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It seems that boycotting LUGRadio works. So, I’m going to boycott LUGRadio until they wake up, see sense and redesign their homepage in flourescent pink with polka dots. I have the following sound reasons why they should do this:

1. I would like them to do so.

I have met all four gents, so I am certainly not a crank.

(With hugs for Alan.)

We went to see Clerks II today at our new favourite cinema, Harbour Lights in Southampton. It was very good, with a large dollop of View Askew back references but a great story too. I chuckled through the flick and it wraps up the New Jersey stories in a really touching if slightly depressing way. Even our mate Walt Flanagan cropped up right near the end for a cameo. It’s the first View Askew film I’ve seen in the cinema, all the rest have been on DVD. But if you have enjoyed Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and even Jersey Girl then you should make the effort and get to the cinema to watch it on the big screen.

In a recent live episode of Novell OpenAudio, Nat Friedman was interviewed and got posed some questions from the floor. One question highlighted that Novell had chosen AppArmour over SELinux and developed XGL in secret.

Nat highlighted two advantages of AppArmour over SELinux. 1) It was written by people who worked on the Linux kernel security structure. 2) It’s easier to configure than SELinux. What the presenters didn’t counter with was why Novell didn’t choose to put their efforts into making SELinux better, rather than spending millions on purchasing a company that owned an alternative product. And given that SELinux is developed by the NSA, it’s probably safe to assume they have a resonable grasp of the security issues…

On the XGL question, Nat’s response was that XGL development started a year or so before AIGLX. I’d have like to see the presenters take him up on that too. The project may have existed, but early development was kept secret and the project was not developed in the normal Open Source manner – a publicly available source code repository and patches submitted by the community. Because Novell didn’t develop XGL using the Open Source model, people were denied the opportunity to get involved and contribute code. That’s hardly a great way to build relationships with the community. Some people who would have contributed to XGL went off and started AIGLX, a project that does much the same thing (albeit in a different way) and that uses the traditional Open Source development model.

Nat’s second point was that AIGLX only works with Open Source drivers, as opposed to XGL which works with all graphics cards. Yeah, there’s an ambiguity there. XGL doesn’t work with the Open Source drivers. So if you want to use it, you have to use the propriatory drivers. So even if you’ve gone out of your way to ensure you have a graphics card supported by the Open Source 3D drivers, you can’t use XGL. From a company that has done so much to free the propriatory software that they have bought, that’s a bit sad.

But being a corporate show, the presenters are never going to be tough on guests from within the same company. At least the questions got asked, I suppose.

It looks as if iFolder has fallen off the rails as a project. It’s not even included in Ubuntu Edgy, the next release due in a few weeks. It’s a great shame as I really liked the look of it. It has a nice web interface to control the “server” and the client-side utility is very simple. There’s just one minor drawback. I never got it to work.

See, I was going to use iFolder to keep my files synchronised between my laptop and the file server. It was also going to synchronise them between the desktop and the file server. So that way files would be stored on three systems and serve as my primary backup mechanism. Also, if I updated a file on one machine, the other would have the updated version within a few minutes, preventing me having to worry about versioning between systems. Of course, iFolder would also have run without intervention, making it all that much more shiny.

Installing iFolder server on Sarge was do-able following the HOWTO on the website, although it involved compiling some things, using alien on others, and generally squishing the software into non-standard and icky locations. But the server ran and the web interface was very nice. It just didn’t let any files synchronise to it. Debugging the server was a case of poking around in the dark. There are .debs for Ubuntu Dapper, but I was told they’re too old to be useful and I should be compiling from SVN. Because there’s no real community built up around this project, there’s no way to get help for debugging without drilling into the code itself, something which is beyond my skills. I got lots of confusing advice about which version of which server to use with which client version and whether I should wait for the client to be rewritten in another language before proceeding. Well, I’ve waited but I don’t think I can wait any longer. Given that I don’t want to change distro, I have to look for alternatives.

This is my home backup system, not work. I don’t need the power and complexity of Bacula and Amanda. I just want to keep my files in different places for redundancy and have them all synchronised to the same version. Historically, I’ve used Unison, but the version shipped in Dapper isn’t compatible with the version in Sarge, and the stand-alone binary of the newer version just returns errors for me on Sarge. Unison was never really ideal though, as I had to go through the list of files that had changed between sychronisations and manually say whether I wanted to copy the file from system A to system B. Then I had to do the same to synchronise system B and system C. And there were vesion conflicts, of course. I appreciate that version conflicts can happen in any system like this, but with a 5 minute synchronisation window, iFolder would have eliminated them for me, given my computing practices.

What I’m looking for should ideally be transparent in operation, except in critical circumstances. It should basically get on with its job and not take up my time to run. Oh, and it needs to be installable on Ubuntu and Debian. I’ve looked at sbackup, which was sponsored by Google Summer of Code and was designed for Ubuntu. It is a more traditional backup tool, rather than a file synchroniser though, and although it claims to backup to a remote host via SSH, this fails whenever the “test” button is used and fails to save the details to the config file. I’ve also looked a little bit at gshare, which looks OK, but uses FTP and might be a bit light on the security side of things. rsync is unidirectional. All the random perl scripts that people use for backups don’t fill me with confidence, don’t meet the criteria above and don’t seem to handle the three-way setup I’ve got. This post is more just an expression of frustration than a plea for help, but if anyone has any ideas, I’ll be interested to hear them. Advice to keep my home directory in SVN and make it available via WebDAV will not be appreciated. Unless it’s really easy to do and meets all my criteria, of course.

I saw this poem on one of the Underground’s “Poems on the Underground” posters and couldn’t help thinking of this little fella and the racket his collar makes when he runs across the field.

I noticed my mail server making a funny noise last night, so I shut it down. I’ve not had time to open it up this evening, for reasons that I won’t go into because they’ll just wind me up. I think the CPU fan might be dodgy.

So I’m not getting any mail at the moment. It should all be queuing on the backup MX, but until I’ve fixed the mail server, please leave a comment if you need to get in touch with me.

Update: All OK again now. The fan dying was the one in the cheap and nasty Vipower hard disk caddy. Luckily I had a spare chassis so I swapped it out and all is well. I’ll be monitoring it for a while though. So you can stop commenting now. Not that anyone did.