OpenExpo Bern March 24, 2008
Posted by Tobias Scherbaum in : Gentoo, On the road ... , 2commentsWell, it’s been nearly two weeks ago that I’ve been in Switzerland for OpenExpo in Bern - but somehow I’m lagging a little bit behind with reports on Linux events I’ve been at. So here it goes …
It’s been November/December that I first talked to Tiziano Müller about having a booth at OpenExpo in Bern. He organized our the booth at the Zurich OpenExpo some months ago and luckily he offered to do so again for OpenExpo in Bern. The booth was quickly registered and also confirmed very quickly. I also submitted an introductionary talk on Gentoo, but sadly my talk wasn’t accepted. But hey, the published conference program showed a clear focus on business-related talks.
Getting a confirmation on our booth early allowed me to search for cheap plane-tickets, as I wanted to have only one overnight stay in Bern I needed an early flight outbound on Wednesday morning and a late inbound flight on Thursday evening. On a typical business-route like Dusseldorf-Zurich these flights were quite expensive with my favorite airline, so I spent a look at what other airlines had to offer - and yeah, I found some quiet cheap flights offered by Air Berlin. To be honest, the train ticket from Zurich to Bern v.v. cost me nearly as much as both flights … (and yeah, i also considered flying to Bern-Belp, but those tickets were extraordinary expensive!).
So I got up on 12th march quite early, took the train to Dusseldorf Airport, got my usual airport-coffee at Starbucks and was able to board the plane to Zurich on time. I spent some additional euros to reserve a seat in row one for me - which was very-well-spent money as both flights were booked quite well. The landing was a little bit bumpy due to stormy weather … *shudder*. From Zurich airport it was an additional one-and-a-half train journey to the Bern Expo were I arrived around noon.
The expo already started some hours ago, so Tiziano already set up the booth and was just talking to a visitor when I arrived. I got some additional flyers to hand out to interested visitors and also a copy of my book “Gentoo Linux - Die Metadistribution” with me. We hadn’t that much space (one table and some chairs) but Tiziano did a very good job in setting up our booth. We had one notebook and an additional display to show visitors what they can use Gentoo for, had some place for handouts and so on … nice booth, well done :)
On Wednesday evening Markus Meier joined us for dinner and I also had the pleasure to meet again with Marc Herren (aka Dj Submerge) who has been a member of our first generation “German conspiracy” and helped as at LinuxTag in Karlsruhe some years ago. Before heading out for some food we joined the social event which was quite overcrowded, so we took one sausage and some beers and went on to the install-zone. We had Wi-Fi there and had some minutes left until the install-party ended, were Marc was helping people to install Ubuntu …
Ah yeah, we had FreeBeer there which was both free of charge and free in license … I’d suggest to get at least two of those tiny bottles ;) Very tasty beer! After having dinner and some additional beers at a restaurant located directly under the tribune of Wankdorf soccer-stadium I fall asleep very early.
(Picture showing Tiziano and our little booth)
The OpenExpo again started at 9 am on Thursday morning. Tiziano already was at our booth when I arrived, on Thursday we also had a /dev/snack-box at our booth :) Time passed by quite fast and around 3pm it was time for me to leave Bern to get back home on time. So, time for some kind of conclusion. When I first heard about OpenExpo in Bern I thought of a nice little regional event - but in fact it was a much bigger event than expected by me. We had lots of interesting discussions, both with people interested in Gentoo but also existing Gentoo users. And what impressed me at most was the huge number of visitors who told us they’re using Gentoo at work or even are building as hosting-platform with Gentoo. No surprise therefore that lots of people asked about best practices on how to administer a large amount of Gentoo boxes and also if there were some efforts on building management-platform for Gentoo systems (like SCIRE). Very interesting discussions and lots of interested visitors made the OpenExpo a big success for us, hopefully I can also manage to visit the Zurich OpenExpo this year!
