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YaST2 network, driver options

I've added support for driver options for openSUSE-11.0.
This is feature I don't really use, but some of openSUSE or SLES users does. Maybe I'll need it when I will play more with bonding devices.




Hm, feature ...
In fact it brings back functionality that there was already there. But it was done in "hwcfg" files - deprecated configuration files for hardware devices. Now that configuration is stored in /etc/modprobe.d/network. But it's probably not final solution.

Why? because all that options are stored "on one place" but options packaged by driver rpms are stored in /etc/modprobe.d/$driver_name.

Maybe in future I'll change that place or enhance functionality to work on whole directory, but I need some feedback or opinions. Are there any?

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YaST2 network, bridge devices

Hello,
this is my first (and very short) blog about YaST2 development.
I put some screenshots here: new features::bridge.

What is bridged network good for? Mostly for network used with virtualisation (Xen, VirtualBox, Vmware, etc.). For this purpose all virtualisation products has their own tools, configurations and scripts.
This (per-virtualisation-application) has some disadvantages:
- possible conflict between sysconfig
- not unified way how to configure
- network configuration can't be clone by AutoYaST
That's why it makes sense to be implemented in YaST

Briefed introduction : when you want for any of your hosted machine to be seen from network, create bridge attached with physical network interface and some tun device. TUN device will be attached into your virtual machine and it makes virtual hosted machine be directly connected to real LAN.

The plan is (together with bridge) to implement also support for tun/tap devices (this should be done in sysconfig first) and Xen networking to confgure all this staff in one place.

Do you like this feature? If you have any feedback, comment or enhancement request - please let me know.

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Disconnect idle users on FreeBSD

If you are trying a solution to disconnect idle users automatically from your server,  take a look at /usr/ports/sysutils/idled. Maybe also is possible to activate this option directly in sshd but I don't find that option. Please let me know if it is possible.
But, idled works well, and can be used with all types of user login sessions.

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Experiments with Rpm payload

KDE Project:

I appologize to everyone thinking WTF? at the following, but I have to blog
about it, otherwise I'll explode :)

This is the reference for our current payload:
-rw-r--r-- 1 coolo suse 36966400 13. Mär 09:42 coreutils-6.10.tar
8.61user 0.05system 0:08.66elapsed 99%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+11936outputs (0major+2007minor)pagefaults 0swaps
-rw-r--r-- 1 coolo suse 6110179 13. Mär 09:45 coreutils-6.10.tar.bz2.9

Then I did lzma -1 to lzma -9 and these are the numbers:

5.90user 0.04system 0:06.03elapsed 98%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+16456outputs (0major+734minor)pagefaults 0swaps
-rw-r--r-- 1 coolo suse 8423507 13. Mär 09:48 coreutils-6.10.tar.lzma.1

5.83user 0.04system 0:05.88elapsed 100%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+10720outputs (0major+3271minor)pagefaults 0swaps
-rw-r--r-- 1 coolo suse 5488129 13. Mär 09:48 coreutils-6.10.tar.lzma.2

27.11user 0.06system 0:27.23elapsed 99%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+9888outputs (0major+3118minor)pagefaults 0swaps
-rw-r--r-- 1 coolo suse 5061307 13. Mär 09:48 coreutils-6.10.tar.lzma.3

29.60user 0.09system 0:30.36elapsed 97%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+9168outputs (0major+4334minor)pagefaults 0swaps
-rw-r--r-- 1 coolo suse 4691437 13. Mär 09:49 coreutils-6.10.tar.lzma.4

42.07user 0.10system 0:42.27elapsed 99%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+8576outputs (0major+6768minor)pagefaults 0swaps
-rw-r--r-- 1 coolo suse 4385224 13. Mär 09:50 coreutils-6.10.tar.lzma.5

44.68user 0.22system 0:46.32elapsed 96%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+8256outputs (0major+11633minor)pagefaults 0swaps
-rw-r--r-- 1 coolo suse 4222761 13. Mär 09:50 coreutils-6.10.tar.lzma.6

47.24user 0.34system 0:49.82elapsed 95%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
8inputs+7776outputs (0major+21360minor)pagefaults 0swaps
-rw-r--r-- 1 coolo suse 3971013 13. Mär 09:51 coreutils-6.10.tar.lzma.7

63.44user 0.18system 1:04.61elapsed 98%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+7344outputs (0major+40818minor)pagefaults 0swaps
-rw-r--r-- 1 coolo suse 3753487 13. Mär 09:52 coreutils-6.10.tar.lzma.8

63.52user 0.32system 1:04.14elapsed 99%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+7328outputs (0major+76468minor)pagefaults 0swaps
-rw-r--r-- 1 coolo suse 3746901 13. Mär 09:53 coreutils-6.10.tar.lzma.9

As you can easily see, lzma -2 beats bzip2 -9 both at size and compression speed
(using slightly more memory). Above that it's no longer win-win as you win another
1MB if you go with -5 (as I read in a patch Mandriva is using) at the cost of
taking 5x the compression time bzip2 needs and twice as memory.

