Un proiect al Grupului pentru Software Liber

România a semnat ACTA.

ACTA, a fost semnat astăzi de către țări ale Uniunii Europene, printre care se număra și România.

Pentru a înțelege ce este ACTA, se poate urmări filmulețul de mai jos. Pentru a te pronunța împotriva deciziei, se poate semna o petiție.

Apparently, while most of the Romanians were busy with „Băsescu” crisis and snow, our government decided to sign ACTA.

To be honest, I’m not sure who’s job was to inform European population about this upcoming decision, but they did it in the worst possible way. Anyway, if you feel the need of blaming your regional/representative politician, you can get his address from here: agenda.grep.ro.

For those who just woke up in this world, and have no clue what’s this all about, take a look at this video.

Din păcate anul trecut nu a fost unul foarte activ, dar sper ca măcar în 2012 să reuşesc să scriu mai mult aici.
Aşa că vreau să încep seria articolelor din 2012 în aroma cafelei de început… şi ce cafea ar fi mai bună decât Java? Ori Java este servită cel mai bine de Tomcat.

Proiectul pe care vreau să-l prezint este Lambda Probe, o continuare a Tomcat Probe.

Lambda Probe este o aplicaţie utilitară, care oferă posibilitatea monitorizării şi administrării în timp real a instanţelor Apache Tomcat folosind o interfaţă web intuitivă şi prietenoasă, fără a consuma prea multe resurse. Fiind dezvoltată pentru a lucra cu Tomcat, această aplicaţie este capabilă să afişeze mai multe informaţii decât oferă în mod normal agenţii JMX.

Dintre facilităţile oferite de Lambda Probe merită a fi menţionate următoarele:

- Monitor pentru utilizarea memoriei JVM

- Compatibilitatea JBoss
- Afişarea detaliilor despre aplicaţiile instalate, starea, numărul de sesiuni, numărul de obiecte, etc.
- Posibilitatea de pornire/oprire/restart al aplicaţiilor cât şi instalarea sau dezinstalarea lor

- Posibilitatea de a compila fişierele JSP în orice moment
- Afişarea listei de sesiuni per aplicaţie
- Afişarea servlet-urilor JSP generate automat

- Posibilitatea de a grupa informaţiile despre proprietăţile surselor de date după URL-ul folosit obţinând astfel o imagine mai bună asupra bazelor de date
- Statistici şi grafice în timp real despre utilizarea conectorilor
- Suport pentru DBCP, C3P0 şi Oracle
- Suport pentruTomcat 5.0.x şi 5.5.x
şi multe altele.

Lambda Probe are de asemenea şi o versiune XML pentru integrarea în aplicaţii de monitorizare automate.

Instalarea Lambda Probe

Lambda Probe poate fi instalat în două moduri diferite, în funcţie de tipul serverului de aplicaţie, Apache Tomcat sau JBoss cu Apache Tomcat integrat

Instalarea în Apache Tomcat

În funcţie de metoda de instalare a fişierelor WAR, Lambda Probe poate fi instalat atât manual cât şi automat. Exemple funcţionale despre ambele moduri de instalare pot fi găsite în fişierul context.xml din probe.war, în directorul META-INF.

Instalare folosind Tomcat Manager (metoda recomandată)

- Se descarcă fişierul .war al Lambda Probe de aici.
- Se porneşte Tomcat-ul şi se accesează adresa de administrare (ex. http://localhost:8080/manager/html)
- Se încarcă probe.war folosind opţiunea “WAR file to deploy”

Instalarea manuală

- Se descarcă fişierul .war al Lambda Probe de aici
– În cazul în care este pornit, se opreşte Tomcat
- Se copiază fişierul probe.war în $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/
- Se porneşte Tomcat

Instalare personalizată

În cazul în care aveţi un Tomcat cu o configuraţie diferită de cea standard, fişierul probe.war se copiază în directorul folosit definit în Tomcat ca fiind directorul de lucru, iar în fişierul context.xml se adaugă instrucţiunea privileged=”true” ca în exemplul următor:

Configurarea drepturilor de acces

Lambda Probe permite folosirea a patru categorii de roluri de acces: manager, poweruser, poweruserplus şi probeuser. Acestea pot fi configurate folosind fişierul din Tomcat – tomcat-users.xml.

