[

mood

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contemplative

]

I wasn't aware of this forthcoming movie until some of my co-workers mentioned it today, and watching the trailers, it wasn't the movie itself that caught me (but it looks promising too), but rather the usage of South African settings and historical footage from the apartheid era. As a South Africa, some of it is just too eerily familiar. It's just really apartheid again, with a twist that it's against "real aliens" now, not the forced alienation of the black population.

• Trailer #1
  Original footage: Starting at 0:35, for 6 seconds.
• Trailer #2
  Same original footage, 0:26 for 2 seconds.
• Original short film
  The SABC logo is too new for 1990, the one used is post-1994.

I really need to get back to writing in this blog. In the meantime, I scoured my email for the last 2 years of fortune submissions that I hadn't compiled together yet, and make a release. Go forth and amuse yourselves with it.

Now for the second set of statistics. These aren't directly useful to mirrors in estimating their traffic, but instead gives a good overview of how our mirroring setup works internally, and now much traffic is involved in the fan-out stage. Distfiles are the main content moved around by this system, but it is also used for the other directories for releases, experimental and snapshots.

A very quick overview of the existing setup:

1. Developer uploads new distfile directly to dev.gentoo.org.
2. The master-distfiles box pulls from dev.gentoo.org hourly.
3. The master-distfiles box checks every ebuild, and downloads missing distfiles from their primary URI if they do not exist. The daily distfile report is also created at this point.
4. Every hour, the cluster master of ftp.osuosl.org pulls the latest content from master-distfiles. (Averages 240MB/day of traffic).
5. The OSL FTP cluster master (in Oregon) pushes to it's slave locations in Atlanta and Chicago.
6. All distfiles mirrors pick up their content from one of the FTP nodes - Internet2-connected hosts are directed via DNS to an Internet2-connected slave for performance.

Each of the distfiles mirrors has about 140-160MB of upstream traffic every day (including both the new files and the rsync overhead for scanning). If there are no files changed, the rsync traffic for a directory scan is 1-2MB. While this isn't a lot of traffic, it's very spiky, as mirrors tend to be on fast links.

The new weekly builds from the Release Engineering team will probably be adding another 1.3GB per week, staggered as one arch per day.

I got a small subset of the logs from the OSU FTP cluster for processing some of these statistics. They cover the 24 hour period of 2008/08/07 UTC. It does not have data of which traffic went via Internet2, and I've grouped the sources by country code (using IP::Country::Fast from CPAN).

As a bit of analysis, I think that more than half of our mirrors (Europe, Middle East, RU) would benefit from having a box to sync against in Europe.

I was doing some statistics about Gentoo mirrors to see about future plans, and thought that the indirect crowd that read my blog via the various aggregators might be interested in numbers.

These are the traffic for boobie.gentoo.org, which is a newer box in the official rsync.gentoo.org box directly maintained by the Infrastructure team. Hardware specs are 2x Xeon 3050 @2.13Ghz, 4GB RAM. Disk is mostly irrelevant - the rsync workload is served purely from RAM (tail-packing reiserfs, backed via loop device pointing to a file on tmpfs).

Inbound traffic is spiky, but does not exceed 10Mbit by more than a little bit - we can the inbound rsyncs from the rsync1 master to 10Mbit. Outbound traffic varies between 4Mbit and 9Mbit, with an average around 6-7Mbit.

logik

A stoner, takes a puff of his joint and says, "Hi, I'm a mac!".
The poorly dressed wannabe bank teller beside him says, "... and I'm a PC."

The door nearby blows in and a heavily armed tactical team storms the room,
throwing both of them to the floor, barrels of MP5k's against their skulls.

Someone yells, "AREA CLEAR!"
The lieutenant comes in after them, smoking a cigar, surveying the area.
"I'm Solaris,
the sergeant over there is BSD (You remember your daddy mac?),
the pretty boy with the M14, he's Linux,
and the guy toting the M60... That there is HPUX.
Now, shut the fuck up, both of you.
We've had about enough of your 'Bill and Ted Get a Computer' bullshit.
Keep it up, and we're gonna do the same thing to you that we did to OS2, got it?"

