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RasNTP : du Stratum 1 dans votre homelab « Hypervisor.fr

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 20:07:32 +0200

By (author unknown) at http://www.hypervisor.fr/?p=4668

Comme tout bon geek, nous avons succombé à la tentation du Rasberry Pi et, comme beaucoup, bien avant de savoir quoi en faire. Après avoir passé la période Raspbmc, GPIO et même 100% wireless, nous ne trouvions pas d’usage “définitif” pour notre petite e-framboise, jusqu’à ce que nous rencontrions un gros problème de NTP sur notre homelab.

En effet, dans notre lab, c’est une vm sous

pfSense

qui fait office de routeur/firewall/proxy/ntp pour tous les vlan ce qui signifie que sans cette vm, pas de source de temps “fiable”. Lors d’une opération de re-câblage et dépoussiérage général, nous avons dû débrancher tout le matériel et donc le redémarrer un peu plus tard from scratch. Lorsque nous avions fini de redémarrer toute les vm, nous nous sommes aperçu que certaines étaient décalées d’une heure en raison d’un bios d’ESX mal configuré cumulé à un accès tardif à internet. Evidement 1h ce n’est pas bon du tout pour un domaine AD et tout ce qui en dépend, il nous fallait donc

une solution qui ne soit pas une vm, qui soit autonome, qui ne consomme que très peu d’énergie pour tourner 24/7 et qui n’ait pas besoin d’un accès à internet pour être une source de temps fiable

. Combiné à une vieille balise GPS usb qui traînait dans un tiroir, notre Rasperberry Pi allait enfin avoir un but dans la vie :

un serveur NTP Stratum 1

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a space-based satellite navigation system that provides location and time information in all weather conditions, anywhere on or near the Earth where there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites.

[…]

About nine satellites are visible from any point on the ground at any one time, ensuring considerable redundancy over the minimum four satellites needed for a position.

[…]

GPS time is theoretically accurate to about 14 nanoseconds. However, most receivers lose accuracy in the interpretation of the signals and are only accurate to 100 nanoseconds

C’est sur le blog de Peter Mount que nous avons pu trouver un howto des plus simples au quel nous avons ajouté un dongle wifi usb :

Le tout monitoré grâce à un template cacti :

Et en prime, un module GPIO LedBorg RGB pour savoir de visu si la source GPS du serveur NTP est ok :

Enfin, pour les fanatiques de la précision, il y a le GPS/PPS sur Raspberry Pi détaillé par David Taylor.

Tags: cacti, GPS, NTP, RaspberryPi

Comments (1) | April 15th, 2013

Happy Birthday - Proxmox VE is 5 years old!

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 20:07:31 +0200

By martin at http://forum.proxmox.com/threads/13514-Happy-Birthday-Proxmox-VE-is-5-years-old!

Proxmox Virtual Environment is celebrating its 5th anniversary today! HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

And a big THANK YOU to all of you being with us for the last years. Many of you contributed to the project by providing code, sharing ideas or helping each other in the forum in a professional way!

In the beginning, only few people knew KVM, most projects focused on XEN. Now, five years later, KVM is the best established hypervisor in almost all Linux distributions.

Here are some recent statistics about Proxmox VE

40.000 Proxmox VE hosts (daily updating servers)
More than 20.000 forum members with more than 70.000 posts
GUI translated into 16 languages

Keep connected and happy virtualization with Proxmox VE!!!

__________________
Best regards,

Martin Maurer
Proxmox VE project leader

Shippin’

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 19:22:40 +0200

By bob@ouya.tv at http://bit.ly/163oeJS

So… we made a game console.

And by “we” I mean you. OUYA wouldn’t exist without you.

Just last summer, we shared an idea for a simple, beautiful, powerful game console that lets any developer publish a game for the TV. We were driven by our love for couch gaming. And when you (and the rest of our early supporters) rallied around us, you inspired us.

We got here together.

