Look at this lovely bag of swag:

Image courtesy of Melissa Draper.

Want to own all this goodness, including Ubuntu Backpacks, women’s t-shirts, key chains, 1 year digital subscription to Linux Pro Magazine or a 1 year print subscription Ubuntu User, and a copy of the The Art of Community by some beardy community guy?

On January 10, 2010 the Ubuntu Women Project announced an International Women’s Day Competition; an awesome effort to gather wonderful stories of how women have discovered Ubuntu. From the announcement:

Ubuntu-Women has tried in the past to find some way to celebrate this event, but as far as I can remember it has never really amounted to much other than some chattering on IRC. So let us try a bit harder for 2010!

We have all come to Ubuntu in our own special ways — every single one of us differently to the next. Yet one of the most common questions we get asked is “How can I get $woman to use Ubuntu?”.

Obviously we cannot really answer that question, but we would dearly love to have a collection of stories by women about how they discovered Ubuntu. Such a repository would allow us to demonstrate that there’s no one definitive answer, and at the same time maybe provide the gift of inspiration to women who are interested — showing them that it’s really not so unusual to be Ubuntu fans after all.

We are not expecting any particular length, but do remember that these stories should be suited to perusal at leisure and not require someone to allocate hours of their day to read. Anywhere between a few paragraphs and a OO.o Write page is ideal.

Two prizes up for grabs. One prize pack will be given to the story that the community votes is their favourite. One prize pack will be given to a randomly drawn entrant. I have been given the pleasure of drawing this entrant in a videocast, and announcing both winners to the world on March 8th. Thanks to the Ubuntu Women project for asking for to do this.

So, get your entries in to ubuntuwomen.competition at gmail.com by 23:59UTC on 22nd February 2010. Rocking!

I've been messing with finding a decent desktop backup application this weekend to run on all the family laptops. I thought backintime would do the trick, but it turned out not to work over sshfs (due to the lack of hardlink support) and doing backups to the same disk that holds the data seems like a bad idea to me.

So, today I found an article on deja-dup in my RSS feed, installed it and it's wonderful. It has a built in scheduler and supports all filesystems that gvfs does, but adds nice things like encryption for your backups and it integrates very well with Nautilus.

I can just select a file or folder and revert it to the state of any of the listed backups, which is exactly the functionality I've been looking for.

Just a shame that I didn't find it in the first hours of looking... but I am happy now :-)

On 25 february, I'm giving a workshop on Zarafa, the open source alternative to MS Exchange.
If anyone is interested in signing up (for free), they can still do so at http://www.open-future.be/zarafa-workshop

Hey all. Got board, and figured I’d throw this up. Just got done getting my machine set up nice.

Photo after the break

In Ubuntu, I uploaded an rng-tools that supports the RNG in TPM devices (my patch is waiting in Debian). This hardware is available on a bunch of systems, including several Thinkpads and the Intel Q35, Q45 and newer main boards.

While most TPM RNGs aren’t really heavy-duty hardware RNGs, they are at least a mild source of randomness. I’ll be using an entropy key eventually, but for now, the TPM can supplement my collected entropy.

/etc/default/rng-tools:

HRNGDEVICE=/dev/null
RNGDOPTIONS=”–hrng=tpm –fill-watermark=90% –feed-interval=1″

After it’s been running a bit:

Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: bits received from HRNG source: 6180064
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: bits sent to kernel pool: 6166144
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: entropy added to kernel pool: 4624608
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2 successes: 309
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2 failures: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Monobit: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Poker: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Runs: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Long run: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Continuous run: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: HRNG source speed: (min=5.207; avg=6.145; max=6.200)Kibits/s
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS tests speed: (min=66.925; avg=75.789; max=112.861)Mibits/s
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: Lowest ready-buffers level: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: Entropy starvations: 308
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: Time spent starving for entropy: (min=3150263; avg=3178447.994; max=3750848)us

And now the kernel entropy pool is high:

$ echo $(cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail)/$(cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/poolsize)
3968/4096

It looks like we’re in for more snow this Tuesday night into Wednesday. If we get what is expected the scheduled CALug meeting with Jonathan Riddell and Justin Kirby will be postponed until Thursday at best and canceled at worst. There are several moving parts right now that need to be coordinated before the final determination is made.

So keep an eye out here, on the CALug mailing list, my identica account, the CALug identica group and/or my twitter account. Those last three will be the same message across them all so pick your favorite (Hint: The Identica site runs Free AGPL software). The CALug website will also be updated but may be a bit behind the announcements I make via my feeds.

Also don’t forget that the local KDE release party will be at Fuddruckers in Columbia, MD on Friday the 12th. With luck the snow will be gone by then!

Let me start off by saying hats off to Dell for giving us Ubuntu as an option. Any company that supports and contributes back to the community is always a good thing. With all that said I found the ordering experience to be quite frustrating.

read more

Watching a new Nena video today on VIVA, I realized that a) she's hot for her age but makes crap music and b) I really need an evil-bunny-man costume.


Naturally, that made me think of Jono's wonderful costume (not to mention the effects it had on the ladies and other random people on the street).


We should make a rule that in order to get Ubuntu membership you need to have a pic of yourself as your alter-ego.

Before I start – no, this isn’t a Star Wars post Sorry!

I currently have an iPhone, and no, I’m not ashamed to admit it, though it is a little awkward that I can’t sync it with my desktop. I’m also not ashamed to admit that I love it, I really do. But as with a lot of things, I find the Apple design of the phone a little restrictive. Sure it’s polished, and it looks sleek and sexy (to some at least), but I just can’t help feeling that I’d prefer an Android phone.

I’ve been looking, albeit briefly, at what Android phones are available on the UK market. Out of the choices, I think I’d prefer a Nexus One, though as far as I’ve seen – they’re Vodafone exclusive, and I’m on an O2 contract, so it’s a no-go. I’d love to hear from some of you guys that have Android phones, and what phones they are, because I’m definitely in the market!

As you may or may not know, Ubuntu has a “membership” available to anyone who has shown significant contributions to Ubuntu. This can be in many ways, not just developing. Being an Ubuntu Member has a few perks that come with it. One of these is that you get an @ubuntu.com email address. This address forwards to your email address which you define on in your Launchpad account. I recently received the honor of being accepted as an Ubuntu Member, and as such, now have an @ubuntu.com email address. (chrisjohnston AT ubuntu dot com)

The thing about my new email address is that I can only receive mail using it. Ubuntu doesn’t have a way for me to send mail using it. Luckily Google’s Gmail has a way for me to set up my account to where I can send mail from either my regular email address or from my @ubuntu.com email address. This is great, except.. I have an iPhone, and I quite frequently will check my email on my iPhone, which creates an issue when I want to reply to something from my @ubuntu.com email address, because the iPhone doesn’t know that Gmail is setup to allow me to send email from both my regular email address and my @ubuntu.com email address, so I either can’t respond until I get to a computer, or I have to respond using my personal email address.