As a recent random time-waster, I went and read all of the bugs in the "Recruitment" product of the Gentoo Bugzilla. In doing so, I found twelve developers (ebuild or other) that weren't listed in our LDAP or historical tracking at all. I added them back now, I have gentoo-core announcements from when several of them joined as well that I double-checked.

• pihta - bug 20756
• ct - bug 22211
• srcerer - bug 23184 (retire date approximate)
• fede2 - bug 25464
• vlaci - bug 31795
• teval - bug 36753
• mccabemt - bug 43029
• rip7 - bug 46353
• twk-b - bug 53723
• dj-submerge - bug 57051
• little_bob - bug 69742
• ruth - bug 70469

• svyatogor - bug 20756 - updated join date for original docs work, he had commit rights two years before his previously stated join date
• archaelus - bug 30835 - data fixup
• apokorny - bug 70188 - add join date

There are 92 developers without join dates. We need to find join dates for them via BugZilla and CVS/SVN. Also audit all join dates for every other developer. Lastly, discover and capture retirement dates for every past developer.

Present statistics: 673 developers total. 247 active, 426 retired.

Following up on my earlier posting on the AD2000BX/AD1989B SPDIF support being broken, I figured out the required fixes, and they are waiting in the sound-2.6 kernel tree for the next merge window

• ALSA: HDA: patch_analog: Implement multiple outputs for AD1988
• ALSA: HDA: patch_analog: Quirk for Asus P5Q Premium/Pro boards.
• ALSA: HDA: hda_proc: Fix printf format specifier
• ALSA: HDA: hda_local: Less magic numbers.
• ALSA: HDA: patch_analog: Fix SPDIF output on AD1989B

Migrating data and cleaning up my old desktop display head machine, I decided to check out my ccache statistics. This is a very old cache, having first started 2006-01-13. The oldest item in the present cache is 2008-01-12, but the statistics are valid for the entire period. hits 229k and 834k misses = approximately 21% hit rate. This wasn't any crazy repeated compiling of my own code, just a dedicated ccache directory for Portage to use.

Setting up the storage on my new machine, I just ran into something really interesting, what seems to be deliberate usable and useful, but completely undocumented functionality in the MD RAID layer.

It's possible to create RAID devices with the initial array having 'missing' slots, and then add the devices for those missing slots later. RAID1 lets you have one or more, RAID5 only one, RAID6 one or two, RAID10 up to half of the total. That functionality is documented in both the Documentation/md.txt of the kernel, as well as the manpage for mdadm.

What isn't documented is when you later add devices, how to get them to take up the 'missing' slots, rather than remain as spares. Nothing in md(7), mdadm(8), or Documentation/md.txt. Nothing I tried with mdadm could do it either, leaving only the sysfs interface for the RAID device.

Documentation/md.txt does describe the sysfs interface in detail, but seems to have some omissions and outdated material - the code has moved on, but the documentation hasn't caught up yet.

So, below the jump, I present my small HOWTO on creating a RAID10 with missing devices and how to later add them properly.

Code fixed now, no specs available yet See my patches here.

A private source that I inquired of indicates that the AD2000B part was only a special run of the AD1989B part. There shouldn't be any functional differences. On the side of a spec sheet, the AD1989B specs should be available "shortly" from Analog Devices.

So in more details to follow, I picked up hardware for a new workstation to replace my G5. The only part of the hardware that isn't working yet, is the digital audio (SPDIF/Toslink) output. My motherboard is an Asus P5Q-Premium, and the specifications claim to have "ADI® AD2000B 8-Channel High Definition Audio CODEC" as the audio chip. This chip is apparently the successor to the AD1988B chip. The analog audio part works fine, just that I use optical to overcome an interference issue on the run between my computers and my actual working area of my desk (with a small digital decoder and stereo speakers).

