The Linux Plumbers Conf wiki seems to have made the discussion notes for the 2012 conf read-only as well as visible only to people who have logged in. I suspect this is due to the spam problem, but I’ll put those notes here so that they’re available without needing a login. The source is here.
These are the notes I took during the virtualization microconference at the 2012 Linux Plumbers Conference.
Several applications need random numbers for correct and secure operation. When ssh-server gets installed on a system, public and private key paris are generated. Random numbers are needed for this operation. Same with creating a GPG key pair. Initial TCP sequence numbers are randomized. Process PIDs are randomized. Without such randomization, we’d get a predictable set of TCP sequence numbers or PIDs, making it easy for attackers to break into servers or desktops.
On a system without any special hardware, Linux seeds its entropy pool from sources like keyboard and mouse input, disk IO, network IO, and any other sources whose kernel modules indicate they are capable of adding to the kernel’s entropy pool (i.e .the interrupts they receive are from sufficiently non-deterministic sources). For servers, keyboard and mouse inputs are rare (most don’t even have a keyboard / mouse connected). This makes getting true random numbers difficult: applications requesting random numbers from /dev/random have to wait for indefinite periods to get the randomness they desire (like creating ssh keys, typically during firstboot.).
I’ve been using the Fedora 18 pre-release for a couple of months now, and am generally happy with how it works. I filed quite a few bugs, some got resolved, some not. Here’s a list of things that don’t work as they used to in the past, with workarounds so they may help others:
Most of the spam I receive gets caught by spam filters, and pushed into the separate spam folder. I check the folder once in a while for false positives.
A recent message in my spam folder, with the subject ‘Mystery shopper needed’ caught my attention:
If you have enabled git information in the shell prompt (like branch name, working tree status, etc.) [1], an upgrade to F18 breaks this functionality. What’s worse, __git_ps1 (a shell function) isn’t found, and a yum plugin goes looking for a matching package name to install, making running any command on the shell *very* slow.
Avi Kivity giving his keynote speech
Avi Kivity announced he is stepping down as (co-)maintainer of the KVM Project at the recently-concluded KVM Forum 2012 in Barcelona, Spain. Avi wrote the initial implementation of the KVM code back at Qumranet, and has been maintaining the KVM-related kernel and qemu code for about 7 years now.
I’ve tried several RSS feed readers, offline as well as online: aKregator, Liferea, rss2email being the ones tried for a long time. One drawback with these offline tools is they may miss feeds when I’m offline for prolonged periods (travel, vacations, etc.). Also, they’re tied to one device; can’t switch laptops and have the feeds be in sync. I tried Google Reader for a while as well, for a solution in the “cloud”, which worked for a while, but not anymore.
So I started to search for an online feed reader, preferably with hosting services, since I didn’t want to keep up with updates to the software. I found several free readers, and Tiny Tiny RSS seemed like a really good option. The developer hosts an online version of the reader, which I used for quite a while. (The online service is soon going to be discontinued.) I was quite content with that option, but when OpenShift was launched, I thought I’d try hosting tt-rss myself: it initially began as an experiment to using OpenShift. Then, when I moved this blog to OpenShift, I realised it didn’t really take much effort to host the blog, and that I could switch my primary instance of tt-rss from the developer-hosted instance to my own. It turned out to be really easy, and here I’ll share my recipe.
The 2012 edition of the Linux Plumbers Conference concluded recently. I was there, running the virtualization microconference. The format of LPC sessions is to have discussions around current as well as future projects. The key words are ‘discussion’ (not talks — slides are optional!) and ‘current’ and ‘future’ projects — not discussing work that’s already done; rather discussing unsolved problems or new ideas. LPC is a great platform for getting people involved in various subsystems across the entire OS stack in one place, so any sticky problems tend to get resolved by discussing issues face-to-face.
The GNOME default of ‘hibernate’ or suspend-to-disk on very low battery power isn’t optimal for many laptops — hibernate is known to be broken on several hardware setups, it frequently results in file system corruption, and just causes pain. That, combined with the weird behaviour of the GNOME power manager to put the system in hibernate, even when the battery isn’t low, annoyed me enough to go hunting for a way to change the default.
The GUI doesn’t expose a ‘sleep’ setting; it just offers hibernate and shutdown, so here’s a tip to just put the system to sleep state (suspend to RAM), which is a much well-behaved default for me.
Updating a Fedora 16 guest to a Fedora 17 guest via preupgrade gave me the ‘Oh no, something has gone wrong!’ screen at the GDM login screen. It’s quite frustrating to see that screen because you can’t switch to a virtual terminal for troubleshooting, or even reboot or shutdown.
To send the key sequence Ctrl+Alt+F2 to the guest to switch to a virtual terminal, use the qemu monitor by pressing
Ctrl+Alt+2
and use sendkey to send the key sequence:
(qemu) sendkey ctrl-alt-f2
Then go back to the guest window by issuing
Ctrl+Alt+1
After logging in as root, I poked in the gdm log files in /var/log/gdm/ and saw the fprint daemon was causing some errors. Removing the fprintd package fixed this, but this is just a workaround, not a solution:
yum remove fprintd
Bug filed.