Andrew's blog

Susanne and I finally made it into Sydney!

It turns out that our flight was via Auckland. And our flight to Auckland was about 10 minutes late arriving. When we finally made it to the International terminal the departure board was saying "Final Call". We had 20 minutes to make it through customs (the queue was long, very long), then a long walk to the gate. Fun. However lots of people boarded after us anyhow... I'm now convinced they always say that.

While the plane was 30 minutes late leaving the airport, due to good winds we arrived in Sydney on time. Awesome!

Unfortunately our arrival in Sydney is going to be delayed by 1 day.

Due to the fog at Wellington airport our flight has been cancelled (after waiting for the fog to clear for 3 hours).
We have been bumped to the same flight tomorrow morning. So we'll be getting up at an insane time tomorrow morning as well. Oh joy.

The only good news is that the flight we're on already had most of the rest of the Catalyst delegation already book on it. Looks like it'll be a - rather subdued - party flight. Oh, actually no, just been told we're on the 0700 flight, the others are on the 0640 flight.

karora and family who are booked with the competition might still be able to fly out today. If only we could switch airlines...

See you in Sydney!

Only 1 sleep to go before Susanne and I leave for linux.conf.au in Sydney. This year they've decided to have the annual Australian Linux conference actually in Australia.

It was held in Dunedin last year, which was very convenient for us, but Susanne was a bit disappointed when I asked her to come to an Australian conference, then told her it was being held in New Zealand. This year however, she is very happy! And looking forward to the Partners Programme which looks pretty good.

I've got a fairly good idea of what talks I'll attend, and will be at the GPG KeySigning (as will Susanne) and will also do a bit of CAcert assuring as well.

Anyhow, back to the preparations.

After almost 3 years we (along with NZRS) have made another open source release of the software which runs the .nz domain name system. Head over to DNRS on SourceForge to check it out.

There is a slew of improvements from the previous release (as to be expected), so we hope that people will pick it up and get involved with it. Interestingly enough there were 800 downloads of the previous version (only 500 odd downloads of all the required components though).

Lenovo seem to be just another company that is completely USA centric.

I wanted to price out a Lenovo notebook, as I've used a number of IBM ThinkPads over the years and always found them to be very good notebooks. I had a look at their website and found the Z61t that seems pretty nifty. I did a few web searches using Google and found people talking about customising it, by adding a higher resolution screen, the 7 cell battery and things like that.

So I try cusomising the notebook on the Lenovo website (after telling it I'm in NZ). You can't. No customisation possible. You can order an additional battery (which is 7 cells) but you still get (and pay for) the 4 cell battery. So I call the 0800 number and talk to a woman at their call centre. She informs me that the package is the package, no customisation, no upgrades for batteries, nothing. I thank her and hang up somewhat disappointed.

Out of curiosity I tell the Lenovo website I'm in the USA. Wow. You can totally customise the notebook. Specify the CPU, RAM, batteries whatever. Although there is no option for a higher resolution screen.

Sigh...

So, the late breaking news of the day is that Susanne is pregnant. Woohoo!

In UPS Proven Useful I gave a score card which showed that the UPS was a good thing. The situation now is:

Circuit Breaker: 2
UPS: 3
Sparky: infinity

A sparky mate came round this morning and installed an additional two circuit breakers.

It turns out there are actually 5 different circuits in the house, but they are shared over 2 circuit breakers. And one circuit breaker has all the power outlets we put high loads onto (heaters, dryer, computers, microwave, A/V gear). One of those circuits is only an external RCD protected power socket.

Now we have 5 circuits on 4 breakers (the outside power socket shares a breaker with an internal, low use, circuit).

Hopefully we won't have any further issues with breakers blowing!

Well, a bunch of people were quite interested in the news that Apple have released a CalDAV server under an open source license, myself included. It is available from the CalendarServer project webpage.

They state that they've only tested it under MacOS X. Which as I 've tried to compile it under Linux certainly shows!

I've managed to fight through the various bits and pieces and managed to get it to run! <phew>

Here are a few notes regarding my experience, some steps and packages might be missing. These are directly related to Debian Unstable.

Required Debian packages:

• python2.4-dev
  
• libkrb5-dev
  
• attr (and make sure that partition is mounted with the option user_xattr, as mentioned in to the comments you can also run `mount -oremount,user_xattr <mount point>`)
  

You need to build the Python xattr package, by running (somewhere handy) the following. You may not need to actually checkout the code first. I had to do this as it wasn't automatically checked out for me. Of course, YMMV.


svn checkout http://svn.red-bean.com/bob/xattr/trunk/ xattr
<become root>
cd xattr
export C_INCLUDE_PATH=/usr/include/python2.4
python setup.py install


The Python module plistlib.py to read MacOS X PList files is required, it is available from SVN. I copied it into /usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages on my machine and it was picked up.

Some of the packages which are checked out from SVN require some patches applied to them. The patches are:

• Twisted
  
• PyKerberos - Also the patches from trac might be useful. Don't worry about the includes one that is on trac, my supplied patch over rides that.
  

PyKerberos will need to be patched before it will compile, Twisted will compile but will do the wrong things with the extended attributes until is is patched. Then just re-running "run" from inside the CalendarServer directory should pick up the change.

I found the method that worked reasonably well was run "run -s" as provided by CalendarServer and whenever it broke (after checking out the required packages) apply the patch that I've provided, then run "run -s" again.

Update: Added details about plistlib.py and alternative to mounting the filesystem. Thanks Andrew M.
Update 2: Add fact that xattr wasn't automatically downloaded for me.
Update 3: The PyKerberos patch should now continue to work for MacOS X folks, and added details about the patches from Trac.

In a follow on from Power Issues and Power Issues - Part 2, we managed to blow the circuit breaker yet again last night.

But this time we had the UPS in place. It started beeping on cue about not having any power, and I was able to reset the breaker without the server going down. Fantastic. Unfortunately the ADSL router isn't on the UPS yet (I need to modify a power strip to have an IEC plug on it so I can plug in the ADSL routers wall-wart).

The score is now:
Circuit Breaker: 2
UPS: 1

To continue on from Power Issues we discovered today that 4x computers, 2x heaters, the drier and the toastie sandwich maker are enough to blow the one and only circuit in the house. The toastie sandwich maker was the straw that broke the camels back.

Of course I didn't have the UPS that was bought after the first occurance hooked up (I was waiting until I had a serial cable for it), so I had to spend quite a while nursing the server back to health again.

This time the server is running off the UPS... I figure that if the power goes off, I'll be home and can hopefully reset the circuit breaker before the batteries run out.

Catalyst is now included in the mirror list for CPAN.

Which means that you no longer need to use arcane (for some) commands to change your mirror to http://cpan.catalyst.net.nz/CPAN.

Thist that if you are close to Catalyst (or working at Catalyst) then you should be using our CPAN mirror. It is fast. Real fast.

If you know of other FTP sites that aren't present in New Zealand already, then let us know, and we'll consider adding it our list of mirrored sites, we have a bit more disk space on there which isn't being used...

Updated: Fixed the link to CPAN

Well, Catalyst has now jumped on the CAcert bandwagon.

We already had one full assurer (Andrew McMillan) and a couple of other people (myself included) that had some points, but not enough to assure others. To fix this, Andrew organised an impromptu signing party. With a days notice we had 3 other full assurers (including a guy from Auckland who was in town for the day) come round to Catalyst for beer o'clock.

As a result, we now have enough assurers in house to make sure that any visitor (with the appropriate Government issued ID) can walk away with the ability to generate server SSL certificates. We don't have quite enough to allow people to become assurers. Yet.

Well, Susanne and I discovered two interesting things last night:

1. Our house has only one circuit for all the power outlets.
   
2. Two heaters, 1 clothes drier, 1 TV, 1 microwave and a few computers are enough to blow the circuit breaker.
   

We turned off one of the heaters until the drier finished...