...leap. Tomorrow's leap day of course. Thankfully, I'm safe from the possibility of being proposed to, but all you unmarried guys in relationships, be on the lookout for the romance being turned on...

Carlos (who incidentally, I keep typing Carols - tis not the season anymore, James...) reminded me about being able to dump output from the perl backends. I'd mucked up slightly, thanks C, now I can work in a bit more focused way.

Met up with Amanda and one of her colleagues after work last night for a couple of drinks. I don't know what she must have thought. She's a civil servant, works for the Employment Tribunal Service, and there's me - hair half-way down my back, unshaven around my messy goatee, wearing a really old Red Hat (it's so old, I had it before I started at SuSE) tshirt.

Finally have my wedding ring back on. I damaged it several months ago when it caught on a door handle. I eventually got around to taking it in to a jewellers two weeks ago, and got it back today. The shape's slightly different to before, it's flatter and wider (I guess because they have to soften it to be able to repair it), and it feels kind of weird having it on again. At least there's no danger of people mistaking me for a singleton now.

Whoops, I've severely b0rked my local version of GST::Users. Took Carlos' advice, but I think I'm having a bad day, with the result that for some reason now when I start users-admin, I get the message

The password you entered is invalid.

So, I don't even know if the code I've written works at this stage. Suffice to say, I won't be submitting a patch quite yet . I think I'm just tired, have rsync'd my code tree to home, hopefully I might have the time/energy to hacka bit more on it over the weekend.

Soul Man went pretty well, we had a 30 guys, and Mike spoke really well, drawing on his own experience, especially from the point of view of when he worked for David Pytches, and how his being a man of vision meant he was secure enough in himself to be able to truely encourage others in their ministries and giftings. I found that really encouraging, as that's one of the prime things I think being a church leader is all about, and if I am called to that, then it's something I'll really want to be about. He also spoke about Nehemiah as an example of someone who responded to the vision he had of rebuilding Jerusalem, and how to deal with the opposition that will come when you try to walk out your vision.

I've mentioned before that this blog is created using blosxom, which is Perl based. I'd observed that a lot of the GNOME guys used pyblosxom, the Python version. Now, I know that this is partly because you have to be a Python freak to be involved with GNOME these days but I figured there might be a performance improvement, so I did a little test with my blog. I set up pyblosxom on the same machine as I host my blosxom blog, made all the settings the same, but didn't include any plugins for pyblosxom (blosxom generates my archives tree using a plugin - that means extra CPU time to execute). Even with the archive plugin, blosxom still displayed the blog content faster than pyblosxom, so I'll be sticking with what I know, the Perl version.

Haven't mentioned this for a few days, I've not been ignoring it. I chatted with Carlos earlier in the week on #GST about it, and basically we both think that my code should work. But it doesn't. If anyone can tell me how the following doesn't work, when $gst_dist == "suse-9.0", I'd love to know:

%login_defs_prop_map = ();
# For SuSE, we need to use SYSTEM_GID_MIN, not GID_MIN

if ($gst_dist =~ /^suse/)
{
    @login_defs_prop_array =
    (
     "QMAIL_DIR" ,     "qmail_dir",
     "MAIL_DIR" ,      "mailbox_dir",
     "MAIL_FILE" ,     "mailbox_file",
     "PASS_MAX_DAYS" , "pwd_maxdays",
     "PASS_MIN_DAYS" , "pwd_mindays",
     "PASS_MIN_LEN" ,  "pwd_min_length",
     "PASS_WARN_AGE" , "pwd_warndays",
     "UID_MIN" ,       "umin",
     "UID_MAX" ,       "umax",
     "SYSTEM_GID_MIN" ,       "gmin",
     "GID_MAX" ,       "gmax",
     "USERDEL_CMD" ,   "del_user_additional_command",
     "CREATE_HOME" ,   "create_home",
     "", "");
}