- manager – este nivelul de securitate cerut de Tomcat Manager. Acesta oferă acces complet la toate funcţionalităţile Lambda Probe.

- poweruser – oferă aceleaşi drepturi ca şi manager, cu excepţia permisiunii de a instala şi şterge aplicaţii, şi a monitoriza Tomcat folosind facilitatea “Quick Check”

- poweruserplus – Oferă aceleaşi facilităţi ca poweruser, având în plus posibilitatea de a reporni JVM.

- probeuser este nivelul de acces cu cele mai puţine drepturi, şi oferă doar facilităţi de citire a informaţiilor.

Intalarea în JBoss

Configurarea drepturilor de acces

Pentru a configura nivelele de acces în Jboss este necesar să facem două fişiere în directorul “JBOSS_SERVER_HOME/conf/props” – probe-users.properties şi probe-roles.properties

- probe-users.properties: conţine lista utilizatorilor în format “utilizator=parolă”, de exemplu:
admin=t0psercret

- probe-roles.properties: conţine lista nivelelor de acces în formatul “username=rol1[,rol2...], de exemplu:
admin=manager

După ce s-au completat informaţiile în aceste fişiere este necesară editarea fişierului “JBOSS_SERVER_HOME/conf/login-config.xml” şi adăugarea următoarei secvenţe de cod în cadrul elementului:

Contextul privilegiat

Aplicaţia Lambda Probe trebuie instalată în JBoss într-un context privilegiat. Pentru asta este necesară adăugarea următorului atreibut în JBOSS_SERVER_HOME/deploy/jbossweb-tomcat55.sar/META-INF/jboss-service.xml:

Pentru a instala Lambda Probe în JBoss, se copiază probe.war în JBOSS_SERVER_HOME/deploy/ şi se reporneşte JBoss.

Pentru a vedea la lucru înainte de a instala pe maşinile proprii Lambda Probe, puteţi accesa site-ul demonstrativ http://demo.lambdaprobe.org site. (Cu credenţialele: demo/demo)

Pentru mai mule detalii pagina proiectului este www.lambdaprobe.org
În cazul în care aveţi nevoie de ajutor, există şi un forum în care puteţi cere informaţii despre Lambda Probe

Some more freely licensed wallpaper sized photos (wide), this time with a winter theme, use as you want:

A small tutorial I made about an effect I used in the previous interviews (in English), so, for consistency, I had to recreate it, even after Kino was no longer available in Debian Wheezy.



I'll probably upload more videos like this about cinelerra, pitivi, gimp, audacity and other software I use for the work I do for our „Sceptici în România”/ „Skeptics in Romania” podcast (The podcast is in Romanian, but we are preparing also a project for the international audience, too).

And in case you are wondering, yes, this podcast is part of the reasons I wasn't able to do any work for Debian lately!

Yesterday was the strike day against SOPA and PIPA and I tried to do my part: blacked-out my blogs, put related content on various places, shared link, informing. Many people seemed to understand the issue, but not everybody. Below is an excerpt from a comment (translation is mine) by someone in Romania, a person with IT and FOSS background, this make the quote even more relevant (I saw similar reaction on other tech sites):

I don't understand... SOPA is an American law, right? passed by their shitty Congress, right? how it affect me? how will affect Europe an American law? we aren't Americans so we don't have to obey their laws... what's the deal with this shit? Google and others can move their servers in Asia or Europe and... done... as Obama failed with Google and HP which moved to Ireland for lower taxes...[...]
Back to the initial question... SOPA is an American law, it will affect them.... not me... I am not American... and I don't ever want to be... European countries don't need to obey American laws... as they, in fact do... they don't obey... If the big companies want to keep up any site with piracy of any kind... they only have to host it in Russia :))... SOPA filters will be made in USA, not in our country...
You will say our routes pass there... so what? it takes 30 seconds to change some server routes on your workstation... and 1-2 hours for them to propagate... If USA want to do that, they can do it...

