Planet Sysadmin               

• Laptops with Kinect sensors are coming. Worth paying attention to, gesturing in air to issue commands, a very different UX could be built on top of this ([1] [2])
  
  
• "Each streaming subscriber is worth only $2.40 in profit each quarter to Netflix, compared to $17.32 for each DVD subscriber. The old business was very lucrative. The new business kind of sucks." ([1])
  
  
• "You're not going to get content owners to license ... for less than what they get from the cable companies ... [if you will] use that cheap content to destroy the cable companies' business model." ([1])
  
  
• "Federal officials approached Google with evidence of its employees' wrongdoing ... Google agreed to pay $500 million to ... ward off criminal charges against the company." ([1])
  
  
• Google is spending nearly $1B every quarter buying new servers and data centers. That buys a lot of machines. ([1] [2])
  
  
• Education startups are suddenly very, very hot. ([1] [2] [3] [4])
  
  
• "Tiny directional antennas at the top of each rack ... send and receive data. A central controller monitors traffic patterns, finds network bottlenecks, configures the antennas and turns on the wireless links when more bandwidth is required ... The design sped up traffic by at least 45 percent." ([1])
  
  
• "Wimpy cores are fine, but if you go down to the wimpiest range, your gains really have to be enormous if you want to consider all the aggravation -- and the hit to their productivity -- that your software engineers face." ([1])
  
  
• A Facebook engineer explains why is actually the right thing for Facebook to produce buggy code ([1])
  
  
• "How sex, bombs, and burgers shaped our world" ([1])
  
  
• "There is a monolithic view that this generation of technology I.P.O.'s is completely broken." ([1])
  
  
• Just three engineers built and run Instagram, which has 14 million users, 150 million photos, several terabytes of data, and hundreds of machines. ([1] [2])
  
  
• Startup founders "say that if they'd known when they were starting their company about the obstacles they'd have to overcome, they might never have started it." ([1])
  
  
• Two 17-year-olds used a weather balloon to send a little Lego astronaut and a video camera 15 miles into the stratosphere. Very fun. ([1])

Josselin Mouette is one the leaders of the pkg-gnome team, he takes sound technical decisions and doesn’t fear writing code to work-around upstream issues. He deserves kudos for the work he has put into packaging GNOME over the years. He can also be very sarcastic (sometimes he even enjoys participating to flamewars on debian lists), and there are quite a few topics where we have long agreed to disagree. But this kind of diversity is also what makes Debian a so interesting place…

Read on to learn more about the pkg-gnome team, its plans for Wheezy, Josselin’s opinion on the GNOME 3 switch, and much more.

Raphael: Who are you?

Josselin: I am a 31 years old Linux systems engineer. I started in life with physics, which I studied at the ENS Lyon. I started a thesis on experimental and numerical models for optoelectronics, but when it became clear that research was not for me, I abandoned it and accepted a job at the CEA, which holds the largest computing center in Europe. Working on these machines has been the most awesome job ever (except for it being near Paris). After that I worked a bit on system monitoring technologies.

I am married, currently living in Lyon, and working for EDF (the French historical electricity company) on scientific workstations using Debian. EDF is using Debian on more than a thousand workstations and holds the fastest Debian supercomputer in the world (200 Tflops), which makes it another obvious place for Debian developers.

Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian?

Josselin: I discovered Debian in 1999 while studying at the ENS, which is one of the biggest nests of Debian developers – while being a small place, it is producing almost one Debian developer per year on average. After wondering for a while what it could be useful for, hacking on a slink snapshot made me think that it was for, well, everything except for gaming. Later, in 2002, when I was working on optoelectronics computing codes, I started to package them for Debian in order to make them easier to install, for us as well as other labs over the world. I started the NM process, and it was going smoothly but also going to take time. However, at that moment, the frozen-bubble game went out and made quite some buzz. Since I knew a guy who knew the game’s developer, he asked me to package it. The package found 3 sponsors in a very short time and was fast-tracked into the archive at a speed that was unseen before. After which the NM process was completed very quickly.

At that time, I was a heavy WindowMaker user, but I didn’t like the direction the project was taking (actually, I wonder if there was one). GNOME was starting to become attractive, but its packaging in Debian was very ineffective, with many inconsistent packages maintained by people who didn’t ever talk to each other – some of them didn’t speak English, and some of them didn’t talk at all. Together with awesome people, among which Jordi Mallach, Gustavo Noronha Silva, JHM Dassen, Ross Burton and Sébastien Bacher, we started the GNOME team in 2003, introducing consistent packaging practices, and initiating synchronized uploads. Releasing a completely integrated GNOME 2.8 in sarge was a considerable achievement; proving (together with the Perl team) that a team was the best way to maintain large package sets changed the way people work on Debian.

“Proving […] that a team was the best way to maintain large package sets changed the way people work on Debian.”

Raphael: You’re one of the most active contributors of the team which is packaging GNOME for Debian. What would you suggest to a new contributor who would like to help the team?

Josselin: There are several ways to contact the team, but the recommended one has always been IRC. We hang on #debian-gnome on the OFTC network, so just come around and ask for us.¹ The real question is what you want to do in the team. Of course, most new volunteers want to help packaging the latest and greatest version of GNOME into unstable as soon as possible, but unless they already have Debian background, this is not the easiest task. Since there are already people working on this, the “big” packages are usually waiting on dependencies.

I used to direct newcomers towards bug triage, but it is a tedious task and I’m now convinced that our huge bug backlog will never be dealt with. The most useful thing to do for newcomers now is probably to find a GNOME or GNOME-related package that needs improvement or is lagging behind, and simply try to work on it. You can also come and fix the bugs you find annoying. Find a patch on the GNOME bugzilla, or cook it yourself, propose it, and if it’s worthy enough you’ll soon get commit access.

“Our huge bug backlog will never be dealt with.”

¹ At this point I feel worth mentioning that if no one answers in 10 minutes, it doesn’t mean that no one will answer in 2 hours, so please stay on the channel after asking.

Raphael: There’s been some controversy about GNOME 3 and the direction that the project is taking. What’s your personal stance on GNOME 3? And what’s the position of the pkg-gnome team?

Josselin: The controversy is not new to GNOME 3, but the large-scale changes made with it have put it more prominently. The criticism usually boils down to a few categories:

1. General lack of configurability
2. Strange design decisions
3. Red Hat centric development
4. Hardware requirements
5. Change resistance

The lack of configuration options has been an ongoing criticism since GNOME 2.0 has decided to rip off most of them. Of course, when the control center was redesigned again for 3.0, there was a surge of horrified exclamations from people who missed their favorite buttons. On this topic, I fully concur with GNOME developers. The configuration option that is useful for you is not necessarily useful for someone else. Of course, sometimes developers go a bit too far, but the general direction is right. At work, we found that only a minority of users actually configure anything on their desktops: they just want something that works to launch their applications. Apple and Google have sold millions of devices by making them the simplest possible and without any configuration.

Design decisions are, on the contrary, individual decisions, and each of them, while having reasons behind it, can be questioned. I remember seeing a lot of complaints when the OK and Cancel buttons were reversed in dialog boxes, something that nobody questions anymore. GNOME Shell is full of such changes; some are easy to get accustomed with, some others just make eyebrows raise. The most obvious example is the user menu in GNOME 3.2, which contains an entry to configure your Google account, but no entry to shutdown the computer. Both decisions were taken independently, each of them with (good or bad) reasons, but the result is simply ridiculous. The default configuration in Debian will contain an extension to make it a bit better, but on the whole we don’t intend to diverge from the upstream design, on which a lot of good work has been done.

“On the whole we don’t intend to diverge from the upstream design, on which a lot of good work has been done.”

Point 3 is more complex. Red Hat being the company spending the most on GNOME, it is obvious that their employees work on making things work for their distribution. An example is the recurring discussions about relying on system services that are currently only implemented by systemd. Since there is a lot of (mostly unjustified) resistance against systemd in Debian, and since it won’t work on kFreeBSD anyway, someone needs to develop an alternative implementation of these services for upstart and sysvinit. Everything is in place for someone else to do the job but it has to be done, and this can be frustrating. Especially since it can also be hard to integrate changes needed for other distributions¹.

Hardware requirements are mostly a consequence of the previous criticism: there’s hardware that most distributions just don’t want to bother supporting. We’ve seen it in squeeze with the introduction of a hard dependency on PulseAudio. The Debian GNOME team (together with the Gentoo maintainers) made this dependency optional, carrying heavy patches, in order to cover the cases where it does not work. Now that it has gained more maturity, making this effort obsolete, the new tendency is to require 3D acceleration. For various reasons, it is not available to everyone². On this matter, the position of the Debian GNOME team has always been to support as much different configurations as possible with reasonable effort. Thanks to efforts from the incredible Vincent Untz, upstream supports a so-called “fallback mode”, which is the GNOME panel from 2.x with a lot of its bugs fixed. We intend to support this mode for as long as reasonably possible in Debian, possibly even after upstream ends up dropping it. However, other applications are going to require 3D because GStreamer is moving to clutter too, affecting video playback performance on non-accelerated systems³. For epiphany this is not a problem; only embedded video will be affected. But for totem, this is a major issue; because of that we will probably keep totem 3.0 in wheezy.

