Wed, 29 Apr 2009

Ubuntu Jaunty - First Impressions

I upgraded two machines from Ibex (v 8.10) to Ubuntu Jaunty (v 9.04). First impressions of the uprade are largely good, but with a few caveats, some of which are quite damaging.

While the upgrade proceeded seamlessly on both machines, one a Dell D430 laptop and the other an Asus eeePC, I had to kill and uninstall the tracker tool, which errored, used up all the CPU and generally behaved like a completely untested and broken piece of software after the install. The system is unusable until you kill this piece of software, which is a very damning start for a supposed tested release of Ubuntu: this is the very first time I've had an unusable system after upgrarding / installing.
sudo aptitude remove libdeskbar-tracker libtracker-gtk0 tracker tracker-search-tool tracker-utils
will remove the tracker search tool and a reboot will complete the cleanup if you're not the type of person that likes finding and killing UNIX processes from the commandline.

Secondly, and something I've not yet managed to work around, my internal 3G modem will now fail to connect correctly every time after the laptop has been through a sleep/wake cycle. I use my Dell D430 while commuting and in the office each and every day, so it's well used to being put to sleep and woken again - if that feature did not work I would be seeking an alternate operating system/hardware platform. From my admittedly limited looking at logs, it appears that network Manager is (once again - *sigh*) at fault here. The 3G modem does connect, and even gets an IP address, but for some reason Network Manager or some associated piece of software decides the connection has failed, and disconnects the modem (which pretty much ensures that it's failed.) NetworkManager has had a checkered history, with many many problems, bugs, incompatibilities and 'features' resulting in it not playing nicely with other software and the system as a whole. It does a complicated job, but this is a regression bug - once which should and could have been flagged prior to the software being released. It works perfectly in Ubuntu 8.10... Fortunately, an old workaround of mine using wvdial / pppd directly works perfectly, though I then have to inform Firefox to stop pretending it's in Offline mode manually. Still - siginificantly better than having to reboot every time I need internet connectivity on a train.

Finally, there has been some breakage of the Display Settings application, which I found worked exceedingly well under Ubuntu 8.10, allowing me to hook my laptop at times into a projector, a second monitor and the TV at home. Fortunately, I have backups of my XOrg configuration files, so I was always able to restore to a stable working state - but again, these backup files were something I never needed to touch while using Ubuntu 8.10.

All in all though, Ubuntu Jaunty is a good leap forward. It upgrades OpenOffice.org to version 3.0, and about time too. I really like the on-screen notification in the top right corner, and all my hardware (excepting the 3G modem after a sleep/wake cycle) appears to work well. The Netbeans Programmer's Editor / IDE also sees a welcome upgrade to version 6.5, which is a pity in many respects seeing as how 6.5.1 has been around for a relatively long time now and 6.7 is already in beta. Still, I value stability over cutting edge on my every-day working machine.

I will hope one of two things will happen soon - either Ubuntu deploy a slew of updates that fix these regression bugs that have snuck into release 9.04, or that I will find the time this weekend to reinstall my laptop with a fresh install of Jaunty, which I suspect has been tested somewhat better than the upgrade scripts. I look forward once more to the simplicity I enjoyed with 8.10 of just clicking the NetworkManager icon and selecting the 3G network option to connect online wherever I might be.

posted at: 08:51 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 10 Apr 2009

RSA security website fail :(

Many companies use RSA SecureID keyfobs to ensure a one-time element to all passwords, and thus increase security. (The three tenets of good security are, something you know - like a PIN - something you have - like a one-time code generator keyfob - and something you are - like a fingerprint or biometric. Using a PIN with the RSA SecureID achieves the first two of these vectors, and specifically prevents someone gaining access if they only get a user's password.)

These keyfobs are not cheap, and so I noticed they had the great idea of printing a little message on the back:

If found refer to: www.rsasecurity.com/found

What a wonderful idea - if someone finds it, they can return it to RSA, and since each keyfob has a unique ID they can return it to the company who purchased it, using their records. The company can, in turn, look up their system to see which user was assigned that token and take appropriate action to either return the token to the owner or possibly berate him/her for losing it in the first place. Either way, it's a 'good thing'&tm;

Except for one minor flaw... the website doesn't work. Hopefully it's a temporary failure, but today if I wanted to return a keyfob to its owner I'd be met with:

Update: It's a simple redirection error, and refreshing the redirect of www.rsa.com/found will display the page correctly. Unfortunately, it appears I was completely wrong about the supposed intent of the page - it simply tells people to return found tokens to the local 'lost & found' or police station, and specifically states that RSA will not reveal who is the owner of any token found. They're quite right not to, but I was hoping RSA might offer a service that they might return tokens found, without revealing who they've returned it to to the finder. Oh well - best not lose my token then ;-)

posted at: 16:46 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 07 Apr 2009

Budget 2009 - Take #2

Ireland sees yet another budget this afternoon, as the government tries to rationalise the sharp drop in tax income they've seen even over the last three months. HEAnet are providing a streamed service for the content - as they do with all Oireachtas content. You can find it at www.heanet.ie/live, the HEAnet live streaming platform.

posted at: 14:12 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 06 Apr 2009

Drupal Workshop, Galway

I've spent the weekend in Galway, learning about and working with the Drupal content management system and creating various bits and pieces of websites. It's the first time I've more than theoretically contemplated making production use of someone else's content management system, rather than rolling my own - and I must admit I've been quite pleased with the capabilities and reliability of Drupal.

Thanks to all involved in the workshops and talks. With the help of various people I was able to deploy multiple sites on Ubuntu - and I promised I'd make the documentation for multisite available to Addison Berry, so I'll publish that shortly (once I remove my copious spelling and grammar errors ;) )

For now, I have the Balbriggan Ar Aghaidh and Balbriggan Community Childcare websites to build, and if I can figure out a sufficiently simple method of migrating my historical blog postings over, this website could also do with an upgrade.

posted at: 00:47 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry