have 5.75% of fuel oil to come from renewable sources, it seems to me that this is possible without importing any bio-Diesel from developing countries!

Electric cars could of course significantly decrease the use of fuel oil too. A Prius+ (Prius modified to take mains power) would be an ideal vehicle for me. I rarely make long journeys and rarely make multiple journeys in one day so I could use mains power most of the time. I estimate that with a Prius+ I would use no more than two tanks of petrol a year.

Then of course there's the issue of market protection. It seems that every first-world country has a farming lobby that convinces the government to pay them to produce more crops than they can sell at market rate. Instead of subsidising food that is sold to other countries such government money could go towards subsidising development of bio-fuels. The US subsidy of corn production is a classic example of this, corn syrup can be easily fermented and distilled to make fuel - much better than eating the nasty stuff!

SE Linux on /.

2007-03-15T23:09:00.000+11:00

The book SE Linux by Example has been reviewed on Slashdot.

The issue of Perl scripts was raised for discussion. It is of course true that a domain which is permitted to run the Perl interpreter can perform arbitrary system calls - it can therefore do anything that SE Linux permits that domain to do. This is in fact a demonstration of how SE Linux does the right thing! If you want to restrict what can be done when executing the Perl interpreter then you can have a domain_auto_trans() rule to have Perl run in a different domain.
Restricting Perl (as used by one particular program) is actually easier than restricting a complex application run by users such as Firefox. Users want to use Firefox for web browsing, local HTML file browsing, saving files that are downloaded from the web, running plugins, and more. Granting Firefox access to perform all those tasks means that it is not restricted from doing anything that the user can do.

A claim was made that a novice users would not understand how to use SE Linux. The fact is that they don't need to. I know many novice computer users who are running SE Linux systems, it just works! It's more advanced users that have to learn about SE Linux because they configure their machines more heavily.

The essential difference between path-based access control and Inode based access control is that the standard Unix commands to control file access (chmod, chown, and chgrp) all operate on Inodes. If a file has 1000 hard links then I can restrict access to all of them via a single chmod or chcon (the SE Linux command that is comparable to chmod) command. AppArmor does things differently and implements an access control model that is vastly different to the Unix traditions. SE Linux extends the Unix traditions with Mandatory Access Control.

Granting different levels of access to a file based on the name of the link which is used is a horror not a feature.

I wrote this as a blog entry rather than a /. comment because my lack of Karma means that less people will read my /. comments than my blog.

things to do for the environment

2007-03-15T22:05:00.000+11:00

I got the idea for this from Ben Hutchings.

A. Copy the list below to your own journal and

Bold the actions you are already taking
Underline the actions you plan to start taking
Italicize the actions that don't apply to you

B. Add one (or more) suggested action(s) of your own

C. Leave a comment here, so that she can track the meme to your journal, and copy your suggested action(s) back to my master list.

Replace standard incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs
Choose energy efficient appliances - I'm documenting the power consumption of my computers
Wash clothes in cold(er) water - Colder than what? I suspect this is based on American machines that are controlled by mixer valves rather than using a thermostat.
Turn the thermostat of your hot water tank down to 50Â°C (125Â°F) - this is a good safety measure anyway
Install a programmable thermostat (or turn the heat down over night and when you're out of the house)
Register with the [Canadian Marketing Association's] Do Not Contact Service to reduce the amount of junk mail delivered to your house. - Substitute MPS.
Eat less meat (particularly feedlot beef) - For practical purposes I'm vegetarian, with occasional exceptions.
Walk, bike, carpool or take public transit as often as possible - I'm writing this on the tram
Make sure you know what can be recycled in your area, and try to recycle as much household waste as possible
Compost using an outdoor compost bin or an indoor vermicomposter
Clean or replace filters on your furnace and air conditioner
Buy local, organic or fair trade food where possible
Reduce air travel - pity that long-distance trains suck in Australia
Wrap your water heater in an insulation blanket
Use a clothesline instead of a dryer whenever possible - don't own a clothes dryer, hanging up clothes inside near a heater works on cold days
Plant a tree - pity my trees are dying because of the drought / climate change
Buy fresh foods instead of frozen
Keep your car tuned up and your tires inflated to their optimal pressure - also minimise driving. I drive about 5000Km per year.
Use biodegradable dishwashing liquid, laundry soap powder, etc.
Drink tap water (filtered if necessary) rather than buying bottled water - remember the Benzene incident...
Turn the tap off while brushing your teeth
Unplug seldom-used appliances and chargers for phones, cameras, etc., when you're not using them - the power use is small so I only do this for rarely used chargers.
Plug air leeks and drafts around doors and windows with weatherstripping
Switch from disposable to reusable products: food and beverage containers, cups, plates, writing pens, razors, diapers, towels, shopping bags, etc - I've done this for most things, could improve though.
Consider garage sales, Freecycle, eBay, or borrowing from friends/family before buying a new tool or appliance - second-hand and refurbished computers are so powerful and so cheap that you don't need to care about the environment to do this.
Reuse bathwater, maybe to flush the loo, water the garden, etc.
Make sure your roof is well-insulated. - I think it is, but as tenants it's not really our choice.
Always wear a jumper/sweater and socks indoors unless it's warm enough outdoors to go without both.
Run your vehicle on biofuel/sustainable fuels
Set up a grey water barrel to use when clean water isn't necessary - grey water should never be stored. It contains chemicals that are used as food for bacteria.
Put grey water on your garden immediately without storing it.
Install tanks to collect rain-water from your roof for watering the garden, washing your car, etc.