Finally, there is a natural human tendency to dislike change (I have it too), and it applies a lot to desktop users’ habits. Needless to say a change of such a scale as introducing GNOME Shell can trigger reactions. However, I don’t think it is reasonable, because of this resistance, to keep gnome-panel 2.x in Debian. This would be a lot of work on obsolete technology, and would prevent the upcoming removal of a lot of deprecated libraries. This time is much better spent improving gnome-panel 3.x in Debian and keeping the “fallback mode” great. One of the change that was made in Debian was to make it easier to find, being available as “GNOME Classic” directly from the login manager, instead of having to find it in an obscure configuration panel. In all cases, I would recommend to actually try GNOME Shell for a few hours before ditching it. I had never been accustomed to a new environment as quickly ever before.

“In all cases, I would recommend to actually try GNOME Shell for a few hours before ditching it.”

¹ Having seen several of my GDM patches reverted without a warning, I know we are not finished with carrying patches in Debian packages.
² Scientific workstations are a non-trivial example, since there is a measurable effect of using 3D in the window manager on heavy 3D applications.
³ On the other hand, on accelerated systems, this feature should end up improving performance a lot.

Raphael: What are your plans for Debian Wheezy?

Josselin: The first goal of the GNOME team is, of course, to provide again a great desktop environment to work on. For wheezy it will probably be based on GNOME 3.4. There also needs to be some work on package management interfaces. Upstream bases everything on PackageKit, but it is not as featureful as the aptdaemon Ubuntu technology. If I have time, I would also like to improve HTTP proxy support, since currently it is based on a stack of terrible hacks.

Raphael: If you could spend all your time on Debian, what would you work on?

Josselin: Obviously I would like to make GNOME in Debian even better. That would imply working on underneath dependencies (what we now like to call plumbing) to make sure everything is working great. This would also imply working more as GNOME upstream to make it more suitable for our needs.

I would also work on large-scale improvements on the distribution, like conditional recommends which I’d love to see implemented¹, or automatic build-dependency generation. I would also work on the installer to make it better for desktops machines.

¹ The idea is to automatically install language packs, or glues between two packages when both packages are installed.

Raphael: What’s the biggest problem of Debian?

Josselin: The obvious answer is the same as the one most people you interviewed before gave: not enough members in core teams. A lot of developers join Debian to work on a small number of pet packages, and don’t necessarily want to be involved with existing teams. It is probably still not obvious enough that the primary way to start contributing to Debian is to join an existing team.

But if there is one thing that is preventing Debian from gaining more momentum now, it is a completely different one: the too short support timeframe. 3 years is really not enough for corporate users. One year to migrate from one version to another is too short, and it is not possible to skip a release. It is definitely possible to change that with reasonable effort: the long-term support after 3 years doesn’t have to cover the same perimeter as the short-term one. For example, we could upgrade the kernel to the version in the current stable release, and stop fixing all non-remote security holes. The important thing is to cover the most basic needs: companies are ready to take the risk of having less support if it allows skipping a version, but not the risk of having no support at all. And even more important is to say that you do something. Red Hat says they support a release for 10 years, but of course after 5 years the supported perimeter is extremely small.

“3 years [of support] is really not enough for corporate users.”

Long-term support will not magically fix all problems in Debian, but it will bring more corporate users into the picture. And with corporate users come paid Debian developers, who can work on critical pieces of the system. Debian was built on the synergy between individuals and companies, and in recent years – perhaps as a reaction against what happened with Ubuntu – we’ve kind of forgot the latter. A lot of individuals have joined the project, and they are actively working, for example, on shortening the release cycle, which goes against the interest of professionals. We should embrace again such users and developers, and that means adapting to the current needs of larger entities.

Raphael: You’re the maintainer of python-support, a packaging helper that was competing with python-central. Both helpers are now deprecated in favor of dh_python2. Does this mean that the situation of Python in Debian is now sane? Or are there remaining problems?

Josselin: dh_python2 (and the Python3 version, dh_python3) has a sane enough design. It fixes a lot of issues in python-central and also python-support, at the expense of somehow reduced functionality for developers. However, just like the previous tools, it merely works around design mistakes in the Python interpreter. For example it is not possible to split binary modules, pure-Python modules and byte-compiled modules in different directory trees, like Perl does – although PEP 3147 introduces a way to do so. There is still no sane and standardized way to deal with module versions. There is no difference made between the module (which is a part of language semantics) and the file containing it (an information which depends on the implementation). Developers heavily rely on introspection features and make assumptions based on the implementation, that make it impossible to work around problems with module files.

Such problems are not restricted to Python. Those who fought against Ruby gems could tell even worse stories. While introducing GObject introspection packages in Debian (they can be used in JavaScript and Python to provide modules based on GObject libraries), I was pleased to see a clear distinction between file and module, but I was again struck by the fact you are not forced to declare API versions in your Python/JS code. In all cases, there is no reliable way to detect runtime dependencies in a given Python or JavaScript file, which leaves the maintainer to declare them by hand, and of course, often be wrong about them. Add to that the fact that most errors cannot be detected before runtime. For all these reasons, and while still being fond of Python for scripts and prototyping, I’ve become really skeptical of using purely interpreted languages to write real applications. Some GNOME developers are moving away from Python and JavaScript, mostly towards Vala; I can only approve of that move and hope the same happens to other projects.

Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions?

Of course there is the never-sleeping, never-stopping, Michael Biebl who can upload a whole GNOME release in a single week-end. But there are a lot of awesome people who make Debian something that simply works. I could talk about Cyril Brulebois from the X strike force, Julien Cristau from the release team, Sjoerd Simons for his sound advice and work on plumbing, Luca Falavigna who is so fast at processing NEW, to quote only a few of those I work with frequently. And of course, Jordi and Sam for their humor.

Thank you to Josselin for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Note that you can find older interviews on http://wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Google+, Twitter and Facebook

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On this post we will take a closer look at this veritas volume manager error when trying to display the available disk space in an existig datagroup. The error is “VxVM vxassist ERROR V-5-1-5455 Operation requires a disk group”

This is a draft post as I currently have no answer yet.. Weird thing is, the vxassist command works on one server and not in the other.. which is spitting out the error in subject.

Take this example:

Working server:


# vxdg list
NAME STATE ID
datadg1 enabled 1169455228.81.sgtjcpb1
datadg2 enabled 1169455429.95.sgtjcpb1
# vxassist -g datadg1 maxsize layout=concat
Maximum volume size: 390506496 (190677Mb)
# vxassist -g datadg2 maxsize layout=concat
Maximum volume size: 676767744 (330453Mb)
# vxassist -g datadg1 maxsize layout=raid5
Maximum volume size: 270483456 (132072Mb)
# vxassist -g datadg2 maxsize layout=raid5
Maximum volume size: 375160832 (183184Mb)


Looks fine right? But when I tried the same syntax on the other sever, I got this:

# vxdg -g sysdg free
DISK DEVICE TAG OFFSET LENGTH FLAGS
sysdg05 emcpower5s2 emcpower5 16777216 2029952 n
sysdg06 emcpower3s2 emcpower3 16777216 2029952 n
sysdg07 emcpower4s2 emcpower4 167772160 2020352 n
# vxassist -d sysdg maxsize layout=concat
VxVM vxassist ERROR V-5-1-5455 Operation requires a disk group
#


I suspect it has something to do with the Veritas VX version or the OS it is running. Will investigate further and let you know.
–

UPDATE.. saw the error after 5 minutes.. saw it? I found “d” error.

Hey guys. I should have called this post "Monitoring with Windows Remote Management (WinRM), and Powershell, and maybe a Certificate Services tutorial too," but then the title would have definitely been too long. In any case, I poured many hours of effort and research into this one. Lots of trial and error. And whether it helps anyone else or not, I definitely bettered myself through the creation of this post.

I'm pretty excited about this topic. This foray into WinRM and Powershell Remoting was sparked by a conversation I had with a coworker the other day. He's a senior Unix engineer, so he obviously enjoys *nix and when presented with a problem, naturally he approaches it with the mindset of someone very familiar with and ready to use Unix/Linux tools.

I'm the opposite of that - I feel like Microsoft is the rightful king of the enterprise and usually approach problems with Windows-based solutions already in mind. But what's important is that we're both geeks and we'll both still happily delve into either realm when it presents an interesting problem that needs solving. There's a mutual respect there, even though we don't play with the same toys.

The Unix engineer wants to monitor all the systems using SNMP because it's tried and true and it's been around forever, and it doesn't require an agent or expensive third-party software. SNMP wasn't very secure or feature-rich at first so now they're on SNMPv3. Then there's WBEM. Certain vendors like HP have their own implementations of WBEM. I guess Microsoft wasn't in love with either and so decided to go their own way, as Microsoft is wont to do, hence why you won't find an out of the box implementation of SNMPv3 from Microsoft.

One nice thing about SNMP though, is that it uses one static, predictable port.

In large enterprise IT infrastructures, you're likely to see dozens of sites, hundreds (if not thousands,) of subnets, sprinklings of Windows and Unix devices all commingled together... and you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a firewall which may or may not have some draconian port restrictions on it. Furthermore, in a big enterprise you're likely to see the kind of bureaucracy and separation of internal organizations such that server infrastructure guys can't just go and reconfigure firewalls on their own, network guys can't just make changes without running it by a "change advisory board" first, and it all basically just makes you want to pull your hair out while you wait... and wait, and wait some more. You just want to be able to communicate with your other systems, wherever they are.

Which brings us to WinRM and Powershell Remoting. WinRM, a component of Windows Hardware Management, is Microsoft's implementation of the multi-platform, industry-standard WS-Management protocol. (Like WMI is Microsoft's implementation of WBEM. Getting tired of the acronym soup yet? We're just getting started. You might also want to review WMI Architecture.) I used WinRM in a previous post, but only used the "quickconfig" option. Seems like most people rarely go any deeper than the quickconfig parameter.

