systemd 233 is scheduled to be released next week, and there is only a handful of small issues left. As usual there are tons of improvements and fixes, but the most intrusive one probably is another attempt to move from legacy cgroup v1 to a “hybrid” setup where the new unified (cgroup v2) hierarchy is mounted at /sys/fs/cgroup/unified/ and the legacy one stays at /sys/fs/cgroup/ as usual. This should provide an easier path for software like Docker or LXC to migrate to the unified hiearchy, but even that hybrid mode broke some bits. ... Read More

My WordPress blog got hacked two days ago and now twice today. This morning I purged MySQL and restored a good backup from three days ago, changed all DB and WordPress passwords (both the old and new ones were long and autogenerated ones), but not even an hour after the redeploy the hack was back. (It can still be seen on Planet Debian and Planet Ubuntu. Neither the Apache logs nor the Journal had anything obvious, nor were there any new files in global or user www directories, so I’m a bit stumped how this happened. ... Read More

I’ve had the pleasure of working on Ubuntu for 12½ years now, and during that time used up an entire Latin alphabet of release names! (Well, A and C are still free, but we used H and W twice, so on average.. ☺ ) This has for sure been the most exciting time in my life with tons of good memories! Very few highlights: Getting some spam mail from a South African multi-millionaire about a GREAT OPPORTUNITY Joining #warthogs (my first IRC experience) and collecting my first bounties for “derooting” Debian (i. ... Read More

I don’t want to criticize the outcome of the UK’s EU referendum — first of all I’m not wiser than everyone else, and second in a democracy you always have the right to decide both ways. Freedom absolutely includes the freedom to hurt yourself and do bad decisions (note, I’m explicitly not saying — or even knowing! — which is which!). What concerns me though, is how the course of political debates at large and this referendum in particular have been going. ... Read More

Historically, the “adt-run” command line has allowed multiple tests; as a consequence, arguments like --binary or --override-control were position dependent, which confused users a lot (#795274, #785068, #795274, LP #1453509). On the other hand I don’t know anyone or any CI system which actually makes use of the “multiple tests on a single command line” feature. The command line also was a bit confusing in other ways, like the explicit --built-tree vs. ... Read More

This week from Tuesday to Thursday four Canonical Foundations team members held a virtual sprint about the proposed-migration infrastructure. It’s been a loooong three days and nightshifts, but it was absolutely worth it. Thanks to Brian, Barry, and Robert for your great work! I started the sprint on Tuesday with a presentation (slides) about the design and some details about the involved components, and showed how to deploy the whole thing locally in juju-local. ... Read More

The last two major autopkgtest releases (3.18 from November, and 3.19 fresh from yesterday) bring some new features that are worth spreading. New LXD virtualization backend 3.19 debuts the new adt-virt-lxd virtualization backend. In case you missed it, LXD is an API/CLI layer on top of LXC which introduces proper image management, seamlessly use images and containers on remote locations, intelligently caching them locally, automatically configure performant storage backends like zfs or btrfs, and just generally feels really clean and much simpler to use than the “classic” LXC. ... Read More

Almost every new autopkgtest release brings some small improvements, but 3.14 got some reboot related changes worth pointing out. First of all, I simplified and unified the implementation of rebooting across all runners that support it (ssh, lxc, and qemu). If you use a custom setup script for adt-virt-ssh you might have to update it: Previously, the setup script needed to respond to a reboot function to trigger a reboot, wait for the testbed to go down, and come back up. ... Read More

Wir sind wieder zurück aus unserem tollen Winterurlaub! Es ging nach Lappland in Nord-Finnland und Nord-Norwegen. Das ganze Fotoalbum gibt es auch zu sehen. Am Montag den 16. März starten wir unsere Reise nach Lappland, vom Flughafen München über Helsinki bis nach Ivalo. Auf dem Flug bekommt man schon einen guten Eindruck von Finnland: Außer an den südlichen Küstengebieten ist das Land sehr dünn bevölkert, und der ganze Norden besteht fast nur aus einem Flickenteppich aus Wald, Seen, und Flüssen. ... Read More

ROS what? Robot Operating System (ROS) is a set of libraries, services, protocols, conventions, and tools to write robot software. It’s about seven years old now, free software, and a growing community, bringing Linux into the interesting field of robotics. They primarily target/support running on Ubuntu (current Indigo ROS release runs on 14.04 LTS on x86), but they also have some other experimental platforms like Ubuntu ARM and OS X. ... Read More