getting big changes in Debian

2007-03-14T09:09:00.000+11:00

Erich Schubert comments on the issues relating to getting big changes into Debian. This is something that I had also noticed. I started work on SE Linux in Debian in 2001 and continued it actively until 2003 when I joined Red Hat. Less than a year after I joined Red Hat there was a Fedora release with SE Linux fully integrated and shortly after that there was a release with SE Linux on by default. The reason for this was that Red Hat management supported the idea of SE Linux and everyone had to accept it. There was no option for a package maintainer to refuse to support SE Linux.

Recently in a discussion on debian-devel one DD (who I won't name in this blog post) advocated removing SE Linux support from dpkg. I then asked him whether he had the same attitude towards non-executable stack
(Exec-Shield/PaX/OpenWall), Poly-Instantiated directories, and PIE executables. When he expressed interest in having those features I pointed out that one of the enemies of security in Debian is the fact that every person controls their little area and has no requirement to work towards common goals (apart from the most obvious ones of making the system work).

This means that instead of having a little cooperation from other developers anyone who wants to get a significant change included will have to fight hundreds of battles.

SE Linux is a classic example of this. Debian could have had SE Linux support long before Fedora, but instead it gets it long afterwards.

The same battles occur with regard to all the other security measures I mentioned (and some others I didn't). We could made Debian the most secure Linux distribution, there are many people who have the skills and the interest in doing so.

If you want features such as exec-shield, then you are missing out - largely because the people with the skill and time to work on them are too busy fighting trench-warfare rather than actively coding.

Now while I strongly object to most incarnations of the "you can't force a volunteer to do anything" meme that infects Debian I do agree that we can't force developers to write new code. We can however strongly discourate an antagonistic attitude towards new features. If someone proposes a feature
that you don't plan to use but which doesn't hurt you then there's no reason to attack - you can just ignore it. If someone sends in a patch that adds a feature which is requested by many people but you personally don't use, then if it has little or no down-side (linking against a couple of shared objects as is the case for many SE Linux enabled programs provides no measurable overhead) and the code is good it should be merged!

The real problem is that some DDs are more concerned about what is best for them personally (in the most short-term manner) than about what is best for the users.

old drivers

2007-03-13T20:52:00.000+11:00

This morning when walking through a shopping center car park on my way to work a grannie came fairly close to squashing me. She accellerated her Mazda 323 backwards as hard as possible and hit a purple Magna. The back ends of both cars were seriously damaged, and the Mazda (which received the worst damage) was possibly a write-off (it doesn't take that much damage to make an old car an insurance write-off). The damage was surprising given that there was only about 4 meters between the cars before the crash, the roar of the engine however did indicate that full accelleration was being used. The area between the vehicles was where I had just walked a few seconds earlier...

I phoned the police and waited until they arrived. They might end up forcing her to have a driving test, but it's most unlikely that she will lose her license. One of my relatives passed such a test more than 10 years after I refused to ever be a passenger in his car.

