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Showing articles from http://times.debian.net/?format=rss20.xml External_link

[175 total ]
smartmontools: control the health of your hard disk

Posted 1 day ago

Article submitted by Noel David Torres Taño. Guess what? We still need you to submit good articles about software you like!

One of the packages I manually install in every new installation is smartmontools. I’ve some expertise in ... [More] managing computers and networks, and it is a fact that pirate hackers and software bugs are not the main cause of problems in small and medium installations. Hardware is.

Thus, you have hardware that can fails, and Murphy says that if it can fail, it will. The point is not to avoid hardware failures, which would be impossible, but to detect them early or even prevent them.

Particularly for hard disks, the tool in charge is smartctl from the package smartmontools. IDE disks (if they’re not of the age of dinosaurs) have an integrated self-testing tool called SMART which means “Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology”. Modern SCSI disks have it too if they’re SCSI 3 or newer. It happens that inside the disk chipset there are routines to check parameters of disk health: spin-up time, number of read failures, temperature, life elapsed… And all of those parameters are not only registered by the disk chipset, but they have designated security limits and both parameters and limits can be checked by software who access the disk using the appropriate I/O instructions.

And that software is smartctl, a piece of the smartmontools deb package. Of course, since they access the disk in a raw way, you need to be root to use these commands.

smartctl can ask the disk for its smart identification:

# smartctl -i /dev/sda
smartctl version 5.38 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Fujitsu MHV series
Device Model: FUJITSU MHV2060BH
Serial Number: NW10T652991F
Firmware Version: 00850028
User Capacity: 60,011,642,880 bytes
Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is: 7
ATA Standard is: ATA/ATAPI-7 T13 1532D revision 4a
Local Time is: Mon May 12 02:39:31 2008 CEST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
More interesting, smartctl can ask the disk for its parameter values:

# smartctl -A /dev/sda
smartctl version 5.38 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 100 100 046 Pre-fail Always - 124253
2 Throughput_Performance 0x0004 100 100 000 Old_age Offline - 18284544
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0003 100 100 025 Pre-fail Always - 0
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 1199
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 024 Pre-fail Always - 8589934592000
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000e 100 087 000 Old_age Always - 1761
8 Seek_Time_Performance 0x0004 100 100 000 Old_age Offline - 0
9 Power_On_Seconds 0x0032 079 079 000 Old_age Always - 10866h 57m 47s
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 1199
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 283
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 6953
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 45 (Lifetime Min/Max 14/58)
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x001a 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 62
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 459276288
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0010 100 100 000 Old_age Offline - 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x000e 100 082 000 Old_age Always - 22371
203 Run_Out_Cancel 0x0002 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 1533257648465
240 Head_Flying_Hours 0x003e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
As you can see, there are some attributes marked as “Pre-fail”. If any of these attributes goes beyond its threshold, the disk is about to fail in hours, maybe minutes.

Even if there are more options to smartctl , the last ones I will comment here are -a and -t.

smartctl -t launches a disk test. It needs a parameter indicating the type of the test, and in the longest case it can last for tens of minutes and will check the electrical and mechanical performance as well as the read performance of the disk, going through all its surface. smartctl -a, in its turn, shows all available information about the disk, including self testing results. Since tests will span minutes or tens of minutes, we can not see them happening. All what we will get when launching tests is like:

# smartctl -t long /dev/sda
smartctl version 5.38 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF OFFLINE IMMEDIATE AND SELF-TEST SECTION ===
Sending command: "Execute SMART Extended self-test routine immediately in
off-line mode".
Drive command "Execute SMART Extended self-test routine immediately in
off-line mode" successful.
Testing has begun.
Please wait 41 minutes for test to complete.
Test will complete after Mon May 12 05:44:03 2008

Use smartctl -X to abort test.
Here, we’re being informed that (maybe) we will get a slightly lower performance on the disk for the next 41 minutes, since the test has started. It is completely background, or better ‘underground’, since it does not happen under the kernel control at all: everything is happening internally to the disk, and all what we can get is the result.

smartctl -a, in turn, show a very large amount of SMART information about the disk: almost all stored SMART information parsed for us. It is usually better to use a more specific switch, see the man page for details.