Here's an excerpt from a Technet doc:

"WinRM is Microsoft's implementation of the WS-Management protocol, a standard Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)-based, firewall-friendly protocol that enables hardware and operating systems from different vendors to interoperate. You can think of WinRM as the server side and WinRS the client side of WS-Management."

I bolded the phrase that especially made my ears perk up. You see, Windows has a long history with things like RPC and DCOM. Those protocols have been instrumental in many awesome distributed systems and tool sets throughout Microsoft's history. But it just so happens that these protocols are also probably the most complex, and most firewall unfriendly protocols around. It's extremely fortuitous then that Ned over at AskDS just happened to write up a magnificent explication of Microsoft RPC. (Open that link in a background tab and read it after you're done here.)

Here's the thing - what if I want to remotely monitor or interact with a machine in another country, or create a distributed system that spans continents? There are dozens of patchwork networks between the systems. Each packet between the systems traverses firewall after firewall. Suddenly, protocols such as RPC are out the window. How am I supposed to get every firewall owner from here to Timbuktu to let my RPC and/or DCOM traffic through?

That's why monitoring applications like SCOM or NetIQ AppManager require the installation of agents on the machines. They collect the data locally and then ship it to a central management server using just one or two static ports. Well, they do other more complex stuff too that requires software be installed on the machine, but that's beside the point.

Alright, enough talk. Let's get to work on gathering performance metrics remotely from a Windows server. There are a few scenarios to test here. One is communications within the boundaries of an Active Directory domain, and the other is communications with an external, non-domain machine. Then, exploring SSL authentication and encryption.

winrm get winrm/config

to see the existing default WinRM configuration:

WinRM originally used ports 80 for HTTP and 443 for HTTPS. With Win7 and 2k8R2, it has changed to use ports 5985 and 5986 respectively. But those are just defaults and you can change the listener(s) back to the old ports if you want. Or any port for that matter. Run:

winrm enumerate winrm/config/listener

to list the WinRM listeners that are running. You should get nothing, because we haven't configured any listeners yet. WinRM over SSL will not work with a self-signed certificate. It has to be legit. From support.microsoft.com:

"WinRM HTTPS requires a local computer "Server Authentication" certificate with a CN matching the hostname, that is not expired, revoked, or self-signed to be installed."

To set up a WinRM listener on your machine, you can run

winrm quickconfig

or

winrm quickconfig -transport:HTTPS

or even

winrm create winrm/config/listener?Address=*+Transport=HTTPS @{Port="443"}

Use "set" instead of "create" if you want to modify an existing listener. The @{} bit at the end is called a hash table and can be used to pass multiple values. The WinRM.cmd command line tool is actually just a wrapper for winrm.vbs, a VB script. The quickconfig stuff just runs some script that configures and starts the listener, starts and sets the WinRM service to automatic, and creates some Windows Firewall exceptions. What is more is that Powershell has many cmdlets that use WinRM, and the entire concept of Powershell Remoting uses WinRM. So now that you know the fundamentals of WinRM and what's going on in the background, let's move ahead into using Powershell. In fact, you can emulate all of the same behavior of "winrm quickconfig" by instead running 

Configure-SMRemoting.ps1

from within Powershell to set up the WinRM service. Now from another machine, fire up Powershell and try to use the WinRM service you just set up:

$dc01 = New-PSSession -ComputerName DC01
Invoke-Command -Session $dc01 -ScriptBlock { gwmi win32_computersystem }

Returns:

You just pulled some data remotely using WinRM! The difference between using a "session" in Powershell, and simply executing cmdlets using the -ComputerName parameter, is that a session persists such that you can run multiple different sets of commands that all share the same data. If you try to run New-PSSession to connect to a computer on which you have not configured the WinRM service, you will get a nasty red error. You can also run a command on many machines simultaneously, etc. Hell, it's Powershell. You can do anything.

Alright so that was simple, but that's because we were operating within the safe boundaries of our Active Directory domain and all the authentication was done in the background. What about monitoring a standalone machine, such as SERVER1?

My first test machine:

• Hostname: SERVER1 
• IP: 192.168.1.10 
• OS: Windows 2008 R2 SP1, fully patched, Windows Firewall is on
• It's not a member of any domain

First things first: Launch Powershell on SERVER1. Run:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

Then set up your WinRM service and listener by running

Configure-SMRemoting.ps1

and following the prompts. If the WinRM server (SERVER1) is not in your forest (it's not) or otherwise can't use Kerberos, then HTTPS/SSL must be used, or the destination machine must be added to the TrustedHosts configuration setting. Let's try the latter first. On your client, add the WinRM server to the "Trusted Hosts" list:

We just authenticated and successfully created a remote session to SERVER1 using the Negotiate protocol! Negotiate is basically "use Kerberos if possible, fall back to NTLM if not." So the credentials are passed via NTLM, which is not clear text, but it's not awesome either. You can find a description of the rest of the authentication methods here, about halfway down the page, if you need a refresher.

OK, I am pooped. Time to take a break. Next time in Part II, we're going to focus on setting up SSL certificates to implement some real security to wrap up this experiment!

Spotify is a great way to listen to music. Unfortunately the official client only runs on Windows and Mac machines. There is an experimental unsupported client for linux, however it’s provided as a DEB (ubuntu/debian) package.

Here’s a gross hack for whom is desperate to get it working on Gentoo.

Step 1 : Get the package

You can download the package from here.
Pick the package matching your own architecture.

Step 2 : Convert the DEB package and extract it

Install the package deb2targz if you don’t already have it.

The following command will create a tar.gz file from the .deb package :

1

deb2targz spotify-client-qt_0.6.2.291.gcccc1f5.116-1_amd64.deb

You can then extract that tar.gz file like below :

1

tar zxvf spotify-client-qt_0.6.2.291.gcccc1f5.116-1_amd64.tar.gz

This will create you a usr directory, containing spotify files.

Toss them at the appropriate places on your system :

1
2
3
4

cd usr
mv bin/spotify /usr/bin/
mv share/pixmaps/* /usr/share/pixmaps/
mv share/spotify/ /usr/share/

Step 3 : Fixing library issues

Now this is the ugly part. Spotify is linked against specific versions of some libraries (SSL 0.9.8 and Crypto 0.9.8). In order to make it work, you need to fake those versions by creating a symlink from the wanted version to the existing (you’ll need to figure this out) version in your system.

1
2
3

cd /usr/lib
ln -s libssl.so.1.0.0 libssl.so.0.9.8
ln -s libcrypto.so.1.0.0 libcrypto.so.0.9.8

Step 4 : Instructing firefox to open the spotify protocol with the Spotify application

You need to register the spotify protocol so that Firefox will know how to deal with those “spotify:” urls.

1. Open the about:config page
2. Create a boolean value by the name of network.protocol-handler.expose.spotify
3. Set its value to false
4. Click on a spotify link (for example a playlist link or such). A popup will open and ask you to pick an application. Use /usr/bin/spotify.

That’s it. All set.
I’m not proud of it…. but I wanted to use Spotify badly

Getting Spotify to run on Gentoo/Linux: A Gross and Cruel Hack is a post from: Tech@Sakana - A sysadmin's blog

I received an email out of the blue through my contact form here from a representative over at “Intus Healthcare”. He pointed me in the direction of the Zeo Sleep Manager, with an aim to reviewing it. Sure enough, I was thoroughly interested, and we exchanged a few emails back and forth on it’s serial port, and other such things. Unfortunately at that point, things went dead – I’ve sent him several emails over the past few weeks but haven’t heard anything back. Nonetheless, the product looks really interesting, and hits several of my interests, and so I went ahead and ordered the product. I ordered directly from myzeo.co.uk which seems to be a store front for Intus Healthcare who are apparently Zeo’s UK distributors of the product.

The order process was simple enough, and I’m thoroughly looking forward to receiving the product. I’ll post further updates when it arrives.

I just submitted a proposal for an hour long talk for this year’s PICC Conference in New Jersey. I shouldn’t have waited so long, but at least I got it in.

Submissions are being accepted through the end of the month, and it’s really super-easy to do. All you need is a short paragraph describing the talk or poster session that you’d like to give. Email that to submissions@picconf.org, and they’ll consider it. It couldn’t be easier!

If you’d like, you can also read the Call For Papers online. Hurry and get it in!

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How to clear the browsing history on your Android Tablet
How to clear your browsers history (the list of sites you’ve visited)
How to install Dropbox on your Kindle Fire
How to clear the cache, history and cookies in Safari for iPad

Unlike Rhythmbox, Banshee or itunes, Xnoise uses a tracklist centric design. The tracklist is a list of video or music tracks that are played one by one without being removed. This gives you the possibility to enqueue any track in any order, regardless if they are on the same album or not.
The tracks can be reordered at any time via drag and drop.
The media browser contains all available media in a hierarchical tree structure of the available metadata. It is easy to find a single track, artist or album by going through this tree or by just entering a search term. From the media browser, music or videos can be dragged into the tracklist to every position.
Single or multiple tracks, streams, albums or artists can be dragged onto the tracklist and be reordered. Within the playing track, it’s possible to scroll to every position by clicking the position bar.
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Today, I’m in San Jose at the Wireless Mobility Symposium, and while we were planning it, Stephen Foskett jokingly suggested that we needed a “geek-o-meter” to help gauge the technical level of the presentations. It sounded like so much fun that I had to do it. And since it’s the Wireless symposium, it had to be wireless, too, right? Right.

So I went to the store and bought the cheapest R/C car I could find ($7), took it apart, attached a piece of foam to the wheel, attached an arrow to the foam, made a suitable geek-o-meter image, and had it printed out and mounted on a foam board last night at FedEx.

