binfalse

Yes, Debian’s 6^th release, codename squeeze, has become stable yesterday!

Those of you following Debian on twitter should have noticed yet, they announced it in about 4 million tweets ;-)

To mark the occasion the also redesigned the whole web presence, just take a look at their new layout!

This article is just a small THANK YOU to the whole Debian team, they are working hard to make your life much more comfortable! Great work guys!

By the way I send some greetings to all the administrators out there running Debian. Just have a look at figure 1 :-P

The journal freiesMagazin just published it’s February issue, describing all the bots that took part in the programming contest.

Those of you that aren’t convinced by this topic, they also have a nice article about VirtualBox and KVM! So go out and grab a copy!

Today I restarted my notebook to boot into another kernel. Unfortunately I couldn’t log-in to the desktop because neither the mouse nor the keyboard was working. The Xorg.log gave me a hint what happened.

That all affected my GRML installation. Unfortunately you can’t change to a virtual terminal while there is no keyboard control, so to change anything you have to connect via SSH or boot from live CD or USB. The error reported in /var/log/Xorg.0.log looks like:

(WW) AllowEmptyInput is on, devices using drivers 'kbd', 'mouse' or 'vmmouse' will be disabled.
(WW) Disabling Mouse0
(WW) Disabling Keyboard0

So you see, all input device are turned off. Annoying!! To avoid this problem you have to add the following section to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf :

Section "ServerFlags"
        Option "AutoAddDevices" "False"
        Option "AllowEmptyInput" "false" 
EndSection

That should solve the problem. If you don’t have a xorg.conf yet you can create one with:

Xorg -configure

This will create /root/xorg.conf.new , so you just have to copy it to /etc/X11/xorg.conf .

Since it was the first reboot for about 30 days and I updated/installed a lot of new software, so I’m not able to blame anyone generating this bug. But if you are feel free to do so ;-)

As far as I know the OpenVZ associated vzprocps-tools are just available in version 2.0.11, at least for Debian. Unfortunately they are damn buggy in this version, so unusable…

There are two smart tools included in vzprocps : vztop and vzps . These programs help you a lot dealing with processes of your running containers. But in 2.0.11 they aren’t working:

root@serv: ~ $ vzps
Segmentation fault
root@serv: ~ $ vztop
 00:29:11  up 1 day,  5:18,  3 users,  load average: 1.14, 1.26, 1.23
1949 processes: 1946 sleeping, 2 running, 1 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU0 states:   0.1% user   0.1% system    0.0% nice   0.0% iowait  98.0% idle
CPU1 states:   4.1% user  15.0% system    0.0% nice   0.0% iowait  80.0% idle
CPU2 states:   2.0% user   3.0% system    0.0% nice   0.0% iowait  94.0% idle
CPU3 states:  14.0% user  20.1% system    0.0% nice   0.0% iowait  64.1% idle
Segmentation fault
root@serv: ~ $

It seems that there is an update, but not available as .deb yet. Here is an example for an alternative to vzps to find zombies:

CONTAINER=$(/usr/sbin/vzlist | /bin/grep running | /usr/bin/awk '{print $5}')
for ct in $CONTAINER;
do
	echo "processing: $ct";
	/usr/sbin/vzctl exec $ct '/bin/ps -ef | /bin/grep defunct';
done

It’s a bit complicated, but you can write a small script to grep for further things..

As I announced I took place in a programming contest organized by freiesMagazin. In the end I’m proud to tell you I’m second!

I still explained my tactics and my map parsing and all in all five other programmers joined this contest. Today the editorial staffs announced the results:

You see I wasn’t able to obtain half of the points of Demel and Keiblinger, looking to the results for each game there was no chance for my bot to beat them. But nevertheless I won the second rank! I couldn’t find any contact information of these guys so I wasn’t able to congratulate personally but if they read this article: Nice work guys ;-) Of course congratulations to the other programmers, even if you didn’t win, taking place is what counts!

By the way the organizer informed me about an IndexOutOfBoundsException in de.binfalse.martin.fmcontest.map.DMap.dirTo(DMap.java:192) , so that my bot quit working 17 times. But I won’t update my code since it has no sence beyond this contest… It’s just to inform you.

Last but not least my thanks goes to the freiesMagazin itself. It was a very nice contest and I’m really happy about the voucher! I still have a good idea what to buy :-P

P.S.: Since both programmers on the first rank should split their voucher of 50 €, they both won a voucher of 25 €. That means with a voucher of 30 € I won the biggest value ;-)