What is needed is periodic testing of all drivers with the same standards as used for initially getting a drivers license (currently the standards are much lower). I would probably have to practice my parallel parking before such a test (it's something I hardly ever do) but I expect that I wouldn't have any difficulty in passing - as would all good drivers.

creating a new SE Linux policy module

2007-03-11T11:22:00.000+11:00

Creating a simple SE Linux policy module is not difficult.

audit(1173571340.836:12855): avc: denied { execute } for pid=5678 comm="spf-policy.pl" name="hostname" dev=hda ino=1234 scontext=root:system_r:postfix_master_t:s0 tcontext=system_u:object_r:hostname_exec_t:s0 tclass=file

For example I had a server with the above messages in the kernel message log from the spf-policy program (run from Postfix) trying to run the "hostnme" program. So I ran the following command to generate a .te file (SE Linux policy source):

dmesg|grep spf.policy|audit2allow -m local > local.te

The -m option to audit2allow instructs it to create a policy module. The local.te file is below:


module local 1.0;

require {
      class file execute;
      type hostname_exec_t;
      type postfix_master_t;
      role system_r;
};

allow postfix_master_t hostname_exec_t:file execute;

Then I used the following commands to create a policy module and package it:

checkmodule -M -m -o local.mod local.te
semodule_package -o local.pp -m local.mod

The result was the object file local.pp and in intermediate file local.mod (which incidentally can be removed once the build is finished).

After creating the module I used the following command to link it with the running policy and load it into the kernel:

semodule -i ./local.pp

nerve action - sound vs electricity

2007-03-11T10:25:00.000+11:00

Leon Brooks linked to this article claiming that sound not electricity travels through nerves.

When you put a moderate voltage through your body it will cause muscle action (try putting 1000V at low current between fingers of the same hand for safety). The original experiment that suggested that electricity is used involved applying a shock to the legs of a dead frog (see the Wikipedia entry for Luigi Galvani).

For this claim about sound to be valid the electric shocks would have to cause sound in the nervous system. Also sound impulses would have to trigger nerve action (IE the "brown note"). AFAIK neither of these have been proven.

another visual migraine

2007-03-10T22:34:00.000+11:00

Late this afternoon I had a visual migraine while driving. I was driving west and the glare from the sun was making it difficult to see so I didn't realise that I was having a migraine until I stopped. When I finished my journey and went inside a reasonably dark room I started seeing flashes of light (which weren't apparently bright enough to be noticed when outside). After about an hour the visual effects went away but I still felt weird for the rest of the day.

SFF disks

2007-03-09T08:22:00.000+11:00

I recently bought a refurbished HP DL385 server at auction. It turns out that it takes SFF (Small Form Factor) disks and has the ability to take 8 hot-swap disks (not bad for a 2U server).

The machine supports SAS disks and S-ATA disks as well. So the next thing to do is to buy a bunch of S-ATA disks for it.

When I got the machine it reported that the battery for the write-back cache on the RAID controller could not be recharged and needed to be replaced. Apparently this is a firmware bug and I can fix it by upgrading the firmware on the machine. Of course I need to buy some disks so I can do an OS install first.

As an aside it's amazing how cheap some of the Opteron servers are at auction nowadays.

features of BMW 5 and 7 series

2007-03-07T22:10:00.000+11:00

I was reading the brochure about the BMW 530i Touring (which seems to be the BMW name for what is known as a "Station Wagon" in Australia or an "Estate" in Europe). I looked at the brochure on the "Touring" because I am interested in a Station-Wagon - the Sedan version of the 5 series is almost the same in every way other than size and shape.

Here are some of the interesting features:
Adaptive headlights, they turn in to a corner when the car is cornering (showing where you are about to go instead of showing you the scenery off the road) and the high-beam switches off when an oncoming vehicle is detected.

Head-up display for speed, navigation, and other driver-relevant information.

Park distance control (PDC). Gives audio and visual alerts when you are about to hit something at low speed.

Eight air-bags of which only the necessary ones will inflate in a collision, and the inflation power will be determined by the severity of the collision.

Dynamic stability control (DSC), traction control, corner brake control, and more. Described as "all of the known features of DSC".

Seat-belt pre-tensioners in the rear and pyro-technic tensioners for front seat belts.

Rain sensor that turns on headlights, and optional head-light washers.

According to it's brochure the 7 series has bumpers that regenerate their original shape in collisions of speeds up to 6Km/h and a tire defect indicator. Apart from that there doesn't appear to be much benefit over the 5 series apart from more luxury features.

To get the PDF files from BMW Australia (without following my links which BMW will probably break soon) you have to fill in a form with "contact details". To enter that form you need a browser that works with their javascript (which means not Konqueror) so that you can enter your postcode and be prompted with a list of suburbs that match the post-code. The second-last page of that process allows you to download PDF files and it seems to indicate that your data will not be stored if you don't continue past the stage where you download the PDF files. It would be good if BMW could get smart and make their PDF files as easy to download as Mercedes does.