Finally, I want to comment that there is a daemon in the smartmontools package, smartd, who can take care of doing tests for you. It works by running smartctl in a periodic way (typically every 30 minutes) and logging all errors and parameter value changes to the syslog. The default configuration in Debian will also mail root if there’s any problem detected. I will not explain here about it, because I want you to read its (short and easy) documentation, but remember that in order to use it you must enable it in /etc/default/smartmontools.

The smartmontools package has been available both in Debian and Ubuntu since a long time ago. [Less]

Debian Project News 2008/12

Posted 6 days ago

Welcome to this year's 12th issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian
community.
Some of the topics covered in this issue include:

Bits from the DPL

Steve McIntyre sent out another Bits
from the DPL mail. His first ... [More] topic was the recently
finished eighth Debian Conference in Argentina. Even though many developers
and contributors could not travel there he considered it to be a successful
conference. He especially thanked the video team, who did an amazing job this
year making most of the sessions available via stream as well as forwarding
questions via Internet Relay Chat. Steve is already looking forward to
next year's Debian Conference, which will take place in the Junta Extremadura
in Spain.

What you can do for Lenny

Unfortunatly, Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny hasn't been released yet.
Alexander Reichle-Schmehl briefly explained
the problems and listed some open issues which need to resolved
before Lenny can be released. He points out that even a simple user
(meaning everyone) can help.

500,000th bug reported

Christian Perrier
noted
that the 500,000th bug has been
reported to Debian's bug tracking sytem. In it, Nobuhiro Iwamatsu requested a feature
for the common debian build system, a tool used to create Debian packages, and
even provided a patch.

Valid-Until field in Release files

While the current archive structure prevents injection of malicious packages
through a digital trust path (e.g. at a bad mirror), it still has a small
flaw. A potential attacker could use outdated release information to force
people to use an outdated mirror, leaving out the latest security updates. To
address this problem, Jörg Jaspert has added
a valid until field to the release information. APT (or another
package manager) can then check if the data available on the mirror is up to
date. Work has already begun to integrate this feature into the apt package
manager and tools based upon it; however,
some questions remain unresolved.

Choosing a language during NAS installations

Martin Michlmayr reported that
due to changes of the internal structure of the debian-installer, it is now
it is now possible to choose the language (and the resulting
system) for installations on NAS machines. Installations on headless NAS devices
are typically done remotely via SSH and up until now, the network had been started
after the language had already been chosen, thus the ability to choose a language
interactively was completely disabled for such devices. Due to changes in the
component responsible for choosing the locale, this feature can now be enabled
for these kinds of devices.

m68k moved to debian-ports

After missing release criteria for both Etch and Lenny, the m68k port made the
switch from using the wanna-build instance on Debian infrastructure to the one
on Debian-Ports. This is a necessary
step before m68k can be removed from the Debian archive. Buildd.Net still supports
the m68k architecture and has already adopted the change. The m68k port was
one of two official ports in the first Debian release, Debian 2.0 (the other
being i386).

Other news

Christian Perrier released
the final number of languages which will be supported in the debian-installer
of the upcoming release. All-in-all 63 languages will be supported, which is 5
more than in the current release.

Linux Kongress 2008

From Thursday the 9th of October to Friday the 10th of October, the Debian
Project will participate with a booth at the Linux-Kongress 2008 in Hamburg,
Germany. Please see the respective
events page for
further details.

Technical Dutch Open Source Event 2008

From Saturday the 25th of October to Sunday the 26th of October, the Debian
Project will participate with a booth at the Technical Dutch Open Source Event
(T-DOSE) in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Please see the respective
events page for
further details.

New Developers

6 applicants have
been accepted
as Debian Developers since the prior issue of the Debian Project News. Please
welcome Tobias Grimm, Chris Lamb, Manuel Prinz, Patrick Schoenfeld, Sandro
Tosi, Jan Wagner and Barry deFreese in our project!

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others):
openssh,
twiki,
phpmyadmin,
horde3,
mplayer,
lighttpd,
squid and
php5.
Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

New and noteworthy packages

ddclient
(an utility to get access to home servers despite having a dynamic IP),
FlameRobin
(a GUI to Administer Firebird/Interbase SQL servers) and
logstalgia
(a pong-like apache log viewer) where presented by Debian Package of the Day.

