Tools for Group Administration of Debian Systems?

2009-03-31 by mjr

I’m sure there must be lots written about group system administration, but it doesn’t seem to be written in either the FAQ, the reference or even the venerable FDL’d SAG, so I hope it’s not a(nother) completely silly question. As I was reminded by the Paralysed Perl Package Problem, sometimes other system administrators can really mess you up by changing things without documenting what, how or why they made that change.

My current solution on that system is to put the message “please record any major system changes with the command dch -c /root/changelog --no-auto-nmu -i 'description of change'” in the /etc/motd file. I’ve also installed apt-listchanges with a suitable configuration. For TTLLP servers, there’s not a problem because we all use the same task tracker to make notes.

For shared/remote servers, I’d like to have something better than fault-finding and the intrusion detection tools, but stop short of trying to require all system administrators to use a particular version control on the system configuration, or trying to require them to use a centralised bug tracker application. (The other sysadmins work for other people, so we can’t require them to do it and “pay us to manage a repository/bug tracker for your server” is an awkward sell anyway.)

What do you do?

Posted in GNU/Linux | 13 Comments

Making infrastructure organisations more resilient Taunton 20 March 2009

2009-03-24 by mjr

Last Friday, I spent most of the day at this NAVCA ICT event in Taunton. (There’s another similar one in York this Friday if you’re interested.) The event was a sandwich, with a Steve Bridger social media session as the filling between workshop halves.

platform
Conference

I went to the workshop for support workers. I’m not sure whether it was quite the right label, but the others were for managers/trustees and for accidental technical supporters, which definitely weren’t. There seemed to be at least three other ICT specialists there, so I wasn’t the only one.

The best thing about the workshop was the mix of specialists and generalists. I was really interested in what the generalists had to say, but sadly the workshop was more of a lecture and I don’t feel I got as much out as I could. I’d be interested to know if that was the same for other participants.

I’m not sure what I thought of Steve Bridger’s session. It was a difficult one: the strange mix of an audience was all together, the room felt pretty warm and it stood between us and lunch. I had trouble concentrating but posted a few updates to identi.ca about it.

The worst thing was all the needless promotion of certain companies’ products. They didn’t talk about blogging and syndication, they talked about Blogger and Google Reader; they didn’t talk about photo-sharing, they talked about Flickr; they didn’t talk about spreadsheets, they talked about Excel.

Nevertheless, I left the event feeling really positive about other ICT specialists, with some hope that the generalists were “getting it” and quite impressed by the people I met from the other tracks. It was pretty good to help someone towards the autosuspend setting on their GNOME-based netbook within ten minutes of arriving, too. I’ve just updated software.coop with Richard Stallman’s explanation of why proprietary software is a social problem, to see if that helps put the community-based view across.

I’ll look again at some of the grant-funded resources mentioned and see if we can improve them, but I’d welcome any comments from the voluntary and community sector about how best to do that.

Posted in SPI | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

SPI March 2009

2009-03-18 by mjr

The monthly board meeting of SPI will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 18 March) at 20:00 UTC. Members may have seen that the meeting announcement was posted, but a bit late and with a misleading subject line. This month, the record-keeping looks like it will catch up to present-day, with a small hole still from Neil McGovern’s time as secretary. The current treasurer and secretary have also posted their reports before the meeting… only the president is missing this month.

There’s some bank house-keeping and another new associated project under discussion: OpenWRT. There seemed to be a little confusion about whether it had been waiting for a legal opinion or not and some controversy about whether SPI recognises a liaison or a decision-maker.

Once again, I may still be travelling and without a stable network connection during the meeting, or I might have made it home by then. Either way, watch the comments below this article for a link to the summary when posted.

Posted in SPI | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Paralysed Perl Package Problem

2009-03-13 by mjr

With any luck, someone has seen this problem before and can fix it easily. I don’t seem to be able to find the fix by searching, but the search terms feel like they’re either too general or too specific.

I was trying to install some perl software on a debian lenny system that was upgraded from etch (and previously from sarge). After installing the dependencies, I started getting errors like this:-

$ perl -MYAML::Syck -e print
Can't locate YAML/Syck.pm in @INC (@INC contains:
/usr/local/lib/perl5/5.10.0/i686-linux /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.10.0
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0/i686-linux
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0 .).
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted.

