I am using the Password Exporter addon for Firefox to sync my passwords between my various Firefox installations (2 OS on the laptop, 2 OS on the desktop and one for portable firefox on a usb stick). I am using it with version 3.0.X and 3.5 just fine.

I have created a shell script that finds the differences between two exported password files and creates a new xml with the differences of the two so that one can edit it and pick the ones he wants imported.
File: ff-password-sync.sh
To use it follow these two steps on each firefox installation:
Firefox->Tools->Add-ons->Password Exporter->Preferences->Export Passwords
Then use the script (you need bash and mktemp):
$ ./ff-password-sync.sh laptop-password-export-2009-07-01 dektop-password-export-2009-07-02
If it runs successfully you should have 2 files in your home dir:
ff-password-sync.diff: Contains the differences of the two files in diff format
ff-password-sync.xml: Contains the unique username password combinations that are missing
Edit ff-password-sync.xml to possibly remove entries you don’t want imported and then go to:
Firefox->Tools->Add-ons->Password Exporter->Preferences->Import Passwords
and load ff-password-sync.xml

If you engage in this process it’s almost certain that you will hit this bug:
“Can’t add a login with both a httpRealm and formSubmitURL.’ when calling method: [nsILoginManager::addLogin]“

The fix is provided by a user on his blog: Fix for Firefox’s Password Exporter Add-on

VirtualBox – my current favourite desktop virtualisation software – has been released in version 3.0.0 two days ago, so I gave it a try. The most interesting new feature in this new version is the “Guest SMP” support. It finally removes the limitation, that a guest can only work on one host core (which means, when you have a 4-core host CPU, the guest could only run with 1/4 of the speed).

The documentation is not very clear about what “Guest SMP” really does – it could, for example, just show multiple CPUs to the guest, but still only use one host core. To make sure that my assumption of VirtualBox 3 actually making it possible to assign multiple host CPUs/cores to the guest, so that it can actually run faster, I did a quick test. I started by making one of my Linux VMs a dual CPU VM:

In the VM, I then started to build the Linux kernel, once with make -j1 and once with make -j2. This is my CPU usage monitor on the (2-core) host, which shows both cores’ usage combined:

In section 1 of the graph, only one compiler process is running (make -j1). At the end of section 1 I aborted the building process and (in section 2) I typed in make -j2. Thus, section 3 shows the CPU usage when two compiler processes are running simultaneously in the VM. So my assumption was correct, it is now possible to make all of the host’s processing power available in a VM.

Thanks, VirtualBox team! (I won’t address the company behind VirtualBox, since this would probably cause my post to be outdated before I can press the “Publish” button). Lets just hope that this great project will see further development, it is currently the best desktop virtualisation project available, in my opinion. It would be even greater if all of the functionality was available in the Open Source version though. This would ensure that, no matter what the current company behind VirtualBox decides to do with it, development could go on.

NeddySeagoon and I have been trying to figure out the official 10th anniverary date of Gentoo, and here are the dates I've figured out so far:

I’ve uploaded an ebuild for the latest version of nicotine+ on gentoo’s bugzilla. Nicotine+ is a great p2p app written in PyGtK2 to connect to the Soulseek network.

I’ve also added psyco as a USE flag since it makes nicotine+ faster…but sadly, a bit more unstable as well. Test it and see if it makes any difference to you.

Ebuild: nicotine+-1.2.12.ebuild

Metro 1.4.1 has been released! I have new documentation online, now hosted on funtoo.org:

The ThoughtScore project is another gypsy on my to-do list along with the BMR. It seems as though the world of 3D graphics and I are drifting slowly apart. It’ll be such a pity to let it go, so I want to make a serious effort and continue the amazing progress I once had on ThoughtScore.

You can see the pitiful post I made after scrolling through history on this page:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=88517&page=3

Revive ThoughtScore! I need a plan, a design, something huge! Grab me some pencil and paper, and let’s bring my vision into a reality! I have a holiday coming up, and I hope I can approach this through another angle which should allow me to continue production.

