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Debian Sid - migrating to Systemd?
by Jason White 21 Jul '14

21 Jul '14

When I run an aptitude full-upgrade, I am prompted to remove sysvinit-core and replace it with systemd-sysv. does this mean that Debian Sid is making the transition now, or is it the result of the specific combination of packages that I happen to have installed? To be clear, I want to make the change to Systemd, while minimizing the risk of an unbootable system in the transition, and I'm considering whether now is the time to go ahead with it or not.

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Red Hat and Oracle licensing and failover solutions
by Peter Ross 11 Jul '14

11 Jul '14

Hi all, it looks as my company wants to buy a product requiring Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle DB. We also plan to buy 2 new servers with 2 Xeon CPUs each. Red Hat seems to have "Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Virtual Datacenters" for $US 1999 per year (https://www.redhat.com/wapps/store/catalog.html) I guess two licenses are the right solution if you want to install Red Hat on bare metal and VMs and containers on it (in short, not being restricted by licensing) Then comes Oracle licensing.. http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/technology-price-list-070617.pdf "Standard Edition One" $US 5800 per processor. Makes it $US 11 600 per machine (or $US 5800 in case I restrict it to a VM with one CPU - is it actually possible?) Is it possible to setup in any meaningful way a second DB server as a stand-by server without paying an additional Oracle license? I guess not.. And then there is $US 1276 "software update license & support". Without that no updates? If it all gets too expensive I may need to look at MS SQL server. I am not very keen to go back to this again but it is the second available option and it seems to be much cheaper.. but I have to work it out in detail too (in defense to MS: SQL Server was performing well and reliable wherever used) In short, my boss would not like to pay more than needed but we need to be sure to have a working setup at the end. Regards Peter

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reminder: Open Source Developers' Conference 2014 (Gold Coast QLD) CFP still open
by Arjen Lentz 10 Jul '14

10 Jul '14

Hi all We're looking for presenters to talk at the upcoming Open Source Developers' Conference (4-7 November 2014, Griffith University Gold Coast Campus, QLD). Register on the http://2014.osdc.com.au/ site, and propose a presentation. You can submit as many proposals as you wish, and come back to edit them later, so why not get started today? We have space for sessions, tutorials, hands-on workshops with keyboard or soldering iron (or both!) and yes, Miniconfs. Speakers attend the conference for free; travel and accommodation is still your own gig, although we may be able to make arrangements in some special cases. Initial CfP period closes soon, but you only have to get your abstract in at this stage, after that you've got quite a bit of time to prep your talk or workshop! Topics ====== While we're looking for presentations related to creation or use of open source, naturally, there are many aspects that you could address: - Cultivating an open source community – What tools, processes, or skills are required to ensure the human aspect of a project are supported? - Show casing a successful, or unsuccessful open source implemenntations – What did you do well? What did you learn? What would you do differently next time? - Open source in the physical world – How does open source software or hardware help the Internet of Things? Arduino, Raspberry Pi, 3D printing, EEG sensors, ... - Open source in education - Do you have awesome resources, or perhaps you're a teacher or facilitator? We want to hear from you! - Open source in the business world – How do you run your open source business? What revenue model do you employ? What benefits and drawbacks have you experienced? - Closed source in an open source world – Closed- and open source have not just coexisted, they have collaborated. How have you come to successfully use both? - Open Standards and Open Data - for documents, audio, video, telephony, etc. Again, we'd love to hear about tools and use cases! These, and many more topics that are relevant to today's open source developers are desirable to help provide a diverse range of subjects at this years conference. Contribute! =========== Remember, we have ample space for sessions, tutorials, hands-on workshops with keyboard or soldering iron (or both!) and Miniconfs. Go on, put in your cool ideas today! http://2014.osdc.com.au/ Cheers, Arjen. (on behalf of the OSDC 2014 organising committee)

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luv-main listserver munging occasional mails?
by Erik Christiansen 09 Jul '14

09 Jul '14

My post to this list: Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2014 22:11:51 +1000 Subject: Re: Android/PC editing Message-ID: <20140708121151.GA1928@ratatosk> came back from the listserver as: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 <=== !!!! **** Sender: luv-main-bounces(a)luv.asn.au But my local copy of what went out confirms that it was: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit and sure enough, the body is plain text, rather than the ghastly base64 lump which came back from the list. Given that internode flagged the list echo as: X-SpamDetect: : -7.000000 IronPort SPAM scanned=-10.0, Whole message is base64 encoded=1.0, Message text disguised using base-64 encoding=2.0 it seems reasonable to infer that the luv-main listserver did the munging. The message has only been seen by internode servers and tainted.luv.asn.au, according to the headers. The other posts on the thread have not been similarly abused, including my earlier post. It was only turned into: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit What can be happening? Did others receive it munged? (Or did their spam filters dump it?) Erik -- "You know, it's at times like this when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young!" "Why, what did she tell you?" "I don't know, I didn't listen!" - Douglas Adams, "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

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Android/PC editing
by Russell Coker 08 Jul '14

08 Jul '14

I've been using Google Keep for editing small documents on a PC (web interface) and Android (native app). It works well for shopping lists and for notes for a LUV lecture. But I'd like to find something suitable for editing longer documents, blog posts and magazine articles. As an aside the Wordpress Android app is terrible if you are writing anything significant. What would be ideal would be something like Google Keep but with sections (maybe a folding editor) and spelling checking. I can survive without grammar suggestions etc but I'd probably use them if they were available. Note that I'm willing to consider a free as in beer system for this. As the documents in question will be public on the Internet in a small amount of time so I don't have to trust the secrecy of longevity of a free service (both of which have been lacking in many instances). If there is no good option for editing on Android/web then what's the best Linux GUI option that supports easy conversion to/from plain text? LibreOffice writer? -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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Re: Android/PC editing
by Nic Baxter 07 Jul '14

07 Jul '14

Hi Russel Have you seen wikieditor? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ondrejchrastina.wikieditor Cheers Nic On 07/07/2014 10:49 pm, Russell Coker <russell(a)coker.com.au> wrote: > > On Mon, 7 Jul 2014 21:26:00 Erik Christiansen wrote: > > There was an issue with an adjacent fold opening when inserting text, > > but a couple of lines in .vimrc fixed that. > > > > Enabling spell checking in Vim is pretty easy, and I have Danish and > > English spell checking turning on via ^D and ^E respectively. From Vim > > 7.3 there's a built-in spellchecker, you don't need the plugin anymore. > > The way vi handles lines is good for source code but not good for documents. > The up/down commands should go to the previous/next line of ~80 characters not > the previous/next paragraph. > > http://etbe.coker.com.au/2014/07/06/desktop-publishing-wrong/ > > I wrote the above blog post on this topic. After reading comments it seems > that a fairly ideal option for me would be to have an Android app that allows > offline editing of MediaWiki documents. That would get desktop/phone use as > well as version control. There doesn't seem to be such an app though. > > -- > My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ > My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/ > > _______________________________________________ > luv-main mailing list > luv-main(a)luv.asn.au > http://lists.luv.asn.au/listinfo/luv-main >

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Re: btrfs/ZFS, sans raid and bitrot
by Peter Ross 06 Jul '14

06 Jul '14

From: "Noah O'Donoghue" <noah.odonoghue(a)gmail.com> > On reading more about ZFS, is it true the latest source code isn't > available for ZFS? So Sun is withholding new features, fixes etc from the > codebase? AFAIK, the open source ZFS "lives" on illumos, FreeBSD and zfsonlinux, coordinated via OpenZFS. The development seems to be independent from Sun/Oracle these days. I am not aware of active contributions from Oracle but I am not 100% sure. E.g. newest open source ZFS versions have "feature flags" instead of the version numbers as used by Oracle. For Russell: Have you seen this? https://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFS The first TODO entry is about file(1) and magic. Regards Peter

