tola

As usual, the TTLLP office will open noon ’til mid-evening on 1 April. I’ve already noted one thing on identi.ca that might be an April Fool’s joke (surely it’s not real) and we’ve enough to do without double-checking everything we’re told.

Further, timezones and international communications (we work with companies from +1100 to -0900 IIRC) makes April Fool’s jokes really tedious. Unless it’s done really carefully, the joker is probably the fool, either too early (31 March) or too late (afternoon) for some of the targets.

I’m sure there must be lots written about group system administration, but it doesn’t seem to be written in either the FAQ, the reference or even the venerable FDL’d SAG, so I hope it’s not a(nother) completely silly question. As I was reminded by the Paralysed Perl Package Problem, sometimes other system administrators can really mess you up by changing things without documenting what, how or why they made that change.

My current solution on that system is to put the message “please record any major system changes with the command dch -f /root/changelog -i 'description of change'” in the /etc/motd file. I’ve also installed apt-listchanges with a suitable configuration. For TTLLP servers, there’s not a problem because we all use the same task tracker to make notes.

For shared/remote servers, I’d like to have something better than fault-finding and the intrusion detection tools, but stop short of trying to require all system administrators to use a particular version control on the system configuration, or trying to require them to use a centralised bug tracker application. (The other sysadmins work for other people, so we can’t require them to do it and “pay us to manage a repository/bug tracker for your server” is an awkward sell anyway.)

What do you do?

Last Friday, I spent most of the day at this NAVCA ICT event in Taunton. (There’s another similar one in York this Friday if you’re interested.) The event was a sandwich, with a Steve Bridger social media session as the filling between workshop halves.

Conference

I went to the workshop for support workers. I’m not sure whether it was quite the right label, but the others were for managers/trustees and for accidental technical supporters, which definitely weren’t. There seemed to be at least three other ICT specialists there, so I wasn’t the only one.

The best thing about the workshop was the mix of specialists and generalists. I was really interested in what the generalists had to say, but sadly the workshop was more of a lecture and I don’t feel I got as much out as I could. I’d be interested to know if that was the same for other participants.

I’m not sure what I thought of Steve Bridger’s session. It was a difficult one: the strange mix of an audience was all together, the room felt pretty warm and it stood between us and lunch. I had trouble concentrating but posted a few updates to identi.ca about it.

The worst thing was all the needless promotion of certain companies’ products. They didn’t talk about blogging and syndication, they talked about Blogger and Google Reader; they didn’t talk about photo-sharing, they talked about Flickr; they didn’t talk about spreadsheets, they talked about Excel.

Nevertheless, I left the event feeling really positive about other ICT specialists, with some hope that the generalists were “getting it” and quite impressed by the people I met from the other tracks. It was pretty good to help someone towards the autosuspend setting on their GNOME-based netbook within ten minutes of arriving, too. I’ve just updated software.coop with Richard Stallman’s explanation of why proprietary software is a social problem, to see if that helps put the community-based view across.

I’ll look again at some of the grant-funded resources mentioned and see if we can improve them, but I’d welcome any comments from the voluntary and community sector about how best to do that.

The monthly board meeting of SPI will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 18 March) at 20:00 UTC. Members may have seen that the meeting announcement was posted, but a bit late and with a misleading subject line. This month, the record-keeping looks like it will catch up to present-day, with a small hole still from Neil McGovern’s time as secretary. The current treasurer and secretary have also posted their reports before the meeting… only the president is missing this month.

There’s some bank house-keeping and another new associated project under discussion: OpenWRT. There seemed to be a little confusion about whether it had been waiting for a legal opinion or not and some controversy about whether SPI recognises a liaison or a decision-maker.

Once again, I may still be travelling and without a stable network connection during the meeting, or I might have made it home by then. Either way, watch the comments below this article for a link to the summary when posted.

With any luck, someone has seen this problem before and can fix it easily. I don’t seem to be able to find the fix by searching, but the search terms feel like they’re either too general or too specific.

I was trying to install some perl software on a debian lenny system that was upgraded from etch (and previously from sarge). After installing the dependencies, I started getting errors like this:-

Update: Well done to Raphael who spotted the local that I’d overlooked. D’oh! Now to see if I can discover where that came from.

Update 2: Also thanks to Florian who emailed in at about the same time (I don’t read my email as much as my website dashboard, usually).

Then I discovered that the debian mirror being used (which is in the same city, and in a nearby network) is marked as bad on the health check. I switched mirrors to a known-good one that I’ve used for other systems recently, but no joy.

I think a key symptom is this bit near the end of the output of perl -V:

Our good systems show a December “compiled at” date and a much longer @INC list. I’ve tried reinstalling pretty much every package I think might be connected, including libc6, libperl5.10, perl, perl-base and perl-modules (those last four are all version 5.10.0-19). I really don’t want to reinstall the whole system because it’s behind an irritating firewall that will make it a 10-hour round-trip site visit. I’m currently hunting and removing obsolete packages to try to make sure they’re not causing problems, because I’m running out of straws to clutch at.

How would you recover a debian system from this?

Conference

This afternoon, I’ll be at What’s So Social About Social Enterprise? in Bristol.

In general, I’ll be trying to support the idea that TTLLP and cooperatives in general are necessarily social enterprise. I may ask a few questions about the Social Enterprise Mark which you may have seen me asking elsewhere already. I’ll probably be sending a few updates during the event to identi.ca and other sites if I can get it working from the venue.

