So today is the third anniversary of my first upload of the ISC DHCP v3 package to Debian.

It all started back in the days of the linux.conf.au 2005 organising committee. Bob Edwards, who ran the ANU Department of Computer Science computer labs (which ran on Debian at the time), was constantly complaining about bugs like #286011, once he'd found out I was a Debian developer.

So I figured I'd try and do something about it, so I think I emailed the maintainers, who had been fairly inactive (the last upload before mine was in July the year before), and asked if they'd like me to NMU the package.

I think Matt Zimmerman emailed me back and told me to knock myself out, and add myself as an uploader while I was at it, and well, the rest is history...

I've had fun fixing bugs, trying to clean things up, deal with a pretty archaic upstream build system and get the package up to current Debian standards compliance. One of the highlights was being able to finally get rid of Debian Installer's dependence on the v2 DHCP client package, so we could finally jettison the v2 packages for Lenny (which reminds me, I still have to figure out how to handle the transition from Etch with respect to that).

I've been working hard to try and get as many of the patches in Debian's DHCP packages incorporated upstream. Unfortunately, they have a totally unpredictable release cycle, and they have feature releases and bug fix releases. The feature releases are very few and far between, and they won't introduce new features into a bugfix release.

Speaking of patches, my personal philosophy is that distribution packages shouldn't differ radically in behaviour or functionality from their upstream source, so I've resisted incorporating some of the more deviant patches from Ubuntu, instead forwarding them directly upstream.

There's still a bit of work to be done with the package. The ISC released version 3.1.0 a while ago, and that's the version I'm trying to standardise on for Lenny. It's got new support for a domain-search option, which means people can stop abusing the domain-name option to set a domain search list in their clients. The domain-search option is also honoured by Mac OS X (Leopard), and I dare say Windows Vista probably supports it as well, but I haven't checked.

Unfortunately the client-side support for the domain-search option is a bit flaky in 3.1.0, so I'm hoping the ISC will release 3.1.1 real soon now, as I believe most of the flakiness issues are addressed in it. Of course, for Lenny to do the right thing consistently with this new option, #460609 and #465158 need to be resolved also.

The last thing I'm trying to sort out for Lenny is the reasonably in-demand LDAP patch. It's been floating around out-of-tree for longer than I've been maintaining the package. José L. Redrejo Rodríguez has been kind enough to clean up the patch for me, so that rather than bastardising the standard DHCP package to build a dhcp3-server package that has LDAP support, it basically builds DHCP twice, once with the patch and once without, and the dhcp3-server-ldap package just diverts /usr/sbin/dhcpd3 out of the way and plonks in the LDAP-enabled binary in its place. I hope to upload a new revision of the package that builds this new binary package within the next week (hopefully this weekend).

After that's done, and hopefully 3.1.1 has been released, and Lenny is out of the way, I'm going to focus on transitioning away from a versioned set of DHCP packages. The whole "3" in everything was to allow the v2 and v3 packages to coexist. I've sought advice from the release team about this, and they said not to bother, but it feels really gross to have the version 4 package (4.0.0 has been released by the ISC for a while now as well) be still called dhcp3, and to install into /etc/dhcp3 and other such versioned directories.

The final thing I want to look into is collaborative maintenance. I've been wanting to do this for a while, but I wanted to get the package into a revision control system (shock horror, it's not currently) and I've been baulking at how to do it the "right" way. I'm pretty sold on using Git for the revision control system, I just haven't figured out the right approach yet. Martin Krafft's articles about it have been interesting, but feel a bit overly advanced, and don't quite suit my situation. I've been hesitant to start using Git, then discover I've done it all wrong, and have to start again. I need to just bite the bullet. My upstream also doesn't use Git, and doesn't make their revision control system publicly available, so I just get the tarballs when they're released.