The next post will be in a week’s time because I am going to be stuck in a jungle throughout next week. You will then receive posts in this order: 1) The Trek, 2) New Perspective Magazine Released, and 3) What is becoming of Eadrax.

Related posts:

1. ThoughtScore Updated!
2. A little (re)introduction to POSE2 and ThoughtScore
3. Final call for Eadrax testers.

I've committed an anti-slowloris patch to Funtoo, in apache-2.2.11-r1. I recommend that Apache users upgrade to this new version. (see http://bit.ly/WGSvD)

The Apache SlowLoris DoS is a pretty nasty thing. If you are running Apache (who isn't) then I strongly recommend you look carefully at the link above, learn about how this exploit works, and ensure that your infrastructure is safe.

I've been reviewing Roy Marples' 0.5.0 release of OpenRC for inclusion in Funtoo (we're currently at 0.4.2,) and the big change with 0.5.0 is that Roy has ripped out the existing networking functionality, and replaced it with something a lot simpler.

…and here I am for yesterday’s blog post with a quick new preview on the Perspective magazine: the centerspread. Lots of things going on, progress on Eadrax being made, my cousin, his wife and baby were staying over for a while, and I’m going on a monday-friday camp/trek/survival next week, so this’ll likely be one of my last posts for a while. Here it is in all its picture-speaks-a-thousand-words glory:

Oh, by the way I don’t take any credit for the photography.

Related posts:

1. Perspective Nov 2008 Distributed
2. Perspective Magazine Feb 09 Released!
3. Perspective in progress

In addition to keeping my blog more up-to-date, I've also decided to post tweets to my Twitter account (funtoo) at least daily.

I have to admit that I haven't been consumed by Twitter hysteria - if you're someone who really loves Twitter, and think I should totally love it too, please feel free to try to enlighten me about how awesome it is. :)

I haven't blogged in a long time, but strangely there has been a ton of stuff for me to blog about. I've just been very busy and need to get back into the habit.

A few days ago I wrote about people complaining that somebody was "wasting time" by porting Tomboy from Mono to C++ in a project called Gnote. Other people like it cause it frees them of the danger that is Mono and whatnot.

So what should we call this port of a program from one language to another one? Waste of time? Rescue from the patent-trap? How about we are all revolutionary and call it just what it is? Software development.

Let's just leave the snake pit that the whole Mono discussion is for a bit and look at something a lot less overcharged with FUD and suspicion, let's look at Python development.

In Python you usually write Python code to implement the functionality you need (wow who saw that one coming? ), but since Python is not really the fastest running language (it's interpreted and lacks a JIT after all [at least CPython does]) it's quite usual to port your library to C for the heavy lifting: After you have the functionality working (and you've got unit tests of course) you start rewriting parts of the library in C to be able to gain native speed. Most cryptographic libraries in Python go that route because crypto-algorithms are bloody expensive.

Does anyone call it a waste of time? No. Why? Because even if the direct porting might not even be a lot faster it will probably be in the end. It's just the normal process of development.

When I need to create something new, I first start building some prototype of sorts. To build prototypes I use the tool that allows me to get the prototype up to where it needs to be as quickly and efficiently as possible: When I need to design a GUI, I use paper or a whiteboard, when I wanna design a library I hack together a quick implementation in a dynamic language that makes developing things in an agile way easier (for me that means usually Python though Prolog has been good to me at times, too). Prototyping is a really important step in development because only when you prototype you can really see whether the basic idea that your mind created actually works.

Now let's go back to the whole Gnote thing. We have a working app, why would someone take a different language/platform to implement it? Well cause nobody (probably someone will come and say they do but I think most people don't ) prototypes in C++ because C++ isn't great for that. All the little things you have to manage make it harder to get to the point where the prototype is good enough so you use something else. Maybe Mono. Now we have an app that works, which means the file format to store things works, basic conceptual problems have been ironed out. The prototype has done its job. Of course we can keep it, develop it further but maybe someone thinks it's time to take what we learned from the prototype and reimplement it in a language that allows things to run faster, less resource consuming and whatnot. That's not a bad thing and not even against the prototype implementation (Tomboy in this case), it's just a new way to look at what we've learned to see whether we gain something from doing it differently.

