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BOM: bug squashing and new versions during last three months

As announced in my previous DTPOM article the month of May should be a bug squashing month. As everything worked well, I used last three months to decrease the bug count in Debian packages. Unfortunately I don’t remeber everything, so this list might be incomplete:

  • Due to the help of T, who pointed me to a patch which was sent to the fpdns-user emaillist, bug 680077 disappeared.
  • All meep-* packages had a problem with include files installed in the wrong directory. So development of own programs was a bit difficult. This resulted in

    All bugs have been closed in Sid, but the release team doesn’t want to put it to stable!?

  • Package setserial had some open bugs. Most of them resulted from a strange concept of initializing the serial port and could be closed with just some explanations:
  • With the next upload of greylistd to experimental two bugs could be closed:
  • Two uploads of package uucp closed a few ‘simple’ and one RC bug:

Further I created packages for some new software versions:

  • all packages of the mgltools got a new version (1.5.7~rc1~cvs.20130519-1)
    autodocktools, mgltools-bhtree, mgltools-cadd, mgltools-dejavu, mgltools-geomutils, mgltools-gle, mgltools-mglutil, mgltools-molkit, mgltools-networkeditor, mgltools-opengltk, mgltools-pmv, mgltools-pyautodock, mgltools-pybabel, mgltools-pyglf, mgltools-scenario2, mgltools-sff, mgltools-support, mgltools-symserv, mgltools-utpackages, mgltools-viewerframework, mgltools-vision, mgltools-visionlibraries, mgltools-volume, mgltools-webservices

  • autodocksuite is now available in version 4.2.5.1-3
  • saint is now available in version 2.3.4+dfsg-2
  • I uploaded version 1.5.3-1 of python-cogent, but meanwhile even version 1.5.3-2 is available
  • gcal got an update to version 3.6.3-2
  • epigrass got an update to version 2.2.2-2, unfortunately in that version it depends on python-sqlsoup, which is still in the NEW-queue. Thus this package got an RC bug …

From my point of view 17 closed bugs and 29 updated packages within three months are a pretty good result.

The next month will be characterized by solving all problems with epigrass (and of course python-sqlsoup), mgltools-cadd (there must be a better version hidden somewhere in the sources that needs to be activated somehow) and mgltools-sff (why doesn’t it migrate to testing?). Further the TODO-list of the Debian Med UDD needs to become smaller.

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Second tunnel/subnet from SixXS (1.3, 1.4, 1.5)

After having configured everything the first time, the second tunnel/subnet is again just a matter of patience.

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Subnet one from SixXS (1.3)

After patiently waiting for SixXS credits, you can apply for a new subnet that is routed to your tunnel.
Again this is done on the SixXS website and you need to add a short explanation about how you want to use the subnet.

As last time, you will get an email that everything is configured.

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IPv6 local endpoint for first tunnel (1.2)

Now we can start to configure our local part of the tunnel. I want to keep each service as much as possible seperated from the underlying hardware. So I will use a virtual machine to handle my part of the tunnel. Thus I can easily control all traffic through the tunnel and get a dedicated firewall for free.
There are lots of information available in the net, so I don’t explain how to create a new Xen guest domain. The new instance is a Debian Wheezy system
with just 128MB RAM and 4GB disk space.

Afterwards you just need to install the Debian package \it aiccu, enter SixXS-Userid and Password and choose the default tunnel you want to use. In case of problems please have a look in the SixXS FAQ. Most likely your firewall has to be configured accordingly. More aiccu configuration can be done via /etc/aiccu.conf

After starting aiccu, the tunnel will be active and hopefully never terminate.

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IPv6 tunnel from SixXS (1.1)

It is very easy to create a SixXS tunnel. First you have to register on the SixXS website. After having done so, you will get some credits. Depending on the number of credits you have, you can apply for tunnels, further subnets routed to your tunnel, DNS server entries and so on.

