First steps with git and I’m not all that pleased

Software,

I have been tracking 2.6.16.x here because Xen doesn’t have patches for 2.6.17 yet (why on earth that is, I don’t know.) But I need a few 2.6.17.x patches to the qla2xx driver. So I figure this is an opportunity to learn git.

I learned git, but then quickly learned that I can’t just pull random commits from one branch to another. I have to use git cherry-pick, which doesn’t actually pull the commit unmodified — it takes a diff, and commits a new patch based on that diff. So I expect problems later when I bump the local branch to 2.6.17.

This seems depressingly like arch/baz/bzr, and is a good reason for me to stay with darcs for now. This same operation with darcs would have been trivial, AND darcs would have automatically pulled in prerequisite patches rather than giving a merge failure and making me find them manually.

Fire updates

House Renovation

Whew. Lots has been going on the past couple of days.

First, many thanks to all that sent us e-mails, comments, and notes. We appreciate it! It’s nice to have people the care.

Next, in addition to the first set of fire photos I posted, I have now added more photos: a second set of fire photos. Note that there are two pages to that as well.

I’ve also added some photos to the Grandpa’s Farm set — this shows what things looked like back in April, before the fire. The buildings that burned are the barn, calf barn, and chicken house.

On to the updates…

Monday I went out to the farm first thing in the morning. Some areas were still smoldering — basically wherever there was hay. It was a bit concerning. I went up to the 2nd floor in the house and took some photos of the yard.

I headed on in to work. Later in the evening, I went back out to check on things. Two fire fighters were back out there with a fire truck dousing the remaining smoldering areas. Apparently the fire fighters had been checking on the place intermittently all day and had been out there with water earlier as well.

The Goessel Fire Dept. is an all-volunteer department. These people aren’t getting paid for this, and they do an EXCELLENT job. Someone was out at 1AM Monday, again at 10AM Monday, then twice more with the truck. They did all this on their own — I hadn’t asked them to. It is amazing how much these people care about the community and taking care of fires.

I also never knew how long bales of hay burn.

Here’s one of the new photos:

Renovation: Weeks 3 – 5

House Renovation

Well, it’s been a few weeks since my last update, but I was still out there once a week taking pictures. The changes have been less dramatic — but then it’s hard to get as dramatic as tearing off the kitchen and pulling off a chunk of a house.

So check out the week 3-5 photos. Note there are two pages of photos.

The lath and plaster is all down. So it looks really empty inside.

The foundation work starts Thursday and continues for about 2 weeks. Then the reconstruction will begin.

Here’s this week’s highlight:

It’s an old wagon that was in the chicken house. Because of the pickup that was in there, I had never been able to get a good picture of it before.

Today’s Political Puzzler

Politics

So recently the prime minister of Iraq criticized Israel for a disproportionate response in their attacks against Lebanon. I don’t know his exact words, but in general, I agree with that sentiment.

It’s no big surprise that Bush and Republican leaders have all been rushing to support Israel and taking their sweet time before helping with a ceasefire, and taking plenty of time with that process, too.

So it’s also no big surprise that a number of Washington politicians mustered up a good deal of righteous-sounding moral indigniation at the Iraqi PM. There were some that boycotted his address to Congress today. Lots of fiery rhetoric.

But here’s the surprise: it was the Democrats doing this.

Huh?

The populist party, the one that’s supposed to be valuing life and perhaps has recently started to grow a backbone in opposing ever-broadening war, is now in support of Israel’s tactics?

I think it’s all politics. The Republicans don’t want to criticize the PM because he’s part of the process their party started. And the Democrats want to pander to their base and criticize anything related to an unpopular war.

I don’t think very many people in Washington from either party have genuine ethics these days. They just take whatever moral position they think will win votes.

Thoughs on cfengine, bcfg2, and puppet

Software,

Yesterday I posted about my first steps with cfengine. By the end of the day today, I had things far along that I can:

  • cdebootstrap a directory
  • Run a special cfengine script to get the base files like /etc/fstab and /etc/hosts set up
  • Bring it up in Xen, apt-get install cfengine2, and use cfagent to bring up the rest of the system and install the necessary base packages (like xfsprogs)

Very nice.

I’ve had a few annoyances with the cfengine packages support, which doesn’t quite seem to work as documented al the time.

I also took a look at bcfg2 thanks to a comment yesterday. It looks very interesting, but I have a few gripes about it. I find cfengine files easier to read. I can look at a file, having never used cfengine before, and have a reasonable idea of what is trying to be done and how it will be accomplished. I can’t say the same for bcfg2, plus bcfg2 uses XML config files (ick) and a bunch of small otherfiles. While the architecture as the authors have described it certainly sounds appealing, I’m not sure that bcfg2 is a simple as cfengine. I am a strong believer in the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle. But THANKS to the person that left the comment, and I hope that bcfg2 continues to evolve and provide an alternative to cfengine.

I also looked at Puppet. This thing looks very slick. Seems to be cfengine with a nicer syntax. On the other hand, it’s not really clear that anybody is using it. That makes me nervous — this is the kind of thing that can seriously harm machines if it does something unexpected.

First steps with cfengine

Software

This afternoon I started looking at cfengine. In very little time, I’ve already set up rules that can bring a system from pretty much cdebootstrap state up to a minimal production system in our environment. I’ve still got a little ways to go, but it’s already hacking on /etc/hosts, hosts.deny, sources.list, installing appropriate Debian packages for our systems, etc.

It’s come a long way since I last looked at it six years ago.

One thing I can’t figure out…

I have a /etc/bacula/bacula-fd.conf file that contains, among other things, this:

Director {
  Name = backup-dir
  Password = "foo"
}

Director {
  Name = backup-mon
  Password = "bar"
  Monitor = yes
}

I can’t figure out how to make cfengine delete just that second section. I tried this:

       BeginGroupIfLineMatching "  name = .+-mon"
         IncrementPointer "-1"
         DeleteToLineMatching "\}"
         DeleteNLines "1"
       EndGroup

But it seems that the pointer is never actually being decremented, even when examined under verbose mode. That is, it leaves the leading “Director {” line in the file.

Something I can’t understand

Politics

I can’t understand Bush’s (and the typical Republican position in general) opinion on life issues. He recently said that it is wrong to “destroy life to save life” and that every being is a valuable person in the context of the stem cell debate. He also said last year that 30,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed as a result of the Iraq war.

So, here’s a Handy Chart:

Topic Bush Theory Bush Moral Judgement
Death penalty Kill known murderers so others won’t kill more people OK
Iraq war Kill 30,000 Iraqi civilians during operation to overthrow Iraqi government OK
Stem cell research A small minority could become babies if implanted Wrong
Abortion Killing an unborn person Wrong

I can’t figure out any possible way that the first two should be OK for someone that believes that the last two are wrong.

In fact, to me, the items in this list that most clearly are wrong are the first two. There is no question about whether life has begun with them. Treating 30,000 people as regrettable results of an operation is not treating them with full human dignity. 30,000 people were killed. That’s more than 10 times the number of deaths from Sept. 11.