Repository key expired V

The repository-key has expired at October 16th 2009. The expiration date of the renewed key has been set to be October 17th 2010. You will have to update the key in your apt keyring by either using the pgp.mit.edu keyserver or a local keyfile in ASCII format at wgdd_archive_key.asc or by updating the wgdd-archive-keyring Debian package. Detailed information can also be found here.

Green IT - a GSoC topic?

I'm back from the conference at Berlin "Faktor X - Tag der natürlichen Ressourcen", a side-conference of the World Resources Forum 2009 in Davos.

It was pretty interesting, although the topic is not new. If you don't know it: We are running out of (several) resources. The main topics going through the media are often energy and oil. Well, several metals will become much more problematic much more earlier! So, what is the aim: material-, product- and production-efficiency and recycling/upcycling(/downcycling).

One of the topics mentioned at the conference was the IT industry. One of the keywords is green IT - more efficiency through IT, more efficiency by more efficient hardware, better recycling of hardware, .... Another point was more efficiency by more efficient software. One of the questions mentioned was “how much resources costs a click at google?”. I think, one can adapt this question to almost every software. We have several software, which is widely used. I'll just mention the apache web-server. Would't it be good to know, that this widely used software won't waste CPU cycles for nothing?

So what about a GSoC project checking such often/widely used software for efficiency (besides checking for buffer or heap overflows or NULL pointer dereferences)? Can anybody imagine such a project? What is your opinion?

Writing manual pages in GROFF (1)

I always wanted to write a short howto for Debian package maintainers, how to write a manual page in GROFF. This is useful for short documents (for longer documents, docbook/docbook-xsl can be a good choice). I already have written some parts. However, here is the first part of hints. More might follow later.

The delimiter in the NAME section

The name section is (probably) the only place, where exactly one hypen-minus \- must appear. The hyphen-minus is the delimiter between the command name and one-line description.

.SH NAME
foo-bar \- foos the template foo-what-bar

Typical mistakes regarding paragraphs

Using a .PP macro directly following a .SH or .SS macro is useless. This macro should be used between paragraphs:

.SH OPTIONS
The program follows the usual GNU command line syntax, with long options starting with
two dashes (`\-').
.PP
A summary of options is included below.

Options/File descriptions

To describe options or files it's usually useful to make use of the .TP macro.

.SH OPTIONS
.TP
.B \-f, \-\-force
Force the execution of the specified command.

.SH FILES
.TP
.I ~/.foobar
Per user configuration file.

To create more than one intended paragraph the .IP macro can be used.

.TP
.B \-f, \-\-force
Force the execution of the specified command.
.IP
This option has no effect in conjunction with \fB\-\-foo\fP.

Avoid hyphenation in URLs/URIs/paths

Usually we don't want URLs or URIs to be hyphenated. This can be done using the \% sequence. Typical examples:

A short tutorial is available online at \fI\%http://foo.tld/some/path/here/manual.html\fP.

On a Debian system the complete text of the GNU General Public License
version 2 can be found in the file \fI\%/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL\-2\fP.

Referencing persons and their mail address

The common markup is to write the person name in bold letters and the mail address in roman letters is put into angle brackets. It's usually a good idea to mark where the mail address starts and ends. We can use the \& sequence as shown in the following example:

\fBDaniel Leidert\fP <\&daniel.leidert@wgdd.de\&>

Ubuntu Jaunty repository replaced by Ubuntu Intrepid repository

Packages of bluefish-unstable are now built for Ubuntu Jaunty instead of Intrepid. You must adjust the entries in /etc/apt/sources.list or update /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.wgdd.de_ubuntu.list. You'll receive HTML error code 410 ("resource gone") using the old entries.

Abit AirPace, ath5k and eduroam

I tried to connect my university workstation to the wireless eduroam network on the campus. The workstation was delivered with an Abit AirPace wlan card (probably an Atheros 5006 chipset). The first thing necessary was the ath5k kernel module (my first shot using ndiswrapper didn't work). Both Debian lenny and Ubuntu intrepid-updates provide it.

Now there are generally 3 ways to connect to the AP. All making use of wpasupplicant. Further the certificate (may differ for the universities) is necessary.

/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

This is described at the sites of my university. It's written in German, but it should still be easy to understand. Let's just mention the snippet for /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf:

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=0
eapol_version=2
ap_scan=1
fast_reauth=1

network={
        ssid="eduroam"
        key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
        proto=RSN
        pairwise=CCMP
        group=TKIP
        eap=TTLS
        anonymous_identity="anonymous@tu-dresden.de"
        identity="****@tu-dresden.de"
        password="****"
        ca_cert="/etc/wpa_supplicant/TUD-CACert.pem"
        phase2="auth=PAP"

}

Instead of the script suggested at the site above, you can also use this snippet in /etc/network/interfaces:

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
        wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

/etc/network/interfaces

It is also possible to put the values directly into /etc/network/interfaces:

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
        wpa-ssid eduroam
        wpa-proto RSN
        wpa-group CCMP TKIP
        wpa-pairwise CCMP TKIP
        wpa-key-mgmt WPA-EAP
        wpa-eap TTLS
        wpa-ca-cert /etc/wpa_supplicant/TUD-CACert.pem
        wpa-phase2 "auth=PAP"
        wpa-anonymous-identity anonymous@tu-dresden.de
        wpa-identity ****@tu-dresden.de
        wpa-password ****

network-manager

Here is a screenshot of the authentication dialog:

So now everybody at the University of Dresden wanting to use eduroam should hopefully be able to configure this connection on his Debian or Ubuntu system.

(WW) AllowEmtpyInput is on, devices using drivers <kbd> or <mouse> will be disabled

Maybe you will observe a changed mouse and keyboard behaviour after updating X.org recently in Debian Sid. Then you will probably discover the warning mentioned in the title in your X.org server log /var/log/Xorg.0.log. The very short and dirty solution to get things working for the moment is to put this into your /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "ServerLayout"
    Option "AutoAddDevices" "off"
EndSection

See the first entry in /usr/share/doc/xserver-xorg/NEWS.Debian.gz and follow the mentioned links for more information. However, the above solution should only be a temporary workaround: Try to migrate things (I will post changes for my system asap).

Network doesn't come up after update to udev 0.140

The recent update to udev 0.140-1 lead to a system without network access to me. The error messages were:

Running 0dns-down to make sure resolv.conf is ok...done.
Setting up networking....
Configuring network interfaces...
ioctl[SIOCGIFFLAGS]: No such device
Could not get interface ‘ath0′ flags
ioctl[SIOCSIWPMKSA]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWMODE]: No such device
Could not configure driver to use managed mode
ioctl[SIOCGIWRANGE]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCGIFINDEX]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODEEXT]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODE]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODEEXT]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODE]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODEEXT]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODE]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODEEXT]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODE]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWAP]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCGIFFLAGS]: No such device
wpa_supplicant: /sbin/wpa_supplicant daemon failed to start
/etc/network/if-pre-up.d/wpasupplicant exited with return code 1
SIOCSIFADDR: No such device
ath0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device
SIOCSIFNETMASK: No such device
SIOCSIFBRDADDR: No such device
ath0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device
ath0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device
Failed to bring up ath0.
done.

It seems, the update added rules to /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules by increasing the device number and applying the last applicable NAME directive instead of the first one. This lead to the following file here:

SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:a7", ATTRS{type}=="1", NAME="ath0"

SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:18", NAME="eth0"

SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX", NAME="eth1"

# PCI device 0x10ec:0x8139 (8139too)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:18", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth2"

# PCI device 0x168c:0x0013 (ath_pci)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:a7", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="ath*", NAME="ath1"

So the devices created were eth2 and ath1 but /etc/network/interfaces contained entries for eth0 and ath0. So fixed /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and rebooted.

<rant>Is it really necessary to break network access with an update???</rant>

Update

I forgot this one: #521521.