How often have we read about people wanting to have some application or framework rewritten in another language: "Oh I'd love to use RubyOnRails but Ruby is just so slow!", "Oh I wanna use Django, but Python isn't installed on my webhost, I wished it was implemented in PHP!", "I really like Eclipse but there's no good JRE for my platform and it doesn't run well, I wished it was implemented in C!"? Why do we treat it differently when Mono is involved?

Why does the whole Mono discussion always seem to go towards FUD and flames and people accusing each other of conspiracies? Just look around, it's a completely normal process, one that happens every day all around everyone who develops.

I’ve decided to start a filter for adblock plus to filter out advertisements from Greek sites.

You can find more information on subscribing to the filter on the page: Greek adblock plus filter.

I started the list a long time ago with some personal filter for sites I visit the most. In order to enrich the list I searched and found a list with the supposedly “top 50″ greek sites (regarding traffic), so I visited them and started adding filters to reduce the ads on them.

I warn you though, the filters are a bit strict…and I don’t like flash ads…I really don’t. I hope you like the list.

Please contact me, by email or by commenting on Greek adblock plus filter page to add your own custom filters to the list.

Introduction

This post details setting up your own private mirror of Fedora’s repos.  There are many ways to do this, but this method is by far the best for heavy usage.  By using MirrorManager, clients in your IP range need no custom configuration.  Roaming laptop users automagically hit your mirror while on the premises, yet use the public infrastructure elsewhere.  Setup isn’t exactly hard, but it isn’t well documented so I’ll write about my experience here.

Some background info.. we have at least 50 Linux desktops, laptops, servers and VMs running about half Fedora 10 and half Fedora 11 at work.  Due to the number of systems, breadth of packages used, and desire to quickly update when new releases are out, I decided on a full mirror setup.  If you only have a handful of systems, you may be better off simply using a general purpose caching proxy like Squid, perhaps telling MirrorManager to point to it.

This guide should be used in addition to http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/Mirroring which has some background info.

Initial setup and mirror

First, get prepared by installing MirrorManager-client, which contains the report_mirror script you will need.  If your mirror isn’t running Fedora, you can clone the source of this app from their GIT repo.

yum install mirrormanager-client

You’ll be using rsync, a sysadmin’s best friend, for efficient mirroring.

Set up a shell script like mine below (d0mirror.sh) one level up from where your mirror will be accessible (http, ftp, rsync, nfs - covered later).  This one mirrors against kernel.org.  Choose a mirror close to you on the Internet.

rsync -vaH --exclude-from=fedora-excludes.txt --numeric-ids --delete --delete-delay \
 --delay-updates rsync://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora-enchilada fedora-mirror
report_mirror

And a text file (fedora-excludes.txt) excluding things you don’t want/need.  Take a look through a public mirror and decide if you want to eliminate anything else.  You may want to remove the *.iso line below if you want users to be able to pull disc images from this box.  Otherwise, this is probably a good list for most people.  You can exclude all of linux/updates/testing/ if you don’t enable the testing repo on any of your machines.

**/debug/**
**/alpha/**
**/source/**
**/SRPMS/**
**/*.iso
**/ppc/**
**/ppc64/**
linux/core/**
linux/development/**
linux/releases/7/**
linux/releases/8/**
linux/releases/9/**
linux/releases/test/**
linux/updates/8/**
linux/updates/9/**
linux/updates/testing/7/**
linux/updates/testing/8/**
linux/updates/testing/9/**

Run your shell script and sit back for up to a day or two depending on your connection speed.  My current mirror weighs in at about 80G.