At Zurich airport I had enough time to buy some swiss-chocholate for my co-workers and also for another tasty coffee for myself. The flight back home was nothing spectacular, got some interesting kind of “sandwich” and warm beer … aside that flying Air Berlin was a good choice :)
Unbelievable … March 3, 2008
Posted by Tobias Scherbaum in : Events, Gentoo , add a comment… someone wants to hide behind me!
(”someone” in this case is the one and only “Mr. Big” and this picture was taken by Markus Ullmann at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2008. A full report on our attendance there is about to follow within the next few days.)
Developer meeting at the “Chemnitzer Linux-Tage” on March 1st January 22, 2008
Posted by Tobias Scherbaum in : Gentoo , add a commentJust in case you didn’t notice already, but are interested in joining us: We’re going to have a (little) dev-meeting at the “Chemnitzer Linux-Tage” on March 1st. If you’d like to attend, please add yourself to this wikipage. For now this dev-meeting will be a “German developers meeting” as only people from Germany have shown interest yet. For suggestions and any kind of information about this dev-meeting please contact me via mail. Thanks!
etc-proposals-1.4.2 January 22, 2008
Posted by Tobias Scherbaum in : Gentoo , add a commentAfter being mentioned in the first GMN (Gentoo Monthly Newsletter) ever, here’s another update: etc-proposals 1.4.2 has just been released (and version bumped), find out more about etc-proposals on its website :)
etc-proposals-1.4.1 and cyrus-imapd-2.3.11 January 2, 2008
Posted by Tobias Scherbaum in : Gentoo, Sysadmin , 1 comment so farJust a few hours after I added etc-proposals to the tree, a bug with initializing the internal DB was discovered and reported. After adding upstream dev Bjoern Michaelsen to that bugreport a fixed 1.4.1 was released within a couple of hours, thanks for your fast response Bjoern :) We need to meet at one of the next Gentoo User-Meetings in Hamburg for sure ;)
While being quite productive today I also finally managed to commit Cyrus 2.3.11 (cyrus-imapd, cyrus-imap-admin and cyrus-imap-dev that is) which was a few days due, I was waiting for the UOA Patches (covering the autosieve and autocreate USE-Flags) and forgot to check if they were available … gladly someone mentioned that the patches were released on the corresponding bug report.
app-portage/etc-proposals January 1, 2008
Posted by Tobias Scherbaum in : Aktuelles, Gentoo , 5commentsetc-proposals just made in our beloved tree this morning, probably being the first addition in 2008.
I first came across this little nifty program which allows for easy graphical diffing between configfile changes (i.e. etc-update w/ GUI) around christmas and first tried it at the 24C3. I found it quite useful and therefore added its fresh and shiny new 1.4 release to gentoo-x86 today :)
(The GTK+-2 Interface, config file changes while upgrading to OpenRC)
planet.gentoo.de? October 6, 2007
Posted by Tobias Scherbaum in : Gentoo, gentoo.de , 1 comment so farAs Steve mentioned support for other languages than English got dropped from Planet Larry. For those of you who are still interested in having a German feed aggregation, I’d like to offer to setup planet.gentoo.de! But before setting this up I’d like to know if there’s an actual interest in that, i.e. I’m not interested in setting up another useless webservice ;)
If you’re interested leave a comment here or drop an email to www@gentoo.de :)
wth is IMSP and is anyone out there using cyrus-imspd? October 5, 2007
Posted by Tobias Scherbaum in : Gentoo , 3commentsThis afternoon Christian and Jakub were discussing the “future” of cyrus-imspd on #gentoo-dev, i.e. is it worth fixing it or is it a candidate for another last rite? As the maintainer of other cyrus packages (i.e. cyrus-imapd and cyrus-imap-admin) i joined their discussion.
The cyrus website states, cyrus-imspd-1.7b is considered to be the “final version” while a newer 1.8 exists on their FTP, A handful of bugs w/ cyrus-imspd in Gentoo’s Portage were submitted to bugs.gentoo.org a while ago. Though this one is considered feature complete (other people would call it: dead) upstream the currently open bugs for cyrus-imspd in Gentoo’s Bugzilla were easy to fix (that’s what Christian said) so the conclusion was to a) fix it, b) remove the x86 stable keyword and c) keep it for now until another breakage occurs.
