ChichaPlanet

I’m looking forward to get a VPS server with root access and ssh login, the requirements i have are not special, i just want to be able to have a mutt, screen and an irssi. It’ll we awesome if i can use it as build server too, so debian based system would be prefered. Did someone of you know/have a VPS that fits my requierements? Please let me know!

Se aproximaba el final del año 97 u 98 cuando el encargado de coordinación me ofreció pasar a formar parte del grupo de operadores OpenVMS en la BVL/CAVALI. Mis compañeros en TdP me decian que no aceptara, que ahi estaba bien. De hecho, ya estaba mas adaptado y la gente me apreciaba, intuyo que además por ser el más joven del grupo con una corbata terrible. Tendría 18 o 19 años en ese momento.

Finalmente acepte y empece a trabajar precisamente el 1ro de enero del año siguiente. El entorno de la BVL era más tranquilo, no tenían grandes servidores ni cosas sofisticadas; sin embargo tenian algunos elementos que eran bastante interesantes para mi, y creo que claves en mi desarrollo: el proyecto era relativamente nuevo asi que había algunas cosas por construir, había un esquema de telecomunicaciones con los distintos agentes de bolsa a través de un sistema ATM usando el protocolo x25 (antecesor del modelo OSI, TCP) -también conocido como MEGANET en TdP-, el ambiente era tranquilo, teniamos acceso a Internet y el grupo era bastante ameno.

En este lugar es donde logre desarrollar un conocimiento de buen nivel sobre el sistema operativo OpenVMS, a punto que recibia constantes consultas de los nuevos operadores que ingresaban a GMD y de algunos desarrolladores. Mis inicios fueron en el turno de la noche, donde básicamente se procesaba información e imprimia reportes para el día siguiente, ejecutaban respaldos y se aprovechaba parte del tiempo para dormir. Recuerdo que mi primera noche me recoste sobre el sofá que mis compañeros me recomendaron y no desperte hasta las 7am, todavía no me adaptaba; de hecho antes de eso no acostumbraba a desvelarme.
En algún momento pase al turno de la tarde donde tenia que interactuar con usuarios, vestir formal (cosa que jamas me incomodo, salvo cuando me “sugirieron” que use el cabello más corto -obviamente me rebele!-), y sobretodo conocer en persona a los CVL$algo, osea los usuarios, de entre los cuales había algunas guapas chicas; cosa que felizmente parece ser una constante.

Con el pasar del tiempo logré automatizar algunos procesos en los servidores, escribi cientos de programas en DCL, y en algún punto practicamente tenia todo el tiempo libre consecuencia de eso. Logré configurar el stack TCP/IP (ya que esos equipos solo funcionaban en red con el protocolo DECNET), ejecutar y navegar en Mosaic desde el entorno Motif de los servidores Alpha para ingresar a Internet y los servicios en los que ya era ávido usuario (confesión). Descubri todo el mundo detrás de OpenVMS, las conferencias DEC, los grupos de usenet, de los que aprendi, además de incrementar mi interés en conocer el tema en más bajo nivel.

Ocurrio en algún momento que llevamos un curso de Unix, del que ya había oido porque un usuario del chat de Yahoo! lograba hacer cosas que otros no y me dijo que sabia Unix y que debería aprender puesto que todo ese chat estaba sobre Unix. Rápidamente busque en Altavista o Yahoo! y aprendi qué era este Unix.

Luego de la primera clase estuve más seguro de que si queria aprender esto. Lamentablemente desde mi sitio no tenia forma de acceder al servidor en la red de GMD que estaba en el otro edificio. No contento con esa limitación empece a investigar en Internet hasta que encontre la luz: Linux, un sistemas imilar a Unix que se podía ejecutar en una PC. Los siguientes pasos fueron reciclar unos discos duros de 500MB, reducir el espacio usado por Windows 95 en la PC (Pentium 33Mhz, 16MB RAM) que tenia asignado, descargar durante 1 mes -debido a que reiniciaban el equipo y la descarga FTP no tenia “resume”- una distribución de Linux (creo que RedHat 5.x), y tratar de instalar y configurarla, cosa que logré luego de algunos días.