Joeb454 from the Ubuntu Beginners Team and myself were discussing using our @ubuntu.com email address on mailing lists and the lack of being able to respond the the mailing list with our @ubuntu.com addresses from our iPhones. After a little bit of searching on the internet, I was able to come up with a working solution on how to send email from an @ubuntu.com email address. To do this, you are going to create a dummy POP account on your iPhone with your @ubuntu.com email address, which will login and send the email through your personal gmail account.

Here are the instructions:

Go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Add Account

Click Other

Add Mail Account

Fill out the appropriate information and click save. (Note: Put your @ubuntu.com email address in the Address field)

Select POP for the type of server.

Incoming Mail Server:
Host Name: pop.gmail.com
User Name: your @ubuntu.com email
Password: doesn’t matter.. Make something up

Outgoing Mail Server:
Host Name: smtp.gmail.com
User Name: your Gmail address (NOT your @ubuntu.com email address)
Password: Your Gmail password

Click Save

It will display an error saying POP account verification failed.

Click OK

Click Save again

Now it says This account may not be able to send or receive emails. Are you sure you want to save?

Click Save

That’s it as far as setup. Now when you open the Mail App, you will see your personal email address and your @ubuntu.com email address. The @ubuntu.com is a dummy address, and opening it will do nothing for you. Plus you will get an error.

To send mail from your @ubuntu.com email address, start a new email.

Click on your email address in the “Cc/Bcc, From:” line to expand the different fields.

Now click on your email address in the “From:” line.

Select your @ubuntu.com email address

Now fill out the rest of the email like normal and hit send. You can see that your @ubuntu.com email address is in the From line.

I hope this works well for you. Any comments or questions please feel free to post on my blog!

A bit of the summary of things since my last Blog Post - :-/


Home

To say I have been busy the last few weeks is an understatement at best. However, I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing, unless I don't stop to smell the roses in my life - my family, and they are awesome! My husband has traveled continuously for the last 5 weeks, stopping at home long enough to repack a bag, have meal with us and back out - we've missed him. My kids, they are awesome. There have been a few days I had appointments for various things and gotten home after they did, (They are teenagers so old enough to home for a few hours alone) and on those occasions, I have returned home to find they worked together to straighten up whatever it was I had missed doing that day. Gotta luv it when teenagers clean without being told - that is so awesome.

I've been spending more time with the kids after they get home from school, and after their homework has been completed taking time to laugh, watch a movie, talk about the day, play a game . I am not sure why but the kids were even more humorous than usual. I love laughing with them. Of Course they still throw in the occasional joke about "Ubuntu stole my Mom" or teasing me about "fine then I am installing " depending on the point they trying to convey it can range from other Linux distros to windows. That should be in the book of how kids of geeky Linux parents rebel. :-/

So I've been stepping away from my computer for a few hours, especially when they are home from school in the evenings and trying really hard not be on at night while they are still awake. This past weekend I took the kids out to eat, then to the mall, and to the movies. I was doing more than just smelling the roses I was attending to my garden. The fragrance is so much sweeter, when care is taken in the nurturing of them and yes they are in those teenage years so we still have some thorns that snag us everyone once in a while. We laughed, and talked about all the things that are on the calendar and they even added a few more things. In short we had fun!

We are still remodeling the house and due to the weather conditions our Kitchen installation had to be postponed a couple of weeks until the ground could dry out enough for the delivery trucks to make it up to the house without tearing up the driveway. Painting the living room, Kitchen, and dining room will get completed this week.


Events

SCaLE 8x
I have been working with the SCaLE 8x coordinators, and the CA Loco Team for the Ubucon event at SCaLE. I am giving a talk at the WIOS event at SCaLE - A Year NTEU the Ubuntu Community and the FLOSS World. I will also be giving one at the Ubucon at SCaLE - Every NTEU is someone's Guru - How to encourage the NTEU* in your organization. I'm also trying to see how many ubuntu community folks will be there and see if we can't grab a picture while there. I am looking forward to seeing the CA LoCo team members, Akkana Peck, Emma Jane Hogbin, and many many more folks in about 10 days or so.

(NTEU - Pronounced like In-To - stands for Non-Technical End User)

Southeast Linux Fest
I have also been working helping with the Southeast Linux Fest, as there will be an Ubucon there this year as well. The Call for Papers is still open so I don't know if I have been selected for the main event at SELF yet, but regardless it will be a great event and the Ubucon should rock. There will be an Ubuntu Booth at this event as well, any Ubuntu LoCo team who are planning on attending please feel free to volunteer your time to help staff the booth or help with the Ubucon. Please feel free to email suggestions for topics or submit a session for the Ubucon. Please include SELF Ubucon in the the subject line.

Atlanta Linux Fest
I have also been busy with Atlanta Linux Fest planning. There should be an announcement shortly as to the date and location of this event. The numbers from last year have pushed ALF beyond the capacity of all donated space we had. Good problem to have right. :-)

FOSSevents
I have also joined in on FOSScon, and FOSSevents discussions and planning. Though I can't claim to contribute much to these, but I am enjoying participating where I can. More on this in a separate post.

Did I mention I love event planning! :-)


Blogging

Not nearly enough. Though several posts are in some form progression I really need to polish them and get them added to both this blog , which is my personal one, and my You-in-Ubuntu blog, as there are several interviews in need of posting for my - People, Personalities, and Planners: Who's behind your FOSS events? series, Not to mention sending out questions for ongoing events. So you have events related to ubuntu, things that are happening in the community that Ubuntu Users can get involved in and contribute too - let me know let's get the word out. :-)

I enjoy blogging to, I really had know idea all the cool stuff you can find to talk about. Don't you just hate it when life interferes with all the fun stuff you like to do. (just kidding - well maybe)



Ubuntu Projects
Ubuntu Women Project
The Ubuntu Women Project is moving forward. As the team has defined that the "official " team member list will come from Launchpad. Subscribers to the mailing list and forums as well as those who are in the IRC channel are encouraged to join the LP team in order to participate in any voting issues. Also members on the Team on LP who are subscribed to the mailing list are encouraged to do so as well, this is another step ensuring communications of all current activities are disseminated to team members. Once the team defined who would vote, a condorcet vote was sent to the LP team members and a decision on the IRC channels was made. Almost all blueprint goals for the Lucid cycle have been meet and soon it will be time to look toward UDS-M.