Some points from my reply:

• US corporations won't move, they will stay and obey the law and even if they move servers elsewhere, they still have to obey the law, since they want to make business in the US
• the case about moving in Ireland is different: it was for taxes, not to produce illegal things
• SOPA filters will fork in such way that an European website may get blocked for people in USA
• the American government has control over the root DNS filters and there the blocking will happen, the world would have to switch to an alternate DNS system
• once it happens, other countries will follow with their own censorship laws, European countries are eager to do it, as demonstrated with TPB
• "free Dmitry": you may get arrested even if you do something legal in your country.

For such reasons the Romanian Fedora community participated in the campaign with a notice about the Fedora's stance against censorship (not a full blackout as with my personal blogs, since neither the international project went for a total blackout). From my part, I would have preferred Fedora to go to a full blackout, like Mozilla, Wikipedia or openSUSE, I am disappointed by Red Hat having a stance so weak, it was not even mentioned on their own opensource.com and I am unhappy with Fedora stuck in bureaucracy and not being able to produce in due time an official statement I can link to in the news item.

Hopefully I will make your day better with shining examples from TheOatmeal, Playboy and FightingInternet.

Update: I managed to make sound work. For some weird reason, a mute switch option of some the many (and who knows how useful) switches of my sound card was enabled. Now the damn thing works. Did I mention that since I did the upgrade all my sound cards (I have a USB sound card, too) have listed as available inputs all the inputs of my internal sound card (mic, front mic, line in, CD, etc.) in Audacity? That makes for a very confusing and loooong sound input sources list! The upside is that I can finally record clips from televisions that do not provide such a feature and FastVideoDownload doesn't handle.

I also seem to have found a possible fix for the caps-ctrl issue in Xfce4 (obviously, setting "-option ctrl:swapcap" in ~/.Xkbmap, instead of that Alt modifier).

---

As I said in my previous post, I will tell you what do GNOME 3 and Windows 7 have in common.

Before everything else, I want to make it clear that when I am saying GNOME 3, I am referring to Debian Wheezy's GNOME 3, since I recently upgraded from Squeeze on my laptop. I'll probably drop a line or two about that, too.

First, I'll tell you about the (boring, probably for many) experience with Windows 7. As I said before, my new job requires me to use a Windows machine, so up until a few months ago I was using Windows XP with some additional software and tweaks to make it usable. Then came the Windows 7 „upgrade”. I am using quotes since the more appropriate term would be „fresh installation on a new partition”, not even close to what Debian users are used to call an upgrade.

So after a fresh Windows 7 installation, my first shock was the fact there was NO Quick Launch*. Some of you might be laughing, but I had never used Windows 7 up until then, just saw it on a laptop of a friend of mine (Ovidiu, one of the guys with whom I am doing this podcast, went to Denkfest with, and made these interviews). That was the first shock. Initial discussions about this with Windows users lead me to believe Quick Launch was dead and for some unexplained reason, I believed them. Later, much later, a week ago, to be precise, I found out that you can bring back the Quick Launch through some convoluted way**. Up until that point I had to have some icons pinned to the task bar, but some others on the desktop (and I hate that) because some of them, like Cygwin, if pinned, would start a cmd console, since Win 7 pins the process, not the starting script.

Among other things which broke in Win 7 and used to work fine in XP, the Virtual Dimension application which provides me with a virtual desktop, was the first one which was broken. I have been using a liniar 4 desktops-wide virtual desktop for over 5 years and I am worthless and inefficient if all my apps are on the same desktop. Mail application is always on the first desktop, work and file managers are on the second, the third is for extras and multimedia editing while the fourth is my gateway to the internet, containing the browser, instant messenger, or whatever.