In terms of safety features it seems that the 7 series offers little over the 5 series. By comparing the brochures it seems to me that the Mercedes S series (as described in my previous blog post) has many more safety features than any BMW. Assuming that the BMW documents are accurate they don't seem to compare well with the Mercedes S class. From a quick search on drive.com.au (the best web site for buying used cars in Australia) it seems that the Mercedes keeps it's value better than the BMW - other people apparently share my opinion of the relative merits of the cars.

In future posts I'll summarise the features of some other cars that I consider interesting.

reading email on a tram

2007-03-06T21:55:00.000+11:00

This morning there were two or three classes from a local primary school on board my tram taking up all the seats (mostly three children to a seat).

So to answer some email and write blog entries I had to sit in a stair-well. Melbourne trams are symmetrical so that they can just change direction at the end of the line (unlike some other trams - the Amsterdam tram line 10 that I used to catch has a circle at each end of the line for the tram to turn). Being symmetrical means that the doors on the left side of the tram are used for passengers to get on and off, and the doors on the right are locked - so the right stairwell is a place you can sit to use a laptop if all the seats are taken.

While I was sitting on the floor some women started talking about me, I heard comments such as "he's answering his email", "it must save a lot of time, he could do half an hour of email on the way to work", and "he must work for an Internet company - look at his shirt" (I was wearing an Intel shirt given out at LCA 2007). At that point I decided to briefly explain the work I do, there's a limit to the amount of time I can refrain from joining the conversation when people are standing around me and talking about me.

They didn't seem to understand enough to enable me to explain anything about Linux.

presentations and background color

2007-03-05T22:53:00.000+11:00

In response to my last post about using laptops for presentations it has been suggested to me that using white (or a very bright color) as the background color can help some displays synchronise with the signal. I haven't had an opportunity to test this but it seems likely that as most computers are configured with a white background nowadays the display hardware is optimised for this case.

Another benefit of a light background is that it provides more ambient lighting to the room where the presentation is held. If all the lights are turned off (sometimes there is no dimmer switch) then the radiant light from the screen is the only form of illumination for the room.

Finally with the way the current generation of beamers work there is less heat trapped in the beamer if there is mostly white on the screen. This will hopefully decrease the incidence of hardware failures during lectures (which unfortunately are not uncommon in my observation).

Update:

Based on a comment on this blog entry I did a quick survey of the color scemes, black on white, yellow on blue, and white on green. Black on white got the most votes with some people saying that yellow on blue was most aesthetic while black on white was easiest to read ("clear and boring" was one comment).

One person pointed out that the light diverges slightly so black on white makes the letters look smaller while white on black makes them look bigger. My response to this is to use a slightly larger font.

last beard post

2007-03-05T19:12:00.000+11:00

On Tuesday the 23rd of January I shaved off my beard after spending 107 days growing it, see above for the final beard pic. It was an interesting experiment and it's something that I recommend trying, but I couldn't keep it.

Having a beard is more effort than being clean-shaven. Eating is more difficult when you are trying to keep your beard out of your food. If you get the full beard (as I did) then the moustache at the sides of your mouth will get into your food (particularly bad for ice-cream). I guess that the benefit of having a waxed moustache would be that the wax would keep it out of the way of the food - the waxed moustache wasn't just an issue of style!

Madduck suggests that when you drink Guinness you "push your lips past the head and draw up only the dark stuff". Of course that won't work if you have a moustache as you don't want a moustache that's soaked in beer!

Immediately after cutting off my beard I didn't shave for almost a week and experienced much less discomfort than I had preveiously experienced when not shaving for that period. I think that having been used to having a beard an amount of hair that would previously annoy me is not noticable. Also it
seems that the hair was initially softer after I cut off the beard. Maybe shaving somehow makes the hair grow tougher.

When I had the beard I thought that I hadn't adjusted my body image to match, as every time I looked in the mirror I felt surprised to see it. Once it was gone my new look initially seemed more odd to me than my previous appearance, and it took me a number of weeks to get used to not having a beard.