Today, we honor you. Today we start shipping our early backers their OUYAs. And at our unveiling event this evening, the first of you will get to see OUYA in the flesh (or, metal, as it were).

Thank you.

Thank you for your encouraging words, for your belief when doubters doubted, for your feedback and ideas, and for your trust. And, I have to personally thank the OUYA team for the sleepless nights and sacrifices they’ve made to make OUYA for you.

A couple things our team wants you to know when you get your OUYA:

When you first boot it up, you’ll experience our first update :) This will either be super fast (seconds) or allow you to get a drink (minutes) based on your connection speed. Eventually, we want to do these updates in the background…
You’ll need a credit/debit card to download games. All games are still free to try. Your card will only be charged if you buy content you love. We do want valid payment information for everyone. This is to ensure that game developers can get paid when you love their game.
OUYA supports up to four controllers (you can always get more at http://ouya.tv). And, because we support Bluetooth, you can pair other devices as well. We are testing now and will start publishing a list of devices soon.

This is only the beginning. Today begins an exclusive preview period as we gear up to launch in June. We’ll continue to add features, refine the user interface, and keep building the software as we head toward our retail launch — now announced for June 4.

We hope that you, our founding backers, continue to shape OUYA as we prepare to launch to the masses. Your feedback, to date, has been incredibly helpful and as you know, we’ve acted on many of your ideas and suggestions. We want your feedback on these first units. You know how to find us — but we are also creating forums keep the convo going. In fact, we are planning an “AMA” (ask me anything) on Reddit to get your ideas. We’ll do this in April (date still TBD), after you’ve had time to give OUYA a whirl.

Start checking your mailboxes daily as these units roll out over the next few weeks. You’ll get an email when your console ships out of our factory. Keep in mind, it’s a rolling shipment, and consoles will be arriving at houses every day for the next several weeks.

Once your OUYA arrives: get playing!

As of 7:59 p.m. PT, there are already 104 published games on OUYA (all still free to try), like Final Fantasy III and some new surprises we think you’ll love: Beast Boxing Turbo, Stalagflight, Knightmare Tower, and even one called Save the Puppies. There are already a few entertainment apps, too. You can watch the TV shows and movies you already own with XBMC and Flixster, or watch games streamed through TwitchTV.

And developers are releasing new games for OUYA everyday. Eight thousand developers have created developer accounts with us so far.

Our hope is to see these game developers express their most creative ambitions through OUYA. We can’t wait to see what they unleash on our TVs.

OUYA on…

Julie

P.S. In case you missed it, as part of making OUYA the most open game platform around, we just announced that we published all the diagrams you’ll need to 3D print an OUYA yourself! Thanks MakerBot (who has a sweet 3D printer, and runs the Thingiverse community site)!

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RaZberry Pi Z-Wave module arrived

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 10:22:43 +0200

By hari at http://bit.ly/177KW41

The brand new RaZberry did arrive last week. It works like a charm with ago control. Just make sure to use “/dev/ttyAMA0″ as device in the “zwave” config section. Kudos to the folks from Z-Wave.Me for this very nice piece of hardware. You can find more information here: http://bit.ly/10Fg2Ok . Very recommended!

RaZberry Z-Wave module for the Raspberry Pi

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Sat, 13 Apr 2013 17:22:33 +0200

Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 13:52:14 +0200

By (author unknown) at http://bit.ly/132JIKU

At 4:16pm last Wednesday I got a short and to-the-point email from Nilay Patel at The Verge with only a link that started with the host “googlereader.blogspot.com”. The sudden spike in NewsBlur’s visitors immediately confirmed — Google was shutting down Reader.

Late night at the office

I had been preparing for a black swan event like this for the last four years since I began NewsBlur. With the deprecation of their social features a year ago I knew it was only a matter of time before Google stopped supporting Reader entirely. I did not expect it to come this soon.

As the Storify history of the Reader-o-calypse, NewsBlur suffered a number of hurdles with the onslaught of new subscribers.

