Debian-Blog

Many of the SAN components in Debian have me involved. So I think out to give an update on what the state of SAN would be in Debian Wheezy.

Open-iSCSI : Just uploaded a newer version to experimental which eventually will crawl into testing. It should fix all release goals for Wheezy. Please give it a good test

iscsitarget : Same goes here. This one is already in testing. Please test. It has some bugs reported, all in needinfo, as they haven’t been easily reproducible or reported complete.

apport just cleared the new queue and is now available in experimental. For those who do not know what apport is:

Debugging program crashes without any automated tools has been pretty time consuming and hard for both developers and users. Many program crashes remain unreported or unfixed because:

• Many crashes are not easily reproducible.

• End users do not know how to prepare a report that is really useful for developers, like building a package with debug symbols, operating gdb, etc.

• A considerable part of bug triage is spent with collecting relevant information about the crash itself, package versions, hardware architecture, operating system version, etc.

• There is no easy frontend which allow users to submit detailed problem reports.

• Existing solutions like bug-buddy or krash are specific to a particular desktop environment, are nontrivial to adapt to the needs of a distribution developer, do not work for crashes of background servers (like a database or an email server), and do not integrate well with existing debug packages that a distribution might provide.

Apport is a system which

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I recently purchased a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 1 TB hard drive. It is a 2.5" compact disk that you connect over USB. It draws its power from the USB controller. My previous Extern HDDs were all 2.5" laptop drives, for which I bought a USB enclosure. Those devices always worked perfect, as in:

• They were automatically detected
• Partitions/File Systems understood
• Desktop systems would prompt for actions

The typical kernel messages I got for these devices were:

OpenXenManager cleared the NEW queue and is now available in the archive.

What it is:

rrs@champaran:~$ apt-cache show openxenmanager Package: openxenmanagerVersion: 0.r80+dfsg-1Installed-Size: 3051Maintainer: Ritesh Raj Sarraf rrs@debian.orgArchitecture: allDepends: pythonDescription: full-featured graphical management tool for xen using xenapi OpenXenManager is a graphical interface to manage XenServer / Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) hosts through the network . OpenXenManager is an open-source multiplatform clone of XenCenter (Citrix)Homepage: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openxenmanager/Section: adminPriority: extraFilename: pool/main/o/openxenmanager/openxenmanager_0.r80+dfsg- 1_all.debSize: 396322MD5sum: 64df482dac6b99bc3403bcc0740f8718SHA1: 9c746f524c3c29eb88de7ae702c96cbca162f577SHA256: 454641eb26c57ba35ad573a3a8493ac6dbd82f7920c8b926049ef892724147e0

Hello World,

I am very pleased to announce the release of Laptop Mode Tools, version 1.60.
This release includes lots of bug fixes and should make power savings much better on your machines.The battery polling daemon now, more reliably, gets triggered and killed based on power states.

This release also includes 2 helper scripts to trigger suspend and hibernate, in case anyone is interested.

Given the advancements of Linux PM ( All thanks to Rafael J. Wysocki ) in recent years, the freezer/thawfunctionality really does a very good job of handling suspend/hibernate, there is no need of a hacky suspend/resumemechanism. Thus, you’ll notice the helper scripts just do a mere echo into sysfs.

So this is the 2nd time I ran into a problem like this again. My FAT32 file system on the external USB HDD, all of a sudden, started reporting:

00:47:32 rrs@champaran:/tmp$ sudo dosfsck /dev/sdb1dosfsck 3.0.9, 31 Jan 2010, FAT32, LFNLogical sector size is zero.

I had been taking a lot of care to ensure that I don’t run into situation like this. No body likes losing data. The good part is that I’ve been lucky enough that, even without backups (now who’s gonna backup a backup disk), I have recovered all my data. All thanks to Christophe GRENIER for Testdisk.

Wrestling (WWE) is entertaining. The way the ww[ef] superstars (Especially the ones like Undertaker, Triple H) are presented is fun to watch. Or the kind of high flying maveuveurs the wwf superstars are able to perform, it really is super cool. The only catch is - it is not a sport. The feuds are all pre- defined to juicen things up.

I recently came to know of UFC. I hope some day they start airing it in my part of the world. I’m still getting acquianted to MMA, but it really is an awesome sport. This is one forum which does show size does not matter. Was watching Royce Gracie’s matches from UFC 4. Awesome matches clearly showing the skill with which one can beat any size or power. The final was in between a pro-jiu jitsu vs pro-wrestler. Gracie won it but was given a tough fight by the wrestler.

I have been thinking of this topic for some time. I am a happy owner of the old Phat PS3 Model. At one time, I use to do a fair amount of gaming on my computers. So when Sony marketed the PlayStation 3 product, it was cool to see a machine that did:

1. Gaming
2. Movies, Music, Pictures
3. Blu-Ray
4. Ran Linux

I convinced myself to buy a PlayStation 3, that I’d use it for playing with Linux apart from gaming. The regular gaming did not excite any more, perhaps it had to do with the limitation of time. On running Debian on it, was when I realized that the Linux support was merely a joke. The Linux support included running a Linux distribution in a VM with not much access to the full hardware resources. Not a Great Experience

With the final package, [fcoe-utils](http://packages.qa.debian.org/f/fcoe- utils.html), clearing the NEW packages queue, the Open-FCoE project’s Fibre Channel over Ethernet stack is now in the Debian archive. I had anticipated to have access to FCoE hardware by the time the packaging would complete but that didn ’t work out. It has been delayed, hence the packages are in experimental. If you have access to FCoE hardware, please test and provide your feedback.

I was invited to talk at the Mukthi 11.04 event hosted at the M. S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology.

I talked about Free Software/Debian - Philosophy, Design, Merits. The focus was more on the philosophical aspects of why Free Software/Debian. The slides are available here.