Work-needing packages

Currently 444 packages are orphaned and 125 packages are up for adoption.
Please take a look at
the
recent
reports
to see if there are packages you are interested in or view the complete list of
packages which need
your help.

Want to continue reading DPN?

Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers
to watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the
contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail
at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org. [Less]

logstalgia: pong-like apache log viewer

Posted 9 days ago

Article submitted by Andrew Caudwell

Logstalgia (inspired by glTail) is a website traffic visualization tool that replays or streams Apache access logs as a pong-like battle between the web server and an unrelenting army of requesting hosts. ... [More] It is rendered using OpenGL, so you’ll need a 3D accelerated video card to run logstalgia.

Requests appear as colored balls (the same color as the host) which travel across the screen to arrive at the requested location. Successful requests are hit by the pong paddle while unsuccessful ones (such as 404s) are missed and pass through.

The paths of requests are summarized within the available space by identifying common path prefixes.

Related paths are grouped together under headings. For instance, by default paths ending in png, gif or jpg are grouped under the heading Images. Paths that don’t match any of the specified groups are lumped together under a Miscellaneous section. Groups can be customized to the page layout of your website fom the command line by specifying a heading, an associated regular expression and a screen percentage.

The simulation can be paused at any time by pressing space. While paused, individual requests can be inspected by passing over them with the mouse.

Logstalgia can read from either a file or standard input. To replay an apache log just run:

logstalgia /var/log/apache/access.log

You can combine Logstalgia with other tools like tail and ssh to watch the access.log of your web server in real time. eg:

ssh user@yourserver.com tail -f /var/log/apache/access.log | logstalgia -

Check out a video of Logstalgia in action:

Logstalgia is available in Debian since Lenny and in Ubuntu intrepid. A version of the package for Debian Etch is available on the homepage. [Less]

ddclient: getting access to home servers despite having a dynamic IP

Posted 16 days ago

Article submitted by Toni Zimmer.

There will be a day when you need access to your Debian box from another place than home, for example to get files from your home server with scp or if you’re running a webserver, an irc proxy, a ftp ... [More] server, a mail server…

Most likely your ISP gives you a dynamic IP address. This problem can be solved by getting a static DNS name, so you can connect to your home even if your IP keeps changing. First of all you have to create an account with your favourite dyndns provider. I use dyndns.org but there are others, such as easydns.com, dslreports.com or zoneedit.com. You can use others if you know ddclient supports its protocol.

There you can specify the hostname (combined with a domain name) for your computer. You can enable mail routing if you want to setup a home mail server.

When you install ddclient you will be asked for the dyndns service provider where you created your account. After that you must enter the complete (or fully qualified) domain name of your computer (something like dpotd.gotdns.org) and your account name (including the password, which will be stored in plaintext in /etc/ddclient.conf!). Now you have to chose the interface that connects you to internet. ddclient will get your IP address from there, so you shouldn’t be behind a NAT. Afterwards you will be asked if you want to start ddclient when connecting with PPP and if you want ddclient to run on system startup or not (probably you will use the first or the second choice). If you choose to run ddclient on startup, you can enter a delay between address checks (default are five minutes, so every five minutes your system will tell your current IP address to your dyndns service provider).

Your settings are stored in /etc/ddclient.conf and look like this:

# Configuration file for ddclient generated by debconf
#
# /etc/ddclient.conf

pid=/var/run/ddclient.pid
protocol=dyndns2
use=if, if=eth0
server=members.dyndns.org
login=dyndnsloginname
password='dyndnsloginpassword'
dpotd.gotdns.org
If everything is okay, wait a couple of minutes for the DNS information to populate and then you will be able to do something like ssh dpotd.gotdns.org or w3m dpotd.gotdns.org

ddlient is available in Debian since Sarge and in Ubuntu (universe) since Dapper. [Less]

FlameRobin: A GUI to Administer Firebird/Interbase SQL servers

Posted 23 days ago

Article submitted by Anton Kavalenka.

Firebird SQL server is popular because it is free, open, lightweight and secure. Firebird is based on the Interbase SQL server, and can be accessed by the same client libraries.