Digging around in the ALSA drivers, it just seems I need to find a different set of controls to toggle the digital lines to be outputs or enabled - and that this data would be in the public datasheet, just like previous versions of the chip. I submitted a technical request to Asus a few days ago, with no response yet. I also contacted Analog Devices directly. Their customer support referred me to their application engineers, whom I phoned, and they then proceeded to deny the existence of the chip, and I quote: "It's not in my system, we don't manufacture it." That's really interesting, because I've got it on my motherboard!

Either the divisions of Analog Devices aren't talking, or Asus is using chips from a 3rd party that's ripping off Analog Device's trademark amongst other things.

Here's the text off the chip:

AD2000BX
14??793.1
#0816 0.3
SINGAPORE

I tried to take a photo, but it's really annoying and hard to read, without dis-assembling my machine, which I'd prefer not to do at this point.

However, I did find another photo on the web, of the same area from a review of the motherboard. The Analog Devices logo is also clearly visible after the 'BX' portion of the text. From the photo I could make out:

AD2000BX
1383055.1
#0808 0.2
SINGAPORE

If I had to make a guess about it, the chip is AD2000BX, the second line is the serial number, the third is the year and week of manufacturer, plus the revision of the chip, and the last line is the manufacture location.

If you're from Asus or Analog Devices, and you're reading this, where's the datasheet for the chip? Is it a real ADI part? I simply want the public datasheet like the rest of models so that I can fix digital audio output in Linux myself, and contribute it back to the ALSA project.

P.S. The upstream ALSA bug is here. There's no downstream Gentoo bug.

Dear Lazyweb,
To avoid a repeat of my previous snafu with a Dell PowerConnect 2716 - in which I found that the VLAN functionality didn't work properly with broadcast packets (esp DHCP requests) to my cable modem.

Specifically, I'd love to replace my need for having a separate switch for my external segment vs. my internal segment, with a single switch and two/three VLANs. I tried to do it with the Dell switch, but found disastrously that it just didn't pass the broadcast packets at all :-(. On the plus side, the Dell switch did get me the jumbo frames that I wanted.

So, does anybody have a Linksys SRW2016 or SRW2024 and can report on how well they work with DHCP packets over VLAN-segregated networks?

This is a copy+paste from my email to the gentoo-dev mailing list, simply because some developers and users follow the RSS feeds rather than read email. If you want the bot in your channel and you are a channel founder/lead op, please respond on the thread in the mailing list

Hi folks,

Sorry that it's taken this long to get completed, but the Jeeves
replacement, Willikins, is finally 99% done, and ready to join lots of
channels.

Getting the bot out there
-------------------------
If you would like to have the new bot in your #gentoo-* channel, would
each channel founder/leader please respond to this thread, stating the
channel name, and that they are the contact for any problems/troubles.

Bug reports
-----------
Please open a bug in the Gentoo Infrastructure product, using the
'Other' component, and assign it directly to me.

Custom bot functionality:
-------------------------
Here's all the functionality that we have assembled, beyond the standard
rbot stuff.
Bugzilla
========
!bug [ZILLA] ID
Looks up bug #ID in the per-channel default or specified bugzilla.

!bugstats [ZILLA]
Totals of bugs per the bugzilla 'status' field.

!archstats [ZILLA] [STATUS] [RESO]
Totals of bugs per architecture, optionally with some specific set of
status or resolution values, comma delimited.

status = OPEN, DONE, UNCONFIRMED,NEW,ASSIGNED,REOPENED, RESOLVED, VERIFIED, CLOSED
Reso = FIXED, INVALID, WONTFIX, LATER, REMIND, DUPLICATE, WORKSFORME,
       CANTFIX, NEEDINFO, TEST-REQUEST, UPSTREAM
zilla = gentoo xine sourcemage redhat mozilla kernel fdo abisource
        apache kde gnome
If you want another bugzilla, file a bug.

Gentoo-specific
===============
!meta [-v] [CAT/]PACKAGE
Print the metadata and optionally herd members for a given package.