When shaving off my beard I decided to do it in stages, firstly I did a "goatee" cut and then just a moustache. The moustache is a little lop-sided, but I was in a hurry and didn't plan to keep it for long.

vaccinations

2007-03-04T22:14:00.000+11:00

You might expect that a vaccine against a disease that causes cancer would be widely embraced as soon as it was proven safe. If the disease in question was transmitted by contaminated food or water, sneezing, or most of the other ways that diseases spread then it probably would be widely accepted.

However recently there is a recently released vaccine against Cervical Cancer. The virus in question is only transmitted sexually. Apparently 80% of women in the US will catch it before the age of 50 (so it's obviously not scaring people away from unsafe sex).

There is a strong Christian lobby against the vaccine, their idea is that if sex doesn't cause debilitating and/or fatal conditions such as cervical cancer then their daughters will have less reason to avoid it. The fact is that religious people are statistically more likely to practice unsafe sex (see this link) so it seems unlikely that preventing one of the STDs that religious people might catch will affect the amount of unsafe sex.

One thing that seems strange about the entire discussion is that no-one has raised the possibility of vaccinating boys. Vaccinating boys could lead to the virus being eradicated. Even if an eradication attempt fails it will help save some of the Christian girls.

the word "beamer"

2007-03-03T23:40:00.000+11:00

Martin F. Krafft blogs about looking for advice on buying a "beamer". He describes the word as meaning a projector in Germany (it also means the same in the Netherlands).

Since the time when I lived in the Netherlands I have been using the word in English, most people immediately understand what it means, and I believe it's a better option than the word "projector". The only possible confusion in this regard is the term Beamer is slang for a BMW car. But it's pretty rare to talk about cars and computer display methods in the same sentence so this shouldn't be a problem.

meeting people at Linux conferences

2007-03-03T23:14:00.000+11:00

One thing that has always surprised me is how few people talk to speakers after they have finished their lecture. A lecture might have many questions and the questions may be cut off, but when the speaker leaves the room they will usually do so alone.

When I give lectures at conferences I'm always happy to spend more time talking to people who are interested in the topic and disappointed that so few people choose to do so. It seems that other people have similar experiences, there have been several occasions when I have invited speakers to join me for lunch and no-one else has shown interest in joining us.

Usually the most significant factor in making someone offer a talk at a Linux conference is the opportunity to teach other people about the technology that they are working on. People with that motivation will take the opportunity to teach people at lunch, dinner, whenever.

Linux Conf Au has an event called the "Professional Delegates Networking Session" which is regarded by some people as the way to meet speakers (about half the delegates don't attend so the ratio of speakers to delegates is significantly better than at other conference events). But it seems to me that it's more efficient to just offer to buy them dinner. When I worked for Red Hat the maximum value for a gift I could accept was $100US, I expect that Red Hat has not changed this policy since then and that most companies that employ speakers at Linux conferences have similar policies. $100US is more than a meal costs at most restaurants that are near a Linux conference.

If I was a manager at a company that sent employees to a Linux conference I would first send email to some speakers who were working in areas of Linux development that were related to the projects that the employees were working on. I would ask the speakers if they would be interested in having dinner bought for them by my company and give them the option of bringing one or two friends along for a free meal (the friends would probably be people who work in similar areas).

spare tires

2007-03-02T07:50:00.000+11:00

The following letter was published in the RACV Magazine. The Royal Automobile Club of Victoria is a driver advocacy organization that provides roadside assistance and insurance. The fact that they published my letter means that the idea can't be totally wacky so I'll blog it. ;)

There have been many mentions recently in RoyalAuto about space-saver spare tires. Some manufacturers claim that they are to save weight which seems to be a benefit for the driver.

I wonder if most drivers really need a spare tire. For my own driving I only have a flat tire about every second year and I almost never drive outside the metropolitan area. Given how rarely I call for road-side assistance I think I would be better off without a spare tire and with the option of having the RACV deliver one for me if I needed it.

I expect that the time taken to deliver a spare tire would be greater than that required for a regular road-side assistance call, and that it might count for more than a regular assistance call, but given that the cheapest roadside assistance package has 8 calls a year I expect that most years I would still use less than half my quota of calls.

Not having a spare tire would save some weight (and therefore fuel) and would provide a little extra cargo space.

Also it seems to me that small cars are unlikely to ever be driven outside the area that is serviced by the RACV and similar organizations. For a small car the lack of a spare tire in the car design would offer a significant improvement to cargo capacity. If the RACV and other organizations endorsed and supported cars without spare tires then the car manufacturers could design small vehicles with more cargo capacity and less fuel use.