FlameRobin is ... [More] a X-platform GUI application that makes the life of Firebird/Interbase admins easier. It’s a very light-weight solution (implemented with wxWidgets) as opposed to Tora, which tries to be universal, but is very huge and takes a while to load. FlameRobin starts almost instantly, but being lightweight doesn’t mean to be poor in features. Some of them are:

Create and drop database entities like tables, views, procedures, indices, domains, constraints, triggers, generators, etc.
Powerful SQL Editor
Perform SQL queries and view results in Unicode-aware GUI. Queries can be built by drag-and-dropping table columns in the SQL editor.
Manage several server connections
Perform queries on system tables RDB$xxxx (system tables)
Manage database rights
Get the DDL as text for automated table creation.
Event monitoring. You can subscribe to one or multiple events and control when and how many of each event happened in the database.
Create all the TABLES, DOMAINS, CONSTRAINTS, USERS, TRIGGERS, PROCEDURES etc, needed for database functionality.
FlameRobin always displays the SQL statement it’s going to run, so you always know what is happening in your database and no under-the-hood mechanism obscures your actions.
Editable data grid, you can modify existing data inside the grid and also add and remove rows. Blob values can be updated from files.
FlameRobin can have multiple log files for a given database, one for each statement, making it easy to build update scripts for production databases.

Using Firebird and FlameRobin included in Debian it is possible to backup a database from Windows, restore it on Linux and take off SQL server load from workstation. This is the only way to move database between 32-bit and 64-bit architecture. It is a feature of Firebird (or maybe bug). On the same architectures database files can be simply copied.

The SQL Editor has syntax highlighting and auto-completion. SQL statements can be entered, load, saved and executed. You can prepare a query and view the execution plan without executing it.

Availability
FlameRobin is available in Debian since Etch and in Ubuntu since feisty. [Less]

Debian Project News 2008/11

Posted 29 days ago

Welcome to this year's 11th issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian
community.
Some of the topics covered in this issue include:

Release update
Luk Claes reported
on the progress regarding the release of the new stable ... [More] release
Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny. While there are still a lot of release critical
bugs to be fixed, Lenny is in good enough shape to call for upgrade tests and
work on the release notes. Regarding the upgrade tests, he especially asks to
test the Linux 2.6.26 kernel. Regarding the release notes, he asks that any
issues that should be documented should be reported as bug against the release-notes pseudo package.
Further discussion will happen on the
debian-doc mailing list.

Should Security Enhanced Linux be standard?
Martin Michlmayr
wondered
if the packages needed for security enhanced Linux should still be priority
standard or if they should be lowered to optional. Martin noticed, that
the installation of these packages takes at least half an hour on popular
devices like the Linksys NSLU2. Frans Pop
noted that
the packages where far from being usable without major tweaks, but were made
standard to gain more testing by being installed but not activated by
default. Russell Coker
reported
on the improvements during the last month. Several people
argued,
that SELinux should either not be installed by default or activated, maybe by
offering an option or task during the installation.

Lenny Upgrade advisor
Franklin Piat
started to
write a script that warns users of potential problems when upgrading their
system from Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 Etch to the upcoming version 5.0 Lenny.
The intention of his script is to notice potential problems (for instance
obsoleted or discontinued package) and point out relevant documentation and
solutions. He asked for further ideas, comments and patches. Christian Perrier
asked
if the messages could be internationalized allowing them to be translated.

Status of translations in the debian-installer
When the development of the current Debian installation system
reached a
state where changing output strings was discouraged (string freeze), Christian
Perrier started coordinated translation efforts and reported daily about the
progress. In the two weeks between his
first and
his
latest report,
the number of translations ready for inclusion with the next
Debian release has been trippeled.

Bits from the Debian GNU/Hurd porters
Michael Banck
sent
bits from the Debian GNU/Hurd porters. Since the last bits had been posted, a
lot of development took place, including the release of several snapshot
releases. Michael also reports, that the base packages and the basic toolchain
are in pretty good shape and most toolchain packages from Debian's repository
can be used without any changes. He also refers to the possibility of testing
Debian GNU/Hurd using XEN and ongoing work to make a Debian GNU/Hurd box
available to all Debian Developers. He closes with a call for help, since
Debian GNU/Hurd still misses an installer.