Today, I unveiled it at the symposium:

If you’re curious, the things are, from left to right, a kid’s toy computer, Milhouse from the Simpsons, Alton Brown, Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters, Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, and Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory.

Yep, I built a radio-controlled Geek-O-Meter that the Wireless Field Day delegates can control from their seats in the audience. I suspect I’m a little too proud of myself.

Example 2: Using a Project Manager with Kanban, Silo’d Teams

This is a product development organization with developers in Italy, testers in India, more developers in New York, product owners and project managers in California.

This organization first tried iterations, but the team could never get to done. The problem was that the stories were too large. Normally I suggest smaller iterations, but one of the developers suggested they move to kanban.

The New York developers had a problem biting off more than they could chew. So nothing moved across their board. The Italy developers had a board where the work did move across the board. The teams took pictures of their boards every day and shared the work across a project-based wiki. That allowed the New York-based developers to see the work move across the Italy board. And, that encouraged the New Yorkers to call the Italians and ask some questions. That helped the New Yorkers to change the size of their work by working with the product owners.

Now, why did the New Yorkers have such trouble originally? Because the developers “knew better” than the product owners, so they changed the stories into architectural features when they had originally received them. (Now they don’t. They leave the stories as real stories.)

Release planning: Management in California plan with agile roadmaps. They have features planned specifically week-by-week for the next 6 weeks, and have more of a quarter-by-quarter approach after that.

Iteration planning: No iteration planning because they are using kanban.

Daily commitment: No daily commitment needed because they use kanban. They do have a checkin a few times a week with each other as a technical team to make sure they don’t create bottlenecks and that they respect the WIP (work in progress) limits.

At one point, both the New York and Italy developer teams created automated tests so that the testers could catch up and stay caught up with regression tests. They add a story like that every couple of weeks, and they are paying down their automated testing debt.

The Project manager keeps an eye on the WIP, work in progress. Project manager also shepherds the product owner into keeping the queue of incoming work full and properly ranked. The product owner is notorious for changing the incoming work queue all the time. Project manager makes sure the team does retrospectives and is a little unclear how to do them in such a distributed team. The project manager is not so sure their retrospectives are working, and has started an obstacle list, to make sure the team has transparency for their obstacles.

Measurements: cumulative flow, average time to release a feature into the product.

(Want to learn to work more effectively on your geographically distributed team? Join Shane Hastie and me in a workshop April 17-18, 2012.)

I’m hoping to explore the DevOps phenomena a bit more, as I’ve seen what I believe are some colossal stretches of reasoning lately. To be sure, what I’ve gathered of that general line of thinking seems to be quite an improvement on the standard systems thinking. However, as with anything, it seems to have been speciated, inbred and over sold.

As a result, if you listen to the more rabid proponents, the following is The One True Solution to all systems engineering and administration problems.

If anyone wants to take a critical exploration of the DevOps movement, holla!

Ubuntu is a free, open-source computer operating system with 20 million users worldwide.

This 30 page guide was written for beginners and will tell you everything you need to know about the Ubuntu experience. You will learn how to install and setup Ubuntu on your computer, find technical support in your community, understand the Ubuntu philosophy, navigate the Unity desktop interface and use Ubuntu compatible software programs. Also with this free guide you will receive daily updates on new cool websites and programs in your email for free courtesy of MakeUseOf.
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The headlines like, "Sen. Reid kills SOPA bill" should really read, "Sen. Reid tells people SOPA is dead so Hollywood can work on more stealthy bill."

What to do about this kind of thing in general?

Joel Spolsky nails it:

(1)
The internet seems to ignore legislation until somebody tries to take something away from us... then we carefully defend that one thing and never counter-attack. Then the other side says, "OK, compromise," and gets half of what they want. That's not the way to win... that's the way to see a steady and continuous erosion of rights online.
The solution is to start lobbying for our own laws. It's time to go on the offensive if we want to preserve what we've got. Let's force the RIAA and MPAA to use up all their political clout just protecting what they have. Here are some ideas we should be pushing for:
* Elimination of software patents
* Legal fees paid by the loser in patent cases; non-practicing entities must post bond before they can file fishing expedition lawsuits
* Roll back length of copyright protection to the minimum necessary "to promote the useful arts." Maybe 10 years?
* Create a legal doctrine that merely linking is protected free speech
* And ponies. We want ponies. We don't have to get all this stuff. We merely have to tie them up fighting it, and re-center the "compromise" position.

(2)
The dismal corruption of congress has gotten it to the point where lobbying for legislation is out of control. As Larry Lessig has taught us, the core rottenness originates from the high cost of running political campaigns, which mostly just goes to TV stations.
A solution is for the Internet industry to start giving free advertising to political campaigns on our own new media assets... assets like YouTube that are rapidly displacing television. Imagine if every political candidate had free access (under some kind of "equal time" rule) to enough advertising inventory on the Internet to run a respectable campaign. Sure, candidates can still pay to advertise on television, but the cost of campaigning would be a lot lower if every candidate could run geo-targeted pre-roll ads on YouTube, geo-targeted links at the top of Reddit.com, even targeted campaigns on Facebook. If the Internet can donate enough inventory (and I suspect we can), we can make it possible for a candidate to get elected without raising huge war chests from donors who are going to want something in return, and we may finally get to a point where every member of congress isn't in permanent outstretched-hand mode.

Read the entire thing here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/117114202722218150209/posts/4GgaRiSyaTf

I think my article on software piracy touched a nerve with a lot of people.

I’ve been arguing my case with Philip Durbin since then on Google+. I’ve had almost innumerable conversations with people on twitter about it. And it apparently spurred Wesley David into writing a piece talking about the moral side of the issue. Interesting stuff.

And for the record, because A LOT of people have asked me about it, my definition of theft is straight out of Merriam-Webster.

I think if you read the article that I wrote, I never said anything about right vs wrong, or illegal vs legal, and that was on purpose. I have mixed feelings about all of it. It’s obviously wrong to take something of someone else’s without their permission. On the other hand, I don’t think that it’s necessarily wrong to do something that’s illegal if the law is in the wrong, either.

Slightly related is YCombinator’s recent Declaration of War on Hollywood. YCombinator wants to fund startups that will eventually eliminate Hollywood Studios.

Joel Spolsky recently wrote a piece on Google+ advocating legislation that causes the elimination of software patents and the rolling back of copyright protection. And this is from a guy who’s company makes copyrighted software.

Between you and me, I think there’s something going on, society-wise. As a group, we’re looking at things differently than we did, even two years ago. I’m not sure if all of the SOPA blackouts would have happened then. I don’t know if it changed with the Arab Spring or not, but it just feels like people are more cognizant of their ability to make change to the world around them. And I think that’s a great thing, and very promising.

The desktop remains central to our everyday work and play, despite all the excitement around tablets, TV’s and phones. So it’s exciting for us to innovate in the desktop too, especially when we find ways to enhance the experience of both heavy “power” users and casual users at the same time. The desktop will be with us for a long time, and for those of us who spend hours every day using a wide diversity of applications, here is some very good news: 12.04 LTS will include the first step in a major new approach to application interfaces.

This work grows out of observations of new and established / sophisticated users making extensive use of the broader set of capabilities in their applications. We noticed that both groups of users spent a lot of time, relatively speaking, navigating the menus of their applications, either to learn about the capabilities of the app, or to take a specific action. We were also conscious of the broader theme in Unity design of leading from user intent. And that set us on a course which lead to today’s first public milestone on what we expect will  be a long, fruitful and exciting journey.

The menu has been a central part of the GUI since Xerox PARC invented ‘em in the 70′s. It’s the M in WIMP and has been there, essentially unchanged, for 30 years.

The original Macintosh desktop, circa 1984, courtesy of Wikipedia

We can do much better!

Say hello to the Head-Up Display, or HUD, which will ultimately replace menus in Unity applications. Here’s what we hope you’ll see in 12.04 when you invoke the HUD from any standard Ubuntu app that supports the global menu:

Snapshot of the HUD in Ubuntu 12.04

The intenterface – it maps your intent to the interface

This is the HUD. It’s a way for you to express your intent and have the application respond appropriately. We think of it as “beyond interface”, it’s the “intenterface”.  This concept of “intent-driven interface” has been a primary theme of our work in the Unity shell, with dash search as a first class experience pioneered in Unity. Now we are bringing the same vision to the application, in a way which is completely compatible with existing applications and menus.

The HUD concept has been the driver for all the work we’ve done in unifying menu systems across Gtk, Qt and other toolkit apps in the past two years. So far, that’s shown up as the global menu. In 12.04, it also gives us the first cut of the HUD.

Menus serve two purposes. They act as a standard way to invoke commands which are too infrequently used to warrant a dedicated piece of UI real-estate, like a toolbar button, and they serve as a map of the app’s functionality, almost like a table of contents that one can scan to get a feel for ‘what the app does’. It’s command invocation that we think can be improved upon, and that’s where we are focusing our design exploration.

As a means of invoking commands, menus have some advantages. They are always in the same place (top of the window or screen). They are organised in a way that’s quite easy to describe over the phone, or in a text book (“click the Edit->Preferences menu”), they are pretty fast to read since they are generally arranged in tight vertical columns. They also have some disadvantages: when they get nested, navigating the tree can become fragile. They require you to read a lot when you probably already know what you want. They are more difficult to use from the keyboard than they should be, since they generally require you to remember something special (hotkeys) or use a very limited subset of the keyboard (arrow navigation). They force developers to make often arbitrary choices about the menu tree (“should Preferences be in Edit or in Tools or in Options?”), and then they force users to make equally arbitrary effort to memorise and navigate that tree.