A few of my challenges and solutions

I was able to handle the 1,500 users who were using the service everyday, but when 50,000 users hit an uncachable and resource intensive backend, unless you’ve done your homework and load tested the living crap out of your entire stack, there’s going to be trouble brewing. Here’s just a few of the immediate challenges I faced over the past four days:

My hosting provider, Reliable Hosting Services, was neither reliable, able to host my increasing demands, or a service I could count on. I switched to Digital Ocean and immediately got to writing new Fabric scripts so I could deploy a new app/task server by issuing a single command and having it serve requests automatically within 10 minutes of bootstrapping.
It didn’t take long to max out my Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) account’s quota of 10,000 emails a day. So a few hours into the melee I switched to Mailgun, which unfortunately resulted in emailing myself 250,000 error reports. If you tried to email me and couldn’t get through, it’s because 50,000 emails about lost database connections made their way ahead of you in line.
Eventually, I was just plain blacklisted on SES for sending too many emails.
Fortunately, when the PayPal fraud department called because of an unprecedented spike in payments, I was prepared.

Paypal’s fraud department just called, asked me what’s going on. Asked the rep from Omaha if she’s heard of Reader, and then a big Ohhh.
— NewsBlur (@NewsBlur) March 17, 2013

HAProxy would serve errors (site is down, maintenance, timeouts, etc) with a 200 OK status code instead of the proper 500 Exception status code because of a ridiculous undocumented requirement to include HTTP Headers at the top of the error template. When your webapp uses status codes to determine errors, you get extremely strange behavior when it loads utter crap into your DOM.
The inevitable file descriptor limits on Linux means that for every database connection you make, you use up one of the 1,024 file descriptors that are allocated to your process by default. Changing these limits is not only non-trivial, but they don’t tend to stick. This is responsible for bringing down Mongo, PostgreSQL, and the real-time Node servers, all at different times of the night.
The support queue is enormous and I’ve had to spend big chunks of my 16 hour days reassuring paying customers that eventually Stripe will forgive me and my unresponsive servers and will send the payment notification that is responsible for automatically upgrading their accounts to premium.

The sad extent of my St. Patrick’s Day

As a one-man-shop it has been humbling to receive the benefit of the doubt from many who have withheld their judgment despite the admittedly slow loadtimes and downtime NewsBlur experienced. Having the support of the amazing NewsBlur community is more than a guy could ask for. The tweets of encouragement, voting NewsBlur up on replacereader.com (If you haven’t yet, please tweet a vote for “#newsblur to #replacereader”), and the many positive comments and blog posts from people who have tried NewsBlur is great.

It has also been a dream come true to receive accolades from the many who are trying NewsBlur for the first time and loving it. Since the announcement, NewsBlur has welcomed 5,000 new premium subscribers and 60,000 new users (from 50,000 users originally).

NewsBlur users are intelligent, kind, and good looking!

The next three months

Over the next three months I’ll be working on:

Scaling, scaling, scaling
Launching the redesign (which you can preview)
Listening to all of you

For those of you who are still trying to decide where to go now that you’re a Reader refugee let me tell you a few of the unique things NewsBlur has to offer:

Radical transparency. NewsBlur is totally open source and will remain that way.
It still feels like RSS, just with a few more bells and whistles. NewsBlur provides actual list of posts, as opposed to the more curated magazine format of some of the other popular replacements. This clean interface makes it easy to see the stories you want. One innovation however is the four different view options you have. NewsBlur can show you the original site, feed, text or story view.
It has training. NewsBlur hides stories you don’t want to read based on tags, keywords, authors, etc. It also highlights stories you want to read, based on the same criteria. This allows you to find the stories you care about, not just the stories that the hive cares about. And best of all, NewsBlur will show you why stories are either highlighted or hidden by showing the criteria in green or red.
NewsBlur has rebuilt the social community that Google had stripped out of Reader. Users can share stories through their Blurblog and discover new content by following friends’ Blurblogs. The People Have Spoken is the blurblog of popular stories.
Because NewsBlur is entirely open-source, if you don’t want to pay you can host your own server. Instructions are on GitHub, where you can also find the source code for the NewsBlur iPhone + iPad app and Android app.
Most importantly, NewsBlur is not entirely a free app. The immediate benefits of revenue have been very clear over the past few days. Not only are NewsBlur’s interests aligned with its users, but as more users join NewsBlur, it makes more revenue that can be used to directly support the new users. Not convinced that paid is better than free? Read Pinboard’s Maciej Ceglowski’s essay Don’t Be a Free User.

