Technology and Random thoughts…
Today I was investigating Continuous Integration solutions for rails projects. In the end I ended up settling on CruiseControl.rb mainly because it’s a rails app and most of the others where Java based.
The only problem is that CruiseControl.rb doesn’t currently support Bazaar, in fact the released version only supports SVN while the development version supports Git and Mercurual.
Anyway after a couple of hours of hacking I came up with the following patch which I’ve filed as a bug.
I uploaded some packages to my Launchpad PPA today. Normally they would build in not less than 20 minutes, however 2 hours later I was still waiting. All my googling for a build bot status page led to nothing useful. wgrant on #launchpad pointed me at https://launchpad.net/builders/ which I though I would note here to help others.
There has been a trend in the Annodex community lately to move towards using git rather than SVN for source code management. Now while I applaud the move to a DVCS, I hate having to use git. It is just extremely painful IMHO.
I just shouldn’t have to look up a man page or tutorial every time I want to use a tool. Something I don’t have to do with any of CSV, SVN, bzr or mecurial. Git may have some benefits under the hood but I think its user interface still has a long way to go. I can totally understand how git is the perfect tool for the kernel community but I just don’t think it makes a lot of sense for some other communities who have jumped on the badwagon.
The nice folks over in the bazaar community have found a way to ease my pain. Some of you may be familiar with the bzr-svn plugin written by Jelmer Vernooij. Well he has recently expanded on the work started by Rob Collins and now we have a working bzr-git.
johnf@zoot:~$ bzr branch git://git.xiph.org/liboggz.git Branched 734 revision(s). johnf@zoot:~$ cd liboggz.git/ johnf@zoot:~/liboggz.git$ bzr log -r -1 ------------------------------------------------------------ revno: 734 git commit: ef3b0ebc1fdc299a09119df01fbd1c8867f90d8b committer: Conrad Parker timestamp: Wed 2009-04-01 00:59:36 +0000 message: Update the link to the theora spec Patch by Ralph Giles
Joy!!! Many thanks to the wonderful guys in the bazzar community for making my life so much easier. All we need now is bzr-hg and I’ll never have to leave my comfort zone đŸ™‚
This time last year was a very exciting time at linux.conf.au 2008. The conference organisers had arranged for 100 XO laptops to be given away to conference attendees.
The XOs came with the following message attached.
Please do something wonderful with this XO, or inspire someone else and pass it on.
I was fortunate enough to get one of these XOs. I knew however that I wouldn’t have any time in the foreseeable future to actually do anything cool with my XO. At the same time I didn’t simply want to give it away to someone, since I knew at some stage I would actually want to do something with it.
After chatting this over with a few other people I came up with the idea of putting together an OLPC Library. (It was originally going to be OLPC Bank but after chatting it over with Pia we decided that a Library seemed to fit the ideals of the project much better).
So as part of the work I’m doing with OLPC Friends we have finally launched OLPC Library. At the moment this is just a place holder page but hopefully soon we will have a site up to actually enable people to loan out OLPCs whether that be to a developer wanting to write a new piece of software/port an application or a community advocate putting on a demo at a school or trade show.
If you are interested in helping out you can see the beginnings of the ideas for the website at the OLPC Library Project page and you can also join the mailing lists.
Just spent a couple of hours trying to get a Mac OS X laptop connected to a Cisco IOS IPSEC/L2TP server. The existing configuration worked fine for windows and linux servers but the Mac just refused to establish a connection. The Cisco logs contained the usual cryptic message.
Dec 16 16:53:47.955: IPSEC(validate_proposal_request): proposal part #1,
(key eng. msg.) INBOUND local= 117.53.171.241, remote= 124.171.30.131,.
local_proxy= 117.53.171.241/255.255.255.255/17/1701 (type=1),.
remote_proxy= 124.171.30.131/255.255.255.255/17/1701 (type=1),
protocol= ESP, transform= esp-3des esp-sha-hmac (Transport-UDP),.
lifedur= 0s and 0kb,.
spi= 0x0(0), conn_id= 0, keysize= 0, flags= 0x800
Dec 16 16:53:47.955: Crypto mapdb : proxy_match
src addr : 117.53.171.241
dst addr : 124.171.30.131
protocol : 17
src port : 1701
dst port : 49561
Dec 16 16:53:47.955: map_db_find_best did not find matching map
Dec 16 16:53:47.955: IPSEC(validate_transform_proposal): no IPSEC cryptomap exists for local address A.B.C.D
After much googling I discovered that the problem was dst port: 49561 . Unlike most other L2TP clients the Mac uses a random source port for the L2TP part of the connection. Most others use 1701 for source and destination.
So relaxing this
ip access-list extended L2TP permit udp host 117.53.171.241 eq 1701 any eq 1701
to this
ip access-list extended L2TP permit udp host 117.53.171.241 eq 1701 any
solved the problem.
It would now normally be the time for me to rant about how IPSEC has to be one of the most badly implemented protocols by all vendors and how getting two different implementations to talk to each other always takes a minimum of 2 hours even if you’ve done it before but it would just be too exhausting.