else
{
    @login_defs_prop_array =
    (
     "QMAIL_DIR" ,     "qmail_dir",
     "MAIL_DIR" ,      "mailbox_dir",
     "MAIL_FILE" ,     "mailbox_file",
     "PASS_MAX_DAYS" , "pwd_maxdays",
     "PASS_MIN_DAYS" , "pwd_mindays",
     "PASS_MIN_LEN" ,  "pwd_min_length",
     "PASS_WARN_AGE" , "pwd_warndays",
     "UID_MIN" ,       "umin",
     "UID_MAX" ,       "umax",
     "GID_MIN" ,       "gmin",
     "GID_MAX" ,       "gmax",
     "USERDEL_CMD" ,   "del_user_additional_command",
     "CREATE_HOME" ,   "create_home",
     "", "");
}

for ($i = 0; $login_defs_prop_array[$i] ne ""; $i += 2)
{
  $login_defs_prop_map {$login_defs_prop_array[$i]} = $login_defs_prop_array[$i + 1];
  $login_defs_prop_map {$login_defs_prop_array[$i + 1]} = $login_defs_prop_array[$i];
}

%profiles_prop_map = ();

# For SuSE, we need to use SYSTEM_GID_MIN, not GID_MIN

if ($gst_dist =~ /^suse/)
{
    @profiles_prop_array =
    (
     "NAME" ,          "name",
     "COMMENT",        "comment",
     "LOGINDEFS",      "login_defs",
     "HOME_PREFFIX",   "home_prefix",
     "SHELL",          "shell",
     "GROUP",          "group",
     "SKEL_DIR",       "skel_dir",
     "QMAIL_DIR" ,     "qmail_dir",
     "MAIL_DIR" ,      "mailbox_dir",
     "MAIL_FILE" ,     "mailbox_file",
     "PASS_RANDOM",    "pwd_random",
     "PASS_MAX_DAYS" , "pwd_maxdays",
     "PASS_MIN_DAYS" , "pwd_mindays",
     "PASS_MIN_LEN" ,  "pwd_min_length",
     "PASS_WARN_AGE" , "pwd_warndays",
     "UID_MIN" ,       "umin",
     "UID_MAX" ,       "umax",
     "SYSTEM_GID_MIN" ,       "gmin",
     "GID_MAX" ,       "gmax",
     "USERDEL_CMD" ,   "del_user_additional_command",
     "CREATE_HOME" ,   "create_home",
     "", "");
}

else
{
    @profiles_prop_array =
    (
     "NAME" ,          "name",
     "COMMENT",        "comment",
     "LOGINDEFS",      "login_defs",
     "HOME_PREFFIX",   "home_prefix",
     "SHELL",          "shell",
     "GROUP",          "group",
     "SKEL_DIR",       "skel_dir",
     "QMAIL_DIR" ,     "qmail_dir",
     "MAIL_DIR" ,      "mailbox_dir",
     "MAIL_FILE" ,     "mailbox_file",
     "PASS_RANDOM",    "pwd_random",
     "PASS_MAX_DAYS" , "pwd_maxdays",
     "PASS_MIN_DAYS" , "pwd_mindays",
     "PASS_MIN_LEN" ,  "pwd_min_length",
     "PASS_WARN_AGE" , "pwd_warndays",
     "UID_MIN" ,       "umin",
     "UID_MAX" ,       "umax",
     "SYSTEM_GID_MIN" ,       "gmin",
     "GID_MAX" ,       "gmax",
     "USERDEL_CMD" ,   "del_user_additional_command",
     "CREATE_HOME" ,   "create_home",
     "", "");
}

for ($i = 0; $profiles_prop_array[$i] ne ""; $i += 2)
{
  $profiles_prop_map {$profiles_prop_array[$i]} = $profiles_prop_array[$i + 1];
  $profiles_prop_map {$profiles_prop_array[$i + 1]} = $profiles_prop_array[$i];
}

Tonight I'm leading a meeting at church, it's the latest Soul Man night. Soul Man is our men's ministry, which I'm involved with leading, and we've recently started alternating our monthly meetings between ones with a spiritual bent (like tonight) and our traditional social nights (normally curry nights). Tonight's meeting is entitled The Wrong Glasses, last time we had our first spiritual night, and it was called The Wrong Trousers, and it's developed into a theme. Mike, our Senior Pastor's ging to be teaching, on the subject of vision (hence glasses - geddit?). Should be a good night, and we're hoping for a good turnout tonight. Last time we had a Delirious? gig to compete with.