Shiloh during better times. Your premium subscription goes to both server costs and feeding her

With NewsBlur’s native iOS app and Android app, you can read your news and share it with your friends anywhere. And with the coming improvements over the next three months, you bet NewsBlur will be the #1 choice for Google Reader refugees.

Join NewsBlur for $24/year and discover what RSS should have been.

Ansible 1.1 Released! | AnsibleWorks Blog

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 01:07:59 +0200

By (author unknown) at http://bit.ly/10A2OlN

Here’s a list of all contributors who made a commit to this release:

Michael DeHaan (395), Daniel Hokka Zakrisson (90), Michel Blanc (18), Brian Coca (16), Yves Dorfsman (15), Lorin Hochstein (14), Chris Hoffman (14), Jimmy Tang (13), lwade (11), Johan WirÃ©n (11), Stoned Elipot (10), Seth Vidal (9), Stephen Fromm (8), Nigel Metheringham (7), milan (6), Yeukhon Wong (6), Vincent Van der Kussen (6), Rob Parrott (5), Maykel Moya (5), Alexander Bulimov (5), lessmian (4), Ton Kersten (4), Tim Gerla (4), Serge van Ginderachter (4), Romeo Theriault (4), Remy (4), Patrick Pelletier (4), Kavin Kankeshwar (4), Jeffrey Chu (4), James Martin (4), Hubert Feyrer (4), Dag Wieers (4), Bernhard Weitzhofer (4), Till Maas (3), Shaun Zinck (3), Scott Anderson (3), Patrik Lundin (3), Mark Theunissen (3), Jeroen Hoekx (3), Jan-Piet Mens (3), David Hughes (3), tin (2), schmic (2), michael@ansibleworks.com (2), mavimo (2), martin f. krafft (2), fdavis (2), Victor Castell (2), Tim Bielawa (2), Rodney Quillo (2), Remy van Elst (2), Piffey Parlance (2), Paul Sbarra (2), Nandor Sivok (2), Matt Cordial (2), Marco Vito Moscaritolo (2), Josh Mandel (2), Javier Candeira (2), Cristian Ciupitu (2), Blair Zajac (2), AndrÃ© ParamÃ©s (2), Andrew Dunham (2), shlomozippel (1), raphinou (1), r-p-e (1), mujahideen (1), jibs (1), ftao (1), davixx (1), bfx81 (1), asad-at-srt (1), Vadim Berezniker (1), Steve Frank (1), Stanis Trendelenburg (1), Sri Harsha Yalamanchili (1), Sam Kottler (1), Rune Kaagaard (1), Ricky Elrod (1), Piotr Roszatycki (1), Piotr Kweclich (1), Peter Sankauskas (1), Peter Janes (1), Oscar Korz (1), Nikolay Panov (1), Mike Grozak (1), Mikael Zayenz Lagerkvist (1), Michael Griffin (1), Mark Maas (1), Lester Wade (1), Junegunn Choi (1), Joel Roller (1), Jim Kleckner (1), Harold Spencer Jr (1), Grant Gavares (1), Fabian Affolter (1), Elliott Foster (1), Devin Bayer (1), Cliffano Subagio (1), Andreas Piesk (1), Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta (1)

Thanks everyone! (and once again, apologies for gitstats’s unicode implementation on messing up some diacritics and other letters!)