Update: Well done to Raphael who spotted the local that I’d overlooked. D’oh! Now to see if I can discover where that came from.

Update 2: Also thanks to Florian who emailed in at about the same time (I don’t read my email as much as my website dashboard, usually).
Continue reading →

Posted in Koha | 6 Comments

What’s So Social About Social Enterprise?

2009-03-09 by mjr

platform
Conference

This afternoon, I’ll be at What’s So Social About Social Enterprise? in Bristol.

In general, I’ll be trying to support the idea that TTLLP and cooperatives in general are necessarily social enterprise. I may ask a few questions about the Social Enterprise Mark which you may have seen me asking elsewhere already. I’ll probably be sending a few updates during the event to identi.ca and other sites if I can get it working from the venue.

What’s your answer? What’s social about social enterprise?

Posted in Cooperatives | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

ippimail to close – what now for friendly webmail?

2009-03-04 by mjr

I was disappointed to read that ippimail announced “the closure of the ippimail project […] barring a miracle we will take the site down at noon on the 1st May 2009, UK time.”

I first covered the ippimail social enterprise back in 2006 as a way to do better than googlemail. There was a longer review on Cutting Free.

So what now for free-to-use UK-based free-software-using webmails? Where do you think ippimail users should look now? Are there others giving to charity? Is a better world possible by emailing?

Posted in SPI | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

New #ukgovOSS Action Plan

2009-02-27 by mjr

Earlier this week, Tom Watson, Cabinet Office Parliamentary Secretary, published the Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use: Government Action Plan. It’s had a pretty mixed reaction, with mild scepticism (niq’s soapbox: Is gov.uk going open-source?) being the average reaction from what I’ve read. I particularly liked the kind offer by Bristol Wireless to debianise Tom Watson’s laptop.

I think commentators are bang-on that the procurement process needs to change and that this sounds positive. I’ll love it if I’m wrong, but this looks like the “lip service as usual” which I’ve seen in the last 10 years working on FOSS in the UK. I want to see the action that comes from this plan! When government actually starts buying FOSS from typical FOSS service providers and not just the IBMs of this world, then I’ll believe it.

My suspicion is re-ignited by some of the activites around this action plan. For example, does anyone know why the Cabinet Office didn’t select FOSS to run their special public FOSS Aggregation page? (Actually, what’s the best FOSS tag aggregator web service out there? I know we can set them up in WordPress widgets, but what hosted services are there?)

I’m also a bit bemused that their page requires users to accept cookies until they expire, yet its privacy policy explicitly says “You may suppress cookies after your visit or configure your Internet browser to prevent them.” Yes, I can prevent them, but then it does nothing useful!

(Based on a comment I made at the OSS Watch team blog and discussions with a few user groups.)

Posted in SPI | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Fairtrade Fortnight

2009-02-26 by mjr

ftfnbutton
This week and next week are Fairtrade Fortnight. As I’ve mentioned in discussions at the Co-operative Group, there are some drawbacks to Fairtrade (most of which can be overcome by trading with co-operatives locally), but it is worth supporting fairtrade overall.

The featured event this year is Go Bananas for Fairtrade, an attempt at world-record banana-eating on 6-7 March. I don’t like bananas much, but I’ll eat them cooked, so I’ll be joining in.

If you want to get involved and do something else, there is an events calendar on the FtFn site.

Posted in Cooperatives | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Welcoming a helping hand

2009-02-19 by mjr

I’ve added the lovely k’s Helping Hand to Koha Community Blogs. I’m particularly pleased to see a site combining both Koha and Drupal, two of my current favourites. A bit more about the background to the site is over at Korerorero: More great Koha news from India.

Posted in Koha | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Banking with Free Software/Firefox: MPS Italy

2009-02-18 by mjr

A web browser
Websites

I’ve just updated the online banking compatibility list after a report from Italy that Monte dei Paschi di Siena is not currently working for GNU/Linux users. Can anyone confirm they broke it, or tell us how to get it working, please?

Posted in GNU/Linux | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments