As sad day for Debian and a sad day for us as there are a lot of users
of Debian and its derivatives at Bitfolk.
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Debian Project mourns the loss of Ian Murdock
Resent-Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2016 13:21:33 +0000 (UTC)
Resent-From: debian-announce(a)lists.debian.org
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2016 14:11:35 +0100
From: Laura Arjona Reina <larjona(a)debian.org>
Reply-To: debian-publicity(a)lists.debian.org
To: debian-announce(a)lists.debian.org
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Debian Project https://www.debian.org/
Debian Project mourns the loss of Ian Murdock press(a)debian.org
January 5th, 2016 https://www.debian.org/News/2016/20160105
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Debian Project sadly announces that it has lost the founder of its
community and project, Ian Murdock.
Debian is only a part of Ian's legacy but perhaps the one that he is
most known for.
Ian was introduced to computers early in his life, and his curiosity
turned to familiarity which led him to start actively programming at
nine years of age. Later as a young adult at the Krannert School of
Management a mandatory programming class rekindled his fascination with
computer programming along with an idea and an opportunity to make
something better.
Ian started the Debian Project in August of 1993, releasing the first
versions of Debian later that same year. At that time, the whole concept
of a "distribution" of Linux was new. Inspired as he said by Linus
Torvalds' own sharing of Linux, he released Debian with the intention
that this distribution should be made openly, in the spirit of Linux and
GNU.
With that simple gesture Ian started a movement in the world of
software. Many developers joined him in this task of creating better
software in a better world.
- From his Debian Manifesto [1]: "The Debian design process is open to
ensure that the system is of the highest quality and that it reflects
the needs of the user community. By involving others with a wide range
of abilities and backgrounds, Debian is able to be developed in a
modular fashion. […] Involving others also ensures that valuable
suggestions for improvement can be incorporated into the distribution
during its development; thus, a distribution is created based on the
needs and wants of the users rather than the needs and wants of the
constructor."
1:
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ap-manifesto.en%0A.ht
ml
His sharp focus was on creating a distribution and community culture
that did the right thing, be it ethically, or technically.
Releases went out when they were ready, and the project's staunch stance
on Software Freedom was and is still a gold standard in the Free and
Open Source world.
Debian 0.01 through Debian 0.90 were released between August and
December of 1993. Ian Murdock writes:
"Debian 0.91 was released in January 1994. It had a primitive package
system […]. By this time, there were a few dozen people working on
Debian, though I was still mostly putting together the releases myself.
0.91 was the last release done in this way."
"Most of 1994 was spent organizing the Debian Project so that others
could more effectively contribute, as well as working on dpkg […]."
"Debian 0.93 Release 5 happened in March 1995 and was the first "modern"
release of Debian: there were many more developers by then (though I
can't remember exactly how many), each maintaining their own packages,
and dpkg was being used to install and maintain all these packages after
a base system was installed."
"Debian 0.93 Release 6 happened in November 1995 and was the last a.out
release. There were about sixty developers maintaining packages in
0.93R6. If I remember correctly, dselect first appeared in 0.93R6."
Ian Murdock also notes that Debian 0.93R6 "… has always been my favorite
release of Debian", although he admits to the possibility of some
personal bias, as he stopped actively working on the project in March
1996.
Ian Murdock led Debian until March 1996, when he appointed Bruce Perens
as the next leader of the project.
The devotion to the right thing guided Ian's work, both in Debian and in
the subsequent years, always working towards the best possible future.
Debian would go on to become the world's Universal Operating System,
found on everything from the smallest embedded devices to the largest
cluster systems, to the Space Station because "of course it runs Debian"
which has been ported across multiple architectures and types of
hardware.
Ian's dream lives on: Debian is made up of a strong community that has
fostered development, growth, and wonder. It remains incredibly active
with thousands of developers working untold hours to bring the world a
reliable and secure operating system. Debian has sparked the interest,
curiosity, and passion of those who want to make something better. Then,
now, and far into the future.
- From the bottom of our hearts, we thank you Ian.
Throughout the Debian infrastructure our websites and services mark our
reflection and mourning with a darkened homepage banner and ribbons on
our logos. The thoughts of the Debian Community are with Ian's family in
this difficult time.
His family has asked for privacy and we very much wish to respect their
desires.
Within our Debian community and for the Linux community condolences may
be sent to <in-memoriam-ian(a)debian.org> [2] where they will be kept and
archived.
2: in-memoriam-ian(a)debian.org
This email address will be active until the end of January 2016. The
Debian Project will then provide the archive to the family and publish
the contents later this year if it is with the wishes of the family.
About Debian
- ------------
The Debian Project is an association of Free Software developers who
volunteer their time and effort in order to produce a completely free
operating system known as Debian.
Contact Information
- -------------------
For further information, please visit the Debian web pages at
https://www.debian.org/ or send mail to <press(a)debian.org>.
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Regards,
@ndy
--
andyjpb(a)ashurst.eu.org
http://www.ashurst.eu.org/
0290 DA75 E982 7D99 A51F E46A 387A 7695 7EBA 75FF
Let me start by saying that I'm pretty confident that this problem has
nothing to do with Bitfolk, but it involves my Bitfolk VPS and there are
some pretty knowledgeable people here...
I run a git repository on my Bitfolk VPS, which clients connect to over
ssh using an unusual port number. (I know that doesn't provide much
extra security, but it reduces the number of irritating log messages.)
One of the client machines is at a school, and said school is in the
process of changing their ISP and firewall software. The new ISP is
Virgin and the new firewall is Smoothwall.
The actual client machine has a local IP address (172.16.x.x) and both
old and new Internet connections use a NAT firewall.
I've been asked to switch over their client machine from using their old
firewall as its default gateway to using the new one. Most things are
fine, but...
With the client machine set to use the new gateway it can ssh to my
Bitfolk VPS just fine. If on the other hand I try to use scp from the
client to the VPS, it gets through the authentication phase and then
just hangs.
If I switch back to the old gateway, both ssh and scp work fine. I get
no warnings about machine IDs having changed, so I'm fairly confident
that there isn't a man-in-the-middle element to the new firewall.
I've been scratching my head over this for a couple of days because I
can't imagine how a firewall lets through ssh and blocks scp. The only
thing I've found on-line is the surprising news that scp is sensitive to
messages echoed during login, but when I connect using ssh then the
messages which I get are identical via old or new gateway.
Anyone any ideas?
TIA,
John
Hello,
I realised yesterday after receiving a ticket where a customer asked
what was going on with the VPS specs, that I had not actually posted
anything on this announce list about the hardware refresh and
related VPS spec upgrades that are ongoing.
I have to remedy that now, because to a customer who knows nothing
of this upgrade process it just looks like we are selling better
spec VPSes to new customers and leaving existing customers to pay
inflated prices indefinitely. That means many of you are now going
to receive the same information you already know, so sorry about
that.
Back in July I said that VPS spec upgrades were coming soon:
http://lists.bitfolk.com/lurker/message/20150713.213922.6b419596.en.html
There was more initial delay than I would have liked:
http://lists.bitfolk.com/lurker/message/20150802.112450.2c7d67f5.en.html
…but since September things have been proceeding fairly rapidly and
at this point just over 36% of the customer base has been upgraded.
I made a wiki page which I update regularly:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Hardware_refresh,_2015-2016
At the moment because of external pressures on which machines must
be removed from colo first we've had to be more selective about
which customers we offered upgrades to¹, but I think we are quite
close (weeks away) to the point where we can just ask the whole
remaining customer base who wants to be upgraded, and proceed mostly
in order of response.
A big down side of doing things this way is that we have many months
where existing customers are stuck paying the same price for a lower
spec than that which new customers can get, and in many cases
hitting a renewal point and paying again for the lower spec.
We would love to have been able to just cut over to higher specs in
one go. As the majority of customers pick the smallest plan, and the
upgrade from 480M to 1,024M is more than double, that would require
us to have about double the RAM available immediately and it just
wasn't feasible.
We have been able to provide pro rata service credit for those
finding their new spec more than they need and requesting a
downgrade mid-contract.
If you have any questions, please have a read of the wiki link above
and if not answered there then do let us know.
Cheers,
Andy
¹ In fact it is more like which customers we force upgrades upon,
because the response rate is only about 20%, yet we still need the
older machines cleared of customers.