The Kolab story

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 11:22:44 +0100

By Thomas at http://bit.ly/ZT54W4

Today I’d like to share a success story of a picture perfect project collaboration as it only happens in the open source world without any commercial, political or geographical borders. It all started back in 2009 after a short interview about Roundcube was published on a techworld.com blog. Short time after we got an email from Georg Greve, founder of the FSFE and member of the Kolab Groupware project. At that time, Kolab already made its name as a free competitor to Microsoft Exchange and Outlook and they were just about to found a new company to push Kolab to the next level. One thing Kolab definitely needed was a better web client to access all the groupware data from anywhere. And this is where Roundcube seemed to fit in perfectly. Although Roundcube was “just” an email client, the Kolab guys saw great potential in our codebase and the vital community around it. And now, more than three years after, we can all witness the great success of this decision.

Lots of lessons learned

After some first meetings and discussions about a possible collaboration between Kolab and Roundcube, we agreed on a general interest from both sides. For the newly founded company Kolab Systems who (as opposed to the Roundcube project) directly hits customers with real needs and urgent bugs to be fixed, it was important to get direct and reliable access to Roundcube developers in order to be agile enough to establish professional services around the open source software stack that is Kolab.

This is also where we started to learn how to run an open source project in a more professional and sustainable way. They taught us the importance of having release branches with long-term support, a clear road map and well documented changesets. Kolab also helped us to better understand the whole licensing topic and with them getting us some legal consultancy from the FTF we finally made the transition to GPLv3 with the added exceptions for skins and plugins. Escpecially the latter one opened the doors for Roundcube to become more accepted in commercial environments which previously had their concerns about the strict terms of the GPL.

Great boost of development

But let’s also have a look at the product side of the story. All users of Roundcube have been on the receiving end of technical and other benefits starting from the 0.7 release. To give you some background about myself:

When Georg and I were talking for the first time, my day-job left me very little time to work on Roundcube. I hadn’t contributed much code in a while, and was even considering to step back from the project altogether because I fell short of my own expectations. Of course it’s impossible to say what would have happened in an alternate universe, but fact is that Kolab Systems enabled me to get back to work on Roundcube. And because Kolab is fully open source, everything has become available to all who use Roundcube.

Here are just some of the features and plugins we added to Roundcube as part of the Kolab integration work:

ACL plugin
Calendar plugin
Tasks plugin
Advanced contact search
Savable contact search queries
Personal spell check dictionaries
ODF document viewer plugin
Inline PDF viewer plugin

And these are only the “visible” additions to our software which have primarily been initiated and forced by Kolab. Lots of improvements on the stability and quality of the underlying codebase, namely the IMAP and LDAP libraries, are referable to reports coming from the Kolab community.

The work on the various plugins used to bring full-stack groupware functionality to Roundcube also resulted in several upstream patches to other open source projects such a jQuery UI and the jQuery fullcalendar. And that’s what makes free software development truly awesome!

Quality guaranteed

Another very positive aspect of the collaboration with a mature OSS project such as Kolab with a competitive company in the background is the quality assurance and testing we get from them. While we get a lot of bug reports from our own community that help stabilizing our code, there’s no real QA process set up for Roundcube, mainly due lack of resources. Because Kolab Systems takes responsibility (and money) for the installations of the Kolab Groupware, they have a strong interest in quality assurance. And with Roundcube now being an important component of their suite, we can just ride on the wave of QA management and processing. The only price we pay is to fix bugs within a reasonable time. And again, the results of this are accessible for everybody who regularly updates their Roundcube installation.

On an operative and decision-making level, Kolab Systems and the Kolab project itself strive to be “good citizens” in the open source world the same way as we do. Without having to ask for it, it was made clear that Roundcube would remain its own fully independent and emerging project run by the community. Whenever there is a question of whether a certain feature is in Roundcube’s general interest, whether it should go into Roundcube core, or into the Kolab specific modules, or perhaps even approach differently altogether, that decision is always ours to make with no interference from Kolab.

So we kept Roundcube as the lean, focussed web mailer that I believe it should be, and moved all other functions into their separate modules. From the perspective of Roundcube, this has led to improvements on all aspects that matter: adoption, code, quality, community and allowing both Alec and myself to spend lots of time that benefits all users of Roundcube.

Summarizing all these facts and stories, this “K”ollaboration finally IS nothing but a success story. Two great open source projects came together to become even greater.

NY Times: Where Apps Meet Work, Secret Data Is at Risk

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 10:52:25 +0100

By Matt at http://bit.ly/WL3194

Exactly!

For readers of this blog, or for any IT manager with their hair on fire because their employees are using consumer-grade apps to sync and share company data, this New York Times story will come as no surprise. But now it’s hit the mainstream.

Dropbox is such a GREAT technology that anyone – once they use it – wants to use it more. Who doesn’t want to have access to their digital life from any of their devices? Or to share aspects of that digital life with their friends and family?

And who hasn’t used Dropbox – or Google Drive, or another cloud service — to sync company documents? Share them with colleagues inside – or partners outside – of the company? But there’s where you run into trouble – using these apps often runs afoul of company data security guidelines.

Some companies (IBM is a great example) have tried to shut down these apps, but tech-savvy employees find easy ways around those restrictions – 3G or guest WLANs. Not maliciously, but in an effort to get their job done. Some have given employees other less-then-user-friendly options, but these fail too.

Many of these consumer-grade app vendors are working hard to add additional security. But, while no system will ever be completely secure, wouldn’t it make sense to at least use a technology that allows you to have the greatest control over your data? To store your data internally instead of third-party storage who knows where? To use technology you already have in place to track, report, secure and monitor data usage?

Enter – of course — ownCloud.

Only ownCloud combines flexibility, openness and extensibility with on premise servers and storage – putting file sync and share control back into the hands of IT. ownCloud integrates into existing user directories, governance, security, monitoring, storage and back-up tools — becoming part of existing infrastructure (not re-inventing the wheel or buying redundant technology). And because ownCloud is open source and open by nature, plug-in apps exist to extend ownCloud out of the box, enabling LDAP/AD integration, file versioning, file sharing, external file system mounts and many more. If an application or capability needed is not there, simply create a new application plug-in and add it to the ownCloud server.

And we have a desktop client and mobile apps too, providing the experience users demand.

What is new about this whole problem is that is has now caught the attention of mainstream media – it is only a matter of time before a breach hits the front page. For those out there reading this, it is time to jump in and fix the problem before it catches up with you!

Kamailio v4.0.0 Released

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 12:37:31 +0100

By miconda at http://bit.ly/XTtxxz

March 11, 2013: Kamailio v4.0.0 is out - a special major release, shifting up the first digit in versioning number!

Besides bringing a lot of improvements and new features, the main reasons for this upgrade of version string are:

end of Kamailio – SER integration: for the 3.x release series, there was the same source code for Kamailio and SER, but with some duplicated modules and different database structures. Now the project is back to one set of modules, all the duplicated modules being integrated.
new transport layer: starting with this release, Kamailio supports WebSocket transport layer (both plain and secure), in addition to UDP, TCP, TLS and SCTP. WebSocket allow modern Web browsers to call between them using SIP for signaling.
Kamailio becomes the default application name (aka, default flavour) and what the public project is packaging. SER can be built manually, its flavour being kept for historical and maintenance reasons.

This release is a result of about 6 months of development and 2 months of testing. Continue to read full release notes at:

http://bit.ly/WjSwqJ

We look forward to meeting many from project community and potential users of Kamailio at our dedicated event – Kamailio World Conference – during April 16-17, this year in Berlin, Germany!

Enjoy SIP routing in a secure, flexible and easier way with Kamailio v4.0.0!

Thank you for flying Kamailio!