MarkDrago.com

rPath, Foresight, Conary

Mark — Thu, 29 May 2008 12:29:28 +0000

I first started speaking about rPath Linux and their Conary package management tool a little over a year ago. But, I just want to get it down in writing that I think this is the future of linux packaging and indeed distribution management in general. They took traditional package management (think rpm w/ yum or dpkg w/ apt) and made it look antiquated. That’s right, apt-get is not the end of the line for package managers.

Conary really takes the problem of managing the software that is installed on your system and fully maps it out. I feel like they broke the problem down in to small chunks and solved each one of the problems well. rPath’s main goal is to create tools and a distribution that can be customized and modified by down-stream distributors to create software appliances. There are a lot of features designed for this task in Conary, but they can benefit other users who may not feel like they have their own customized distribution. For example, do you have a farm of machines that are running the same software with your own customized configuration files? Why not create a package that shadows the upstream apache package for example, but includes your own configuration files in the apache:conf component?

One of the other wonderful features of Conary is that the repository is kept in version control and branches are supported by all of the supporting tools. Imagine if Debian was using a tool like Conary to track and manage their entire distribution. All of the Debian derivative distributions would be able to have their own branches of the distribution. This would make it a lot easier for derivative distributions to use Debian’s existing packages and for them to make contributions back to Debian.

There is one problem with the Conary story. All of the server-side distribution management tools are closed-source. I do see this as a show-stopper. Well, a lot of things are using rPath and Conary, and rPath as a company seems to be doing alright, so maybe ’show-stopper’ is a bit harsh. But, this will absolutely keep other major distributions and large chunks of the open-source community from getting on the bandwagon. All I can say is that I hope this will eventually be remedied by the open-sourcing of the server-side components. The technology feels like such a good thing for the community and for distributions in general, but it’s the kind of thing that can not be entrusted to one company. Hopefully someday rPath will be willing/able to release the server-side stuff.

Regardless, the feature-set exposed by Conary is, to me, the clear future of package management. Whether it ends up being Conary that makes it big or some other (possibly completly open source) implementation is yet to be seen. But I wanted to get this article out there with a date on it so that when it happens I can say, “I called it!” If you want to play around with Conary on your desktop I would highly recommend Foresight Linux. It’s pretty bad ass.

OpenID Delegate Plugin for Wordpress

Mark — Fri, 23 May 2008 23:23:18 +0000

I just upgraded my wordpress installation to 2.5.1 from 2.3.3 or something like that. 2.5 is very nice. The upgrade was really simple and the new administrative interface is pretty slick. I decided it was time for me to manage my wordpress installation with subversion so that later upgrades are a simple ’svn switch’ away. The process of switching was pretty easy because I had scripts in place for backing up and restoring all of the custom parts of the site.

As part of the upgrade I had to make sure that all of the plugins I was using were moved over properly. The one plugin that I really use is the openid delegation plugin. This plugin lets you use your wordpress URL when logging in to a site using openid. All it does is put extra tags in the of your home page that redirect the open id request to your real open id server. I use claimid.com for this purpose.

I had made a change to the plugin at one point because it would not put the tags on my home page because my home page is a ‘page’ and not a ‘post’ in wordpress terms. When I originally made the change I sent a patch over to the original author hoping that he would incorporate the change and put the improved version on his page. He never did. While moving the plugin today I almost over-wrote my changed file with his original. Now, my changes amount to 6 or 7 lines of code, but I really didn’t want to have to go finding out which wordpress objects and hooks I had to use to recreate my change. To avoid this problem in the future I decided to throw it in to my repository. So, if you use wordpress and you’re looking in to open id, check out the slightly improved openid delegation plugin for wordpress.

Another Upgrade … Another Post

Mark — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 14:49:03 +0000

It was again time for me to upgrade wordpress, so why not write up a post? Besides, Sid has been begging people to join planet.lilug.org. But we’ll get more posts on planet if we add more people and if those of us on planet post more often. So, here it is.