The HUD solves many of these issues, by connecting users directly to what they want. Check out the video, based on a current prototype. It’s a “vocabulary UI”, or VUI, and closer to the way users think. “I told the application to…” is common user paraphrasing for “I clicked the menu to…”. The tree is no longer important, what’s important is the efficiency of the match between what the user says, and the commands we offer up for invocation.

In 12.04 LTS, the HUD is a smart look-ahead search through the app and system (indicator) menus. The image is showing Inkscape, but of course it works everywhere the global menu works. No app modifications are needed to get this level of experience. And you don’t have to adopt the HUD immediately, it’s there if you want it, supplementing the existing menu mechanism.

It’s smart, because it can do things like fuzzy matching, and it can learn what you usually do so it can prioritise the things you use often. It covers the focused app (because that’s where you probably want to act) as well as system functionality; you can change IM state, or go offline in Skype, all through the HUD, without changing focus, because those apps all talk to the indicator system. When you’ve been using it for a little while it seems like it’s reading your mind, in a good way.

We’ll resurrect the  (boring) old ways of displaying the menu in 12.04, in the app and in the panel. In the past few releases of Ubuntu, we’ve actively diminished the visual presence of menus in anticipation of this landing. That proved controversial. In our defence, in user testing, every user finds the menu in the panel, every time, and it’s obviously a cleaner presentation of the interface. But hiding the menu before we had the replacement was overly aggressive. If the HUD lands in 12.04 LTS, we hope you’ll find yourself using the menu less and less, and be glad to have it hidden when you are not using it. You’ll definitely have that option, alongside more traditional menu styles.

Voice is the natural next step

Searching is fast and familiar, especially once we integrate voice recognition, gesture and touch. We want to make it easy to talk to any application, and for any application to respond to your voice. The full integration of voice into applications will take some time. We can start by mapping voice onto the existing menu structures of your apps. And it will only get better from there.

But even without voice input, the HUD is faster than mousing through a menu, and easier to use than hotkeys since you just have to know what you want, not remember a specific key combination. We can search through everything we know about the menu, including descriptive help text, so pretty soon you will be able to find a menu entry using only vaguely related text (imagine finding an entry called Preferences when you search for “settings”).

There is lots to discover, refine and implement. I have a feeling this will be a lot of fun in the next two years

Even better for the power user

The results so far are rather interesting: power users say things like “every GUI app now feels as powerful as VIM”. EMACS users just grunt and… nevermind . Another comment was “it works so well that the rare occasions when it can’t read my mind are annoying!”. We’re doing a lot of user testing on heavy multitaskers, developers and all-day-at-the-workstation personas for Unity in 12.04, polishing off loose ends in the experience that frustrated some in this audience in 11.04-10. If that describes you, the results should be delightful. And the HUD should be particularly empowering.

Even casual users find typing faster than mousing. So while there are modes of interaction where it’s nice to sit back and drive around with the mouse, we observe people staying more engaged and more focused on their task when they can keep their hands on the keyboard all the time. Hotkeys are a sort of mental gymnastics, the HUD is a continuation of mental flow.

Ahead of the competition

There are other teams interested in a similar problem space. Perhaps the best-known new alternative to the traditional menu is Microsoft’s Ribbon. Introduced first as part of a series of changes called Fluent UX in Office, the ribbon is now making its way to a wider set of Windows components and applications. It looks like this:

You can read about the ribbon from a supporter (like any UX change, it has its supporters and detractors ) and if you’ve used it yourself, you will have your own opinion about it. The ribbon is highly visual, making options and commands very visible. It is however also a hog of space (I’m told it can be minimised). Our goal in much of the Unity design has been to return screen real estate to the content with which the user is working; the HUD meets that goal by appearing only when invoked.

Instead of cluttering up the interface ALL the time, let’s clear out the chrome, and show users just what they want, when they want it.

Time will tell whether users prefer the ribbon, or the HUD, but we think it’s exciting enough to pursue and invest in, both in R&D and in supporting developers who want to take advantage of it.

Other relevant efforts include Enso and Ubiquity from the original Humanized team (hi Aza &co), then at Mozilla.

Our thinking is inspired by many works of science, art and entertainment; from Minority Report to Modern Warfare and Jef Raskin’s Humane Interface. We hope others will join us and accelerate the shift from pointy-clicky interfaces to natural and efficient ones.

Roadmap for the HUD

There’s still a lot of design and code still to do. For a start, we haven’t addressed the secondary aspect of the menu, as a visible map of the functionality in an app. That discoverability is of course entirely absent from the HUD; the old menu is still there for now, but we’d like to replace it altogether not just supplement it. And all the other patterns of interaction we expect in the HUD remain to be explored. Regardless, there is a great team working on this, including folk who understand Gtk and Qt such as Ted Gould, Ryan Lortie, Gord Allott and Aurelien Gateau, as well as designers Xi Zhu, Otto Greenslade, Oren Horev and John Lea. Thanks to all of them for getting this initial work to the point where we are confident it’s worthwhile for others to invest time in.

We’ll make sure it’s easy for developers working in any toolkit to take advantage of this and give their users a better experience. And we’ll promote the apps which do it best – it makes apps easier to use, it saves time and screen real-estate for users, and it creates a better impression of the free software platform when it’s done well.

From a code quality and testing perspective, even though we consider this first cut a prototype-grown-up, folk will be glad to see this:

Overall coverage rate:
   lines......: 87.1% (948 of 1089 lines)
   functions..: 97.7% (84 of 86 functions)
   branches...: 63.0% (407 of 646 branches)

Landing in 12.04  LTS is gated on more widespread testing.  You can of course try this out from a PPA or branch the code in Launchpad (you will need these two branches). Or dig deeper with blogs on the topic from Ted Gould, Olli Ries and Gord Allott. Welcome to 2012 everybody!

I’ve been working with geographically distributed and dispersed teams for the past couple of years. Some of them on quite large programs, some of them reasonably small. What they all have in common is that they all want to transition to agile.

Most of them start this way: someone takes a Scrum class, gets all excited. This is good. Then reality hits. Scrum is meant for collocated geographically cross-functional teams. Uh oh.

Almost all of these teams are separated by function: the developers are in one place, the testers are in another, the business analysts are in a third place, the project managers are in a fourth places, and if there are product owners (or what passes for product owners) they are often in a fifth location. It’s not uncommon for every single function of the team to be separate from every other member of the team. So, the teams don’t fit the Scrum criteria. Uh oh.

Since Scrum has so much brand recognition, these people think if they can’t do Scrum, they can’t do Agile. Nope, not so. What they need to do is start from the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto, and go from there. They create their own lifecycle, and their very own brand of Agile.

When I worked with one client, that client thought they could extend their iteration. Nope, if anything, that means you keep the iterations even shorter, because you need more frequent feedback when no one is in the same place. Well, there were words. And more words. But, if you start from the values, you see that short iterations are the way to go if you want to be agile. Otherwise, you get staged delivery, which is a lovely lifecycle, but not agile.

I’m blogging a series of examples. Please don’t ask me why the people ended up in these locations. I have no idea. All I know is that’s where the people are.

Example 1: Using a Project Manager With Iterations, Silo’d Teams

One IT organization has teams with developers in the Ukraine, testers in India, product managers and project managers in the UK, and enterprise architecture and corporate management in the eastern US.

This organization moved to two-week iterations. The developers were 3.5 hours ahead of the testers, which was not terrible. This organization had these problems:

1. The product managers had to learn to be product owners and write stories that were small enough to finish inside one iteration.
2. The enterprise architects had to stop dictating the architecture without features to hang off the architecture.
3. The developers and testers had to learn to implement by feature so the architects could help the team see the evolving architecture.

This organization had a ton of command-and-control to start. The project managers needed to facilitate the teams, not control them. The architects needed to help the teams see how to organize the product, not to tell the developers what to do. The testers needed to not be order-takers, as in taking orders from the developers.

You might ask why the organization wanted to move to agile. Senior management wanted agile because the releases got longer and longer and longer, and could not accommodate change. Agile was a complete cultural shift. The two-week iterations, along with an agile roadmap of features helped a lot.

The pilot project team consisted of the developers, testers, a product manager, and a project manager. The team rejected the enterprise architect as a member of the team because the architect refused to write code.

Release planning: The project manager and the product manager do an initial cut at release planning as a strawman and presented it to the team. “Can you do this? What do you think?”

Iteration planning: The team does iteration planning together, making sure every story is either small, medium, or large, where a large story can be done by the entire team in fewer than three days. The team makes sure they get every started story to done at the end of the iteration.

Daily commitment: The team does a daily checkin, not a standup. They timebox the checkin to 15 minutes. They ask these questions:

• What did you complete and with whom yesterday? (reinforces the idea that people work together)
• What are you working on and with whom today?
• What are your impediments?

The project manager who acts as a servant leader, not a command/controller manages the impediments.

The pilot project has two experienced agile people: the project manager and a developer. Both act as servant leaders.

Measurements: burnup charts, impediment charts

The pilot team has been together for six months now, and is successful. This is not Scrum. It’s not Kanban. It’s agile and it’s working. They are ready to start another project team, working by attraction.

(Want to learn to work more effectively on your geographically distributed team? Join Shane Hastie and me in a workshop April 17-18, 2012.)