What’s your answer? What’s social about social enterprise?

I was disappointed to read that ippimail announced “the closure of the ippimail project [...] barring a miracle we will take the site down at noon on the 1st May 2009, UK time.”

I first covered the ippimail social enterprise back in 2006 as a way to do better than googlemail. There was a longer review on Cutting Free.

So what now for free-to-use UK-based free-software-using webmails? Where do you think ippimail users should look now? Are there others giving to charity? Is a better world possible by emailing?

Earlier this week, Tom Watson, Cabinet Office Parliamentary Secretary, published the Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use: Government Action Plan. It’s had a pretty mixed reaction, with mild scepticism (niq’s soapbox: Is gov.uk going open-source?) being the average reaction from what I’ve read. I particularly liked the kind offer by Bristol Wireless to debianise Tom Watson’s laptop.

I think commentators are bang-on that the procurement process needs to change and that this sounds positive. I’ll love it if I’m wrong, but this looks like the “lip service as usual” which I’ve seen in the last 10 years working on FOSS in the UK. I want to see the action that comes from this plan! When government actually starts buying FOSS from typical FOSS service providers and not just the IBMs of this world, then I’ll believe it.

My suspicion is re-ignited by some of the activites around this action plan. For example, does anyone know why the Cabinet Office didn’t select FOSS to run their special public FOSS Aggregation page? (Actually, what’s the best FOSS tag aggregator web service out there? I know we can set them up in Wordpress widgets, but what hosted services are there?)

I’m also a bit bemused that their page requires users to accept cookies until they expire, yet its privacy policy explicitly says “You may suppress cookies after your visit or configure your Internet browser to prevent them.” Yes, I can prevent them, but then it does nothing useful!

(Based on a comment I made at the OSS Watch team blog and discussions with a few user groups.)

This week and next week are Fairtrade Fortnight. As I’ve mentioned in discussions at the Co-operative Group, there are some drawbacks to Fairtrade (most of which can be overcome by trading with co-operatives locally), but it is worth supporting fairtrade overall.

The featured event this year is Go Bananas for Fairtrade, an attempt at world-record banana-eating on 6-7 March. I don’t like bananas much, but I’ll eat them cooked, so I’ll be joining in.

If you want to get involved and do something else, there is an events calendar on the FtFn site.

I’ve added the lovely k’s Helping Hand to Koha Community Blogs. I’m particularly pleased to see a site combining both Koha and Drupal, two of my current favourites. A bit more about the background to the site is over at Korerorero: More great Koha news from India.

Websites

I’ve just updated the online banking compatibility list after a report from Italy that Monte dei Paschi di Siena is not currently working for GNU/Linux users. Can anyone confirm they broke it, or tell us how to get it working, please?

The Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation are probably the two authorities on what is free and open source software that are better respected than the debian project. It’s fairly easy to see that the famous licences (GNU GPL) appear on both lists, but how similar are their approvals?

There was a comparison at Asheeshworld Notes you will like: OSI vs FSF in 2007, but I’ve noticed more and more duplicates in that listing and the source code didn’t work for me. I’ve captured the current differences between their actual approvals in a pseudo-diff. The generating code and intermediate steps are splattered around the same folder.

Many of the differences look like a result of process differences, but I’m not sure because OSI doesn’t make any comments and their licence review process archive seems awkward to search. As I understand it, a lawyer advocates a licence in the OSI process, so it requires the licensor to contribute (and many licensors couldn’t care less about OSI); but FSF does an independent review, so FSF has to decide it’s worth reviewing. In case it’s not obvious, I think FSF’s independent foundation-led review is much the better of those two.

There are two licences that OSI approved but FSF lists as non-free: NASA Open Source Agreement and the Reciprocal Public License. Both of these are “send-back-ware” where changes have to be sent back or made available to the upstream developer. Many debian developers agree such payments-in-kind are non-free (OSI’s OSDefinition is based on the Debian Free Software Guidelines), but I think an early OSI advisor thought they were a good idea, so those approvals look like an OSI bug to me.

It’s not obvious if there are licences that FSF approves but OSI rejects. OSI doesn’t seem to list licences to avoid.

Is it helpful to see the differences? Would a comparison with the debian archive be useful? Are there other curiousities captured in the differences? Are people interested in reconciling the differences?

Three things I really like have released recently:-

1. Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (”Lenny”): I installed it on a laptop the weekend before going to a conference and I’m really impressed. It installed fairly neatly and was good-looking (gtk installer from USB stick, default desktop task, in case anyone cares). I found one or two small glitches while travelling, which I’ll reportbug soon, but they’re very minor. Well done to everyone involved in stabilising this release!
2. The co-operative officially launched its new brand with a 2.5-minute whole-break advert using a Bob Dylan track, both of which are unusual. OK, so I feel it should have been available in a FOSS-friendly format and not done on the same day as announcing a sale of opticians or a big closure, but it’s still good to see the co-operative getting big TV exposure.
3. Videos of Debian at FOSDEM and the Business of Open Source mini-conference at Linux.conf.au were released, which I’ll watch soon. The current trend of recording key conferences isn’t a substitute for being there in-person, but it’s still invaluable and I thank all those involved.