Lilug

John Kuczewski and Quarsaw brought up the idea of having Lilug tee shirts on the mailing list the other day and sufficiently guilted me in to finishing the work I had started on the Lilug cafe press store. $2 from every apparel purchase gets donated to Lilug. So go, shop, be merry. Buy yourself a Lilug tee-shirt with a Lilug button to pin to it. All of the cool kids are doing it. Lilug shirts are really ‘in’ this season.

LugRaffle

I’ve put a bunch of time in to the LugRaffle project that we’re doing at Lilug Dev-Sig. It’s coming along pretty nicely and is really fun to hack on. It’s to the point where it does ‘things’, but it still isn’t useful for holding a raffle. That’ll come soon enough. I welcome everyone to check it out and play around with it. You can browse the code via gitweb here: http://git.markdrago.com/git or clone it from here: http://git.markdrago.com/git/lugraffle .

House

So Jen and I are buying a house. It’s in Lindenhurst, at the end of a dead-end street, and in the Alleghany elementary school zone. It’s got four bedrooms, 1 newly renovated bath, a garage, a basement, and a decent sized yard. We’re pretty excited. We recently went to contract and we plan on closing in July. The current owners don’t want to move until the Summer, because they have kids in school, which is fine with us.

Typically Great Exchange

Mark — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 17:45:15 +0000

Jason and I have interesting exchanges on IRC:

 13:39 < kupo> I just registered URMOMZ.com

 13:40 < markdrago> kupo: nice

 13:40 < kupo> markdrago: I feel like a million bux

 13:40 < markdrago> yeah - hold on to that one forever.

Live Masonry

Mark — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 14:49:33 +0000

We had another live airing of the Free Software Round Table last Saturday night. One of the big news items in the Linux world was that Ubuntu had released the 7.10 version of their distribution, which is code named Gutsy Gibbon. I had been running the previous version of Ubuntu on my laptop and decided that it would be kind of fun to upgrade to the next version while we were on the air. So, the first thing we did at the beginning of the show was talk about Gutsy and then I started upgrading. It had to download 1.1GB of updates (which took about an hour) and then it started installing the updates (which would have taken about 2 hours). However, after 1 hour of upgrading we were about to finish the show and head home. So, I restarted my machine right in the middle of the update. It rebooted, but a slew of things were broken. It’s a little embarrassing to be live on a Linux radio show while you ‘brick‘ your Linux laptop. However, last night I was able to run ‘dpkg –configure -a’ to finish installing the packages that it had half installed, and then run ‘aptitude dist-upgrade’ to finish the rest of the installation. The system is now up and running just fine. Besides the bricking incident the radio show went really well. I don’t think we’ll be doing another 2 hour show anytime soon, but the hour that we actually had content prepared for went really well.

Litany

Mark — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 02:23:51 +0000

I just updated my blog to wordpress 2.3. It seems like I only post to my blog when wordpress has a release. So, instead of complaining that I don’t post to my blog enough, complain that wordpress doesn’t have new releases often enough.

I set up IPv6 connectivity for my home network last week. So, you can now ping6 me here: 2001:470:1f06:33::2 as well as a few other internal IPv6 addresses. This was a wonderfully interesting, albeit mostly pointless, exercise. Well, it’s not fair to call it pointless. I did learn a whole lot about IPv6 and I can now connect directly to machines on my network. But, other than that it really doesn’t do much. Oh, I can now see the swimming turtle over at www.kame.net.

I’ve been working on some new code at work that will really help us put the squash on web based proxy sites. The web based proxies make it way too easy for people to get around a filter. Blocking access to these proxies is a really big problem for the entire industry. They go up and down so fast that the traditional host name evaluation just doesn’t work. So, we’ll throw in a little automated discovery mumbo-jumbo and some distributed data acquisition gobbledy-gook and we’ll be good to go.

I also recently released some code at work that should seriously cut down on the bandwidth that we use when upgrading our categorized list of host names. The way we updated the list in the past always bothered me but I didn’t have the time to devote to fixing it nor a clear picture of how the entire process should work. When a little bit of time cleared up I did some research and came up with a plan. With the new code the download size, on average, will drop from over 100MB a week per customer to under 3MB per customer. Oh, and the whole thing will work better and be more exact as a result. You’ve got to love when there are basically no drawbacks to a change.