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Reliable data storage
by zlinw＠mcmedia.com.au 01 Jul '14

01 Jul '14

I have been reading the "btrfs/ZFS, sans raid and bitrot" thread and a number of thoughts and questions spring to mind. I get the impression that some are looking for a single reliable storage solution to avoid having to do backups. Surely this is impossible, I certainly would ______NEVER______ (excuse the shouting) ever trust my life to a single system if at all possible. When one is doing instrument flying training as a pilot you are constantly told never to rely on a single instrument but scan all of them and come up with an overall coherent picture. If one relies in such circumstances on a single point of failure you __will__ kill yourself. One is told raid or any such thing is a reliabilty strategy __not__ a backup strategy. I personally keep all data I consider important on four separate systems/devices one device (which is in fact duplicate items but differing technolgies) being kept off site. Maintaining this is a bit of a pain but there is no other way as far as I can see. The reason for the number of separate backups is we had in one instance in a large commercial situation managed to destroy two backs trying to restore a system. We only succeeded in the end becuase I had independantly duplicated one of the backups on another system. Lindsay

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btrfs/ZFS, sans raid and bitrot
by Noah O'Donoghue 01 Jul '14

01 Jul '14

Hi All, After reading about bitrot and feeling guilty for storing my most valuable data on cheap drives (although with backups!) I've been thinking about moving to something more resilient. My current setup is a Ubuntu laptop, with 2 external drives. 1X 2TB ext4 for data storage 1X 3TB ext4 for backup (using Crashplan commercial backup software). My question, is if I change the first drive to btrfs or ZFS, will I gain resiliency from bitrot? My understanding is I need 2 drives in at least a RAID 1 to get automatic healing from bitrot, but if I at least use a filesystem with check summing support then I will be able to at least restore my affected files from my Crashplan backups (which are compressed then checksummed and regularly checked for errors automatically) and I won't have the risk of my main drive corrupting my backups, because the read will FAIL if it doesn't pass the checksum. Is my understanding correct? Cheers, Noah

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Re: btrfs/ZFS, sans raid and bitrot
by Russell Coker 01 Jul '14

01 Jul '14

On Tue, 1 Jul 2014 10:03:44 Rohan McLeod wrote: > Noah O'Donoghue wrote: > > Hi All, > > > > After reading about bitrot and feeling guilty for storing my most > > valuable data on cheap drives (although with backups!) I've been > > thinking about moving to something more resilient. > > Out of curiosity I googled "bitrot" and whilst there seems to be some > usage of "bitrot" in relation to RAM; > mostly it seems to be in the context of storage media. > As a novice I found: > > http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/bitrot-and-atomic-cows > -inside-next-gen-filesystems/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_Anywhere_File_Layout That article claims that ZFS is the oldest of the "next generation filesystems". WAFL did it first and NetApp (the developer of WAFL) sued Sun alleging patent violation in ZFS. > informative; but apart from a suggestion that it might be related to > 'cosmic rays' and thermal magnetic effects; > couldn't seem to find > (a) a definition which is a measure of bitrot and > (b) actual measures of this phenomenon in various media and differing > conditions. > > Presumably as a probabilistic phenomenon; bitrot might be defined in > terms of the half-life of the data ? http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/corruption-fast08.html The above paper is the best reference I've seen. Half-life isn't a good measure as you can expect to lose ~50 sectors at a time on a TB+ disk. On Tue, 1 Jul 2014 12:29:39 Peter Ross wrote: > For Russell: Have you seen this? > > https://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFS > > The first TODO entry is about file(1) and magic. That is about ZFS dump files (the output of "zfs send") not the block devices. As I have never run zfs send and don't have any immediate plans to do so this hasn't been a concern for me. Thanks for the suggestion though, I've attached it to the Debian bug report. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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