• Rands In Repose: A Design Primer for Engineers
  Rands on design.
  (categories: design engineering ux interaction )

When you start your journey with Debian, you tend to have lots of questions. You’ll find some answers in various documentations but there always are remaining questions. Those can be asked on various support channels:

• on mailing lists (debian-user@lists.debian.org for the English-speaking one);
• on IRC (channel #debian on irc.debian.org);
• on questions & answers websites like ask.debian.net;
• on web forums like forums.debian.net;
• on every other places where Debian users hang out together (on a booth during a conference, during an install party of a Linux User Group, etc.).

Those are the places where you can also start your journey as a Debian contributor… instead of asking questions, you just have to answer questions of other users! Let me share some advice if you want to do some user support.

User support is difficult…

It’s not always an easy task. Some users are more skilled than others and there might be difficulties related to the language, English is not always the native language of a user who asks a question in English.

Be respectful and courteous when you answer user questions, even if they made mistakes. You’re effectively representing Debian and you should give out a good image of the project. If you don’t have the patience or the time needed to do a good answer, don’t reply and let someone else take care of this user. I invite you to read (and follow!) the Debian Community Guidelines.

Avoid RTFM answers, instead you should show the users how they could have found (alone) the solution to their problem. We don’t want to scare people away, we want to grow our community.

But it’s also rewarding

In some cases, the problem reported by the user will be a real problem and you’ll have an opportunity to file a good bug report, thus helping to improve Debian for everybody.

Often, you don’t even have the answer to the user’s question. But you’re more skilled than him/her to do researches on the web, or you know of a good documentation that might contain the relevant bits of information, in any case you’re doing further research to help this user. In this process, you also grow your own skills since you’re learning stuff that you didn’t know yet.

At least that’s how I learned many things during my first year in the Debian community… there’s no reason why you couldn’t learn lots of stuff that way, in particular if you also read the answers of other skilled people on those channels (it takes a bit of training to learn who are the skilled people though).

I still believe that doing user support is one of the best ways to join the Debian community and to start contributing. It helps you to grow your skills, and to slowly progress from “average user” to “advanced user”.

If you want to start contributing to Debian, click here to subscribe to my newsletter and get future updates for new contributors. You can also follow me on Identi.ca, Google+, Twitter and Facebook.

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I make great use of lightning in my thunderbird installation.

At the moment I am in the process of migrating from my Sun Blade 2000 Sun Ray server to an x86 based one.

The problem is that I am running the lightning plugin from my automounted home directory and the lightning plugin has one shared library (libcalbasecomps.so) in it.

Now the thunderbird as installed in Solaris 11 actually comes with a compatible lightning installed so you can use that. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I try to run current thunderbird (at the time of writing 9.0.1).

For reference, you can get the lightning plugin for Solaris from http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/releases/1.1.1/contrib.

The obvious answer would have been to install it where I keep my thunderbird executables, but I couldn't quickly work out how to do that.

I already had the SPARC version installed. Apart from the Identifier number being different the only differences in lightning.xpi (after unzipping it) appear to be a platform line in install.rdf and the shared library.

What I did was to make a directory in my thunderbird install directory to house the architecture specific library on both the SPARC and x86 machine.

$ mkdir /rpool/thunderbird/arch

On each machine I got hold of the shared library and put a copy of it into this directory.

$ unzip lightning.xpi
...
$ cp components/libcalbasecomps.so /rpool/thunderbird/arch

The we head into the currently installed plugin in my home directory. Note the quotes. Shells have special meanings for braces.

$ cd '.thunderbird/profilename/extensions/{e2fda1a4-762b-4020-b5ad-a41df1933103}/components'
$ rm libcalbasecomps.so
$ ln -s /rpool/thunderbird/arch/libcalbasecomps.so .

Almost there.

Now in the directory one up from the components directory there is a file called install.rdf. In this file there is the following line:

<em:targetPlatform>SunOS_sparc-sunc</em:targetPlatform>

This needs to be commented out:

<!-- <em:targetPlatform>SunOS_sparc-sunc</em:targetPlatform> >

I now can run my thunderbird from either machine and continue to use lightning. I just need to follow this process whenever I upgrade thunderbird/lightning (Part of the reason for doing this blog).

As an aside, my /rpool/thunderbird and /rpool/firefox are each a zfs filesystem under rpool. Before I upgrade anything I make a zfs snapshot. That way if anything breaks, rolling back to a working version is trivial.

A wallpaper for those who are new to Ubuntu and want to know some command lines.
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Problem: I’m not always at the machine that is VPN’ed into work.

Solution: place the following into /etc/network/if-up.d/sametime-forwarder:

#!/bin/sh
#
# redirect Sametime's port 1533 to messaging.ibm.com
#
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward # turns on forwarding
iptables -F -t nat # Flush existing translation tables
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 1533 -j DNAT --to 9.17.136.77:1533
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -j MASQUERADE

(Before I start, I’d like to make it clear that I am not “calling out” anyone. This post started out as a comment on the blog post I refer to below, however my words quickly grew in number and I decided to make my own blog post on it. This post is intended to be a spinoff of Matt’s post. This topic is tangential to the post referenced below, and not in response to it.)

In a recent post by Matt Simmons titled “The real loser in software piracy isn’t who you think“, the Standalone SysAdmin posits an interesting theory. To summarize, software piracy may cost better, alternative products their userbase. If people need to twiddle a few pixels, the Photoshop brand immediately captures their attention. As a result a person may pirate Adobe’s software when a better, less expensive or possibly free alternative to Photoshop would have been just as good.

I completely agree with the above, and it’s a viewpoint that I had never considered outright. I think I’ve thought along those lines without realizing it though. In my experience, if someone with only a little computer background wants to put an all-in-one server in their office to manage printing, file shares, their internet gateway and etc. I am slightly disappointed that Microsoft’s Small Business Server product is usually the first and only product that comes to mind. There are so many alternatives! ClearOS, Untangle, and others are awesome alternatives often with a free tier that can get you started.

However, because the SBS brand is so large, and people think “I guess that’s what I need,” they’ll likely implement it and never consider the alternatives. In some instances, they may improperly license the software. If even just one quarter of the organizations that are not properly licensing SBS would move to an alternative product, I believe that would make the industry better. Microsoft would see clear competition from the growing userbase of other products and have a better idea on how to improve. The alternative products would increase their userbase and know how better to support their customers. Customers get great products all around! Generally speaking, it would be a win-win situation for everyone involved.

Often in discussions concerning software piracy the supposed dollar amount of lost revenue for the software company is brought up. Upon investigation those numbers are built on some flimsy presuppositions about the buyer’s intent. Users of software will often not truly be legitimate candidates to purchase the software. However, this is where I find the topic to be most interesting. When the topic of morality gets introduced is when things get fascinating. That’s also when you’ll see some truly jaw dropping logical and philosophical gymnastics.

Let’s talk a bit about morality. Are there absolutes or are there not? Is this purely a financial equation or is there more at stake here?

Definition of Terms

I’ll be using some quotes from Matt’s post as my springboards, but not as a direct response to him (this isn’t about two people disputing, but about different and yet related ideas being fleshed out). Also, I’m not focusing on the recent takedown of MegaUpload. I’m also not focusing on one pirated product over another. This is as generalized as I can be.

The first thing that needs to be determined in talking about “software theft” is “what is theft?” From Matt’s post:

As many people have said, theft is the taking of something which deprives the owner of use.

Before any topic can be given a thorough treatment, a definition of terms must take place. In this case, I’ve never heard of theft being defined as the deprivation of use from an owner. Perhaps it’s regional? That definition sounds more like some definitions of larceny. Theft does not, in my layman’s understanding of the term, primarily consider deprivation of use. Theft is usually defined along the lines of the taking of property that is owned by one person or entity without their consent. No validity is given to the consideration of if the object was useful to the original owner.

Perhaps you’ve seen dilapidated cars from two or more generations ago sitting on a farm. Certainly the owner is receiving no use from it, but taking it would still be considered theft (although I realize there are often tiered designations to the types of theft based on the dollar amount of what was stolen). That is, theft is defined as the taking of property that is owned by one person without their consent.

Certainly in the realm of software it gets tricky because you’re not dealing with cut-and-dried physical goods. In the physical world, it would be as if you could clone the junked automobile and then use it (perhaps for scrap metal, I don’t know). But you can’t perform an atomic copy of something in the physical world so it’s a moot point. Yes, you can copy a design and get in trouble with copyright infringement, but that seems to be an entirely unrelated phenomena. In the virtual world, you can perform an “atomic” copy of a thing – and that fact blurs some lines slightly.

However I believe the key to the situation is a realization that license terms on a software package define what acceptable use is. One you take those terms into account it is easier to understand how theft would be defined in the case of intangible software. Software companies by and large do not “sell” the software to you, but basically sell you the right to use it. It’s a contract for use. If a contract states that in order to use some software you have to pony up some cash then it “is what it is” and no amount of legal wrangling can reverse that. Going outside of that contract would be considered some form if illegal activity.

In the end, it is a non-consensual use of a product that has certain restrictions made upon it. Perhaps the term “theft” is over simplifying the behavior. Perhaps “breach of contract” would be better? That might be especially true since most software makes you accept an agreement before you can use it. Technically you are then bound by that contract. Define it how you will, we’re still dealing within the realm of morals, so at least we haven’t gotten too far off track.

Of course, I also find it laughable whenever software piracy is mentioned and people assign monetary value to the “stolen” software…as though the options were either “steal this software” or “pay for it”. A false dichotomy if I ever heard one.

If people say “one million copes of this software have been stolen, and the software costs $500 per copy, that means the company has lost half a billion dollars!!1!” then they are most certainly making a false dichotomy. Not all of the one million people have $500 to spend and even if they did, they would not necessarily spend it on that software if they were forced to make a choice.