!changelog [CAT/]PACKAGE
Changelog stats for a package

!devaway list
List all away developers.

!devaway DEVNAME
Display .away message for a single developer.

!herd HERD
Show herd members

!expn NAME
Show the expansion of any public Gentoo mail alias

!glsa GLSAID
Shows the title and external IDS for any given GLSA ID.

!earch [CAT/]PACKAGE
Earch output for a given package

!rdep [CAT/]PACKAGE
Reverse RDEPEND for a given package

!ddep
Reverse DEPEND for a given package

What isn't supported yet
------------------------
1. !glsa -s TEXT
This used to search for GLSAs that matched that string in their title or
external IDS.

2. New bug announcements
Jeeves used to announce brand new bugs to #gentoo-bugs as well as
targeted channels or users, depending on the product, component,
assignee, cc and a number of other factors (deeply nested if/else
trees). The old implementation had this in code entirely, and it would
be nice to avoid having to modify the code whatsoever, and instead have
some domain-specific language for doing this.

Source availability
-------------------
Gentoo specific:
http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/rbot-gentoo.git
Bugzilla support:
http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/rbot-bugzilla.git
(flameeyes has his own tree as well, but he's been sick lately, so it
was lagging behind my development)

Right now, if you want to run your own instance of the bot, you will
need the latest Git tree of the rBot itself, as upstream only fixed the
last remaining issue a couple of hours ago.

Thanks to
---------
solar:
Running the old Jeeves Eggdrop till now, and helping to document all of
the Eggdrop functionality we used.

flameeyes:
Bugzilla plugin development

halcy0n:
Gentoo-specific stuff

tango_, jsn-:
(rbot upstream developers) For fixing the bugs as I found them :-).

Cardoe was complaining that repeatedly hitting the Gentoo CVS server was too slow, and it turned out he wasn't using SSH ControlMaster at all. Other developers have blogged about it before, but here is a quick reminder how.

Without ControlMaster, running "time ssh robbat2@cvs.gentoo.org w" shows a turnaround of 1.9 seconds. With ControlMaster, It's more in the range of 0.07-0.09 seconds :-).

Host master-cvs.gentoo.org
    HostName cvs.gentoo.org
    User robbat2
    ControlMaster yes
    ControlPath ~/.ssh/master-%l-%h-%p-%r.sock
Host cvs.gentoo.org
    ControlMaster no 
    ControlPath ~/.ssh/master-%l-%h-%p-%r.sock
    BatchMode yes

Now just do anything like you would normally. For security, you should probably close the ControlMaster session if you're going away from your machine for a long time. It would be nice to detect the loss of the ControlMaster and re-initiate it always at the start of a sequence.

Having my bike stolen has made me wonder about locks more. Defeating most forms of bike locks are trivially easy with some lateral thinking.

This was my lock:

key-based

bumpkey (given a suitable blank or other key of same style), pick the lock, drill or freeze the lock (either LN₂ or just adding in warm water on a day that's below freezing)

combination-based

guess or shoulder-surf the combination

Cable/Chain

Large bolt cutters, wire cutters or hacksaw

U-Lock/D-Lock

Use a jack inside the arms to apply outward force

Any other bicycle lock types or different attacks that you can think of? Any way to effectively defeat one of more of the above attacks? From a security perspective, we need to consider not only the permitted attacks, but all possible attacks.

In my case, they either defeated my combination (probably by shoulder-surfing), or just used some form of cutting attack. Since the lock wasn't left behind, I suspect the former more than the latter.

Ok, so I've totally slacked off, and not posted about the rest of OLS2008 yet, but this post is more important than that for now. I was out at the Pride Parade today, then went to meet up with a friend. I locked up my bike at ~17h20, to the racks outside Waterfront Station (I wrote Centre in my Twitter posts, but then realized it was actually Waterfront Station at that spot). I came back at 20h30, to find my bike was gone :-(.