My boss recently (like just today) built a new computer for himself and his family. His video card has more memory on it than any of my computers have in system ram. Yeah - it’s that kind of computer and it is awesome. He really decked it out - from the giant copper heatsink to the hard drive with a window, it is bad-ass. Now all he needs is some neon lights … and maybe a set of spinners.

Speaking of spinners, Public Enemy kicks ass and I’ll stand behind it. Oh, Radiohead kicks ass too. They just released an album called In Rainbows that is only available online at www.inrainbows.com where you can name your own price.

Last thing I promise - by the time anyone reads this the 7.10 release of Ubuntu will have been released. I’ve been running the beta for a few weeks and I highly recommend it to … basically everyone. Download Ubuntu, don’t be a sucker.

We’re Getting Hitched!

Mark — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 22:06:46 +0000

It’s official. Jen and I are going to get married. We went to Central Park yesterday. I took her out on one of the row boats that you can rent. I rowed her out to the middle of the lake, managed to get down on one knee in the boat, and proposed. She freaked out but managed to not drop the ring in to the lake. We’re both very excited. We stopped at a Barnes and Noble on the way back to the subway and picked up a book on wedding planning. We then stopped at her mother’s house and my parents’ house. When we finally got home Jen called basically everyone we know. What a wonderful day. What a wonderful girl.

supertom@yahoo.com

Mark — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 21:42:46 +0000

Today is Tom Melendez’s last day at Bascom. I remember the time before he started here pretty well. John Palmieri, who had been working at Bascom for a few years, had just taken a position with Red Hat, so we were looking to hire someone. I already knew Tom as I had been attending LIPHP for a while before this. When I overheard that some guy named ‘Tom’ would be coming in for an interview I immediately began to wonder if it was Tom Melendez or not. I was very psyched when I saw him sitting in the conference room for his interview.

Working with Tom these past few years has been a great experience and I wouldn’t have picked anyone else to work with. I learned a lot by working with Tom. The things that I learned weren’t limited to just technical things. I learned more about real estate, taxes, time management, setting priorities and all kinds of general life management things from Tom. I tried to spend a lot of spare time with him just to pick his brain and absorb as much of this stuff as possible.

It’s going to be weird at work with him not being here. I’m pretty confident that we’re going to continue to do great work, but I’m also pretty sure that it is going to be a little less fun for a while.

I wanted to wish Tom good luck at Yahoo!, and what better place to do that than on my blog. I’m sure he’s going to do great things with Yahoo! News and then go on to great things throughout Yahoo! and whatever company is lucky enough to have him next. Make us proud, Tom!

You Knocked My Tooth Out

Mark — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 02:09:25 +0000

Child Brutality

This past weekend Jen and I went to a party for her sister’s confirmation and her brother’s communion. We got there a little late because we were at Tom’s going away party. We walked in and there were a few kids there that I hadn’t met before. Jen’s sister had a friend there and her brother had a friend there, who in turn had brought his little brother. Of course, all of the corresponding mothers are present as well.

Now, I started playing frisbee with the kids that are there. This was a little complicated because all three of the boys lined up on one side of the yard with just me on the other side. So, it is basically my job to make sure that no one child feels left out. I’m trying to distribute the throws evenly, but the frisbee isn’t exactly a tool of precision. Things are only made worse because the two brothers (~ age 9 and 6) are fighting every time that one of them catches the frisbee. Now I feel like I’m starting a fight between these two kids and that the mother probably hates me for getting them all riled up. Of course, I don’t really know any of these people besides Jen’s family, I’ve only been there for 5 minutes at this point.

It was then that I threw the frisbee to the 9 year-old boy, he bobbled it in front of himself for a little bit, eventually dropped it, looked up at me holding his mouth and said, “You knocked my tooth out.”. He runs past me, holding his bloody tooth, and his mother takes him in to the house to get him cleaned up. When he comes back out I ask him to smile for me and I can see what I believe to be the top half of one of his front teeth still in his mouth. Only later on did I discover that the tooth had been loose for a while and what I thought was a half of a broken tooth was in fact the new adult tooth already showing through his gums.