So it's important to remember why we're thinking about lzma to begin with:

uncompressing the bzip.9:
1.81user 0.00system 0:01.82elapsed 100%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+1068minor)pagefaults 0swaps

uncompressing the lzma.2:
0.80user 0.00system 0:00.83elapsed 97%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+824minor)pagefaults 0swaps

uncompression the lzma.5:
0.69user 0.01system 0:00.70elapsed 99%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+1080minor)pagefaults 0swaps

And decompressing is what our _users_ do. So what do rpm users want?
- Smaller downloads
- Faster installs of these downloads
- Reasonable memory usage
- (Not waiting one more day for a rebuild to be synced out)

So we're in a small dilemma, but we'll continue playing and something between 2
and 7 will be it.

BTW: remember that these are coreutils sources, the compression rates for binaries
won't be as impressive.

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RadeonHD: Support for RV620/635 added!

Hurray!!! RV620/635 support is finally out!

A lot of people have been asking why there were so few commits
lately. People have been wondering if we were working on something
big.

Indeed we were:
Mode setting-wise RV620/635 ment the biggest change in subsystems
since R5xx: All outputs blocks have changed to allow for support
of Displayport.
The Displayport support is still missing as we are both lacking
hardware and programming information.

The digital outputs have been split up into an encoder and a
transmitter block which is now reflected in our programming model.
Furthermore the pixel clock PLL had been reworked completely.

We got hardware for testing as early as December 2007 however most
of the relevant documentation needed to code this has only been
received over the past four weeks.

Along with this support for dual link DVI has been added which is
still completely untested (due to lack of hardware).

So, even if you don't use any RV620/RV635 hardware,  please get it
and give it a try! We are awaiting your feedback...

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SOCKS proxy with SSH

Do you want to connect to irc network you realize that the ports are blocked. Using ssh -X you can forward programs on your computer but if you have a slow connection it doesn't work very well. It is possible to use -D option to create a SOCKS proxy:

    -D [bind_address:]port

    Specifies a local ``dynamic'' application-level port forwarding.
    This works by allocating a socket to listen to port on the local
    side, optionally bound to the specified bind_address.  Whenever a
    connection is made to this port, the connection is forwarded over
    the secure channel, and the application protocol is then used to
    determine where to connect to from the remote machine.  Currently
    the SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 protocols are supported, and ssh will act
    as a SOCKS server.  Only root can forward privileged ports.  Dy-
    namic port forwardings can also be specified in the configuration
    file.

So the magic command is (you need a ssh account on remote server):

$ssh -D 10000 user@ssh-server

this will create a SOCKS proxy on port “10000″ of your computer. This is a nice tunnel to the server. Now, all you need to do is to set in xchat to use a SOCKS proxy. The proxy is, “localhost”, with the port 10000. That's all, the xchat works and you can spend a lot of time on irc.

Also you can use this kind of tunnel for safe browsing. You have to set your preferences in Firefox to use a SOCKS proxy. When you browse, all the connections you make to websites will seem to originate from the server to which you SSH-ed. In addition, all outgoing and incoming data for the browsing session will be encrypted since it passes through the SSH connection. I am using the SOCKS proxy when I need access to websites and I don't have access from home (for example if I need scientific papers), so I open a ssh-tunnel to university and then I can access them.

There are also applications (email clients) which may also support SOCKS proxy.

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bash completion for zypper

Version 0.10.3 of zypper will include a bash completion script written by Marek Stopka during Hack Week 2. The script uses zypper help [command] output to retrieve the list of commands and command options in order to feed it to the command line. Given the growing number of zypper's commands and options i believe this will be a pleasant help for many users.

Thanx to Marek for doing this!

Currently the script provides completion of commands and command options. This can be extended in the future to include package name completion for the install, remove and info commands, or even repository aliases for the repo handling commands and the --repo option.
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When the cat's away, the mice can play

KDE Project:

It may work earlier for other couples, but it didn't work out earlier for us. So yesterday was officially the first evening mom was out alone - that is without being called home at 7pm because coolo ran out of ideas how to calm the baby.

Breastfeeding is really a great way to feed babies (and taking that Felix almost tripled his birth weight in just 6 months proves my point), but it also has one downside: My wife was irreplaceable when it came to food for quite some time and she both loved and hated it. Now she's out of direct duty as he's getting random vegetables for lunch and millet gruel for dinner, she thought we retry the experiment.

So I had an interesting evening, of course this ultraclever boy figured pretty quickly that something is different this evening. So he protested pretty clearly when I tried to feed him and did not want to sleep at all. I guess many parents know that: too tired to eat, too hungry to sleep.

So I put on our beloved "Ergo Baby Carrier" and went up and down till he finally was more tired than hungry and slept. Then I read the backlog of the openSUSE project IRC meeting and turned on the TV to watch some soccer. But as sleeping hungry wasn't the long term plan of my son, I only watched the first half. Then the bottle? carrying? diper? fun? bottle? sleep? carrying? bottle? fun? - cycle started, which almost frustrated me as much as calling my wife. Then we entered the living room and he spotted the soccer - and was calm out of the sudden. Something of it fascinates him, so he forgets every other problem he's having. This only works with soccer - and for a short time if our birds are having a fight.

So I was very pleased the fabulous Neuer kept the race open till well after 10pm. During that time, Felix was nipping from the bottle and it was enough so he felt back to sleep early enough so I could only guess the result of the penalty shootout while singing him to sleep in the sleeping room. But I did not expect anything else from the Neuer we saw last night (and even though the guy basically destroys the dream of my brother-in-law to ever become goal keeper auf Schalke).

Needless to say Maren was very happy to see us alive as she came home. And I'm very happy she does not want to go out tonight, so if time permits I may join the yast team tonight.