start-stop-daemon stop and --exec harmful

So, many people agree that stopping daemons in the preinst and restarting them in the postinst is not ideal, because the services have to be offline for the entire length of the upgrade. One can then simply restart the service in the postinst. The problem is if one uses the --exec option of start-stop-daemon when stopping the process, as the inode numbers will no longer match, as the binary has been upgraded. The same problem happens with a system that has prelinked the binaries since the last time the server was restarted. The stop script will always say that nothing is running. This can be a big problem if a commonly used system library has a security hole (say zlib), and you want to restart all of your daemons so that the new, fixed version is being used. But the init scripts all claim that your daemons aren't running...

wanna-build

On the way to rebuilding libgc for the C++ transition, I got sidetracked by optimizing wanna-build. First I tried replacing the manual regex and formatting that Wrap_DB uses with use of Storable's freeze and thaw on the hash instead. This resulted in a massive slowdown (almost twice as long to list the whole database). Then I tried replacing Wrap_DB with MLDBM using Storable, had to rewrite the code to minimize calls to FETCH and to correctly call STORE on MLDBM. This has resulted in a 3x performance improvement in all database access.

I can't think of anything to write anymore, but wanted an entry from this year...

Nethack

Whew! been a long time. Finally ascended the chaotic wizard, and now I'm thinking of which lawful class to give a try to. Then I might go for the tourist...

mips

Lots more has happened here -- the start of the mipsel auto builders, a change in the mips auto builders, boot floppies for mips, and coming soon for mipsel. The "fucking sysmips" problem should be fixed soon, hopefully improving things for people building a mips-1 userspace, but with mips-2 capable hardware...

misc

I just felt like posting something since the last one was a long time ago. I should go work on w-p now...

Stormix

Well, it seems the word is out now that Stormix has filed under for bankruptcy protection in Vancouver under Canadian law. They call the document "Notice of Intention to make a Proposal", and it basically lists everyone who is owed money, and the amount they are owed. It gives the filer 30 days of protection from creditors to come up with a plan for payment or secure enough money to pay them.

There's a rather ominous entry on January 15th that sort of hints at something, and is when things started happening. Things are not over yet, however, and people may yet see Stormix continue to exist.

Oh, and yes, the real reason that ftp.stormix.com (AKA ftp.ca.debian.org) is down is the cost of bandwidth to keep it running. It's not a cheap investment to give back to the community, and just can't be afforded during this time. I wish it had not been said that it was waiting on hardware, but by the time people were asking, someone else had already answered...

So look for some more news on this in the near future. Unlike what the newsforge article says, the ftp server hasn't been up and down, just down since it was unplugged. Anything affecting the mailing lists in early January has nothing to do with any of this, it was actually a server shuffle/upgrade of things, and the resulting DNS changes taking time to propagate.

And yes, this is my diary, not any sort of statement on behalf of Stormix, of course...

mips

So, I've got this Indy, and a few weeks ago, there wasn't even a compiler in the Debian system I installed. Now, I have a build daemon running, and am building ~200 packages per day. It's been rather interesting building most of Debian -- you see what packages haven't been touched since the slink days, and how they don't compile anymore, a few bugs in the builder (sbuild), and lots of interesting build-depends that aren't correct. It's been quite fun, now I just have to sort out collisions with the other people working on it.

Games

Played settlers of Catan a few days ago with wheat. It was rather fun, and now I'm looking for people who might want to play gnocatan with. I still have to get the right bit of luck for my chaotic wizard, as I just seem to keep dying....oh well. I've also been playing Armagetron, and wonder if anyone knows where some network play servers might be hiding at?