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
_______________________________________________
announce mailing list
announce(a)lists.bitfolk.com
https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/announce
Hello,
So as to avoid missing out on our chosen venue I'm thinking about
booking a table for the Christmas drinks in the next couple of days.
I don't think I want to go through the whole doodlepoll business to
find the most-wanted day as it takes ages and hasn't been that much
of a reliable indicator of who will turn up anyway!
I am just going to say: it's going to be the first week of December,
either Tuesday 1st, Wednesday 2nd or Thursday 3rd.
So on to venue. De Hems always seems to be a popular choice, but is
there anywhere else that anyone likes better?
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Dear All
I logged into my vps around 21:00 CET today using ssh. When I typed the
command *ls* it took quite a while (5 to 20 seconds - these things are
hard to tell when one does not measure it with a clock).
I also tried to request a page from my web server which did not work. I
do apologize for not knowing the exact error anymore.
Finally, *git pull origin master* against the repository on my vps got a
time out.
When I tried all the above mentioned things again a few minutes later
things were back to normal.
Now, what could that have been?
Regards,
Sam
--
Sämi Bächler
Obere Bläsistrasse 1, 8049 Zürich
M: +4179 478 4942
P: +4143 817 4628
Hello BitFolk People
I'm about to install Debian on my shiny new SSD-based BitFolk VPS, in the standard configuration with 1GB of RAM and 10GB of disk space.
And the first question is: Should I, in 2015, go for 64 bits or 32 bits?
* The BitFolk rescue environment supports 64 bits now.
* Addressing 1GB of RAM is not an issue.
* Will a 64-bit system run faster? Or slower?
* Will 64-bit executables waste precious disk space?
For a long time, running 64-bit systems involved various hacks and workarounds and 32-bit libraries for software that was not yet compiled for 64 bits. Is the opposite happening yet? -- i.e. is it becoming necessary to allow for software that no longer supports 32 bits?
Any suggestions and advice will be appreciated.
Cheers,
Chris
Hi,
There's been quite a run of gmail believing that all email from our
Request Tracker was spam and automatically filing it into your spam
folder.
So, if you use gmail please could you have a look in your spam
folder and see if there is any bitfolk email in there, and if so
please do mark it as "not spam".
Meanwhile I have added DKIM, SPF and DMARC to emails from
support(a)rt.bitfolk.com so hopefully this is less likely to happen in
future.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
_______________________________________________
announce mailing list
announce(a)lists.bitfolk.com
https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/announce
> Author: Andy Smith
> Date: 2015-11-11 04:38 -000
Hi Andy.
Thanks for the help, I do appreciate that Bitfolk is a service for
real geeks and that support for installations is not part of the deal.
Your support is one of the reasons why Bitfolk is special :)
> I'm sorry to see
> you're having problems. Here's an asciicast I just made of me
> installing Ubuntu 14.04 i686 on the same host that you're on:
>
> https://asciinema.org/a/ckiwp5sm75kbll77wj3r23myt
I watched the asciicast and what you did is pretty well what I did.
The main difference was the partitioning. When I did the first and
subsequent installs the partitions were already there and I just
labelled and formatted them. You deleted everything and started from
scratch.
The other difference is that for the first and last attempts I took
the LAMP and encryption options. These two installations both booted
but with error messages and I was unable to ssh into them. It is
running like that now. The installations without those options would not boot.
>
>I suspect what has happened to you is that somehow grub-pc (GrUB 2.x)
> has become installed. Only grub-legacy is supported at the moment¹,
> but the self-installer is not meant to leave you with grub-pc, so it's
> still a bug.
I hate GrUB2 :) I always had the feeling that it was designed for and
by enterprise users. On your screencast you were offered a grub boot
menu. I did not see this on mine.
> The other thing it might be is that I see you have a quite interesting
> partition layout.
I mentioned this above. I am happy to do another install deleting the
partitions and doing exactly what you did.
> broken install still exist, for me to examine?
Yes. It is running. I will not touch it until you have given me the
all clear. I am happy to give you my login details.
> Depends what "could not log in" means. :) >
I tried to ssh to the IP address and received an instant 'connection
refused'. It did not respond to ping.
