This post doesn’t cover fully setting up KVM/Qemu with virt-manager and creating virtual machine guests. See the Ubuntu KVM Installtion, VirtManager Guide, the Ubuntu Server Guide on libvirt, or HowtoForge for that.

Instead this blog post details the most relevant steps to get file system pass-through between a Linux host and Qemu guest working. The upstream Qemu docs provide a good starting point, as is the original IBM paper on VirtFS. For users of Ubuntu <= 13.04, watch out for the libvirt bug that I know many people run into, myself included.

Programming as an Artform

- 2 mins read

This is a response to the excellent post by Jani Gorše, titled Why is Programming an Art?

Ever since I began studying Computer Engineering at university back in 1995 I have struggled to find the “proper” ways to format my code, name functions and variables appropriately, structure functions into files and files into directories with Makefiles and Makefile snippets, using both recursive and non-recursive make. Formatting of code, for instance, was for a while a bit of an obsession of mine, and it sort of is still. But today I am more concerned with the overall structure and how components interact. Even though I can still get very annoyed at people naming their local variables obtrusively.

Finit v1.8

- 2 mins read
It’s been a long time coming, but here it finally is, Finit v1.8! The goodies we’ve been waiting for are: Runlevels Multiple TTYs One-shot tasks Let’s start off with tasks. Tasks are one-shot commands, with a syntax like service directives, but are not monitored and respawned like services. Tasks are started in parallel, just like services. For some cases, like the system bootstrap phase, some tasks may need to be executed in sequence, and for that purpose there also exists a run command.

Proof of Life

Joachim Nilsson - - 1 min read
There is a certain “burstyness” to the way I work on my open source projects. It seems it often coincides with intense work loads during new release cycles at work. However, I’ve just finished restoring two pages that got lost in the big server crash: mrouted pimd Big thanks goes to the Wayback Machine for maintaining records of the original pages I lost!

Resurrection

- 1 min read
Quite some time has passed now since our old site, http://vmlinux.org, crashed and burned, and with it much of my previous Open Source work and blogs. Tech blog entries, archives for the projects I maintain, lost. Backups? Of course not. This all happened in 2011. Since then we also managed to lose the domain and I kind of lost myself for a while, including my motivation. Fortunately, at this point in time I had migrated most of my projects from CVS and Subversion to DVCS’ like Bzr and GIT, so I could easily setup new homes for most of my Open Source projects at GitHub.

Announcing pimd v2.1.7

- 1 min read
This is a followup release to the security fix in pimd, v2.1.6. The change to use /var/lib/misc/, instead of the insecure /var/tmp/, has now been refactored into using the proper FHS recommended /var/run/pimd/ instead. As always, check the homepage, the ChangeLog and the GIT log for more details.

Announcing pimd v2.1.6

- 1 min read
This is a security release of pimd, v2.1.6. The following fixes are included: CVE-2011-0007: “Insecure file creation in /var/tmp” Build error on GNU/kFreeBSD Thanks to Vincent Bernat this time for the CVE fix! As always, check the homepage, the ChangeLog and the GIT log for more details.

Use Ubuntu to Serve iTunes

- 3 mins read
OK, so we finally got an iPad. The effective marketing droids of Apple are doing a good job, even the Linux zealots are starting to use their products :-) So, how to serve the immense music collection of our family to the iPad? Well, it seems the magic integration with iTunes is not enough (yet), so you need a Simple Daap Client app on your iPad to get the most out of this HowTo.

Announcing mrouted v3.9.3

- 1 min read
Here is another bug-fix release of mrouted. This time with a couple of really nasty bugs fixed. A big thanks to Dan Kruchinin for tracking down a NULL pointer dereference in the conf file parser and an overzealous check of netmask that made mrouted useless over tunnel interfaces or point-to-point links (OpenVPN, PPP, L2TP and PPTP). See the ChangeLog or the GIT log for details.

Announcing pimd v2.1.3

- 1 min read
I’m very pleased to present the next bug-fix release of pimd, v2.1.3. The real announcement for v2.1.2 I never really got around to write because the diligent Debian maintainer, Antonin Kral alerted me to some problems. Which is great! I do not have the resources to test the build on all those platforms. I sure appreciate all the help I can get. Thank you Antonin! As always, check the homepage, the changelog and the GIT log for details.