Tony Yarusso's Blog

Okay, for everyone out there who has been frustratingly reporting that KompoZer is broken in various ways in Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex", I just wanted to say, I know. That said, I do not know why or how to fix it. So, here's a little background and explanation of where things stand.

So I noticed this morning both on my laptop at home and in the logs on servers at work that there had been a BIND update that came down the pipe, and being a core system service, was a bit curious what the deal was, but didn't look into it right away. Now, later in the day I'm going through the tech / security news of the day, and found this article providing a bit of background, and was able to confirm that it was related via USN 622-1.

Okay, you know the drill by now.

Affects: APT

Issue: While apt is fantastic in it's current design, it is still targeted for the one-way client-server topology of the "old internet", if you will. As anyone who tried to download or upgrade on Gutsy release day knows, both the main server and most mirrors, both archive and CD mirrors, were extremely bogged down, almost to the point of completely unusable. While this is great news in terms of Ubuntu's popularity, it's not so great for the users trying to access those servers, nor for the people/organizations providing them who have to pay for the bandwidth.

Now, the solution seems obvious: leverage the power of peer-to-peer technology to spread the load out among Ubuntu's now vast user base. There are already torrents available for the CD downloads, and these normally work quite well - provided users are aware of them (and everyone did a great job this time around making a point to urge people to use bittorrent when possible, so that's great). However, this doesn't help those who wish to do a network upgrade rather than getting a new CD.

So, what I would like to see implemented is developing a way of integrating P2P technology, preferably the bittorrent protocol, into apt, and making this either extremely easy to enable (and quite obvious to the user that it exists and that they should use it), or perhaps even the default mechanism. Another option would be to have release dates somehow programmed in, and have users' machines switch to the torrent version of operation around release day, but use http the rest of the time.

There are two tools I am aware of that have started trying to address this issue. I have heard that the latter is a more advanced implementation of the solution, but I'm not sure.

See also:
http://sianka.free.fr/ - Apt-Torrent
http://debtorrent.alioth.debian.org/ - DebTorrent

See my first post in this series for an explanation. In short, I'm tossing out some of my personal remaining gripes and hoping someone finds them worthy of their time to address in the next six months.

Affects: Ubuntu alternate installer (debian-installer), and encryption options (partman-crypto, dm-crypt, LUKS)

I was pretty excited when I found out that install-time encrypted partitions would be possible in Gutsy. Unfortunately, after going through the installation process a few times and trying to use the system afterwards, I don't think it's really ready. I've identified three issues I would like to have addressed, one each of high, medium, and low severity to me. The bug reports are the best descriptions this time I think. Essentially for this one, take what has been implemented and make it production-ready, as an LTS release deserves.

See also:
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/partman-crypto/+bug/155987
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cryptsetup/+bug/110970
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cryptsetup/+bug/139057

See my previous post for the explanation of this series. Basically, I'm throwing ideas out and hoping I get a bite (aka volunteer) to make them happen.

Affects: Rhythmbox

Issue: Rhythmbox should have full iPod support. Banshee, Exaile, and Amarok already do - why not RB? Yes, I know you can play your music with it, and even transfer files, but when transferring files Rhythmbox does not update the database, making them unplayable by the device itself. I'm guessing this is probably relatively simple to fix, especially if the different players are all able to share similar code for these kinds of tasks, but I guess I don't really know.

See also:
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/rhythmbox/+bug/109192
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rhythmbox/+bug/109192