zobel's blog

First of all, THANKS Rhonda for pushing me to do that! I did plan to integrate the Debian menubar for a long time, but it never made it high enough on my todo lists up to now.

So, what am i talking about? For those of you who don't follow debian-www@l.d.o too closely, there was a recent thread about debian.org's page layout, where Rhonda pointed the initial poster to the layout proposals from Kalle Södermann. Rhonda was so kind and mainly documented in the recent blog post how to convert the gitweb theme to that layout.

I took that documentation and sat down Friday evening and converted the layout of my local instance of the DSA internal wiki to that new layout. While not everything looks perfect yet, it took me less than an hour. WOW, that was fast.

Now i became megalomaniac. After copying over the current list archive to an other machine (to not destroy the current archive while playing with mhonarc), I started playing with the same layout for lists.debian.org. The whole scripts for lists.debian.org were a bit more complex than the ikiwiki code we use for dsa.debian.org, but i managed to render usefull pages yesterday early morning.

Not everything was easyly convertable, and I still have some smaller issues to work on, but if you compare for example the following posting using the old and the new layout, i think we can use my work as basis for further improvements of the layout. Eg. i am aware that the new HTML  code does not fullly validate using the w3c validator.

Many thanks also go to Kalle, who responded to my problems with the CSS immediatly.

Not all lists are converted to the new layout yet, as a full list archive rebuild seems to run about 24 hours. Also i adjusted some minor stuff in the templates while the rebuild was running, so you will see some smaller differences in the breadcrumbs. That will go away when I start the next rebuild.

So what is next? Rhonda, do we want to see if we can take over qa.d.o? ;-)

PS: if someone wants to generate new icons for the thread view arrows, i am happy to integrate them.

Now that we have released the slightly updated version of Debian's Machine Usage Policy (DMUP), I am thinking about a major rework for the next version. Maybe we should even start with a completely new text for it. I am currently doing a bit of brainstorming about how the new version could look.

Here are some of my ideas (completely unsorted):

• Debian is not an ISP. All services are offered on a best-effort basis. While we provide @debian.org email addresses, they should only be used for Debian-related work.
• Debian resources should be used for Debian-related work only. Even though I think this is self-evident, it should be explicitly mentioned.
• Data meant to be private should stay private, and not mirrored elsewhere. This especially includes log files and subscription data of any kind. I am not sure yet what to do with anonymized data, but in my personal opinion we should not even allow mirrored data of that.
• Drop large parts of the document and move it to a new document, called Debian Machine Usage Guidelines or Debian Machines Best Practices. Some parts of the current document are outdated, so let's see if we can drop those entirely.
• We forbid unlawful activities on our machines. Machines should not be used for private financial gain or for commercial purposes.
• Penalties might need some rework, in coordination with DAM.
  

Please note that this brain dump is my very personal opinion and does not reflect the opinion of the complete DSA team.

I would like to see a discussion on what the new DMUP should look like. Even though the final decision on which paragraphs make it into DMUP should stay with DSA, I think the Debian community should be involved in the evolution of this document.

Even though i am not attending DebConf10 (actually I think no one from DSA will make it), it might be a good idea if the conference could be used to do some further brainstorming. Maybe having a BoF on DMUP 2.0 might be a good idea.

Taken from the CentOS Install Guide:

While text mode installations are not explicitly documented, those using the text mode installation program can easily follow the GUI installation instructions. One thing to note is that manipulation of LVM (Logical Volume Management) disk volumes is only possible in graphical mode. In text mode it is only possible to view and accept the default LVM setup.

Dear CentOS, please learn that doing LVM setup is even possible with the Debian text mode installer. It can't be that hard.

[UPDATE]: I need to admit, it's not CentOS to blame to, but RedHat, as CentOS is a clone of RHEL.

It's quite silent in my INBOX when master is down.

DSA recently switched www.debian.org to GeoDNS. Now, 72 hours later, it seems we didn't broke the website too hard with it. While reviewing the query logs for abnormalities i started to do some statistics, which i thought might be worth publishing.

• In total we had about 1.44 million DNS queries within 72 hours.
  
• There were about 12550 queries where the source IP wasn't in the GeoIP database, so we had to deliver the default zone. Most of those had been IPv6 addresses.
• Europe does ~50% of all the DNS queries

Update

After a long period of not-blogging, i decided to relaunch my blog using MovableType. Yes, i know ikiwiki does exist... ;-)

(To be fair: It is not theirs, Tolimar will be the godfather. But they do it with a perfection.)

Thanks to the colleagues at credativ for this nice romper suit.

Hi, i am Pia Zobel and I watched the sun rising today for the first time. I was born 8:29 CET, 51cm in size and 3050g in weight. Mum is well, though it was a C-section.

Thanks to the outstanding work of Stephen Gran SpamAssassin 3.2.3-0.volatile1 is now available in etch-proposed/volatile. Before we accept it to etch/volatile i would like to ask some experienced SysAdmins to do some (more extended testing as we did) of the package and report back any problems you find to debian-volatile@lists.debian.org. As soon as we are convinced that SA 3.2.3 works as expected, I will move the package to etch/volatile and send an official announcement. Please consider that this upgrade might break your system, so you upgrade at your own risk. Thanks in advance for all the feedback you will send us.