I was pretty scared there for a minute, but his Mom ended up thanking me for my help extracting the tooth. Apparently it had been holding on for a while.

Puppet / CFengine2 / FAI

At work I have the need to remotely manage a few hundred linux machines. I need to have the ability to pick and choose what packages are installed on those systems and what their configuration files look like. Most of the systems are going to be identical in package selection, and their configuration will be driven from a database. There will be scripts that reside on the machine which can take the settings from the database and produce the configuration files that are needed for each service. I do need the ability to control these things by grouping machines and by singling out individual machines and making changes to their installed packages, etc.

I asked in #debian if anyone knew of any such beast and someone in there recommended using FAI (Fully Automatic Install) for the initial installation of the system, and then using either puppet or cfengine2 for maintenance thereafter.

I haven’t done too much research yet, but puppet seems to be really interesting. I’m not sure that it is going to fit our needs 100%, but it is definitely worth a lot more investigation. It seems like a lot of these tools cater to clusters, which makes sense. But, we have requirements that a cluster doesn’t, just as a cluster has needs that we don’t have.

Hello Planet Lilug

Mark — Mon, 14 May 2007 03:21:14 +0000

John (sid) Teddy and Ilya (dotCOMmie) Sukhanov took the initiative and created planet.lilug.org which my blog is now syndicated on. Seeing as my blog is now syndicated on a Linux related blog site I will likely start writing about more technical and nerdy things than I did before. Seeing as I didn’t write very much before at all I figure this is an improvement. So, here goes.

Here’s a little background. The company at which I work sells software that filters Internet traffic at K-12 schools as well as provides curricular tools for teachers. We sell this software as a software appliance that is a Linux distribution. This makes all kinds of sense since we provide many other services like routing and firewalling. Also, in order to provide a strong filtering solution, being the gateway of a network really helps.

Now, the Linux distribution that we are using is based on SuSE 7.1 with many many updates that we performed ourselves by packaging software as RPMs. This is less than ideal because it means that we have to maintain all of the software on our own, and it makes it difficult for us to benefit from work that is going on in other communities. So, we’re looking for alternatives.

We originally looked in to rPath, but due to several reasons including cost, package selection, proprietary server-side component, dependence on one company, etc. we decided against it. Since then we have been looking in to Debian. At first glance Debian looks like a great fit. It has a very strong updating and packaging system. It has well defined policies and all kinds of documentation. There really is a lot of documentation - I was really surprised. There are a lot of tools that already exist for Debian which we could use like debtakeover and debian-installer. Oh, and there is a tremendous community, which makes it easier to find help and easier to find experienced employees.

But, there are some open questions about Debian that mostly revolve around the release schedule. We have the need to have access to the latest software. So, if I want to use PHP6, SQLite4, or a driver only available in the 2.6.75 kernel, I need to be able to do that. But, I don’t really want to have to constantly perform major upgrades to our systems that may or may not contain features or bug fixes that I care about. It is for these reasons that I am torn between using Debian Stable or Debian Testing. I then toyed with the idea of using Ubuntu Server. This has many of the benefits of using Debian, and a 6 month release cycle. But I’m really concerned about Ubuntu using update-manager rather than apt to perform updates from one release to another. I haven’t found any information about what update-manager is doing exactly.

Right now I’m leaning towards using Debian Testing. It seems to be stable enough. I have it installed on a machine at work with a package selection that is pretty similar to what we would be shipping and there haven’t been any major updates yet, just a few packages every few days. I did look in to what is in the cue and it seems like there might be a libc update which a whole bunch of other updates are waiting on, so we’ll see how that goes. I’m also a little concerned about the speediness of security fixes for testing. I can understand patches going in to stable first, and then unstable, but I don’t want to wait 10 days for them to hit testing. I’m going to have to look more closely in to backports.org. That should make it more comfortable to use stable, but how comfortable is remotely updating hundreds of machines to the next stable going to be?

Anyway, that’s where things stand. If you have any tips, hints, or suggestions please leave them as comments to this post. Suggestions to use Gentoo can be directed to /dev/null. :-)