The International Women's Day Competition will end in just a few weeks. February 22, 2010. If you are a women or know a who uses Ubuntu encourage them participate in this Competition. There's a great prize pack, sponsored by Canonical, Linux Pro Magazine and Ubuntu User Magazine also included in Jono Bacon's newest book, The Art of Community.

If you a woman in the Ubuntu Community and not a member of the Ubuntu Women Project please consider joining. There are women who's skills range from the highly technical to the just installed ubuntu and everything in between. So whether it's spring boarding into community contribution, developing a talk for an event, planning events, advice on dealing with sexism, or how to encourage women to get involved in Ubuntu and Open Source and more - the Project aims to provide an opportunity for women who want to be involved in the Ubuntu community thereby increasing the diversity in Ubuntu-Linux. Go here to learn more.




LoCo Leadership Series
At UDS-L, the idea for a LoCo Leadership Series was rolled out. It was The goal is to have Chapters 1-3 completed by UDS-M. Chapter 2 has been written now Chapters 1 and 3 need to completed. If you want to help with that email me.

USTeams
Ubuntu USTeams - New interview series targeting approved LoCo teams. These interviews will be posted on the USTeams Website, and the goal is to have the 1st one completed and ready fr March 1st. Looking for a place to help out and like to getting to know people in the community interviewing them is a great way and I already have some questions to start with if you are worried about how to start.

NC LoCo Team
Luv it - Ubuntu on a local level. The team is really working hard on becoming an approved LoCo team. There are now Ubuntu Hours in Winston Salem and a regular basis, and the folks in the Asheville area are looking at setting up regular Ubuntu Hours. Members of the LoCo team are working on building up the wnclug group as well. Right now it has an IRC channel on freenode (wnclug) and a mailing list. If you are in NC and you are interested in all things ubuntu please considering joining the team.

Ubuntu Weekly News
This is my Saturday/Sunday activity. It's fun seeing all the stories folks find to add to the newsletter and helping summarize them. The news team rocks! If you have links to articles or blog posts you would like to see included please send email to: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/Ubuntu-news-team

Oh I am sure there is something else I've been working on but it escapes me at the moment :-) Here's to another awesome week!

I didn’t come up with this idea, but the manner in which it is being expressed is mine. The idea itself is a very old one and has been expressed many times and ways across many ages.

Censorship steals from people the opportunity to exchange error for truth, whether it is one who is being censored at the hands of the masses or the masses being censored at the hands of one. Silencing the expression of ideas necessarily prohibits any exchange of ideas in either direction. Regardless of which side may be embracing truth, censorship forbids the other from receiving it by breaking down communication. It also prohibits both sides, when wrong, from having their ideas adjusted through discourse.

Share and Enjoy:

Another year over and FOSDEM has come and gone.  It was an amazing weekend, full of interesting talks and meeting people.  With so many attendees on this subject, there are so many opinions on subjects, technology, languages and operating systems flying about it can get heated. It’s also rather entertaining!

Friday night I met up with the Freenode Staffers for dinner, I’ve only been involved in Freenode since last summer, and work on community areas, so nice to meet the folks who do a lot more work than I do.   Followed by the Friday beer event, leaves you set up for the weekend ahead of you!

Saturday morning consisted of me in the lightning talks room, nice way to ease myself into the day after the night before! I popped down to the Ubuntu booth, passing all the others and listening to what was being said, great chatterings.  I brought along some extra Karmic, Kubuntu , Server CDs and stickers as we’d some left over to give out to folks.  Nice to put the faces to the names and chat to people. Always great, even though I am woeful with names!

Popping in and out of talks, and finding people I chat to on IRC to wave hi, and grab a bite to eat with others was great.  I got to bounce ideas off others and get some feedback, which was handy. Saturday night was the Ubuntu Dinner, if there were folks going we asked them to sign up, most did.  Thanks to JanC who organised it, as to seat a large number of people is rather difficult. 18 of us went for dinner, nice to chat to people sitting down,Muharem Hrnjadovic from the Launchpad team joined us, nice for community and non community to meet up a these events. Went to the GNOME drinks meet up as it was close by, but I really needed an early night so homewards I went.

Sunday was the day I’d been looking forward to, more lightning talks, followed by Make your users happy, “cloudify” your app with desktopcouch which was interesting. Afterwards I ran to the Ubuntu Debian talk, but this was wedged packed, I got to hear the first 2 minutes before I had to leave due to the heat and over crowding.

Lucas is both a Debian and an Ubuntu developer and stated that at the beginning of the talk, followed by he had friends on both teams and the talk was being recorded, trying to lighten the humour I suspect as the room was very packed and a show of hands for Debian was rather over whelming where as when it was show of hands for Ubuntu maintaining, it was one other person.

It’s a developer conference so I must admit I found that rather saddening to be honest.  There was a distinct lack of Ubuntu developers there for what ever reason, it’s the largest OSS developer conference that I’m aware of, I could be wrong. You could see the sea of Red Fedoras and Debian kilts, BSD, Gnome, KDE and many more around the conference.  So it would seem Ubuntu should have a larger presence at it.

Afterwards I went to the short presentation from the Mozilla team on WoMoz -  Woman and Mozilla and  then chatted to some of the women involved and exchanged contact details once I explained my role in what I do.  I pointed out their ideas sounded great, and that other groups had done similar, we should pool our resources together. I was even shortly interviewed for the Mozilla team on women in open source, for those who don’t know me, I hate speaking in public on my own, in discussion groups I’m fine.  On my own, I tend to get rather embarrassed and speak even faster than normal, plus I also hate cameras and usually want to punch the person with the camera pointing it at me.

The afternoon was filled with more lightning talks, this time they were from the  Mozilla room, then finally the end talk for me was the Inside StatusNet: How Identi.ca Works.

It was a very enjoyable weekend, I’m glad I went, following the tweets/dents for #fosdem did help to highlight some of the other talks I didn’t get to, which was rather handy.  Lots of the talks were recorded for later viewing.  One tweet that caught my eye was – Debian’s conclusion about Ubuntu at FOSDEM, add that to google and you get the interesting views of the talk which features photos of slides of the presentation, and also a thread

Picked up a N900 the other day. It's really quite amazing. Best of all it's linux *and* the keyboard is big enough for my thick fingers. The design isn't as nice as the iphone though.