The shortcuts I use to get to the various desktops are Win+1 ... Win+4 keyboard shortcuts, but the M$ Evil Empire decided that those shortcuts are going to start or bring foreward the first, second and so on applications pinned on the task bar. And you can't change those shortcuts***. Nor is disabling just those possible since they are all disabled through a huge switch which disables ALL Win+x keyboard shortcuts, among which Win+E (file expolrer) and Win+D (Show Desktop) were also. Luckly, Win+L (lock screen) was not disabled. So I disabled al those Win+ shortcuts, since I need virtual desktops.

Now, imagine if I had to start a Cygwin console and I had all sorts of apps open! Win+D was disabled, so I had to minimize the apps covering the desktop shortcut for Cygwin, click on the icon to start it, bring back the minimized windows and go on with my work. What a waste of clicks, mouse movement, energy and time, just because some dudes thought a Quick Launch-like feature was useless****.


You might wonder already what do those '*' sings mean. Well, sadly, that's what GNOME 3 / gnome-shell and Windows 7 have in common.

Gnome 3 was a shock for me. An empty desktop right after upgrade. No panels, no shortcuts*, no power indicators, no wicd indicator, no virtual desktops, no desktop icons, (I have a few dirs and docs there). Sounds like an Evil Empire decision, doesn't it?

Luckly I have been using Tilda as my always-ready console and I could fire up iceweasel from the console in order to understand where my panel disappeared.

I then realised that the upgrade brought me Network Manager, that app which wicd replaced. As a consequence, I had no working wlan since Network Manager made sure to mess up with the network manager I chose.

After looking through the documentation of Network Manager and realising I either had it set up to leave wlan0 alone or I didn't understood NM's documentation, I simply stopped the service, which let Wicd its job flawlessly.

The first thing I searched was „Gnome 3 panel” or something of that sort and I was confronted with the obvious option to appeal to the Forced Fallback Mode which was disabled. I figured I either had an old version, or Debian disabled this feature (hoping they provided an alternative). There was also the option to conform to this convoluted way of working** with Actions and such uselessness like that. I still wonder, what is the purpose of the „Favourites” bar on the left side, since it's accessible only after wasting a lot of mouse movement and time? For Joe's Pesci sake, I use focus under mouse just to avoid needless mouse and keyboard manipulation. Why? Why? WHY would I want every time I need to start or SWITCH to another application to move the mouse to the upper-left corner then take my hands off the mouse to type, move the mouse downwards or move across the whole width of the screen to get to my beloved virtual desktops and pick the app I want?

Making a long story short, after even trying XFCE4 (which for some unknown reason resets almost immediately my keyboard layout to the default layout with the Caps on Caps, instead of my preferred and set Ctrl on Caps - yes, it's global), I managed to find GNOME Shell Frippery** which made the experience better.

Later I found out that GNOME 3's file manager, Nautilus, has decided that an „up on level” button is useless, since the default is to use that uncopy-pastable button location bar instead of a sane text location bar. And it seems the GNOME developers decided this*** and I should conform to it.

To add insult to injury, those icons on my old panel are apparently useless**** and even in the fallback version I can't get them back. Or so the GNOME developers decided.

At some point this sunday, don't know how or why this change happened, producing sound was impossible. I know the problem is pulseaudio since when I kill the pulseaudio daemon from the console I can play audio. BTW, great timing, just when I needed sound the most, before releasing episode 32 of our podcast (yay, I reaslised that xfce just decided to reset my caps to be caps, after setting to ctrl a few minutes ago).

I know I praised pulseaudio when I first tried it, but failing to make it work out of the box or after some tinkering is a deal breaker for me, so I removed it. Now I find it that is a default in GNOME, yet all it manages to do is prevent audio from working. At least on my machine.

Other problems? Gnome Power Manager manages to hang and block my session, GNOME managed somehow to fail to start at some point. Yeah, and that sound problem which I didn't fix yet, didn't went away after removing all the pulseaudio packages which could be removed (e.g.: ryhtmbox depends on libpulse0, same do some other apps like audacity, so I couldn't remove all pulse related packages).