Had a bit of a result today, I finally beat a Nokia IP30 into submission to establish a VPN with one of our satellite offices. I'm quite proud of myself.

Just to clarify the oven issue (for Paul's benefit...)

We did not forget that we had switched it off, and had to get a repair dude out just to turn it back on. It died while in use, it would now seem due to a power surge. The repair engineer took the top off the cooker (the gas hobs) and flicked a switch behind the front panel, which gets triggered by power surges or overheating. This switch is not mentioned anywhere in the manual, with the result that we've lost out on 75 quid, which could have proved handy this time next year when we would have got it, when potentially, I could be at college again.

Ever have one of those days where you realise you actually know quite a lot about Cisco kit? More than perhaps you want to know?
That was me today.

Ever have one of those days when you get no hacking done at all, and you'd swear someone glued your phone to your ear?
That was me today.

Ever have one of those days when you blow a £75 non-usage payment from an extended warranty to have a repair man come round a flick a switch?
That was us today.

At least our oven now works.

...after a fashion...

Went round to Dave's last night to try to help him set up his USB DSL modem under Linux. Dave has SuSE 9.0 Personal, dual-booting with a less free OS, and he just got DSL. His ISP provided him with a Binatone DSL500 modem, which claims to support Linux. Naturally, Dave had tried to set it up in YaST, which successfully recognised it as a USB ADSL modem, even said what make and model it was (although it listed it as the original make, not the Binatone rebadging - but that's fair enough). However, in spite of that, and pretending to configure a PPP interface using it, nothing happened.

The CD that came with the modem had a directory cunningly called Linux on it, in which were a i386 compiled RPM, a source RPM and a README. Dave had, after YaST's failure, installed the binary RPM, but still couldn't figure out how to get it working. He was aware that Binatone said the RPM was for Red Hat, but had hoped it might be OK.

It probably would have been, had it not been for such an old version of RH (7.1) that the kernel module included was compiled with a GCC 2.x compiler, rather then 3.x as used in SuSE 9.0. No problem I thought, I'll just take advantage of the fact they supply a source RPM, and rebuild it for this kernel. Problem is that 9.0 Personal doesn't supply the kernel-source package on the CDs, to save space presumably. rebooted into the less free OS, and downloaded the latest k_athlon/kernel-source packages, saved them somewhere I'd remember, booted Linux and installed them. A quick reboot for the new kernel and I proceeded to install some handy things like make, gcc, etc from the CDs. The package took all of a couple of seconds to build on his Duron, and I installed it. Ran the init.d script provided, and lo and behold, the interface came up. I guess the username and password were stored on the modem by the 'doze driver, because it just came up. rebooted to verify it would do so on boot and yes, it did. Now, I'm going to have to give Dave some insserv headers to pop in the top of that script so SuSEconfig doesn't knacker it, but otherwise, it just worked. Had I had access to the kernel source right from the outset, I could have been done in a matter of minutes.

I left Dave with APT downloading a whole bunch of updates for him, with that modem, the Linux support for which appears to have really just been an after-thought, getting transfer rates of about 50% faster from the same server under Linux than it did under that other, less free, better supported OS.

My huge investment of time in Astaro is nearing an end, thank goodness. I've enjoyed some of it, but frankly, I'll be glad when the machines in question are just sitting there doing their stuff and occasional maintenance.

Spent some time at lunchtime hacking on GST::Users, managed to get it working with SuSE 9.0, but only if I'm prepared to break it for other distributions. I'm not. Still, means I could do a patch for SuSE RPMs, but really I'd rather get a patch that can be merged into the actual code done. I need to check with Carlos how gst_dist is used, because it seems I'd totally misunderstood it.