Mercedes S class and car safety

2007-03-01T22:15:00.000+11:00

The S Class Mercedes has some really interesting safety features, see this 6.8M PDF file for details. If you are interested in technology then you want to read it just to learn about all the cool features - it's got more technology than a Prius!

The S class includes the following features to protect the occupants in the event of a crash:

Tire pressure monitors
Electronic Stability Program (ESP) to selectively apply the brakes to reduce the risk of skidding
Active suspension
Pre-Safe is a management feature that recognises a potential collision by the steering and braking patterns of the driver and prepares the vehicle for an impact. This can involve adjusting the sun-roof, the seat-belts, and the driver's seat position to prepare for impact, closing the side windows, and inflating air chambers in the sides of the seats.
Head rests that automatically adjust in the event of a rear impact

The following features reduce the risk and/or severity of a crash:

Night view (infra-red) display gives a display of potential obstacles ahead without dazzling oncoming traffic
Distronic Plus is a brake assistance package that includes automatic braking based on radar surveillance of the traffic ahead
4Matic is a new feature that combines AWD with the traction-control feature that has become common on all expensive cars. This means that when any combination of wheels starts to spin on water or ice the brakes will be applied to them so that the wheels that have good grip can still be used for acceleration.

After a crash there are more safety features that can help you:

The engine can be automatically turned off after an impact and if necessary the fuel supply can also be cut
The hazard lights and emergency interior lights can be automatically activated
The side windows can be partially lowered, if your car lands in water deep enough to submerge it then you MUST open the windows as soon as possible - otherwise water pressure may make it impossible to open the doors - people forget this so it's good to have an automatic feature
Automatic door unlocking after an impact (good for rescuing unconscious occupants)
Cutting points marked on the windscreen and rear window for the benefit of emergency workers who need to cut the roof off with the "jaws of life"

These features are documented as being available in the latest S Class, I haven't investigated what is available in the cheaper models and I'm not even sure where to find information on the safety features available in older models (a second-hand E class is more in my price range). But if I won the lottery a S class Merc would be high on my list of things to buy!

If you know of other cars that have a similar set of safety features to the S class and cost less then please let me know.

I will probably write a blog post about the BMW safety features in the near future. I couldn't do so immediately because the BMW web site sucks. They have a form for me to fill in contact details so that they can post me a brochure (I want to read it NOW ONLINE). The form doesn't like my postcode and refuses to proceed (it should at least have an option for them to contact me via email or phone).

slang

2007-02-27T21:16:00.000+11:00

It is reported that a theater in Florida has changed the name of The Vagina Monologues to The Hoo-Haa Monologues after a complaint.

How does a medical term become so offensive? Is Hoo-Haa less offensive than other terms such as Beaver?

The Vagina Monologues is old news anyway. The idea was surprising when it was new, but that was a while ago. Anyone who wants to complain has really missed their chance.

Wikisaurus has a collection of synonyms for vagina, maybe a better name than Hoo-Haa could be found?

a good dog for uplifting

2007-02-15T20:25:00.000+11:00

The Norwegian Puffin Dog has six toes that are all fully formed. This has to be a good start for the uplift process.

The requirements for uplift are intelligence, speech, and the ability to use tools (dexterity in fingers). It seems that the Puffin Dog has a finger advantage over other breeds. Also the Lundehund has the ability to spread it's front legs out horizontally and to turn it's head around to face backwards, both these abilities significantly increase it's potential ability at using tools (uplifted dogs could use their mouths to manipulate tools as well as their hands).

So we need to find a breed that has good vocal capabilities and a breed that is intelligent and produce a cross-breed that has the best of all three!

Lundehund Syndrome sounds nasty, and would be almost impossible to breed out of pure bred dogs, but when producing a cross-breed it should be easy enough to do. Given that we don't care whether the uplifted dogs look like Lundehund's, have the same number of teeth, or are identifiable with that breed in any way other than dexterity it should be easy to breed out the genetic damage.

xen sucks

2007-02-12T23:09:00.000+11:00

According to Debian bug #399113 and linked discussion it is impossible to run a stable system on Xen without enabling PAE. It seems that no-one is considering the fact that a hypervisor that runs on both 32bit and 64bit architectures should be able to support 32bit systems with <4G of RAM (IE not using the PAE feature).

But instead to work around this bug the Debian developers have decided to just enable PAE. This is annoying for me as I have to either buy a new laptop or reduce my use of Xen.