This is where, often, the conversation with someone turns finances into morality. “Well I wouldn’t pay for it anyway!” or “I only use it once in a great while!” or, my favorite, “The software company has plenty of money. They’re not losing that much because of me.” As if, somehow, arguments of convenience or shareholder meetings shift the foundations of right and wrong.

Finances Vs. Morals

Certainly the dollar amounts that are brought up around software piracy are smeared around to make the software companies seem like helpless victims. When you look into the numbers, it’s highly unlikely that Adobe, Microsoft, Autodesk, Symantec and etc. aren’t losing a ton of real money. They might even be gaining value in the long run with their products being used by more people who carry that brand in their minds from then on.

However is the discussion about software piracy all about numbers and branding? Can a person change right and wrong based on their own convenience or their determination of how much a company needs more currency?

I’d like to focus this topic less on the numbers and more on how one behaves after digesting the numbers. My question for us all to think about is this: What determines right and wrong? Here are the numbers and a fairly accurate interpretation of them:

[Those that download commercial software without paying] didn’t have $500 to buy photoshop. Did Adobe really lose that $500 that wouldn’t have been paid to them? No.

Most of us would agree with that. Framed within the context of “a person doesn’t have $500 and furthermore wouldn’t spent it on the software if they had it” then the software maker didn’t lose money. However, if we then take that likely reality and use it to excuse a breach of contract, we start determining right and wrong based on profit and loss. In the presence of moral absoulutes, a thing that has certain contractual usage restrictions on it being used outside of those restrictions is still wrong. Typically, that “wrongness” is only superseded if there is considerable harm to another person unless that contract is broken.

“That money didn’t exist. Assigning it a value is dishonest.”

Certainly the numbers are trumped up to an extent. On that there is little dispute. Where do we go from here? Can we go from “I don’t have the money to buy this software,” to “I’m going to intentionally break a contract so that I can use it anyway”?

At this point in a discussion on software licensing (or music, movie and other entertainment licenses), the discussion usually continues spinning its wheels. Volleys of words like “fair”, “greedy”, “corporations” and “big business” get lobbed.

A product has value independent of a person’s ability to pay for it. A product is then sometimes priced disproportionate to its value. Or, oddly, value is manipulated by price, but that’s another discussion. If a company, within their legal rights, sets a price on a product that a person feels is disproportionate to its value, does that person’s personal evaluation of the price/value equation allow them to morally break contract and use the software outside of its licensing restrictions?

We could argue about the fairness of current licensing practices, the greed of corporate licensing practices, the value of a product in comparison to its price and if software patents are detrimental (please, no GPL fanbois). Those things are important to talk about, however in the context of determining morality, if those smell fishy, that’s because all of them combine to form one giant red herring distracting us from the real point. The real point is centered on how one determines right and wrong.

Absolute Uncertainty

The question of absolutes now comes up. Is it ever right to take something that is not yours? If a loved one is dying, and you can steal medicine to save their life, is it wrong? If you and others are locked in a prison camp during a war and face almost certain death, is stealing the keys from the guards okay? Is killing your guards okay?

Those are extreme examples, but valid nonetheless and thus not in the realm of straw men. It shows us that, usually, there is a line when theft and even killing become acceptable. (Even so, there are those who believe in pacifism to the point of never fighting back even in the defense of your or another person’s life.)

The question remains, is there ever a time when it is acceptable to break a contract or license? Once you figure that out you can answer the following questions with certainty and be able to backup your view: When is it okay to break a contract? When is it okay to perform an act that is punishable by law? Does solvency determine right and wrong and if so when?

I think moral absolutes is the heart of the issue of software being used outside of license restrictions (I hesitate to call it “theft” or “piracy”). If there are none, then this topic is wasted energy. If there are absolutes, but they contradict honoring software licensing then we should at least define them and be aware of why we do what we do. If there are absolutes, and they say to honor law in so far as the law does not clearly contradict other absolutes (e.g. a law requiring you to punch a random person in the face), then the topic is rather simple, in spite of arguments about practicality. Your pragmatic need for a software title notwithstanding, show some fortitude and don’t break a contract / license agreement (essentially dishonesty). Go find a product whose licensing you agree with or do without.

For myself, I am a license pest. I actually read some EULAs. I actually follow them to the best of my ability. For example, I recently bought an OEM copy of Windows 7 for a workstation I built for my small business. According to strict licensing interpretation you are not allowed to install the OEM version of Windows straight onto a PC from the DVD. You are supposed to use the OEM Preinstalltion Kit or the Express Deployment Toolkit. So, I got rid of the installation that I had initially made, turned one of my other PCs into an EDT server and installed the OEM version of Windows across my home network onto my workstation.

Who would have known? What difference does it really make? For one, I would have known. Secondly, I believe the difference is in how a person continually builds their character. If you are unfaithful in the little things, it makes unfaithfulness in bigger things a little bit easier to justify. If people that I know have little or no problem breaking contracts and licenses, my trust in them is eroded. If a person rationalizes things in such a way as to take relatively clear cut restriction and justify breaking them in the absence of clear harm to another person, i wonder what else that person could justify.

I am not here to point fingers, flex my “morality,” or get anyone to behave the way I do. I am here to encourage you to stop and consider yourself. Stop and consider why you choose what you do. Consider why you think what you think. Consider everything. Have a reasoned defense. A new topic that has been intriguing me is that of dialectic reasoning. One of my favorite quotes is attributed to Socrates:

The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.

Do not live an unexamined life.

What do you think about software licensing? Is it okay to break the license terms? Is there a practical limit? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

This tutorial will explain how to show desktop from command line in ubuntu.You can use xdotool to do this.

xdotool lets you programatically (or manually) simulate keyboard input and mouse activity, move and resize windows, etc. It does this using X11′s XTEST extension and other Xlib functions.
(...)
Read the rest of Ubuntu Tip:How to show desktop from command line (27 words)

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Post tags: desktop, How to show desktop from command line

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I use BlogEngine.NET for this blog. I've loved it so far. It suits me perfectly because I also love .NET and C#.

BlogEngine.NET comes with a few "extensions" out of the box, and one of those extensions is called SimpleCaptcha. You simply configure it with a question and an answer. Visitors who supply the correct answer get to post comments. This wards off most of the spammers. But from what I'm seeing, is that whatever spammers use to automatically crawl the web, leaving little spam-filled coprolites in their wake, seems to be able to solve simple mathematical equations like 5+5, 3+7, and even (5+2)-1. I changed my captcha challenge to that latter equation and received a spam comment not five seconds later.

Maybe this will stop them...

So I figured the next best thing to do, without annoying and frustrating my visitors too much with those really bizarre graphical captchas that you can't even read half the time, was to change my SimpleCaptcha to something that was still simple, but required slightly more human-like thinking than what I suspect most spambots are capable of. Questions such as "what is the opposite of cold" or "a shape with four equal sides." These sorts of questions have brought my comment spam to a screeching halt. But there's one last problem: SimpleCaptcha is case sensitive and there's no immediately apparent way to turn it off. I don't want a visitor to type "Square" and not get their comment posted because they needed to have typed "square" instead.

So, to remedy this problem, simply access your web server and browse to wherever you have IIS/BlogEngine.NET installed. Then drill down to where SimpleCaptcha is. For me, it's C:\inetpub\wwwroot\App_Code\Extensions\SimpleCaptcha\. Open up the file SimpleCaptchaControl.cs in a text editor (or Visual Studio if you'd rather,) and find this method:

public void Validate(string simpleCaptchaChallenge)
{
   this.valid = this.skipSimpleCaptcha || this.simpleCaptchaAnswer.Equals(simpleCaptchaChallenge);
}

Simply change that one line to this:

public void Validate(string simpleCaptchaChallenge)
{
   this.valid = this.skipSimpleCaptcha || this.simpleCaptchaAnswer.Equals(simpleCaptchaChallenge,StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase);
}

And you've just made your SimpleCaptcha not case-sensitive. The change takes effect as soon as you save the file; no restarts of anything are required.

• -9 tonight? Blimey. #
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• Zappos turns off phones after up to 24 million customer records exposed http://t.co/pzpUmrqV #
• 'Two Small Men' movers used extortion against customer, judge says http://t.co/W9KZBuFi #
• How Software Is Made, by Sally, Age 8. http://t.co/R4Lthby8 #
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• Haha oh god. http://t.co/AScQe2Tp #
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Hello again, fellow wanderers.

I was having a hell of a comment spam problem here for a couple days... hope I didn't accidentally delete any legitimate comments in the chaos. (Read this excellent comment left on my last DNS post.) Then I realized that I might ought to change the challenge question and response for my simple captcha from its default... I guess the spammers have the old "5+5=" question figured out. :P

A few years ago, I made my own simple captcha for another blog that was along the lines of x + y = ? using PHP, but x and y were randomly generated at each page load. Worked really well. The simple captcha that comes boxed with BlogEngine.NET here is static. Being able to load a random question and answer pair from a pool of questions would be a definite enhancement.

Anyway, since we're still on the topic of auditing Active Directory, I've got another one for you: Auditing "inactive" user accounts.

I had a persnickety customer that wanted to be kept abreast of all AD user accounts that had not logged on in exactly 25 days or more. As soon as one delves into this problem, one might realize that a command-line command such as dsquery user -inactive x will display users that are considered inactive for x number of weeks, but not days. I immediately suspected that there must be a reason for that lack of precision, as I knew that any sort of computer geek/engineer that wrote the dsquery utility would not have purposely left out that measure of granularity unless there was a good reason for it.