So, it's my lunch hour at work, I'd brought sarnies, so I didn't have to waste 30 mins going to Tesco. Figured I'd quickly port p.SuSE to the latest Planet code before spending the rest of the time looking at GST. Forty minutes later, I finally decided I was happy with p.SuSE, and I've not got much time left (even less once I've done this blog entry) to hack on GST. Gah.

So, p.SuSE changes are as follows:

• Updated to latest code, which makes it easier to produce multiple output formats
• Added an RSS 2.0 feed of p.SuSE, RSS 1.0 will follow, as will the blogroll in ROAF and OPML all being well.
• SuSE News and SuSE Security feeds are now provided by scripts hosted by Nick Daniels, this means that they are done automatically, rather than me having to manually update them. Nice one Nick.
• Had to remove the Novell news feeds, as they're in un-hacked RSS 0.91, which because of the way the new code handles a lack of pubDate (the old code simply ignored such items) gave all the Novell entries an effective pubDate of the time the generation script was run. novell are working on RSS 2.0 feeds, so they'll return when they're ready.
• I've also made sure the Planetarium list is as up-to-date as possible.
• Added a SHORTCUT ICON of a dinky little Geeko head

In other news, we took delivery of a male hamster yesterday that we're going to try to mate Tia with. Thing is, she didn't seem remotely interested in him. We eventually just had to seperate them after she started trying to make mincemeat out of him.

Our oven died last Wednesday. It's still under warranty, but we can't have someone come and look at it until Monday of next week apparently, and then, if it's not repairable, or the cost of doing so is more than the purchase price, we'll be getting a new one, and we'll have to wait again for a delivery date to be available. I dunno what Comet expect us to do in the meantime, but last night we got pizza. Can't do that every night though.

Or can we...?

Well, on the GST front anyway. I did open backends/users-conf.in in vim, but that was all, didn't actually add or remove a single character of code. Built new Garnome and gave it a whirl, alas, until Evolution is in a situation where I can actually use 1.5.x (ie, where it doesn't just lock up whenever I try to look at my Calendar) I can't reasonably use/test it. (Evo 1.4 won't start with the 1.5 versions of ORBit etc loaded first). Still like the look of 1.5 though.

Sent a birthday card to my mother today too (hi mum, I know you read my blog, even if you don't get most of it )

Seems the license issue isn't the big thing with HA on Astaro, it is actually a bug, but the spaces in the encryption key appears to be a genuine thing.

Gonna knock up a script to install all Michael's support packages for OOo from the Red carpet channel, without actually having to install RC itself (been burned once, not going there again). Will do it on my home machine I expect, and then use ooo-build to build packages. No reason not to then link to the Ximian packages on ULB, then I can get down to some serious testing with it.

Spotted this in Jeff's blog, an article on IBM Developer Works about the Planet phenomenon, and it makes positive reference to Planet SuSE amongst others. Check it out. amanda's at work today, overtimetastic, so I'm going to take care of some chores. Might check out jhbuild on my home machine too.

Right, seems that the problem lies in the fact that the users group's gid on SuSE is less than GID_MIN as defined in login.defs, which means that it's not in the range that's available bu default in GST::Users. If you enable the 'view all users and groups' checkbox, then it's used as the default, but that doesn't cut it. So, I' going to have to rig it so that under SuSE, GST::Users uses SYSTEM_GID_MIN.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, daring blogger James Ogley will attempt to justify his continual references recently to Astaro Security Linux on his blog that forms part of Planet SuSE. I heard a rumour today, and granted, it may not be accurate, but I'll take it as my justification, that Astaro 5 will be based upon SuSE! Also, I noticed that if one puts 'astaro' into Google, my blog appears 6th in the search results - smooth. It also means that people looking for help on Astaro may well end up here, and therefore it's time for my
Astaro Tip Of The Day
Okay, this is by no means going to be a regular thing, but it's a Friday, and I'm in need of amusement. My tip is this: if you're setting up High Availability, you need to remember two things:

• You need a licensed version, else the HA nodes will simply tick you off with their errant behaviour (try it with an eval version to see what I mean)
• Don't use any spaces in the encryption key for the heartbeat link - this will only bring you pain, frustration and hair loss

I've spent most of the last two days sat on the floors of comms rooms with a laptop working on Astaro, so no GST hackage has happened. Noticed the new release of GNOME-Mud last night, and I think it may have been the first time I'd ever actually built and ran it, which I did for about 30 seconds last night. Seems nice, although didn't feel as polished as Papaya while at the same time feeling more GNOMEy. Still plan to get involved and hopefully contribute some useful code, but work is really eating my life at the moment.

Also been emailing Michael about getting involved in some useful way (probably testing in my case here) with the GNOME/OOo work. Should be fun, especially if he has SuSE packages of the various dep's - I really don't have time to build them myself at the moment. Got to wondering today whether anyone at Ximian has ever tried ULB GNOME.

Built and about to upload GStreamer 0.6.5

Sometimes all you want to do is a list of your achievements/lack of for the day

• Cisco router configured and commissioned, and shock - it worked!
• Updated APT installation guide for ULB GNOME
• Made brain hurt trying to get HA working on Astaro 4
• Utterly failed to hack on GST at all
• Built latest Garnome^*

^* As a result of this, lost all my panel launchers when I switched back to ULB-GNOME. Had the chance to try an Evolution 1.5 snapshot at last, but the one in Garnome is at least one release out of date (as is the D&DP release included) and it didn't manage to build LDAP support, not that I can actually access the LDAP server at work anyway. It also failed to import my calendar and addressbook - boy was I glad that it uses a different location for the files, so I hadn't lost them completely. I'll wait till the next release I think before really sinking my teeth in, although I have to say, I like the new Evolution interface.

OK, I haven't blogged in a few days, to be honest, I simply haven't had the energy or the inclination to share my thoughts with the world recently. I've also not had much hacking to report, not had the time to get any further with GST::Users or GST::Services. I officially hate Cisco DSL routers though - what a pile of pants they are. Gyah!

Away from work/hacking stuff the last few days have actually been quite reasonable. Was cool to see Dave & Catherine on Friday, and Caz came round for dinner last night. Church was special on Sunday, albeit quite difficult as well, saying goodbye to Rachel, one of the pastoral staff. She's moving away to get married.

Seeing the DDO tomorrow night to talk about my preparation for selection conference, I'll be letting him know about my college interview dats as well I expect. Just got one form left to finish filling in for Ministry Division too.

Haven't even thought about Saturday as yet, better get the thinking cap on...

Have added the mighty Michael Meeks to Planet SuSE. He works for Ximian, and uses SuSE. A lot of what he's working on results in mmmm, good stuff for use SuSE types, especially the OpenOffice.org work he's doing. Wonder whether he's going to be the first of many Planet GNOME/SuSE cross-overs...

More Astaro goodness, mmmm, mighty fine. When I think about the trouble some other firewall products have given me in the past, Astaro rocks out. I'm someone who actually really knows about firewalling and stuff like that, but with some products, it's just nigh-on impossible to get them to do what you want. Astaro, at least under test-bench situations, is different. It behaves. When it says it's doing something, it actually is. As yet, it's yet to throw a typical IT less-than-useful error message at me as well.

In other news, fixed a small buglet in my enchant packages, and reuploaded gimp2-devel from yesterday. Seems something went screwy in uploading, cos although the package installed fine for me, anyone who grabbed it from my site or by APT couldn't install it cos of a bad checksum (if I remember right).