Speaking of upstream, I made the discovery last year that they're just down the road from me in Redwood City, so I've been trying to improve relations by getting the main folks who work on DHCP at ISC to pop up to Google for lunch every now and then, which so far has happened twice, and been good a opportunity to have a chat. In fact, they're keen for Debian to join the DHCP Forum (Debian is already a member of the BIND Forum) and I think they've started talking to the Debian folks responsible for our BIND Forum membership about extending that to cover the DHCP Forum as well.

So that's about it. I think after three years of being the sole uploader, I'll formally put myself in as the maintainer and Eloy as an uploader until I get around to implementing collaborative maintenance.

Jeremy Visser writes about the evilness of User-Agent sniffing

I tend to disagree with him, particularly after reading Wikipedia's robots.txt file, and some of the comments in there.

wget can be quite a nasty program if used incorrectly. Chances are, if you know what you're doing, you'll know how to change the User-Agent string, and therefore you're probably not going to do something dumb like try to download the entire site recursively.

If you don't, you're probably Doing It Wrong.

One of Sarah's university subjects this semester is a statistics course. One of the requirements of this course is some software package that only runs on Windows. As the only Windows machines in the house are my laptop, which dual-boots between Linux and Windows XP and goes for many months without XP seeing the light of day, and our desktop, which dual-boots between Linux and an ageing Windows 2000 installation (which blue-screens on boot at the moment because I have a Sun Quad Fast-Ethernet card in it), we figured it might be a good idea to look into getting a copy of Windows XP (especially before it stops becoming available). I wouldn't buy Vista, given all the bad things I've heard about it.

The game plan was to either throw it on the desktop (and see if it tolerated the QFE card better than 2000) or try out Boot Camp on Sarah's MacBook Pro. We ended up doing the latter.

I did all of the post-installation configuration of XP while Sarah was napping this afternoon, and I have to say I'm impressed. Apple (for whatever reason) has gone to a fair amount of trouble to make sure that Windows runs really well on their hardware, and the Boot Camp stuff is really slick. It all "just works". Even the built-in iSight camera.

So I feel pretty dirty for forking out for a copy of Windows XP (although I'm deriving some pleasure from boosting the Windows XP sales figures in spite of Windows Vista being available), and then putting it on a Mac to boot, but we'll blame the university for being uncool.

Now if I could just get the Windows version of ClamAV to make me feel confident it was actually providing some protection...

From the e2fsck man page:

SIGNALS
       The following signals have the following effect when sent to e2fsck.

       SIGUSR1
              This  signal causes e2fsck to start displaying a completion bar.
              (See discussion of the -C option.)

I was just lamenting to myself how e2fsck should default to showing a progress bar for those times when you check a multi-terabyte filesystem, and would really like to know how long it's going to take so you can decide to go to bed or not, and you've learned about the -C option after you've started e2fsck.

I'd been thinking to myself how grouse it would be if e2fsck would let you know how far it had gotten on receipt of some signal of some sort.

Ted Ts'o, I salute you.

Update

Too bad I can't say the same thing for resize2fs.

I wonder if things could go any worse if we actively tried?

So despite going back to see the cardiologist on Monday afternoon, concerned about there possibly being still some sort of infection, and being told there wasn't, on Thursday morning, the top part of the incision was looking swollen.

It looked even more so by the evening when I got home from work, and Sarah emailed a photo to the cardiologist, and he agreed it didn't look too crash hot, so he phoned a prescription for another, longer course of antibiotics through to the pharmacy, but too late to get filled last night.

By bedtime it was looking even more ready to blow, and sure enough, around 1am (it's always 1am) it erupted everywhere. Fortunately (for me), I missed all the gory details, but I think there was a fair bit of fluid built up in there.

So we went back to the clinic this morning, and they decided that they needed to open up part of the incision to let it drain and heal properly.

They took another swab to run another culture, and then got a physician's assistant to take to her with a scalpel. I've seen my poor wife go through too many painful things in the last six months. Today's was no better. Most of the problem was the local anaesthetic injections, but watching them open up the incision again wasn't much fun either. No one should have to go through as much shit in a short time as what Sarah has had to. It's just not fair.