So what defines an "inactive" user? A user that has not logged on to his or her user account in a period of time. There is an AD attribute on each user called LastLogonTimeStamp. After a little research, I stumbled across this post, where it is explained that the LastLogonTimeStamp attribute is not terribly accurate - i.e., off by more than a week. Now that dsquery switch makes a lot more sense. I conjecture that the LastLogonTimeStamp attribute is inaccurate because Microsoft had to make a choice when designing Active Directory - either have that attribute updated every single time a user account is logged on to and thus amplify domain replication traffic and work for the DCs, or have it only updated periodically and save the replication load.

To further complicate matters, there is an Active Directory Powershell cmdlet called Search-ADAccount that, when it returns users, it reports a LastLogonDate attribute. As it turns out, LastLogonDate is not even a real attribute, but rather that particular Powershell cmdlet's mechanism for translating LastLogonTimeStamp into a more human-readable form. (a .NET DateTime object.)

Next, there is another AD attribute - msDS-LogonTimeSyncInterval - that you can dial down to a minimum of 1 day, and that will have replication of the users' LastLogonTimeStamp attribute updated much more frequently and thus make it more accurate. Of course, this comes at the expense of additional load on the DCs and replication traffic. This may be negligible in a small domain, but may have a significant impact on a large domain.

*ADSI Edit*

Lastly, your other options for being able to accurately track the last logon time of users as close to "real-time" as possible involve scanning the security logs or attributes on all of your domain controllers and doing some heavy parsing. This is where event forwarding and subscriptions would really shine. See my previous post for details. I don't know about you guys, but all that sounds like a nightmare to me. Being able to track inactive user accounts to within 1 day is just going to have to suffice for now.

So we made the decision to decrease the msDS-LogonTimeSyncInterval, and I wrote this nifty Powershell script to give us the good stuff. Each major chunk of code is almost identical but with a minor tweak that represents the different use cases if given different parameters. Reading the comments toward the top on the five parameters will give you a clear picture of how the script works:

# ADUserAccountAudit.ps1
# Writen by Ryan Ries on Jan 19 2012
# Requires the AD Powershell Module which is on 2k8R2 DCs and systems with RSAT installed.
#
# Locates "inactive" AD user accounts. Note that LastLogonTimeStamp is not terribly accurate.
# Accounts that have never been logged into will show up as having a LastLogonTimeStamp of some time
# around 1600 AD - 81 years after the death of Leonardo da Vinci.
# This is because even though their LastLogonTimeStamp attribute is null, we cast it to a DateTime object
# regardless, which converts null inputs into a minimum date, apparently.
#
# For specific use with NetIQ AppManager, put this script on the agent machine at 
# C:\Program Files (x86)\NetIQ\AppManager\bin\Powershell (for 64 bit Windows. Just "Program Files" if 32 bit Windows.)

Param([string]$DN = "dc=corpdom,dc=local",         # LDAP distinguished name for domain
      [string]$domainName = "Corpdom",             # This can be whatever you want it to be
      [int]$inactiveDays = 25,                     # Users that have not logged on in this number of days will appear on this report
      [bool]$includeDisabledAccounts = $false,     # Setting this to true will include accounts that are already disabled in the report as well
      [bool]$includeNoLastLogonAccounts = $false)  # Setting this to true will include accounts that have never been logged into and thus have no LastLogonTimeStamp attribute.

# First, load the Active Directory module if it is not already loaded
$ADmodule = Get-Module | Where-Object { $_.Name -eq "activedirectory" } | Foreach { $_.Name }
if($ADmodule -ne "activedirectory")
{
   Import-Module ActiveDirectory
}

if($includeDisabledAccounts -eq $false)
{
   if($includeNoLastLogonAccounts -eq $false)
   {
      Write-Host "Enabled users that have not logged into $domainName in $inactiveDays days`r`nExcluding accounts that have never been logged into`r`nAccounts younger than $inactiveDays days not shown.`r`n-------------------------------------------------------"
      Search-ADAccount -UsersOnly -SearchBase "$DN" -AccountInactive -TimeSpan $inactiveDays`.00:00:00 | 
      Where-Object {$_.Enabled -eq $true -And $_.LastLogonDate -ne $null } |
      Get-ADUser -Properties Name, sAMAccountName, givenName, sn, lastLogonTimestamp, Enabled, WhenCreated |
      Where-Object {$_.WhenCreated -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-$($inactiveDays)) } |
      Select sAMAccountName, givenName, sn, @{n="LastLogonTimeStamp";e={[DateTime]::FromFileTime($_.LastLogonTimestamp)}}, Enabled, WhenCreated |
      Sort-Object LastLogonTimeStamp |
      Format-Table   
   }
   else
   {
      Write-Host "Enabled users that have not logged into $domainName in $inactiveDays days`r`nIncluding accounts that have never been logged into`r`nAccounts younger than $inactiveDays days not shown.`r`n-------------------------------------------------------"
      Search-ADAccount -UsersOnly -SearchBase "$DN" -AccountInactive -TimeSpan $inactiveDays`.00:00:00 | 
      Where-Object {$_.Enabled -eq $true } |
      Get-ADUser -Properties Name, sAMAccountName, givenName, sn, lastLogonTimestamp, Enabled, WhenCreated |
      Where-Object {$_.WhenCreated -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-$($inactiveDays)) } |
      Select sAMAccountName, givenName, sn, @{n="LastLogonTimeStamp";e={[DateTime]::FromFileTime($_.LastLogonTimestamp)}}, Enabled, WhenCreated |
      Sort-Object LastLogonTimeStamp |
      Format-Table 
   }
 
}
else
{
   if($includeNoLastLogonAccounts -eq $false)
   {
      Write-Host "All users that have not logged into $domainName in $inactiveDays days`r`nExcluding accounts that have never been logged into`r`nAccounts younger than $inactiveDays days not shown.`r`n------------------------------------------------------"   
      Search-ADAccount -UsersOnly -SearchBase "$DN" -AccountInactive -TimeSpan $inactiveDays`.00:00:00 |
      Where-Object { $_.LastLogonDate -ne $null } |
      Get-ADUser -Properties Name, sAMAccountName, givenName, sn, lastLogonTimestamp, Enabled, WhenCreated |
      Where-Object { $_.WhenCreated -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-$($inactiveDays)) } |
      Select sAMAccountName, givenName, sn, @{n="LastLogonTimeStamp";e={[DateTime]::FromFileTime($_.lastlogontimestamp)}}, Enabled, WhenCreated |
      Sort-Object LastLogonTimeStamp |
      Format-Table   
   }
   else
   {
      Write-Host "All users that have not logged into $domainName in $inactiveDays days`r`nIncluding accounts that have never been logged into`r`nAccounts younger than $inactiveDays days not shown.`r`n------------------------------------------------------"   
      Search-ADAccount -UsersOnly -SearchBase "$DN" -AccountInactive -TimeSpan $inactiveDays`.00:00:00 |
      Get-ADUser -Properties Name, sAMAccountName, givenName, sn, lastLogonTimestamp, Enabled, WhenCreated |
      Where-Object {$_.WhenCreated -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-$($inactiveDays)) } |
      Select sAMAccountName, givenName, sn, @{n="LastLogonTimeStamp";e={[DateTime]::FromFileTime($_.lastlogontimestamp)}}, Enabled, WhenCreated |
      Sort-Object LastLogonTimeStamp |
      Format-Table   
   }
}

So there you have it, a quick and dirty report to locate users that have been inactive for over x days. Accounts that were just created and not logged on to yet would have a LastLogonTimeStamp of null and would therefore show up in this report, so I threw the Where-Object {$_.WhenCreated -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-$($inactiveDays)) } bit in there to exclude in any case the user accounts that were younger than the specified number of days required to consider an account "inactive." Furthermore, you might want to resist the urge just now to go a step further and programmatically disable inactive user accounts. Most organizations use service accounts and other special accounts that may not get logged into very often, and yet, all hell would break loose if you disabled them. I'm considering a system that disables the accounts, but also reads in a list of accounts which are "immune" and would therefore be ignored by the program. For a future post I guess.

Lastly, I want to thank Ned of the AskDS blog, without whom this post would not have been possible. (Now it sounds like a Grammy speech...) But seriously, I asked him about this stuff and he knew all the answers right away. Helped me out immeasurably on this.

The thought occurs to me that there is a lot of concern about the health of SSDs by admins who don’t have a lot of experience with them.

I don’t have a lot of experience with them either, but I’ve spent a decent amount of time learning how they work, why they fail, and reading about the various failure modes. The problem is that I have no hands-on time with old, failed, failing drives.

What I’d like is to see some failing (or old/slow/etc) drives first hand. My ultimate goal is to write a small SSD health check that can be plugged into Nagios (or whatever monitoring system you want to use). As of right now, there’s no SSD health check on Nagios Exchange, and I think one that actually did check would be valuable.

Of course, there will be limitations (like when the SSD is part of a RAID array, or really really old, or the drive is so dead that it doesn’t respond), but still, the lack of ANYTHING is kind of frustrating.

Since I’m not made of money and time, I can’t just go buy a bunch of SSDs and wait on them to die in interesting ways. This is where you come in :-) I’d be interested in taking (or borrowing, if you’d prefer) your old unhealthy drives. I can get my own reference shiny-new drive(s), but I’m more interested in drives that are long in the tooth, either because they’re just old, or because they’re slow from all of the writes that you’ve been putting them through, or whatever.

I’d prefer drives with the SMART extensions, but I’m not overly picky, I guess. Since I don’t need dozens, I can probably pick up shipping as long as you’re in North America.

If you can help me out with my little project (or have suggestions on how I can acquire drives like this), please drop me a line or comment on this story. Thanks!