Still haven't figured out what's up with the users backend in GST, hoping to touch base with one of the lead developers sometime this weekend on IRC to chat about it. Also, the services backend is going to need a serious overhaul to port it to SuSE 9.0, because of insserv. Basically, if I allow it to just symlink services into the runlevels willy-nilly, the moment SuSEconfig gets run, insserv's just going to obliterate the links. Seems to me that in this case, the correct behaviour under SuSE is to use insserv. I actually, think insserv's a great piece of software, makes managing runlevels very easy if you know how to use it. Thing is, it will make the UI for setting a start priority a bit redundant on SuSE.

Started looking towards the next release of ULB GNOME today, in the light of my GST work. The plan is to do the ULB-G update when I'm ready to build packages of GST for 9.0, probably bump the version number to 0.7.0 rather that 0.6.5 as a result. I've also updated ulb-themes in preparation for that update. Partly to change the Metacity theme in the usr local bin theme to the new Nuvola, but also, I've included a new Smooth GTK+ theme, SmoothStreak, which also uses the kick-ass 'Crystal' icon theme. I'm using that theme now. First time in ages I've used something other than the ulb theme for any length of time.

Dave & Catherine coming round for dinner tonight. Given that Dave reads my blog, I better say we're really looking forward to it... (we really are as it happens - saves me lying about it...).

Seriously thinking about switching to a 2.6 kernel, as I've heard it provides some seriously, actually noticable, performance improvements. Just thinking at this stage, mind...

Submitted a patch to GNOME System Tools that adds SuSE 9.0 support to the time tool. Have mostly got the user admin tool working here too, but for some reason it's insisting on using the Red Hat model of user groups (for anyone who doesn't know, Red Hat creates a group for each user, with the same name as that user). Now, while this is all very well and good, as it provides more options in terms of permissions that just putting everyone in the users group by default, the fact is that SuSE uses the users group, and part of porting the tool is to match the way the distro does things as far as is possible. I'll get there, I'm sure. Also, done an updated version of the SuSE icon used within GST, to be based upon the new SuSE logo rather than quite an old version of it.

Built GIMP 2.0pre3, which prompted at least one comment about me being quick on the draw on SLE. It's largly cos my new build machine's CPU has a clock speed about 2.5 times that of my old one. Which is nice. Also just built Sound Juicer 0.5.10.

Astaro Security Linux really is very nice, as I commented yesterday. I'm really taking a shine to it. Talk about user-friendly, and it's all done using Free Software (with the possible exception of their front-end).

Wycliffe have brought my interview forward from the end of April to the middle of March, which is nice, means St John's will still be fresh in our minds, and we'll be able to make a better comparison. Also going to meet up with Mark while we're in Oxford, it's about 18 months since we saw him, which is waaaay too long...

I've refused two Orkut invitations so far, please don't invite me, I don't need anything else to suck my time away...

I like Astaro Security Linux.

Let me be very clear about it, I like it a lot, and would use it over certain other firewalls.

Seems Evolution 1.4.6 will finally come out this week. This is good, gives me an excuse to build ORBit 2.8 (and then build Evo against it), so that I can then build Evolution 1.5 packages too. could only be a matter of time then until I also get GNOME 2.4 packages built and online - you never know...

I have two of them arranged now. Well, I guess you could say three. I already knew I'd be having an interview at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, I just don't know when yet, but today, I got dates for interviews at St John's College, Nottingham and Wycliffe Hall, Oxford.

We're training the newest member of the Word Projection team tonight at church which is always fun, it's great to see new people getting involved with our little team.

Did I say "saddle"? I meant "harness" (Blackadder)
finally got my new machine sorted today, hooray for APT. This was particularly useful for anyone who uses my Gaim packages, as it meant I was able, at last, to build packages with the patch to fix the recently discovered security problems. Also got updated Rhythmbox and libwpd packages up on the site.

On the whole a very good weekend, the fondue night was just sheer class, and a very interesting suggestion was made to me, which if I decide to go for, will no doubt be documented here.

Finally got around to finishing off my other two college application forms yesterday, and they will have gone in the first post today

Incidentally, as well as a new PC, I also now have one of these monster VoIP phones on my desk at work (Nokia 8310 included for size comparison)