FAI / Emdebian work session in Extremadura
Holger Levsen
wrote
a report on the recent work session in Extremadura, Spain. 18 Debian
contributors met and worked to get the fully automated install (FAI) in shape
for the upcoming release of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny and to work on the
infrastructure for using Debian on embeded architectures. Beside that Holger
reports, that 30GB of DebConf7 videos (as ntsc and pal mpeg1 file formats)
where uploaded, so that DVDs can be created soon. He closed with thanks to
Junta de Extremadura for sponsoring yet another successful work session.

Brazilian government-owned IT enterprise SERPRO selects Debian GNU/Linux for its servers and wishes to collaborate
The Servico Federal de Processamento de Dados (SERPRO), a US$ 1 billion
annual revenue Brazilian government-owned IT enterprise, announced during the
Debian Day Brasil 2008 in Porto Alegre that it
has selected
Debian GNU/Linux as the preferred distribution for its hundreds of
GNU/Linux development and production servers.

Other news
The 10th issue of the

miscellaneous news for developers has been released and covers the
following topics:

New Developers
5 applicants have been
accepted
as Debian Developers since the prior issue of the Debian Project News. Please
welcome Laurent Bigonville, Gregory Colpart, Timo Jyrinki, Adriaan Peeters and
Soeren Sonnenburg in our project!

Important Debian Security Advisories
Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others):
freetype and
linux-2.6.24.
Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

New and noteworthy packages
mythtv and
mrxvt where presented by Debian Package of the Day.

Work-needing packages
Currently 452 packages are orphaned and 125 packages are up for adoption. Please take a look
at the recent
reports to see if there are packages
you are interested in or view the complete list of
packages which need your help.

Want to continue reading DPN?
Please help us create this newsletter.
We still need more volunteer writers to watch the Debian community
and report about what is going on. Please see the
contributing page to find out how to
help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at
debian-publicity@lists.debian.org. [Less]

mythtv: A personal TV recorder

Posted 30 days ago

Article submitted by Karl Erlandson. Do you think there are better alternatives to the packages posted here? Help us! Submit good articles about software you like!

No one likes to sit at home and wait for their favorite show to come on ... [More] anymore and many have turned to buying hardware to record them for later viewing. Popular solutions to this problem include the expensive and proprietary TiVo and cable/satellite boxes with built-in TV recorders.

MythTV aims to solve these problems without the need to rent a cable box ($15/month) or buy a TiVo (~$200). An older computer can be used and all that needs to be purchased is a simple TV card, which can be found for under $30 on eBay. An HDTV card will cost you more, and will also require a more recent computer. If your TV card doesn’t come with a remote control, a controller will have to be purchased separately.

As of last year, the TV guide info used for MythTV in North America is no longer free. Unfortunately, if you live in the USA or Canada, you now have to pay a subscription fee if you want to access the TV guide info, but the cost is negligible at $20/year and going down with every new subscriber. There is a free trial period available. If you live in another country, you may find TV listings for your country in XMLTV.

Features
What MythTV gives you that those other boxes don’t is freedom, it’s open source so you can do whatever you want with your machine. For example, you can set it to automatically skip commercials (a feature that surprisingly works!).

MythTV can be divided into two main programs, the Backend and the Frontend. The Backend refers to the program that actually records programs and must be installed on a computer that has a TV tuner. The Frontend program allows you to view content from the Backend. Importantly, the Frontend program can be installed on the Backend or as a stand-alone program on any computer. With a Frontend only install, you can watch what you’ve recorded in any room of your house. They will also have the ability to watch live TV (with options to pause, rewind, fast forward).

MythTV also offers many recording options with the ability to record a show daily, weekly, once, only in a certain timeslot, etc. Since it is open source, various improvements have been added. An interesting plugin was developed that overcomes the problem of recording sports when games go on longer than scheduled. This program actually checks the web to see if the game it is recording has gone into extra time and adjusts the recording time to end later.

MythTV will organize your music and video libraries and allow all that downloaded content to be played on your home entertainment system. Album and DVD art can be automatically downloaded from IMDB. I have to say that the music system could use a lot of work.

Other options include the ability to schedule your recordings over the internet, watch your shows over the internet, display weather alerts, and notify you of new emails on screen.