Cierto día buscando información di con la página del Proyecto GNU y leí su manifesto, e inmediatamente coincidi con el mismo. Esto me animó bastante a conocer, usar y promover esto que ahora sabía que se llamaba software libre. Posteriormente supe que habían distribuciones y encontre a mi subsiguiente amor: el Proyecto Debian. Luego de leer su contrato social, manifesto y las directrices, en donde percibi claramente que cualquiera podría contribuir a éste, levante la mano y dije: yo también. Hasta antes de eso no había sentido tan cercano el hecho de que, además de usar algo, también podía hacer cosas para hacerlo mejor y que beneficie a otros como efecto secundario. Esto claramente fue amor a primera vista, de los cuales uno nunca se separa.

Reemplace el RedHat por Debian, que por ese tiempo era complicado de instalar; lo instale en la PC de mi casa, que había adquirido recientemente, y decidi enlistarme en el grupo de traducción como punto inicial de mi contribución.

De las anécdotas de ese tiempo recuerdo una cuando el nuevo jefe de sistemas, ex marino, ingreso al centro de cómputo para mostrarlo a una visita y empezo a describir las actividades y equipos que teniamos. Al señalar mi PC, ejecutando GNOME 1.x, con una terminal ejecutando top y alguna otra cosa, dijo: desde aquí monitoreamos todo. Tuve dos sensaciones, la primera la obvia (no tenia idea de lo que estaba pasando allí -ya que yo mismo me autorice a instalarlo-) y la segunda fue un poco de ego que me decia: exacto, tengo el control de todo esto (cosa que tampoco estaba lejos de ser cierto).

En algún momento, años después cuando ya había salido de GMD, fui a ayudar a mi amigo Oscar con un tema de backups y para sorpresa mía se trataba de uno de los programas que hice tiempo atrás. Finalmente llegaron a usarlo (Oscar era reacio porque no quería olvidarse las órdenes y sus parámetros) y replicarlo en otros proyectos, fue bastante halagador :)

Altough it was on my willingness to travel to Mar del Plata for this year’s Debconf, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ll have to skip it this year, again. I happen to have final exams the very same week and the one which follows debconf and have to deliver a small software class project next week.

This escenery renders almost imposible to have a decent timeframe for me to be able to stay for more than 24 hours at Argentina. This is bad since, besides willing to speak about my recent work and seeing old friends, I also did want to visit my father’s family on La Plata and have lot of fun at ‘La ciudad de la furia’ aka Buenos Aires, wich I happen to like a lot.

I still plan to find ways for me to be able to present my talk, since I noticed it’s been accepted!. Maybe I can run a non-RL debconf in Second Life ;)

Anyway, life isn’t this bad at all. I’m afraid I’ll be enyoing a wonderful vacation with such insuperable compannion soon. So, expect me to dissapear of the known world and to return from the sky. Looking forward to that moment! :)

Latest months have been of great improvement and empowerment on my life; say by my return to the academic life, more of the crazy corporate and business world and other changes on my own (read self hacks) have been keeping me busy and on constant training. Sadly, and not by intent, this have impacted on my direct contribution to the free software ecosystem and interact and work together with the brave gnu world out there. However I’ve been doing some little work and also finding ways to keep cooperating but now from another position. Today I’d like to present the first of this new form of contribution to the free software ecosystem, and specially to the Debian Project.

In the last couple of months I’ve been working on a paper which intends to offer a (not so) new -as you might notice after reading it- approach to what the Debian Project have been managing to produce and what can be done to keep doing it better in the new escenery that we are and will be living in the upcoming years.

My work describes the way Debian have been sucessfully producing lead-users, as described by Eric Von Hippel’s Democratizing innovation book, since it’s conception and what elements were key to have done so. Previously it takes a look on how the process of innovation is really done. Then it describes the current and future world’s escenery according research and current trends, later it makes links between them and gives some ideas for us to keep fostering innovation and play a key role in the free software ecosystem.

With this work my intention is for us to understand what we are, what are we good doing, and how we can keep rocking! I want Debian to look further and be the free software development cutting edge project and atract bright people to work on what they are passionate about.

Hopefully I’ll be in Mar del Plata to discuss about this and also have some fun with you guys I haven’t seen in years!

I’d appreciate any comment or feedback to this. My intention is to turn this work into a collaborative fashion that allow us to make our project much more wonderful!

The full paper is here to download (pdf): http://stone-head.org/talks/debconf8-fostering-innovation.pdf

I’ve been writing a lot about Augeas and all the process i go through to get it included in debian/ubuntu. It seems that a lot of people was following it, but some of them don’t actually understand the whole picture and what is augeas for, so i’ve been asked to write a post explaining what it is, so here we go:

From the upstream homepage:

Augeas is a configuration editing tool. It parses configuration files in their native formats and transforms them into a tree. Configuration changes are made by manipulating this tree and saving it back into native config files.