In Ireland we have a special relationship with software we see the goodness but politicians dont have a clue how to make sure they get delivery on the sanctioned software systems. There have been a few systems an e-voting system and PPARS(its a payroll system for the medical service) both cost a half a billion to develop and neither are being used.
This is where proprietary software failed badly so why not open source the software (for PPARS not the e-voting) and let the community fix the problem? No matter how complex the system needs to be I cant see how any company can get away with nearly €200 million and not deliver on a product.
Why not open source all failed software projects that wont see the light of day? How many games a year get cut half way through development and never get played? The answer is lots and lots of them. How about really old games (around 15-20+ years old) and open sourcing them? No one makes money on them so who is it harming? In fact we can give a new lease on life for lots of projects and I think its sad that we the community arent being considered at all. A game I would love to have a crack at porting to linux is the original Fallout game.

In the continued interests of helping to make Ubuntu rock as a platform for scratching itches and making awesome apps, I am putting together a new online learning event: Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week, happening online between 1st – 6th March 2010.

The week will be just like our previous online learning events such as Ubuntu Developer Week and Ubuntu Open Week, but instead providing a week jam packed with awesome sessions about writing applications that scratch your itch, and predominantly focusing on Python tools and frameworks, Bazaar, Launchpad and infrastructure. The goal for the week is give attendees a head start on a given technology useful for applications.

So, I am looking for volunteers. If you feel you could give a tutorial about a given Python module or associated technology (e.g. Glade, Launchpad, Bazaar etc), please drop me an email at jono AT ubuntu DOT com and I will liaise with you to get it scheduled. I am also look for some showcase sessions: stories about how you put together an application, how it scratched your itch and what tools you used. Thanks to everyone who contributes to leading a session!

The week has already been added as a Lernid event and I am going to encourage session leaders to create slides for their sessions. As each session is confirmed it will appear in Lernid and on the wiki page. Rocking!

[Discuss Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week on the Forum]

Originally posted by Jono Bacon here on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 6:53 am

Let’s think about this creating command:

vmbuilder kvm -c karmic.cfg \
--domain ubuntu-server.eu \
--dest /vmachines/kvm/ \
--bridge br0 \
--hostname testvm02 \
--user shermann \
--pass foobar \
--mem=256 \
--ip=<whatevr ip> \
--mask=255.255.255.0 \
--dns=<your dns server >\
--gw=<your default gw> \
--libvirt qemu:///system \
--tmpfs=-

The correspondent karmic.cfg looks like this:

[DEFAULT]
arch = i386
part = ubuntu-karmic.part
user = shermann

[ubuntu]
mirror = <your package mirror>
suite = karmic
flavour = server
addpkg = openssh-server, vim-nox

[kvm]
libvirt = qemu:///system

and the partition file looks like this:

root 5000
/boot 100
swap 1000
---
/var/log 2000
/home 1900

Thanks to the work of David Henningsson, we now have a proper Apport symptom for audio bugs. It just got updated again to set default bug titles, which include the card/codec name and the problem, so that Launchpad’s suggested duplicates should work much more reliably.

So from now on you are strongly encouraged to report sound problems with

$ ubuntu-bug audio

instead of trying to guess the package right.

It seems that the N900 is able to run for > 3 days in standby, I unplugged it Friday on 7:00, and it lasted until Sunday 23:50. I used it for browsing the web a bit and to listen to music via FM transmitter.

Filed under: General

In the continued interests of helping to make Ubuntu rock as a platform for scratching itches and making awesome apps, I am putting together a new online learning event: Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week, happening online between 1st – 6th March 2010.

The week will be just like our previous online learning events such as Ubuntu Developer Week and Ubuntu Open Week, but instead providing a week jam packed with awesome sessions about writing applications that scratch your itch, and predominantly focusing on Python tools and frameworks, Bazaar, Launchpad and infrastructure. The goal for the week is give attendees a head start on a given technology useful for applications.

So, I am looking for volunteers. If you feel you could give a tutorial about a given Python module or associated technology (e.g. Glade, Launchpad, Bazaar etc), please drop me an email at jono AT ubuntu DOT com and I will liaise with you to get it scheduled. I am also look for some showcase sessions: stories about how you put together an application, how it scratched your itch and what tools you used. Thanks to everyone who contributes to leading a session!

The week has already been added as a Lernid event and I am going to encourage session leaders to create slides for their sessions. As each session is confirmed it will appear in Lernid and on the wiki page. Rocking!

There is a discussion going on in the Ubuntu Marketing team’s mailing list about creating Ubuntu videos in order to advertise Ubuntu to normal users. We got onto talking about existing adverts from Microsoft and Apple and I thought I’d share with the wider community my thoughts.

Interestingly when you look at the adverts for both companies you find an interesting pattern.

Often a leading brand / product doesn’t need to reference it’s competition, it just goes along with “We’re awesome, and everyone knows it”, The second fiddle is often comparing it’s self to the market leader.

What we have is Apple constantly comparing themselves to PC (even though an Apple is a PC and what they really mean is windows). Then Apple’s adverts were so successful that they put Microsoft on the defensive and they produced a bunch of laptop hunter adverts that mention Apple’s expensive laptops, unusual strategy for a market leader. But then the dynamic is kinda odd since Microsoft is a software company and Apple is a hardware company. so it’s not like they’re competing… not really.

But you’ll notice that every advert reinforces a set of ideas:

1) That there is such a thing as a Mac and it’s not a PC.
2) That a PC is Windows and nothing else.
3) That there are only two choices.
4) That you have to pay one way or another.
5) No one need worry about control when they get fancy features.

It’s interesting that we don’t play on our strengths of pointing this out, getting people to go “Oh hey there is something else, oh it can be installed on any PC, even Apple PCs, oh it’s free and I get to OWN it, control it, give it to my friends and even get involved with real people who make it, not just marketing departments.

There is a whole bunch of stuff we could focus on in very clever ways. But what I see a lot of here is tail chasing… lets copy them because they’ve spent money on those adverts. Perhaps people really have bought into the ideas in those adverts and that just sounds like the adverts were successful in telling their story and we want our story to be Microsoft’s or Apple’s because we were taken in.

But why do we want to tell the same story when we’ve a completely different narrative that’s run our communities for years.

Your thoughts?

I had a crack at creating some electronic music. I know, not metal. I figured I would share this, and I have never done this before, so be gentle.

Check out Master Of The Situation in MP3 and Ogg format.

Created in Cubase with Halion One, a KeyRig and Drumkit From Hell.

It was pointed out to me that my last post contained an error in the date. The next CALug meeting is Wednesday February 10th. NOT the 11th as was in the previous post. The corrected post follows:

Hi Everyone!

This coming Wednesday, February 10th is the next Columbia Area Linux Users Group meeting in Columbia, MD at the offices of Tenable Network Security.

Jonathan Riddell will be opening with his talk entitled “Kubuntu Community and Technology”. He will talk about the Linux distribution Kubuntu who makes it and the tools used.