Availability
MythTV is not available as a Debian package due to licensing/legal issues, but it is on debian-multimedia. To enable this repository, add this to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ stable main
(instead of stable, put “testing” or “unstable” if you use that flavors of Debian). Now run apt-get update. The MythTV wiki provides instructions to install it in Debian stable (Etch), Debian unstable (Sid) and Ubuntu. The Ubuntu community has its own set of installation instructions. I found the KnoppMythWiki very useful in setting up my machine. They also offer a MythTV distribution. [Less]

Brazilian government owned IT enterprise SERPRO selects Debian GNU/Linux for its servers and wishes to collaborate

Posted about 1 month ago

Brazilian government owned IT enterprise SERPRO selects Debian GNU/Linux for its servers and wishes to collaborate

The Servico Federal de Processamento de Dados (SERPRO), (a US$ 1 billion annual revenue Brazilian government owned IT ... [More] enterprise), announced during the Debian Day Brasil 2008 Porto Alegre that it has selected Debian GNU/Linux as the preferred distribution for its hundreds of GNU/Linux development and production servers.
Future SERPRO tenders and public hearings will include clauses requiring Debian GNU/Linux compatibility. Recent SERPRO tenders have already encouraged participation by small FLOSS regional companies, as well as Debian support services.

The SERPRO board decided that Debian GNU/Linux is more suitable for its new corporate goals. SERPRO has decided to increase supplier independence, flexibility, agility, and participation in technical solutions by direct interaction with the Debian Project community.
This is the first time that a federal government institution of this size has reached out to the Debian Project community for a closer relationship.
The Debian Project will keep its institutional partners collaboration channel available for other government agencies who want to consider a similar relationship.

During a discussion panel with the LUG Debian RS (mediated by the Associacao Software Livre
at Debian Day Porto Alegre) SERPRO heard suggestions on how to encourage the participation of key employees, avoid internal forks of FLOSS projects, and modify its internal culture to relax tight project controls. These will increase collaboration with, and gain the respect of, the community for mutual benefit, improving communications, and so lead to better operational performance.

SERPRO has created a FLOSS Strategic Coordinator (CESOL), in part to assist co-operation between FLOSS communities and other federal government agencies, using the federal government committee for FLOSS implantation (CISL) website and meetings. SERPRO and other Brazilian government agencies
have already started to release some code as free software.

SERPRO is evolving its internal culture to the values of FLOSS through the creation of a corporate internal Wiki, Gforge, introducing regional FLOSS committees, increasing management awareness at all levels, opening code, and supporting FLOSS events.
Debian Day Brasil 2008 was supported by SERPRO and a number of other companies.

About SERPRO

The Servico Federal de Processamento de Dados (SERPRO) is a US$ 1 billion annual revenue Brazilian government owned IT enterprise for other government agencies.

It has 43 years experience of development and production, 10,000 employees, and manages a nationwide network infrastructure of tens of thousands machines, from handhelds to mainframes, clusters and grids, at or for many Brazilian government agencies.

About the Debian Project

Debian GNU/Linux is one of the free libre operating systems, with a broad
list of officially maintained packages on 15 hardware platforms, from cell phones
to mainframes, developed by more than two thousand volunteers from all over the world who collaborate on the Debian Project.

The Debian Project's key strengths are its volunteer base, its dedication to
Free Libre Open Source Software,
to the Debian Social Contract and the non-profit nature Debian Constitution,
its open and meritocratic development model, its organization and social governance
and its commitment to provide the best operating systems attainable, following a strict quality policy,
working with an established QA Team and helpful users reporting bugs, suggestions, exchanging ideas, solutions, and registering experiences
during its history.

One can help Debian Project joining it or even not being a programmer, or being a development and or service partner company or institution at the Debian Partner Program, or simply making various donations to the Debian Project.

Debian Project news, press releases and press coverage can be found from the official Debian wiki page. PR contact at debian-publicity list. [Less]

mrxvt: Fast, light multitabbed terminal emulator

Posted about 1 month ago

Article submitted by Hugo Carrer.

As any other Debian user I love writing obscure commands on my terminal. I love too having so many open terminals that I have to come up with a special system to find the one where my favorite obscure ... [More] command is running on.