Internal distribution

While you wait for sync, decide how you want to run the service internally.  HTTP is nice because it is easy for users to browse and decently quick with keep-alive.   Using NFS, rsync, or FTP may be a bit more efficient if you are worried about this.  You can list several URLs in MirrorManager for the best of all worlds.

Add the following to your Apache configuration if you decide to use HTTP:

Alias /fedora/ "/mnt/ar1/fedora-mirror/"

AddType application/octet-stream .rpm

<Directory "/mnt/ar1/fedora-mirror">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

<LocationMatch "\.(xml|xml\.gz|xml\.asc|sqlite)">
    Header set Cache-Control "must-revalidate"
    ExpiresActive On
    ExpiresDefault "now"
</LocationMatch>

Set up any other services of you choice to push that directory out in addition.

Working with MirrorManager client and server

Next, open up /etc/mirrormanager-client/report_mirror.conf.  Take notice of the site name, password, and host name.  You will need to set these up in MirrorManager in a bit.  The paths here are all local and used by report_mirror to check what you have available.

# if enabled=0, no data is sent to the database
enabled=1
server=https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mirrormanager/xmlrpc

[site]
# if enabled=0, no data about this site is sent to the database
enabled=1
name=<yoursitename>
password=<yourhostpassword>

[host]
# if enabled=0, no data about this host is sent to the database
enabled=1
name=x345-a2.internal
# if user_active=0, no data about this category is given to the public
# This can be used to toggle between serving and not serving data,
# such enabled during the nighttime (when you have more idle bandwidth
# available) and disabled during the daytime.
# not passing it means leave it alone in the database.

[stats]
# Stats are only sent when run with the -s option
# and when this section is enabled.
enabled=0
apache=/var/log/httpd/access_log
vsftpd=/var/log/vsftpd.log
# remember to enable log file and transfer logging in rsyncd.conf
rsyncd=/var/log/rsyncd.log

[Fedora Linux]
enabled=1
path=/mnt/ar1/fedora-mirror/linux

[Fedora EPEL]
path=/var/www/html/pub/epel
enabled=0

# lesser used categories below

[Fedora Web]
enabled=0
path=/var/www/html/pub/fedora/web

[Fedora Secondary Arches]
enabled=0
path=/var/www/html/pub/fedora-secondary

[Fedora Other]
enabled=0
path=/var/www/html/pub/alt

# historical content

[Fedora Core]
# if enabled=0, no data about this host is sent to the database
enabled=0
path=/var/www/html/pub/fedora/linux/core

[Fedora Extras]
enabled=0
path=/var/www/html/pub/fedora/linux/extras

Log into https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mirrormanager, creating a new account if you need to.  Add a new site with the same name as the config file from above.  You’ll set the site password here, and make sure to check the ‘private’ box if this is only for internal users.  Now, add a host under this site.  The name here should probably be a FQDN of your actual mirror, even if it is internal only (i.e x345-a2.internal from my example above).  Once that is done, add a “site-local netblock”.  This is your public IP network/netmask or network in CIDR notation.  If you only have one public IP, it will be in the format nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn/32.

Almost done.  Now, click Add Category.  “Fedora Linux” is the only one you are concerned with if you followed all the values in this guide so far.  Add the others if needed.  Tell them your upstream source (rsync://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora-enchilada from above) and then your internal URL (http://x345-a2.internal/fedora/linux for my setup).

Conclusion

Once your rsync is complete and report_mirror is done, you should see clients start hitting your box.   Don’t forget to add your mirror script (domirror.sh from above — rsync and report_mirror) to cron!  You may wish to join the private ‘fedora-mirrors’ mail lists to be informed of new releases and changes.

The best thing is that it works across all package requests, including new machines, roaming users,  ‘preupgrade’, etc.   All in all, pretty nifty!  Your users will love you when their upgrades are almost instant!  The Fedora infrastructure is set up very well for mirroring, public and private, and this is how the project copes with the huge demand for new releases.  Comment away if you need clarification or help.