I wonder what will happen if a Xen bug is discovered that only happens on PAE systems? Would that make Xen only an AMD64 thing?

John Howard is bizarre

2007-02-12T22:04:00.000+11:00

Our despicable prime minister said "I think that would just encourage those who wanted completely to destabilise and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and victory for the terrorists to hang on and hope for (an) Obama victory".

That statement is wrong in many ways, firstly the US (with Australian help) has destabilised and destroyed Iraq already. Claiming that removing US troops at this stage will do any further harm is unproven (and except for the Kurdish area extremely unlikely). Trying to link a presidential candidate with a terrorist organisation is the worst type of dirty politics.

Texas Republican senator John Cornyn requested that the Australian government stay out of US politics. It sounds like a reasonable request. But I wonder whether John Cornyn got involved when the US ambassador spoke out against the leader of the Labor party at the last Australian Federal election...

Senator Obama suggested that if John Howard wants to criticise his policies in Iraq then he should first send another 20,000 Australian troops (there are currently 140,000 US troops compared to 1,400 Australians). According to the CIA World Fact Book Australia has a population of 20.3M while the US has a population of 298.4M. If the ratio of serving soldiers was to match the populations then Australia would have 9,500 troops in Iraq. If Australia was to be a full military partner of the US (but scaled down due to the smaller population) and therefore had troops in South Korea, Japan, and Germany then the number of Australian troops committed might be closer to the 20,000 number cited.

But this is no criticism of Senator Obama. For a number that was made up to demonstrate his point that Australia is not pulling it's weight in Iraq it's a quite reasonable estimate.

The US Democrat Senator Ron Wyden correctly described Howard's comment as "bizarre". This may become a catch-phrase for the Howard regime (as the Bush regime is described as a "miserable failure").

Johnny seems to think that it's in his best interests to send Australians to fight a war that has no benefit for Australia (or the US for that matter), but he doesn't have the guts to do it properly. Fortunately for him the Bush regime understands his position and allows him to send a token force to demonstrate support without the risk of any significant number of casualties or having to conscript soldiers.

This mutual meddling in elections is a demonstration of the way Bush and Howard conspire against the interests of the Australian and US citizens. Both countries need governments that look after the interests of their citizens at home and let the UN take a larger role in world issues.

names

2007-02-11T20:44:00.000+11:00

Wouter wrote an interesting post about names. I wonder how many people know me as Russell SELinux...

execmod

2007-02-10T19:11:00.000+11:00

Ulrich Drepper has written a good web page about text relocation which is most often noticed as execmod failures reported when running SE Linux. When an AVC message reports a failure of execmod against a shared object it means that the object has text relocations (the shared object code writes to code that it executes to fix up addresses). This is due to being compiled without -fPIC or -fpic.

The command eu-findtextrel (from the elfutils package) when run with a parameter of the shared object in question will tell you which functions were compiled without -fpic or -fPIC.

The module in question must be recompiled with -fpic or -fPIC to generate the correct code.

Without SE Linux it's still a bug to compile a shared object without position independent code, so any shared object which can't run under SE Linux because of execmod will probably have problems in other situations anyway (maybe only on certain architectures).

xen and yoyo

2007-02-09T21:13:00.000+11:00

One of the benefits of Xen is that it allows a machine to be easily rebooted. Remote console and remote power management technologies are either expensive or implemented on the motherboards of expensive machines. With Xen the virtual machines can be managed without such expense and also with less effort.

This raises immediate possibilities for training sys-admins. One problem with training system administrators is that they need to have servers to administer and the mentor needs to be able to easily access them and fix them when they become unbootable. Xen makes these problems easy to solve on cheap hardware.

Monash University has for many years had a machine named Yoyo which is used for training sys-admins. It's not expected to be up as much as machines that are run by experienced sys-admins (hence the name) but I expect it would still have better uptime than a lot of corporate servers.

Unfortunately until recently there were no options available to people who weren't Monash students for learning about system administration. To solve this I want to run some sys-admin training with a server.

My plan is to set up a machine running Xen at a server room and provide a basic Debian install in a domU. I will then give the root password to a small group of trustworthy people (who I have known for some time or who are local and can be verified) and start the training. My plan is to set up a mailing list for emergency communication on one of my servers and have the trainees set one up for regular use on the domU. I will provide DNS secondary service and have an NS record for yoyo.coker.com.au point at the machine in question so the first task for them would be to run a DNS server.