Jonathan works for Canonical and started Kubuntu five years ago.

As long as Jonathan keeps to his contract and doesn’t do his Leno impression he’ll turn over speaker responsibilities to Justin Kirby*.

Justin will be presenting his talk “Making the leap from KDE user to contributor”. Justin will discuss simple ways for KDE users to become contributors, even without knowing a thing about developing code. His talk will provide specific details about various teams that exist within KDE, what you can do to help them out, and who to talk to if you have questions.

Justin Kirby is an active contributor to the KDE Promo team. He has been a user of KDE for about 3 years but more recently got actively involved in giving back to the community in July of 2009. You can learn more about the KDE Promo team on their wiki.

So join us at the Tenable offices at 6:30pm for pizza, wings and soda supplied by Praxis Engineering followed by the talks starting at 7pm.

* After minutes of negotiation with Justin’s agent I was able to secure a return appearance at a later date should Jonathan decide the evening belongs to him alone.

Make me believe!

Background

The Internet has been nominated for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Conclusion

Given that the Internet has allowed a powerful global conversation to start and thus implies non-violence as well as being a platform for global voluntary cooperation, it should be given the Nobel Peace Prize. Although the prize itself is meaningless, it does have an undeniable symbolic value.

Now the analysis.

The Nobel Prize to Barack and “Scandinavian” as adjective:

One of the main reasons for Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize was his stand and preliminary work against the dispersion of nuclear weapons. Well let’s not forget that we, the world, are still facing many dangers that are not being fought against by any politician. Instead politicians ally themselves with them to set the discourse of the day, and this is true for most societies worldwide. So it’s fair to call these dangers for what they are: Press, Radio and Television = Weapons of mass destruction!

Well, as much as I was disappointed with the stupidity of the Nobel committee here in Oslo last year, I don’t blame them. I guess Thorbjørn Jagland, chair of the committee, wanted to shake hands with Barack and play the cool kid in front of the world. To me that is not surprising coming from him. In my eyes he is a poster child of the manic Scandinavian obsession with and speciality for organizing peace and freedom. He also represents the historical, and current, Scandinavian pushing for the creation (notice where the first 2 UN Secretary General are from) of a One World government. And as any politician or person of power, he likes to show off. Period.

In second though, the peace organizing behavior might actually be driven by guilt or might just be categorized as schizophrenic as the track record of Scandinavian countries (read Norway and Sweden specifically) is not as peaceful or uneventful as you might think. But please, don’t get me wrong. I love Norway and the other Scandinavian countries and their people, I just want us to acknowledge collectively that we are acting sanctimoniously. If we are to change things we have to recognize mere facts first!

The point:

So before you get me going with my rant and I bore you to death: The Internet has allowed individuals from al parts of the globe to communicate  and in the process it has changed the way we think of ourselves,  people around us, country borders and the world itself. I guess we can link this to the idea of the Internet being a global conversation driven by argumentation, and this does not only apply to markets, but also has political and social implications. Thus, Discourse ethics can seem to be a valid tool to search for interpersonal relations and moral implications in this global polilogue of ours.

Not surprisingy, as I have taken my stand, I will take a libertarian approach and analize if this global conversation actually has brought us some amount of peace or, at least, less violence. Anyway far less damage than Nobel’s invention.

From Wikipedia’s article about Discourse Ethics:

Drawing on the work of Habermas and Apel, Hoppe, a former student of Habermas’s, asserts that argumentation, or discourse, is by its nature a conflict-free way of interacting and requires individual control of resources; thus, he argues, certain norms are presupposed as true by anyone engaging in genuine discourse. These norms include the libertarian principle of non-aggression, which itself implies libertarian rights. Therefore, no one can argumentatively deny libertarian rights without self-contradiction.

Now let’s see Gary B. Madison’s analysis on the subject:

“the various values defended by liberalism are not arbitrary, a matter of mere personal preference, nor do they derive from some natural law. . . . Rather, they are nothing less and nothing more than what could be called the operative presuppositions or intrinsic features and demands of communicative rationality itself. In other words, they are values that are implicitly recognized and affirmed by everyone by the very fact of their engaging in communicative reason. This amounts to saying that no one can rationally deny them without at the same time denying reason, without self-contradiction, without in fact abandoning all attempts to persuade the other and to reach agreement.”

These implicitly recognized values include a renunciation of the legitimacy of violence. Thus,

“it is absolutely impossible for anyone who claims to be rational, which is to say human, outrightly to defend violence …. [As Paul Ricoeur writes:]‘. . . violence is the opposite of discourse. . . . Violence is always the interruption of discourse: discourse is always the interruption of violence.’ That violence is the opposite of discourse means that it can never justify itself—and is therefore not justifiable—for only through discourse can anything be justified. As the theory of rational argumentation and discussion, liberalism amounts, therefore, to a rejection of power politics.”

Thus, Madison, like Hoppe, argues that the fact-value gap can be bridged by an appeal to the nature of discourse.

While Hoppe attempts to show that the non-aggression principle (i.e., self-ownership plus the right to homestead) itself is directly implied by any discourse or argumentation, Madison’s arguments are a bit different. For instance, he argues that, because discourse has priority over violence, this validates the Kantian claim that people ought to be treated as ends rather than means, which is the principle of human dignity. The principle of freedom from coercion then follows from the principle of human dignity.

Out of this we can derive, among others, that the internet is just the platform for this global argumentation, and it’s infrastructure hosts the reflection of this argumentation as text. But the conversation itself is driven by its users. All of them.

So, give the Nobel Peace Prize to all of us, to humanity that always finds ways to do what we have evolved ourselves to be best at: cooperate!

Go back to the top for the conclusion.

I know this whole analysis is quite naive, but I had to get it out of the system.

Thanks for reading!

So today I've been playing with some new new software via PPA's, for all the guys doing this many thanks.

Hey All.

So, some of you might be curious as to where I have been for the last week or so. I’ve been unusually absent from the usual day-to-day on Ubuntu work, so I figure that I’d put a post up to explain this a bit.

I am, as most of you know, a student at a Jesuit university in Ohio, John Carroll ( JCU ). There is currently a bit of noise about the LGBTQ ( Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, Questioning ) community, and their rights.

The long and short of it is that the Administration of John Carroll decided on creating an “agreement” to dictate conduct, rather then a legally binding statement to protect the LGBTQ community. I have been involved with this a good deal, and it would mean a lot if you were to post your opinions here, or send an email to my University in support of creating a legally binding clause protecting LGBTQ members of the University. Any opinions you would like to share can be directed to the President of JCU, Father Niehoff, S.J.. Father Niehoff is supportive of this change, so if you are to send an email, please be respectful.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. Please consider helping us bring equity to Ohio, and John Carroll University.