You can obtain new credits by keeping your tunnel active for some time. Every two weeks you will be given five credits. So all you need to work with SixXS is patience.

The first step after registration is to apply for a tunnel. SixXS won’t manage tunnels by itself but delegates this task to one PoP. You should choose the nearest one (network wise) for you tunnel and give a short explanation about how you want to use it. After some time you will get an email that everything is configured.

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IPv6

After playing around with IPv6 just for fun, I think it is time to really reconfigure the whole network now.

1) As I don’t have native IPv6 access yet, I need a tunnel broker to connect my hosts to the IPv6 network.
According to Wikipedia there are only two of them who have PoPs in Europe:

  • SixXS
  • Hurricane Electric

In order to make things a bit more complicated, I want to connect two sites together with some external servers.
Further all IPv4 stuff needs to work as well, so I need a dual stack solution.

The following is a list of problems that I am trying to solve step by step.

1.1) tunnel one from SixXS
1.2) local tunnel endpoint one
1.3) routable subnet one from SixXS
1.4) tunnel two from SixXS
1.5) local tunnel endpoint two
1.6) routable subnet two from SixXS

1.11) tunnel one from Huricane Electric
1.12) local tunnel endpoint one
1.13) routable subnet one from Hurricane Electric
1.14) tunnel two from Huricane Electric
1.15) local tunnel endpoint two
1.16) routable subnet two from Hurricane Electric

1.20) check IPv6 availability for external server at Hetzner
1.21) check IPv6 availability for external server at Strato
1.22) check IPv6 availability for external server at Server4You

2) configure external server
2.1) configure connectivity for external server at Hetzner
2.2) configure connectivity for external server at Strato
2.3) configure connectivity for external server at Server4You

3) configure services
3.1) bind
3.2) DNS resolving
3.3) apache
3.4) exim4
3.3) inn2
3.6) ssh
3.7) nagios
3.8) nfs
3.9) openafs
3.10) xen
3.11) ftp
3.11) openvpn

4) configure home network
4.1) automatic configuration for all hosts
4.2) dynamic default route
4.3) manually routing of special networks
4.4) configure services from list in 3)

Let’s start the journey …

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DTPOM: lots of stuff for Debian Med

April has been the month of new packages. I had a look at the task list of Debian Med and tried to finish some (older) packages or created some new ones.

Finally the following packages made it first to “unstable” and after the release of Wheezy, they migrated to “testing” as well:
– uc-echo – error correction algorithm designed for short-reads from NGS
– python-clips – Python module to interface the CLIPS expert system shell library
– visionegg – Python library for 2D/3D visual stimulus generation
– qrisk2 – cardiovascular disease risk calculator

Further there are still some packages waiting in the NEW-queue
– treeview – Java re-implementation of Michael Eisen’s TreeView
– proalign – Probabilistic multiple alignment program

The month of May will be under the banner of bug fixing and new upstream releases. But in case any other package shall be part of Debian, just send an email to blog@alteholz.eu.

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DTPOM: libkeepalive – enable tcp keepalive support in programs using shared libraries

In one of my projects I needed to activate TCP keepalive for some sockets. Unfortunately those sockets were handled by a library and I didn’t want to compile everything just to get this feature.
Searching the web I found this small piece of code and here is the Debian package now. Maybe someone else might find it useful as well.

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BOM: openAFS

February and March have been the months of openAFS bug squashing. I sent in patches for #660622 and #639475, helped on an issue with building modules for amd64 kernels on an i386 architecture and opened bug #702018 in package dkms which is the reason for openafs bug #620014.

This has been great fun.

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DOPOM: scheme48 – A simple, modular, and lightweight Scheme implementation

Some years ago I heard about Scheme and was fascinated by the (at that time at least for me) strange syntax. As this was not yet the time of WWW, I even bought a book to learn more about it.
Unfortunately priorities changed and I needed to spend my time on other things. As I now found that orphaned package I would like to give it a second try and at least keep it rolling.