I got involved with Debian and GNU/Linux because it was tweakable and customisable, didn't use to force all sorts of option on me and now I find with its increasing popularity it becomes more and more like a product of a corporation which decides to change some things just to change and totally disregadring user experience and uses.

So, in the light of all of these problems I think it's time to probably consider trying KDE. Is it any good lately?

On modern Linux distributions, the users have two main possibilities of configuring the network: ifconfig and ip.

The ifconfig tool is part of the net-tools package along side other tools like route, arp and netstat. These are the traditional userspace tools for network configuration, made for older Linux kernels.

The iproute2 is the new package that comes with the ip tool as replacement for the ifconfig, route and arp commands, ss as the new netstat and tc as a new command.

There are pros and cons for each of them and there are users (and fans) of each. Let’s see the differences…

First of all, why was the iproute introduced? There had to have been a need for it… The reason was the introduction of the Netlink API, which is a socket like interface for accessing kernel information about interfaces, address assignments and routes. The tools like ifconfig used the /proc file hierarchy (procfs) for collecting information. The output was reformatted data from different network related files in /proc.

alexj@hathor ~/techblog $ strace -e open ifconfig eth0 2>&1|grep /proc
open("/proc/net/dev", O_RDONLY)         = 6
open("/proc/net/if_inet6", O_RDONLY)    = 6

The costs for the operations like open and read from these files were rather big compared for the netlink interface. For comparison, let’s assume that we have a large number of interfaces (128) with IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and their associated connected routes.

alexj@hathor ~/if $ time ifconfig -a >/dev/null 

real	0m1.528s
user	0m0.080s
sys	0m1.420s

alexj@hathor ~/if $ time ip addr show >/dev/null

real	0m0.016s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m0.012s

But most of normal users are not that geeky to care about millisecond speedup. They do, however, care about usability. And iproute2 does seem to have a better user interface. The ip command is better organized, in what they called objects. Links, addresses, routes, routing rules, tunnels are all objects, that can be added, deleted or listed. If a user learns how to add an address, by intuition, he can easily guess how to add a route, for example, because the syntax in similar.

Keyword shortening and auto completion makes the ip command more efficient by removing redundant characters. The following commands are identical as effect:

ip address show
ip address
ip addr show
ip a s
ip a

Some network engineers will like iproute2 because it’s similar to Cisco’s IOS: “ip route show” in Linux vs “show ip route” in IOS. Another usability feature is that you have the \number format for subnet masks instead of the quadded-decimal format, the first one being shorter to write and more up to date with the concept of VLSM.

So what does ifconfig still have to keep it around? Its biggest weakness is its biggest strength: its age. ifconfig has been out and used for so long that it’s very hard to put it away. Still many scripts in the heart of Linux distributions rely on ifconfig to work and most system administrators are used to the ifconfig command and it’s hard to move them to something new and unfamiliar. A lot of tutorials on the Internet about network configuration teach ifconfig and not iproute2 to beginners. For example, LPIC-1, one of the biggest Linux Certification out there, still requires ifconfig skills for passing the exam and barely mentiones iproute2.

When released, iproute2 had at least one advantage over ifconfig, and that was the feature of interacting with the IPv6 stack while ifconfig was only for IPv4. But since then, fans of ifconfig patched it so it could also be IPv6 ready.

But other features were not replicated. In old Linux Kernels, an interfaces could have only one IP address, so in ifconfig you could configure only one IP address on an interfaces. In newer kernels, each interface has a list of addresses and iproute2 via the NetLink interface could manage them. Latest ifconfig versions still rely on the idea of subinterfaces to provide more than one address on an interfaces.

So, given all these arguments, iproute2 should be declared the winner. But it’s not that easy. Just like in the case of IPv4 vs IPv6, where the latter one is the obvious choice, iproute2 will eventually replace ifconfig. Only it’s going to take a long time for that to happen, so net-tools will still be around for some time, but they will be eventually phased out.