*Edit*

Rbt Y-Lee was nice enough to share this link here. I figured someone else might find this as interesting as I did. Thanks Rbt!!

I have just uninstalled hal from my laptop running unstable, and everything still seems to work, including suspend & resume.

Filed under: Debian

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #179 for the week of January 31st – February 6th, 2010 is now available here.

In this Issue:

* Open source industry veteran Matt Asay joins Canonical as COO
* Lucid Translations now open
* Ubuntu Developer Week Re-Cap
* Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS Maintenance release
* Lucid Ubuntu Global Jam Announced
* Project Awesome Opportunity
* New Ubuntu Review Team: Reviewing bug with patches
* Jane Silber Interview
* Dustin Kirkland Interview: Encryption in Ubuntu
* Ubuntu Stats
* Nicaraguan LoCo Team’s Third Anniversary
* Report on Launchpad down-time of 4th Feb 2010
* The Planet
* In the Press & Blogosphere
* January Team Meeting Reports
* Upcoming Meetings & Events
* Updates & Security

* And much, much more!

This issue of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

* John Crawford
* Craig A. Eddy
* Dave Bush
* Liraz Siri
* Amber Graner
* J. Scott Gwin
* Nathan Handler
* And many others

If you have a story idea for the Weekly News, join the Ubuntu News Team mailing list and submit it. Ideas can also be added to the wiki!

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License BY SA Creative Commons License.

Firstly, lots happening on the Ubuntu 10.04 audio front:

* daily builds of stable alsa-driver snapshots (thanks, Brad!);
* massive alsa-lib and alsa-plugins debugging (thanks, David!);
* continued alsa-driver/linux quirking;
* uploads of latest stable alsa*, libsdl1.2 (including direct seeding of the pulse backend in the Ubuntu desktop seed), openal-soft, and pulseaudio source packages;
* re-addition of HDA power down for Sigmatel/IDT in pm-utils-powersave-policy 0.3.

Some very positive Canonical goings-on have occurred, too, but that's the purvey of others. Also importantly, fellow community members are stepping forward to help triage Ubuntu audio bugs. You gals/guys are too numerous to list individually, but rest assured that your efforts (even if you're new to bug triaging!) are much appreciated. Thanks for helping make Lucid rock!

Secondly, John Poelstra recently wrote a fantastic piece on chairing effective meetings. The points are so entirely lucid (bad pun I know) that I can't believe that I hadn't used them!

In fact, the revitalized DistrictOfColumbia LoCo team meetings have begun using them. Brian has been doing a bang-up job posting summaries in lieu of a configured mootbot to keep us accountable. Members of the LoCo team are working on a screencast/video to demonstrate archive-uploadable activities at jams using Bug Hugger, Lernid, and Ground Control. I'll be doing a portion on fixing alsa-driver/linux bugs.

Your favorite personal finance application, wxBanker, has turned 0.7!



This release comes about 2 months after the previous release, and focuses on usability and user experience issues that I obtained from watching people use wxBanker as well as from Launchpad bugs (thanks Arty!). Let's take a look at some of the changes, starting with the account control:



On the right we have the new account chooser in 0.7. The main change is using radio buttons for the accounts instead of links. This is a much better, already understood method for choosing accounts, and will also fit in with themes better. The last item is now "All accounts" and is selectable, making it easy to get a view of all your transactions and search in them.

The "Hide zero-balance accounts" option has moved to the View menu, and now has a keyboard shortcut. I've also removed the total number of accounts from the header, as well as the colons after the account names, to reduce clutter. Finally, everything has been given a bit more padding and the buttons have been slightly rearranged.

Additionally, the previous graphing library has been replaced by cairoplot (thanks Karel!), which looks much more attractive. Let's check it out:



The Summary view allows you to see a graph of your balance over time, and you can view a graph of a specific account or all accounts by using the account chooser on the left (previously the graph had its own account chooser, that was silly!).

And in case you missed the 0.6 announcement, that version brought recurring transactions, XDG directory support, and more intuitive behavior regarding deleting/editing transfer transactions.

For downloads and the full list of features and bug-fixes, check out the release page. You can also add the PPA for easy installation and upgrades.

If you'd like to stay in the loop join the wxBanker Users team (and announcement mailing list) on Launchpad, follow wxBanker on Twitter, or hang out in #wxbanker on irc.freenode.net.

I recently read an article that made me shake my head. It was full of misinformation, uninformed conclusions, over generalizations, and red herrings. It was about how the argument for Open Source software is being detrimental to our schools. I am going to link to the original and comment on the article here, but I really would like to hear what your thoughts are.

The article starts off with a very insulting over-the-top paragraph:

“The Case against Open Source is really a case against the “Free and Cheap” mantra that some Open Source Advocates chant when they solicit action (and wrong-headed decisions) from school district leaders. This is a case against folks (who know little about instruction and even less about the needs of teachers); who, despite their lack of knowledge, pitch this “save-money fantasy (delusional) strategy” to school district executives (who should know better than to listen, but don’t).”

It becomes obvious from the opening salvo that the author either did not talk to an actual Open Source advocate or did not properly process the message. Open Source advocates are not about Free and Cheap (as in beer); they are about Free as in Liberty. It makes me think that the author is either more interested in a flame war than real discussion or they are of limited intelligence; neither is particularly good.

“These folks could even be school district employees, Techies, who have used Windows™ Open Source software (the most prevalent kind); but, most of these folks are “outsiders” that…”

I love the derisive “Techies” moniker that the author uses here. This term is usually used by the technically inept as a way of devaluing the skills of a technology professional. I recognize that I have no experience in a classroom and value the professional experience of teachers. Regardless of software and hardware choices there must be a synergy between professional IT and professional teaching staff for technology integration to work in schools.

This is followed by a quick sidebar which has several bullet points; I would like to address a few.

“Don’t understand what teacher want or need”

I agree I do not know what a teacher wants or needs. As a technician I view my roll as helping the teacher know what is available and to ‘cut through’ the sales pitch that companies often deliver. I can not tell you the number of times vendors represent their product as web based when it is, in fact, not web based.

“Don’t comprehend the compatibility issues that are associated with running software within a school district ‘technology ecosystem’”

For my part I do have an idea. I know that software and hardware compatibility happen regardless of platform. Even in a closed Apple ecosystem there are compatibility issues that plague school districts.

“Don’t realize that Technology Integration is a failed concept…unless an entire program is funded to an adequate level, with additional funding contingency funding”

I guess the author misses that Free and Open Source (FOSS) software can lower the cost of software which in turn makes it easier for available funding to be adequate. Certainly there still has to be funding for hardware and training.