Share and Enjoy:

Related posts:

1. Fedora 9, KDE 4.0 done right Wow! I just downloaded the Fedora 9 KDE live spin. ...
2. Syncing Directories with Multiple Computers I have a laptop, a workstation, and a server at...
3. Kernel developers don’t get Xen The recent bruhaha surrounding Xen on LKML (http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/6/2/475) is really...

With the recent addition of halevt in Gentoo’s portage it is now relatively easy to automatically mount media like USB sticks and CD/DVD discs on /media.

What I wanted to do was to emulate my previous set of configs and scripts that ivman used to create icons of automatically mounted media on ROX desktop (called pinboard). I am using ROX pinboard on top of my favorite window manager, fluxbox.

The idea is that halevt is started by the fluxbox startup config file and when a new device is attached to the computer, halevt config calls a script that creates an icon on the ROX pinboard using ROX rpc. When a device needs to be removed ROX pinboard is configured to call a special eject command that checks for a couple of things before unmounting the device and calling the script to remove the icon from ROX pinboard.
Apart from automatically mounting/unmounting of devices I have also added a nice option in the halevt config to unmount and eject the CD/DVD drive when the eject button on the device is used and of course when the CD/DVD is not in use. That emulates a bit the windows behavior that so many users have gotten used to.

Since the script used by halevt involves a lot of file reading/writing and parsing I thought it would be wise to convert my old rox.panelput bash script to perl. And I was correct, the speed difference, even for such simple tasks is more than noticeable.

The installation process. Please take notice of the user executing the commands, $ is for normal user, # is for root:
0) create /usr/local/bin/ path and put it in your shell’s PATH
# mkdir /usr/local/bin
$ echo "export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin/" >> ~/.bashrc

1) install halevt
# echo "sys-apps/halevt ~x86" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
# emerge halevt


2) create ~/.halevt/HalevtConfigActions.xml in your home directory:
File: HalevtConfigActions.xml (right click->Save-as)

3) Create /usr/bin/eject.hal. Take notice that the script uses bash and not dash!
#!/bin/bash
if [ -z $1 ]; then
echo "Usage: eject.hal "
exit
else
echo "$1" | egrep "^/dev"
if [ "$?" == "0" ]; then
#echo "Device First, find mount point"
TOSCAN=`echo "$1" | sed -e 's/ /\\\\\\\\040/g'`
TOUMOUNT=`grep "$TOSCAN" /proc/mounts | cut -d" " -f2`
UDI=`hal-find-by-property --key volume.mount_point --string "$TOUMOUNT"`
DISC=`hal-get-property --udi "$UDI" --key volume.is_disc`
/usr/local/bin/rox.panelput.pl Remove "$TOUMOUNT"
halevt-umount "$1"
halevt-umount -s
if [ "$DISC" == "true" ]; then
/usr/bin/eject -p "$1" &>/dev/null
fi
else
#echo "Mount Point First, find device"
UDI=`hal-find-by-property --key volume.mount_point --string "$1"`
DISC=`hal-get-property --udi "$UDI" --key volume.is_disc`
TOSCAN=`echo "$1" | sed -e 's/ /\\\\\\\\040/g'`
TOUMOUNT=`grep "$TOSCAN" /proc/mounts | cut -d" " -f1`
/usr/local/bin/rox.panelput.pl Remove "$1" nowait
halevt-umount "$1"
halevt-umount -s
if [ "$DISC" == "true" ]; then
/usr/bin/eject -p "$TOUMOUNT" &>/dev/null
fi
fi
fi

File: eject.hal

4) Create /usr/bin/rox.panelput.pl perl script. The script is written very simplistically to be easily understandable and changable.
File: rox.panelput.pl

5) Start halevt from fluxbox startup..make sure ~/.fluxbox/startup file contains at least the following, changing YOURUSERNAME to the one appropriate:
/usr/local/bin/rox.panelput.pl Restore
killall -9 halevt; halevt -f -u YOURUSERNAME -g plugdev &
/usr/bin/rox -p pinboard

6) go to ROX options and change ‘eject command’ to use eject.hal

That should be all. Upon fluxbox restart halevt should start and when you plug in your usb the set of scripts will create an icons on ROX pinboard for you.