She now has a gaping hole in her chest with some gauze packed in it, which has to be changed twice a day (by lucky old me). The idea is to let it heal from the bottom up, rather than the top down, as it seems an abscess had formed in the wound, and that was were all the trouble was. So by leaving it all open, it can drain properly, and heal from the bottom up. $DEITY only knows what sort of mess it's going to make of the incision area, but we can deal with that later. They reckon it'll take another 4-6 weeks to heal.

I'm really hoping now that with it draining, and another course of antibiotics, Sarah will be in much less pain.

I just did the evening gauze change. Fun. The opening in the incision is longer than I remembered them making this morning. It's about an inch long, and a centimetre deep, and there's a small hole in the bottom that presumably leads to the "interior". It's not as bad looking as I thought it might be. Packing the gauze in didn't seem to hurt Sarah too much, which is just as well.

This really is the pits. I really hope this is the end of this, and the infection goes away for good, and the incision heals quickly. In terms of recovery, this is a pretty major setback in my opinion. From now on, we won't be relying on the cardiologist for surgical opinions, we'll be insisting a member of the surgical team checks Sarah out.

I don't think the first trip ever made a mention in either of our blogs. Funny how an exhausting trip tends to stem the care factor to write about it afterwards...

Anyway, Sarah was in a fair bit of pain last night when she went to bed, and despite taking 800mg of Ibuprofen, some amount of Oxycodone, and some sleeping tablets, she was up again under 2 hours later, in agony.

The main concern was that the staph infection she'd apparently had in the incision a few weeks prior hadn't been kicked fully by the antibiotics, and was coming back.

So off we trotted to Stanford's ER, getting there around 1am. Fortunately it was very quiet (not that it matters when you mention the magic words "chest pain") and Sarah got straight in.

They did the usual battery of tests and decided to keep her in for observation, so I trundled off home for some sleep at about 5am.

They told her she could go home at about 1:30pm. Apparently the problem was muscle spasms, which can happen in some people after having heart surgery (even this long after the surgery). The solution? Valium. The poor girl's going to rattle soon with all these pills.

They did some blood work and there's no sign of the staph infection. Whatever pain medication they gave Sarah intravenously today made her extremely nauseous, and she was still concerned about the state of the incision around the area that had been weeping previously, so we trekked back in to Stanford this afternoon to see the cardiologist, who wasn't concerned about the incision at all. In fact, he said the surgical doctor had been a bit generous with pronouncing a staph infection in the incision two weeks previously, saying that the swab they took at the time probably just picked it up off Sarah's skin, where it's quite common to be found. So she may never have had a staph infection in the first place.

In light of this Linux kernel local root vulnerability, I thought I should audit the trustworthiness of users with logins on systems I administer, so I slapped together this script to find users who had a valid shell and an unlocked account.

Disclaimer: I wrote it in bed on a Sunday morning. It may be utter crap.

I went back to work today after something like a total of 6 weeks off. (2 weeks vacation, 4 weeks unpaid leave).

The month of January went pretty quickly really. The week in hospital with Sarah was a blur. The week and a half afterwards was also pretty much a blur. Then we had the week where things went a bit backwards, and then we had this week, a few days of which were spent up north at an inn in Little River, Mendocino County. Heck, let's just call the entire month a blur and be done with it.

Sarah's doing pretty well now. Surgery on the 3rd, discharged on the 9th, back in the Emergency Room on the 21st with tachycardia. Concerns about the incision weeping on the 21st, and again on the 28th. General increase in pain on the 28th, along with a few sleepless nights preceding.

But now, with a doubling of her beta blockers, some antibiotics, pain killers, anti-inflammatories and sleeping tablets, she's feeling a bit more human again, if not like a human pill bottle.

The surgical folks want to see her again on Monday to follow up how the incision is going since they prescribed the antibiotics. The weeping has calmed down significantly, but hasn't gone away completely.

A couple more months to go before we can call her "recovered".