The strange thing is that I just tried again, received a response to
ping and to ssh:
$ ssh zaphod(a)85.119.83.139
zaphod(a)85.119.83.139's password:
Permission denied, please try again.
I typed in the password very carefully three times and checked that
the caps lock were not on.
> You should have seen a block of text printed before the login prompt
> which tells you what the (randomly-generated) credentials are.
I did see the instructions but there was no block of text telling me
the credentials. I suspect that it disappeared because I touched
something but left the login prompt. I am not a screen user and it
took me longer than it should to escape from the login prompt :( Once
I did that I did succeed in logging in to the rescue environment.
>
> Did yours not look like that? If it did, then clearly this is still
> too confusing.
It did and it was confusing to someone who is not used to screen. I
did control + a k to kill the session but it returned to the same
login screen when I made a fresh connection. It was later that I found
contol + ] that returned me to the Xen shell. Later I saw that on the
initial screen it tells about control + ] but it was not visible when
I needed it.
> Do you have any suggestions on how to make this
> clearer?
Maybe a 'how to get out of here if your login fails' hint at the login
screen? I guess the typical Bitfolk customer would not need that sort
of help.
Thanks again.
Steve
I am doing a clean install on a new ssd disk while my old installation
is still running. The first installation was messed up so I decided
to start again on the zen console.
I ran install ubuntu_trusty, went through the installation procedure,
formatted the drives, no encryption, used only the basic server and
opensshd options, watched it shutdown and then ran the boot command.
This it what it gave me:
xen-shell> status
Guest: Shutdown
xen-shell> boot
Booting instance: simpee
Parsing config from /etc/xen/simpee.conf
libxl: error: libxl_bootloader.c:628:bootloader_finished: bootloader
failed - consult logfile /var/log/xen/bootloader.113.log
libxl: error: libxl_exec.c:118:libxl_report_child_exitstatus:
bootloader [-1] exited with error status 1
libxl: error: libxl_create.c:1022:domcreate_rebuild_done: cannot
(re-)build domain: -3
libxl: error: libxl_dom.c:35:libxl__domain_type: unable to get domain
type for domid=113
Unable to attach console
libxl: error: libxl_exec.c:118:libxl_report_child_exitstatus: console
child [0] exited with error status 1
xen-shell> status
Guest: Shutdown
xen-shell>
Just to be sure I repeated the install twice with the same result. The
first installation did boot up with a similar error message but I
could not log in after booting
It might be because the new IP address 85.119.83.139 has not been
updated in the DNS records. Maybe I missed something in in the
installation options?
Then I tried to work out what was going on using the Bitfolk Rescue
Environment. This gave me a 'Rescue' login prompt. It is not clear
which user name and password it needs but I tried both the Bitfolk and
Ubuntu users but could not log in.
Can anyone give me any pointers?
Steve
Could someone please help me with setting up nameservers on a new
Bitfolk VPS (Debian Jessie with ISPConfig 3).
My old server has hostname vs1.vconsult.co.uk and the new one is
vs2.vconsult.co.uk
I currently use an external provider for Primary and Secondary DNS but
would now like to run my own nameservers.
vconsult.co.uk is hosted on UK2 who do not appear to support glue
records, needed for nameservers.
I have other domains that I could use on Fasthosts, who do appear to
support glue records.
So based on my limited knowledge of setting up nameservers, the options
I have are:
1. Transferring vconsult.co.uk to another registrar such as Fasthosts
and setting up ns1.vconsult.co.uk and ns2.vconsult.co.uk with glue records.
2. Changing the hostname on my new VPS to use a Fasthosts hosted domain
e.g. vs2.example.com and setting up ns1.example.com and ns2.example.com
with glue records .
3. Using a Fasthosts hosted domain to set up ns1.example.com and
ns2.example.com on the current hostname vs2.vconsult.co.uk
For Option 1 I'm not keen in case the transfer results in a break in
web/email services?
For Option 2 I'm not sure if there are any issues with changing the
hostname of the VPS, and would prefer to use my 'company' domain?
For Option 3 I'm not sure whether nameservers based on 'example.com' can
reside on vs2.vconsult.co.uk?
Any advice appreciated, sorry if this is a bit basic for most on the list.
Martin