On a sidenote we wondered about what cyrus-imspd is actually doing or at was least designed for. Their website states
“The IMSP server is used for storing application preferences and address book data in a shared location. Few applications support IMSP preferences and address books.”
So, is anyone out there actually using cyrus-imspd (on Gentoo?) … if so please leave a comment and enlighten us! :)
Nagios 3.0b4 ebuilds and nagios-plugins 1.4.10 September 30, 2007
Posted by Tobias Scherbaum in : Gentoo , 4commentsI finally managed to put some Nagios 3.0b4 ebuilds together and committed them to my personal dev-overlay on friday. Besides supporting the latest bleeding-edge Nagios I added support for another webserver, lighttpd aka lighty - thanks to Tiziano Müller for his patches (bug #191675). For testing lighty w/ Nagios I set up my first lighty installation ever -and I’m still kinda impressed of its easiness :) Another thing I consider for Nagios 3 ebuilds is FHS compliance - there’s been a bug opened this weekend (# 194141). I’m pretty unsure about that, as this will probably break all Nagios installations on Gentoo boxes out there, plus Sysadmins would need to adjust all their customizations while upgrading to a newer Nagios version. As I said, I’m *very* unsure about that - so any feedback on implementing FHS compliance for nagios-* ebuilds is welcome :)
After getting up I usually read my mails - so I did on early saturday morning. One email I found was the announce of nagios-plugins 1.4.10, no suprise as there was a discussion about things to get fixed for 1.4.10 on the nagiosplug-devel mailinglist just some days ago. But 1.4.10 also fixes a buffer overflow in the included check_http plugin, after doing a quick version bump (and adjusting some patches) stabilization is now handled by our security team in bug #194178.
Back from a weekend in Kopenhagen August 13, 2007
Posted by Tobias Scherbaum in : Gentoo, Me, Myself and I, On the road ... , add a commentLike mentioned in the last update of my little “tour-calendar” just some days ago, I spent the last weekend in Kopenhagen visiting Corny (and some other now-former-Gentoo Developers). Instead of my favourite airline Lufthansa I booked Skandinavian Airlines this time, mainly because Lufthansa doesn’t offer any nonstop-flights from Dusseldorf to Kopenhagen and the SAS flight was *very* cheap. It was my first flight with a McDonnell Douglas MD-80 (MD-82 to be precise) type machine ever on which I discovered that these machines are quite noisy …
On Friday evening we visited Kopenhagen’ Tivoli which basically is a leisure park in the middle of central Kopenhagen, it’s located nearly next to the main station. Their somewhat special pricing-system made it quite difficult for us, while being already lined up for the rollercoaster we found out, that we would need some additional tickets … well …. *sigh* … 10 Minutes later we were again lined up for the rollercoaster - this time with ride-tickets :P After taking some other rides we went out for some beers :)
Saturday was a classic-sightseeing day, we visited the little mermaid, Amalienborg Castle and other typical tourist attractions. For sunday Alexander Færøy organzied a little bbq-party at his place where some other people including Bryan Østergaard joined us and we grilled some “Pölser”, basically saucages. Before the bbq started we did a little touristic boat-trip around Kopenhagen’s harbour.
For the price of “wow, this is a really cheap flight!” I had to take the first plane back to Germany on early Monday morning - early as in “i needed get up at 5 in morning” which sucks. After I had a quite nice seat in one of the last tiers of the machine on the outbound flight I decided to take the same seat again - which was a really bad decision. Instead of a MD-82 SAS decided to operate this flight with a MD-87 which is a shorter variant of the MD-82. So … my quite nice seat in a MD-82 was a seat in the last tier of a MD-87, right next to the engines. Quite loud as I can tell :P The way from landing at DUS airport back home took me exactly 60 minutes - including baggage claim, transfer to the airport rail station, a 20 minutes train ride and 10 minutes to walk - wow!