Actually, it is a library which does all that stuff and can be manipulated using its public API. But what does this actually means? I will explain it using augtool and /etc/hosts as an example. As you might know it has the information of the host names and their IP addresses, so let’s take this hosts as an example:

127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.localdomain host.domain

After parsing it on augeas we will end with:

/files/etc/hosts/
- - - - - - - - - - - 1/
- - - - - - - - - - - - ipaddr = 127.0.0.1
- - - - - - - - - - - - canonical = localhost
- - - - - - - - - - - - alias = localhost.localdomain
- - - - - - - - - - - - alias = host.domain

So, then we might want to change some values:

augtool> set /files/etc/hosts/1/alias[2] myhost.domain

Ending with:

/files/etc/hosts/
- - - - - - - - - - - 1/
- - - - - - - - - - - - ipaddr = 127.0.0.1
- - - - - - - - - - - - canonical = localhost
- - - - - - - - - - - - alias = localhost.localdomain
- - - - - - - - - - - - alias = myhost.domain

or add new values:

augtool> ins alias after /files/etc/hosts/1/alias[1]

what will turn into:

/files/etc/hosts/
- - - - - - - - - - - 1/
- - - - - - - - - - - - ipaddr = 127.0.0.1
- - - - - - - - - - - - canonical = localhost
- - - - - - - - - - - - alias = localhost.localdomain
- - - - - - - - - - - - alias
- - - - - - - - - - - - alias = myhost.domain

then we need to set a value since now it’s NULL:

augtool> set /files/etc/hosts/1/alias[2] myhost

ending like:

/files/etc/hosts/
- - - - - - - - - - - 1/
- - - - - - - - - - - - ipaddr = 127.0.0.1
- - - - - - - - - - - - canonical = localhost
- - - - - - - - - - - - alias = localhost.localdomain
- - - - - - - - - - - - alias = myhost
- - - - - - - - - - - - alias = myhost.domain

Then you can save it using:

augtool> save

Also you can add a new host, or whatever you want, just need to play with the tree.

Ok, but how this Black Magic work and how can i expand it to read new configuration files? Augeas uses lenses which are a Meta Data type using regular expressions that is being used for parsing, reading and writing configuration files. If you want to play around with lenses you can check this step-by-step tutorial written by Raphael Pinson (Thank you!)

As it usual when someone gets in, this is my hello Planet Debian post.

I’m Nicolas Valcárcel, i’m the maintainer of terminator and augeas and really interested on server and security topics. I’ve just started my New Maintainer process some weeks ago and hoping to put all my energies on making debian even better and easier!

I Live in Lima, Perú.

This is one more of those post with some random information and updates:

One more week for holidays!!
I’m going to travel to Orlando, Florida with my girlfriend’s family for holidays, i’m going to be after 17 years in disney world again! I’m also looking forward to know the LoCo Team (if there is any) and/or random FreeSoftware enthusiast, so if you live there, drop me an e-mail so we can get in contact to find a place and time for having some beers

Augeas is finally in!
Augeas has already reach the ubuntu and debian archive! So it’s time to write lenses and work to have it in good shape!

Config:Model
Last week (i think) i’ve been mailed about the Config:Model project, it looks really promising to me, i’m only waiting for augeas support to package it and start playing. If it gets into that stage soon (which i hope it does) we can have UCSA (or whatever i call it at the end) for intrepid+1!!

UDS in California
I’m really exited about this, next UDS will be at google offices in Mountain View California from 8th to 12th December, that’s one week after my final exams, so i won’t need to ask for permission at the university! Also i already have my visa for the united states, so there are less problems to go there (just the financial one :P). So i hope i can see you all in there!!

New Maintainer process
I’ve started my journey into Debian development. I’ve been contributing since i started with ubuntu development (really less that for ubuntu, but still forwarding a lot of stuff), i’m the maintainer of 2 packages now and i will start co-maintaining one more package, so i thought it was time to start the NM process, i founded an advocate (thank you kees!!) and i jumped in, it’s a long and not quick process but an awesome one, i still have a lot of debian in my heard, since was the distro which introduced me into Linux and i want to pay that back!

New Mentoring Model
Last week we have been discussing a lot inside the mentoring reception team and with other MOTU’s on improving the mentoring program, we start writing a draft, making changes, discussing more, and finally we released it!

I think this was all the random stuff going on in my life this last days!

As i said on my previuos post augeas got it’s 2 acks in ubuntu, so it’s on the new queue waiting for an archive administrator to review and include it on the archive. Today i got it also sponsored in debian (thank you kees, you rock!) so it’s waiting on it’s new queue also waiting for an ftp master to review and include it! So anytime from now on you will be able to play with it! It’s awesome.

I have also uploaded it to my ppa for those who cannot wait until it’s included to play with it (and start writing lenses). So if you are one of those you can’t wait and/or want to contribute on the lenses writing stage yo just need to add this to your sources.list in hardy:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/nvalcarcel/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/nvalcarcel/ubuntu hardy main

Then you can install augeas-tools and play with it!

So, as i promise in my previous post i’m posting an update of the state of my project.

I have already packaged augeas, it’s a mixed package including a binary, a library, development files, and some extra files, i have already uploaded to my ppa to use it for testing, if you want to play with it feel free to include my ppa on your sources and mail me if you find some bugs

I’ve also uploaded it to revu so if you are a reviewer please check it, comment and Ack it when ready (if you are DD you can also check it on mentors.d.n and sponsor it for debian).

But what is augeas? Taken from the long description:

Augeas parses configuration files into a tree structure, which it exposes through its public API. Changes made through the API are written back to the initially read files.

The transformation works very hard to preserve comments and formatting details. It is controlled by “lens” definitions that describe the file format and the transformation into a tree.

So as a summary it is a cool, fun and easy way to manage config files!

You may have read already about Ubuntu centralized server administrator since it has been mentioned on the lasts server meetings and as you may have noticed i’m not present on them, so i will start giving the status of the spec from here, but first, as this is the first time i blog about it i will start describing what is ucsa:

On the last UDS i talked to some people about making a tool to control and manage services easily and without pain for new sysadmins. The first thing really painful about service management tools is that you have limited options on it, and if you edit your config file by hand it will simply break the tool, so you can or use the tool or edit config files, not the 2 of them at the same time, so one of the goals was to have some way to edit the config files by hand and not destroy the management tool, but how? You can’t! You must be out of your mind! Well, it might be, but we got some ideas on how to do this:
Ignored zone:
We first talk about making the tool read until some stop point, so the sysadmin can edit after that point without breaking anything because the tool wasn’t going to read it.

Augeas
After UDS someone send some links to the server team list and one of them catch my attention, it was a tool that parses config files and present them as trees so you don’t need to care about the config file itself, just edit the tree and save it, it was the perfect backend for ucsa!

Also, i wanted a tool that doesn’t depend on any service (as a web browser), since i want to care only about the services, so we need a user interface different from CLI, since it’s “hard” from the new linux sysadmins (now i love it, but remember when you start!). Gtk? plz! who wants Xorg on his server, maybe for home servers, but not as initial UI, Curses! That’s perfect! We can use it from command line without needing anything extra! Yay!

So what’s the progress? I’ve already packaged augeas, i’m just waiting for someone to review it and give me feedback or upload it.

Find this a cool idea? Stay tunned, there is more!

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

UDS Group Foto, originally uploaded by nxvl.

FossCamp and UDS has already ended, We have had a lot of interesting session and decided about a lot of things. The most interesting things about the whole event have been the Ubuntu/Debian colaboration session leaded by the awesome Lucas Nussbaum, i hope that most of the things we talked about become real things.

In the Server side has also been a lot of interesting things happened, we have had the great OpenLdap Project Leader with us in the sessions, so we have talked a lot about how to integrate services and ways to use OpenLdap in those.

Now i’m in a one week trip across Europe, so i have not much time to write a big post, but i promise to write it when i came back to Lima, we have hade a LOT of interesting things happened this week.

If you want to check some photos i have already uploaded a lot of them into my flickr account.