Description: Norco model 7030 (only 95% certain, can't remember exactly), mountain bike. Olive Green and Beige, with some white lines. Front white LED from PlanetBike (batteries quite worn down), no rear light. Stock seat. Rear aluminum pannier rack. Bike lock was an OnGuard Doberman combination lock.

I bought the bike used, almost 3 years ago, from the antiques/junk store on the corner of 31st and Main, for $50. It was probably hot merchandise at the time, but it was a good deal, and in reasonable condition. I've put in probably $50 of maintenance, and the lock+rack were another $40 approximately. Not a lot of money, just enough to be annoying.

On Tuesday for OLS2008, I attended the wireless mini-summit. In past years, fellow Gentoo developer dsd has attended, and was remember by some of the attendees. I'm not so much involved with wireless stuff these days, but I have a good grasp of it from back when I worked at Net-Conex doing point-to-point links using Airaya WirelessGRID 802.11a gear doing 108Mbit w/ AES256, plus personal experimentation.

The vendors (Intel, Marvel, Broadcom, Atheros, Ralink, Nokia and others) and major distributions (Fedora/RH, Ubuntu, Debian, Suse) were present, but I was the only attendee from the smaller distros. Also present were some of the other core wireless developers, incl. Johannes Berg.

Most of the talk focused on 802.11 stack and driver issues, with a presentation about WiMax from Intel.

One of the really interesting things was the work from Luis R. Rodriguez, on the new Central Regulatory Domain Agent (CRDA). There were some large questions from the Intel crowd about API and interaction, but the general concept was very well received. The support for signing the domain file is probably going to not be used for the most part, as there are too many other places to subvert usage of the data even if the file is signed. 802.11d and 802.11h are mostly considered as useless as apparently no regulatory agencies have signed off on them.

Another interesting discussion came out of the discussion on power management. Stuff on the usage of the CARRIER interface flag. It's apparently quite inconsistent, and the UP/DOWN status on some wireless devices has large implications. Some devices go totally away on DOWN, and need firmware loaded on UP. In some, the power consumption in reset state prior to loading firmware is lower than any other powered-down state. Multiple power levels may be added later to try and allow devices to define what states are best/available for their power saving. Implications of firmware loss and DOWN state on associations to APs, esp. when some parts of WPA are in play. This all also sucks with some DHCP clients as they perform DOWN on release or failure, which loses the firmware - such behavior from userspace really needs to be stamped out.

For lunch, we went to a buffet resturant, Tuckers. I was a little dubious of this at first, as buffet is really not my thing, however I can say that it was quite decent, esp. their roast beef carvery, with some nice whole-grained mustard. The salads weren't so great, but overall I think I'd eat there again in a group if there was sufficient group demand.

On the way out of lunch, I ran into a cute girl (I'll call her A) with a rubber-spiked laptop bag, and started chatting to her. As she was an Ottawa resident, she was prepared with an umbrella for the torrential summer rain that started during lunch. Sharing her umbrella we returned to the hotel conference rooms, splitting up thereafter as she was in the virtualization mini-summit.

Post-lunch, resuming the wireless mini-summit, we discussed more issues about the CRDA, core mac80211 development, and then breakout sessions on power-management and ??? (I can't remember what the other side was, even though I was in it).

For dinner, I took a clear walk out via parliament, and a very long way, full route. Ended up at "Elgin Street Freehouse" for dinner, had an Indian-fusion twist on steak, and did manage to find virgin Mojitos successfully. Nice 5km walk for exploring.

I met lisanys and sarahemm for brunch, originally planning to go to Cora's, but the lineup was extremely long, and we gave up after 15 minutes - and wandered over to the Bymarket area instead. Ate club sandwiches, not that good, chicken was very bland next to the prosciutto.

From there, ambled over to the park over the canal from parliament hill, up to parliament hill (without going down to the canal), then down sparks street, before returning to Les Suites hotel to chill for a moment before picking up luggage and split ways.

Now on the flight back I get to write up the rest of my OLS days, as well as the Blackthorn party.