Example:

References: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-731555-highlight-halevt.html

Usually I do really enjoy the Linux Action Show: The production quality is good, they aggregate some stuff I might have not seen earlier and are most of the time just fun. I like that they have their own agendas and positions which often go out of the "linux mainstream", it gives people a good hook to start thinking about what's really right and good and what's just propaganda of any side of the discussion.

Today I listened to Episode 7 of Season 10 (the current one at the time of writing this) and I gotta say that that episode was just below any quality standard when it came to the "Mono Discussion".

A few remarks first: I have written about Mono before, coming to the conclusion that it is in fact not evil. I use a bunch of Mono applications (because they allow me to do things better than I could do them without these apps): I run Banshee, GNOME-Do, Tomboy and F-Spot without feeling "guilty" or "bad". Those apps rock and make my days better. I am not a "Mono hater" (though I'd probably avoid writing C# just as I would avoid writing Java just cause I don't like those languages, but that's a different topic).

The discussion was triggered by the Fedora Project deciding to drop Tomboy from the LiveCD and the default install and replacing it with GNote, which is pretty much a clone of Tomboy just written in C++. Bryan and Chris then went on and on, pushing each other into more and more extreme phrases. Now I know how it is sometimes and how getting into that kind of ranting can be fun, but that's why you can edit your podcast to make sure that you've got at least the facts straight. Let's do some cleaning up.

Complaint No.1: Duplication is waste of developer time

Both hosts complained that Hubert Figuiere, the creator of Gnote would just waste developer time replacing an app that works. They continued collecting all those little bugs they encountered in the different Linux distros they use, hinted at some MacOSX features the Linux kernel didn't have and that duplication was the reason for those "flaws in Linux".

This might look like it makes sense if you don't look to closely: You have X people, each putting in Y hours a month into Linux/FOSS. If one person spends Z hours to do something "useless" we lose those hours and have just X*Y-Z hours left for the "valid" stuff. Which would make sense if hours were that freely distributable which they ain't for a bunch of reasons: I don't know Hubert, but maybe he has no interest or skills to hack on the Kernel or patching it to duplicate some MacOSX feature? So his hours couldn't be spend in that area. But the more important aspect, one that always annoys me when it comes to Wikipedia deletionism, too: If somebody takes time out of his or her full day to do something, that is never futile or useless, if it was, that person wouldn't have done it. Whether Hubert just doesn't like Mono cause of legal reasons or cause he hates the platform for its less that stellar startup times or just cause he loves C++ oh so much more doesn't matter: He decided that it was worth his time to implement a Tomboy clone in C++.

FOSS is about choice and this is a great example: You can chose to use the Mono app that is probably more mature or you can use Gnote. Maybe you just don't wanna have Mono on your system for space reasons (or cause you don't wanna compile it [me being a Gentoo user knows the pain: It's the reason I don't run any KDE apps: compiling kdelibs and family just wastes precious time and resources]), maybe Mono doesn't run? Your choice. The best program will win the mindshare or both projects will agree on a standard that lets them interact. That is the way FOSS works. Just cause Tomboy was first and works we shouldn't grant its developers the monopoly on note-taking: what happens if Gnote goes in a different direction in a month and creates something even more awesome? Do we wanna risk losing that? New perspectives on problems, on software implementations are good, they allow us to see flaws more clearly and competition forces us to define open interfaces and standards that allow better integration in the long run. If Beagle had not gotten competition by Tracker we probably wouldn't have the Xesam standard that allows everybody to plug random desktop search engines into the desktop. Competition is our strength, because it makes our platform stronger, more refined.

Complaint No.2: Dropping Mono programs is just cause of FUD and legal threats that don't exist

The next big comlaint was that fedora was just dropping Tomboy cause of FUD: That the Mo