“Don’t have a clue about how software costs add a minor (almost trivial) expense in the overall success of a technology program”

I think the author truly does not understand how much software costs. I would like to give an example of a typical windows based computer.

• Computer:  ~$500
• Windows Active Directory CAL: $8
• Windows License (Enterprise or Professional): $54
• Microsoft Office: $54
• Photoshop Elements: $54
• Antivirus License: $8
• Altiris Management License: $8
• A package of three ‘educational’ titles: $54

The balance is ~$500 for the hardware and ~$240 for the software for the ‘typical’ windows based instructional computer. There are other solutions that would raise the price for specific departments. This does not include the labor to install and support the systems, but I believe those costs would exist regardless of platform choice and are, thus, a red herring. With the numbers above the software cost 32% of the cost of the computing environment. Perhaps the author considers this amount trivial; I do not.

“Fail to recognize that Apple™ computers provide better solutions to their arguments for “Free and Cheap Open Source” than Open Source software does”

I am not even sure how to respond to this. Apple computers are nothing more than a hardware platform. They are PCs running OS X. The initial purchase of an Apple does come with some software included, but the higher cost of the computer pays for that software. Much of the software must be paid for if you upgrade it in the future.

“A second cost center, training and professional development, should be at least 30% of project cost.”

I would hope that reducing the cost of software would assist in making funding available for training.

“For example: If a project costs $30 million USD, then training and professional development costs should run about $10 million USD. But, school districts seldom allocate more than single-digit percentages to training and professional development…funds for stipends, trainers, follow-up support, release time, software and equipment for teachers to use at home, etc. School districts skimp and under fund in this area, and the results (as observed nation wide) is technology that is un used, under used and under utilized.”

“For example: For the $30 million project, $10 million for hardware, software and infrastructure, $10 million for training and professional development and $10 million for Back-End programming, interoperability, automation, development and support.”

In the scenario the author describes there would be 10 million spent on hardware and software. Given the numbers I gave this would result in a 3.2 million dollar savings. 3.2 million to put towards more training, more hardware or just reduce the total cost of the project.

Computer: $400
Installation: $60
Three Year Warranty: $125
Network Drop (to connect the computer to a Switch): $130
Cost of Port on the Network Switch: $125

Using the authors numbers, which may or may not be valid, the total cost of a computer with proprietary software would be $1080 and a completely open source computer would cost $840. While this reduces the cost of software to 22% of the computing environment; that cost is still far from trivial to me. The author makes no attempt to normalize these costs either. A network drop and switch will have a significantly longer life span than the computer or the software. Those two items might last as long as two or three computers depending on the replacement cycle set for computers. The author proposed a three year replacement cycle which would result in three computers and three software upgrades in the lifespan of the switch and drop. That alters the cost of software to 27% of the cost of the computing environment.

The author also specifically cited the issue of “software and equipment for teachers to use at home” while apparently not grasping that teachers must pay full retail cost for many of the titles schools pay very little for.

• Office $149 w/o a database program or $419 w/ a database program
• Antivirus $39
• Photoshop $129

With open source adoption the teachers cost of applications to replace the core three listed above would be zero.

“Move to full SIF Compliance”

Having worked with several proprietary vendors in regards to SIF compliance I am shocked to see this brought up. Under SIF I have seen product A support a sub-set of data and product B support a different sub-set of data rendering the two products incapable of integration via SIF. Proprietary products and vendors tend to tie your data down in their format.

The article also ignores the fact that the world is moving more and more towards using open source. I agree that one can not just rip and replace all Windows or Apple computers, but it is foolish to not pick and choose quality open source applications for use in the educational arena. It is foolish to ignore the cost of ‘home use’ for both teachers and students if one wants to close the digital divide.

While I agree with the parts of the article that talk about ignored costs of technology integration such as infrastructure and training I can not understand how the author missed the fact that reducing software costs should increase available funding for those two areas. The other wrong-headed idea the author pushed was that the adoption of FOSS is an all or nothing game. It is not.

Link to original article

Right now I’m preparing some tests regarding virtualization without VMWare.

Yesterday I tested LXC (aka Linux Containers) on my local desktop, because this machine is too old to have some AMD/Intel virtualization extensions. Anyways, that worked somehow, but using KVM was the goal.

So, looking at my root server (hosted by Hetzner), checking if this machine is able to carry some KVM machines on it.

It does, so I started to grab some documentations from the Ubuntu Documentation about KVM.

Most of the things are straight forward, but what is not as simple as it should, is to bring up the network to play nicely with the Hetzner system.

When you booked a server in 2008 or before that, you got one static IP address from Hetzner. Regarding the contract, you are able to get more then one IP for your root server, you get a 8IP subnet, where 6 IPs can be used.

So, what I can’t use is a bridged interface directly connected with the main ethernet device (eth0).

Therefore I need a virtual tunnel device (tap device from UML).

So what to do:

1. Get your additional ip subnetwork (for this to work, check your Hetzner Robot Login for this)
2. sudo apt-get install bridge-utils uml-utilities
3. add a tap device to your /etc/network/interface
4. add a bridge device to your /etc/network/interface

So point 1. and 2. are straight forward. Adding a tap device to your /etc/network/interface is mostly simple:

/etc/network/interfaces:

auto tap0
iface tap0 inet manual
   up ifconfig $IFACE 0.0.0.0 up
   down ifconfig $IFACE down
   tunctl_user <your user who runs the virtual machines>

Adding the bridge interface is also not complicated:

/etc/network/interfaces:

auto br0
iface br0 inet static
   address <one address out of the additional ip network, I use the last usable address>
   netmask <netmask of the additional ip network>
   bridge_ports tap0

Now, the address is one of your additional ip addresses you got from Hetzner. I used my last usable address. This IP Address on this bridge interface will be your default gateway inside your KVM machines.

The “bridge_ports tap0″ is important, because if you enter here e.g. your main ethernet device (e.g. eth0) it will give you a non accesible system anymore (you need to rescue it, via Hetzner Robot system -> Rescue system and Reboot System).

What does it do: the tap0 device is a tunnel to your eth0 device. And br0 will bridge all IP traffic from your KVM machines to via this bridge to tap0. The tap0 device then uses your default interface to leave your host and vice versa. (to make this understandable for the non technical audience, the reality what is happening under the hood is more complicated)

After that you can use vmbuilder to create your KVM image, according to the Howto on https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KVM. Just give the KVM machine an IP address from the additional IP subnet (not the one you used for the Host Bridge (br0)) and set the default gateway (–gw) to the IP address of your host bridge (br0).