I won't have unlimited bandwidth so I will track the bandwidth use from the dom0, and I will use the dom0 to make backups of the system via LVM snapshots.

The terms of service etc will be mostly copied from the Monash machine.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions for how to run this.

Hopefully this will work out and other people will want to do the same. If you run such a machine then please add a comment to this post with the URL for information on it.

phone spam

2007-02-04T12:49:00.000+11:00

Recently I had someone call my mobile phone asking whether I wanted to change phone providers. I asked them if they could hold the line - then I put my phone down and went back to work.

It took over eight minutes before they hung up on me.

Next time someone phone-spams you try to beat that record, please post a comment on this blog entry if you can beat eight minutes and twenty seconds of dead-air.

The call might have lasted longer if I had periodically picked up the phone and said "I'm almost ready". It's something I may test in the future.

classic security mistake

2007-02-02T21:44:00.000+11:00

One of the most obvious (and yet most common) computer security mistakes is to take input from an untrusted (and potentially hostile) source. A classic example of this is in Windows Vista where audio output from the system speakers can be taken as input to the speech recognition system. According to the BBC article an MS representative said "it would be unlikely the user would not be in the room to hear the file with malicious instructions being played".

It seems that according to MS it's OK for your computer security to be breached, just as long as you are around to witness it!

ssh tunneling of email

2007-01-28T10:06:00.000+11:00

On a Debian mailing list someone claimed that it was inconvenient to use ssh tunneling for sending and receiving email due to the issue of broken connections.

On my source-dump blog I have posted an entry with xinetd configuration for doing this in a reliable manner.

presentation laptops

2007-01-25T08:35:00.000+11:00

I suggested in a previous blog entry that conferences should provide computers that speakers can use for their presentations. The reason for this is that getting one computer working with the beamer in each room is an easy task, while getting the laptop of every speaker to work is much more difficult.

It seems that my idea has been rejected by almost everyone who read it, so I'll document some tips for getting a laptop working.

 SZ:    Pixels          Physical       Refresh
*0   1400 x 1050   ( 474mm x 356mm )  *50
4    640 x 480    ( 474mm x 356mm )   50
5    800 x 600    ( 474mm x 356mm )   50
6   1024 x 768    ( 474mm x 356mm )   50
8   1280 x 960    ( 474mm x 356mm )   50
9   1280 x 1024   ( 474mm x 356mm )   50

Firstly there is the command xrandr which can be used to change the resolution without logging out. Above are the most useful lines produced by running xrandr with no options on my Thinkpad T41p. The left column is the index to the list of resolutions. For example I run xrandr -s 9 to use mode 1280x1024 and xrandr -s 0 to use mode 1400x1050. This takes much less time than editing an X config file!

The next thing to note is that my Thinkpad has a refresh rate of 50Hz, apparently most beamers expect at least 60Hz, this explains why I have had ongoing problems in getting my Thinkpad to correctly work for presentations for the entire time that I have owned it. If you own such a Thinkpad then I recommend that you just bring another laptop to do your presentation on the assumption that the display possibly won't work and probably won't work properly! I had developed this habit anyway after repeated problems in getting my Thinkpad working (occurring on a number of occasions in several countries). It's good to now know the reason for this (thanks Keith).

When setting the resolution there are often tweaks that can be used. For example in my talk for the Debian Miniconf of LCA 2007 I used mode 800x600 (I think - Keith set it up and I didn't look closely after verifying that things basically worked). Even though the beamer didn't have good support for a low refresh rate it worked when the resolution was low enough. Fortunately the xrandr program allows changing resolution fast enough that all 13 resolutions could be attempted in about a minute.

The support for better display detection and configuration is steadily improving. Hopefully this year the problems will be solved (which means that for the Debian and RHEL releases in 2008 the problem will be solved).

A possible work-around is to use Xephyr (the replacement for Xnest). In a previous blog entry I described how to get Xephyr going for use by Xen images. It seems to be a common symptom of display synchronization problems that the edges of the screen will be clipped. The most common work-around for this is to not use the full-screen mode of OpenOffice - which means that instead of having a small amount of text clipped there is a large amount of OpenOffice menus etc on the screen. As Xephyr accepts any resolution it should not be difficult to arrange for it to use 98% of the screen space and then run the presentation full-screen in the Xephyr window. This will be particularly useful for programs such as MagicPoint (my favorite presentation program) which don't support a windowed mode of operation.

If you have any other suggestions on how to solve or work around display problems with laptops then please leave comments.