To be able to enjoy this I need a very fast multitabbed terminal emulator: mrxvt.

Some of the things I like the most about mrxvt are for example,

It is very fast and light.
Fast pseudo-transparency.
Background with your favorite images.
Highly configurable keyboard shortcuts.
You can have the same command typed on every tab at the same time. This feature is disabled by default. you can enable it by editing /etc/mrxvt/mrxvtrc and uncommenting the ToggleBroadcast macro (around line 171). After that, Ctrl Shift d toggles input broadcasting to all tabs.
Automatic or “by-hand” tab labeling.
It is independent of your desktop (no KDE or GNOME needed).
Did I mention that is very fast and light?

After installing it would look something like this:

You can change this rather old fashioned look by copying the example config file from
/usr/share/doc/mrxvt-common/examples/mrxvtrc.sample.gz
And placing it in ~/.mrxvtrc

The file is full of comments helping you with the meaning of each option. Of course you can find all available options in the man page. Some useful shortcuts are Ctrl-shift-t to open a new tab and Ctrl-shift-m to show the menu.

So, after playing, trying and tweaking for a little while you can get a futuristic look for your terminals. Like this one of me sketching this article on an emacs session inside mrxvt (Note all those beautiful tabs up there)

Downsides? Well it depends on the kind of user,

No UTF-8 support.
It has no config menu.
You have to remember the shortcuts or read the config file every now and then.
And as with anything worth doing, to get things working the way you want to you’ll have to read through the man page and maybe scratch your head once or twice but it’ll work.

To sum up, it’s the perfect application to config during those boring rainy weekends and then show off to your friends at work.

mrxvt is available in Debian stable and in Ubuntu too. [Less]

Debian Project News 2008/10

Posted about 1 month ago

Welcome to this year's 10th issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian
community.
Some of the topics covered in this issue include:

Debian Live Lenny Beta1
The Debian Live team announced the first beta of
Debian Lenny's Live ... [More] images. This is the first official release of Debian
Live CDs. The main features are, that these Live images are build 100%
with packages in Debians main section and different flavours (GNOME, KDE
and Xfce as well as a small image without graphical environment.

Debian Translations for French and German Reach 100%
Christian
Perrier announced On August 22nd, both German and French languages
reached 100% completeness for po-debconf translations in unstable. For German,
this is the very first time this has happened and the German l10n
(localization) team deserves congratulations for that achievement.
Po-debconf translations enables native speakers use Debian in their own
language and is an important aspect in working toward Debian's goal of being a
universal operating system.

Policy for web apps session storage?
After several bugs regarding possible
symlink attacks were reported, Olivier Berger wonders
about a policy how web applications (or their framework) should handle
storage of their session files. He noted that PHP already tries to prevent
possible symlink attacks, by using /var/lib/php5 which is only readable
by the root-user and automatically cleaned with a cronjob to prevent
attacks by opening a lot of sessions. He especially wonders, if whether
there's a similar approach for applications using perl and
CGI::Session.

Usage of Package diffs?
Joerg Jasper asked, if
the package diffs, a system to update the package list by downloading the
differences between versions of that file, is used at all. Since he
usually turns that feature of, which seems to him only slow apt down and
wastes a lot of bandwidth of our mirror network.

people.debian.org to move to a new host and file transfer between Debian hosts
Peter Palfrader reported
that people.debian.org, a service offering web space for Debian
Developers, will be moved to new host in late September ans asks all
Developers using that service to check if all needed packages are
available on the new host.

Other news
Joerg Jaspert announced,
that James Troup stepped down from his post as Debian Account Manager.
We would like to thanks James for the hard work and dedication over many
years.

Important Debian Security Advisories
Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others):
postfix,
linux-2.6,
libxml2 and
tiff.
Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Work-needing packages
Currently 453 packages are orphaned and 110 packages are up for adoption. Please take a look
at the recent
reports to see if there are packages
you are interested in or view the complete list of
packages which need your help.

Want to continue reading DPN?
Please help us create this newsletter.
We still need more volunteer writers to watch the Debian community
and report about what is going on. Please see the
contributing page to find out how to
help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at
debian-publicity@lists.debian.org. [Less]