Couple of days/weeks ago I’ve issued call for testing of new cluster stack for Ubuntu 10.04. At that time, most of the stack was finished, but we lacked proper support for clustered file system. Now, I’ve modified ocfs2-tools package so that it compiles with support for libdlm (provided by redhat-cluster) and pacemaker. I’ve also modified redhat-cluster package so that it builds with support for pacemaker.

As a result, there is now a new test case which needs testing - cluster with drbd for underlying device and ocfs2 as a filesystem. So, please visit - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ClusterStack/LucidTesting#Pacemaker, drbd8 and OCFS2 and give it a go.

After completing this milestone, only thing left for proper cluster stack in Ubuntu 10.04 is submitting MIRs (Main Inclusion Requests) for packages that are still in universe and demoting cman (and others) to universe.

For those that would like to test their own setups and are familiar with corosync/pacemaker/drbd8/ocfs2, ubuntu-ha’s PPA is located here: https://edge.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-ha/+archive/lucid-cluster/.

For most of this week it appears that the OpenDiagnostics image was broken on the server. It isn't anymore, but the update script broke it, so I am figuring that one out. Original image is up (here).

Yes, we got a great set of features in this release of ground control, as well as the regular set of fixes for problems that seemed to crop in last time. Thanks to everyone who reported to bugs and kept me on my toes fixing them.

You can download the version 1.3 at my PPA or keep up with the daily builds of the ground control trunk (which may not always work)

So waht do we have? well as you can see from the screenshot we have a new feature where you can search for bugs in launchpad and attach them to commits, much like you would use –fixes= on the command line. The difference is that the search feature makes it easy to pinpoint the exact bug you need.

Not only that, but we now have the Jono Baon inspired bug fix work-flow, there is a new button on the projects and project view which allows someone to search for a bug and then let the code do all the hard work of downloading the right branch of code and giving it an appropriate work-name. Then when your finished fixing the code, there is just a simple one button which commits, pushes and merges into launchpad including attaching the bug you originally specified.

If the bug you selected has a project assigned which doesn’t have a default development focus, then it’ll bring up a branch selection so you can choose which branch you should fix the bug in.

So we need testing of both of these new features, as well as testing of existing features which have been there for a few releases. Obviously we’re trying to make sure everything is stable for the 18th Feb (only 11 days away) so we need your immediate assistance in picking out problems with the release.

And I have to say that I’ve been loving the encouragement from you guys, I’m glad yu like this work and can see value it in being done.

I really like this below:

And these options:

Hugs and Good Luck! 
My Brazilian Blog
Get involved
http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate

Introduction

In my job as a network engineer, I am constantly looking for ways to increase the availability of the network. This is especially true in the data center, where services are expected to always be available. One of the ways to increase the network availability of a server is by using multiple network interfaces. This technique has many different names, but I am just going to call it NIC teaming.

Purpose of NIC Teaming

NIC teaming increases network availability by removing single-points-of-failure (SPOF). These SPOFs are components that will cause a service outage if they become unavailable. If we consider a single network connection from your server to your switch, we can identify quite a few SPOFs:

1. Server NIC failure
2. Network cable failure (such as being cut or unplugged)
3. Network switch failure (such as a planned firmware upgrade or unplanned outage)
   

Methods of NIC Teaming

The reason I am writing this blog is to help people understand the different options for NIC teaming. If you search the Internet (like I did), you will be hard pressed to find a standard NIC teaming setup that works across all operating systems. You may not be able to find a listing of pros/cons and requirements of each NIC teaming strategy.

In order to fully understand the NIC teaming options available in Linux, please read the official Linux Bonding How To. I am only going to cover two of these options, which are the two that I am going to recommend.

Adaptive Load Balancing (ALB)

The first recommended NIC teaming strategy is called "Adaptive Load Balancing" (ALB). This is specified in Linux by using bonding mode = 6.

"Adaptive load balancing: includes balance-tlb plus receive load balancing (rlb) for IPV4 traffic, and does not require any special switch support. The receive load balancing is achieved by ARP negotiation."

When you use ALB, you should plug each NIC into a different switch. This removes all three SPOF mentioned above. Additionally, it provides a basic level of load-balancing. I highly recommend using ALB for NIC teaming, because it offers the most advantages without requiring special configuration on the network switch.

IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic link aggregation" (LACP)

The second recommended NIC teaming strategy is called "IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic link aggregation" (LACP). This is specified in Linux by using bonding mode = 4.

When you use LACP, you are required to plug all NICs into the same switch. You should only use LACP if you have an internally redundant switch, usually in the form of modular cards or a proprietary stack of switches. Additionally, you are also required to configure the switchports to use LACP. Once you have met all the requirements, you will have a great network connection. LACP can have the same fault-tolerence as ALB, and it has a better load-balancing than ALB.

Summary

Most people should use ALB (mode=6) for NIC teaming their Linux server because it is the simplest method to achieve fault-tolerance and load balancing. If you require higher bandwidth, and you have an internally redundant switch, and you can configure your switchports to use LACP, then you should use LACP (mode=4) for NIC teaming.

Here are a few links on how to configure NIC teaming in Ubuntu Linux:

HowTo do Ethernet Bonding on Ubuntu – Properly

UbuntuLTSP Trunking

Caveat: I am a network engineer, and not a server engineer. It is my goal for everyone to increase their server's network availability with this knowledge. If you have an opinion on this topic, please share it in the comments. Thanks!

Weekly Ubuntu District of Columbia Meeting Minutes

In attendance:
crimsun
kjcole
Magilum
bcurtiswx

[START] crimsun opens meeting at 18:00 sharp
[DONE] kjcole finished redirect of DCTeam to DistrictOfColumbiaTeam wiki page
[DONE] crimsun posted last week's bugjam/LoCo team photos to http://www.flickr.com/photos/crimsun/sets/72157623317037372/
[ACTION] crimsun to follow up with fridge admins regarding LoCo activities on Ubuntu fridge Google calendar]
[ACTION] crimsun to investigate merging Lucid source packages using Ground Control
[ACTION] bcurtiswx to follow up about using GC to fix bugs
[ACTION] bcurtiswx to chair next meeting
[ACTION] Magilum to nominate packages for loco adoption
[END] crimsun closes meeting at 18:48

Thanks to all who attended

I love being married, it has opened up an incredible sense of commitment and security in my life and my wife’s life. Love is love, and I would never want to prevent anyone from enjoying what I am afforded the privilage of enjoying. This includes gay people. As such, I have joined this Facebook group to get 1,000,000 who support same sex marriage. I usually hate these kinds of groups, but I think it could be interesting to visualize the support behind this issue. Worthy, methinks.