Tal como se ve en la web de DebianPerú, he publicado un tutorial sobre cómo usar bzr-builddeb para mantener paquetes Debian/Ubuntu:

• Tutorial en el wiki
• Hilo de discusión en el foro

On my really first years using Linux i become myself a Debian user so i wished to become myself a Debian Developer, but for several reasons i don’t ever start my way into it. Years after i started using Ubuntu, and then, log time after, i started my way into MOTU but never forgetting where i came from, so i started helping in the ubuntu “Debian Collaboration Team”, reporting bugs back to debian and helping resolving them, sending patches, talking to the debian developers, and so on, so i feel really good collaborating back to the distribution who involved me on free software, and now, as i have my way to MOTU really advanced i start my way to debian too, and now i’m a debian mantainer, i get terminator included on debian (thanks stone-head) so now the goal is to be more involved on the project and maybe became an official DD one day

For the time being offline I've been doing a lot of things, and some of them involve free software of course. I'm glad to announce that this march Peru will be heading the direction from its current status-quo to, what we expect, is the first step into a real and sustainable ecosystem where our talented people (from academy, and others) get their hands dirty into to real contribution to free software projects.

involucrate.org has born as a project focused on building an environment to foster a real free software community focused on technical contribution and making our country have a larger spot on the free software contributors world-map.

The lack of appropiate models and the inhability to stablish a link between the real actors on such scenary have led to a poor involvement and groups atomization for "ideological" or political means, making room for "religionization" of a very technical and licensing model matter where debate over technical aspects have gone 0.

Our manifesto (in Spanish) explains our vision and mission, and also how we expect to achieve such a challenging goal. Is in our will to link our academic people, who was somehow behind the walls (a luxury for a country like mine), and the other actors here and globally. We want our talented people to see globally, and offer our life-experience on the field to make them aware and show them the opportunities that they can have and how other people near us who are making it right!.

This time, thanks to the wonderful guys at GNOME Foundation, we are having our very first international conference called involucrate+GOME focused on free software development and, as we expect to be, be the first step of a series of world-class events where we expect to set a yearly world-known free software event here in Peru. Something we dodn't have after more than 10 years since the first group of people gathered together to discuss which is the best distro or something like that and the discussion is still ongoing.

As noted the conference will be focused mostly, well almost 90%, in GNOME, but we expect to have more editions dedicated to one or more projects. So, I invite you to check our program and our cool speakers, all from south america and all contributing on GNOME.

Of course you are invited to attend to, if you happen to like us! Bring your questions and contributions to this initiative to both our project web or DebianPeru web who is coordinating this initiative, I mean this is almost a debianite sub-project ;)

I want to say as a side-note, that despite what media has made people think, we are making a real cool relationship with the chilean community. Expect to hear from us soon, and not because we've buying more wine from Chile and they are importing real pisco from Peru, or because we'll mimic our presidents. I really like this time, it comes 10 years late, however!

Well, these have been busy days, i have been working on some ubuntu MOTU tasks, involving me in the Server Team and i have felt in love and involve myself on the developing of terminator. Finally i can easy split my monitor with terminals and see all of them at the same time! it’s what i was looking for!

The last days we where working on the 0.7 release and all the packaging work for it’s inclusion on Ubuntu and Debian, for ubuntu there was a LOT of feedback, comments and help from the MOTU’s and finally after some work done it’s have been uploaded today and it’s on the build queue waiting for the admins to approve it, i’m so happy to see it there after all the work we put in there. I hope to receive some feedback from the Debian developers on the next few days so it can also be included up there, for now let’s start working on 0.8 and on the hardy development circle

Como ya es tradición, este sábado quince de diciembre se realizó el Día Debian 2007 en el Perú. El local escogido por sus méritos y virtudes fue el auditorio de la FIIS en la UNI. Ese día empezó tarde para mi, después de una noche de parranda desperté a eso de la una de la tarde, [...]

Es un cambio bien gracioso, en fin. La cosa es que he pasado de jurarsela a la que parió a los Debian Developers a hacer mi primer commit al SVN de pkg-gnome (el grupo encargado de velar por la alegría y buen humor de GNOME en Debian).

Para los curiosos, simplemente incluí en el paquete de Nautilus el parche para el bug #478363 (bugzilla.gnome.org). Así que ahora los thumbnails o vistas previas en Debian recuperan sus lindos bordecitos ?.



Y en ooootras noticias, Laura -la dueña de Pirañon/JoséG- está embarazada. Muchas felicidades para ellos, espero que esto no afecte al staff de DebianPerú.

Nodoka es un tema bastante chévere de GNOME, obra y gracia de Martin Sourada y nuevo tema por defecto de Fedora. Se ve más o menos así:

Hoy, leyendo el planeta debian en español, via google Reader, vi esta imagen posteada por Alejandro Santos, la verdad no dejo de reirme.