WebLog Pro Olivier Berger

10/04/2007

Report from FOSTEL 2007

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — Olivier Berger @ 22:12

I’ve had the chance to attend the FOSTEL (Free Software/Open Source Telephony) summit last week.

It was a very interesting conference, gathering lots of different projects.

There were people involved in VOIP, protocols, PBx, IM, collaborative applications, porting Linux to various devices (including phones/smarphones, PDAs).

I can’t remember everything, but here are some bits for the record :

Some of the interesting talks I remember is the one of Sean Moss-Pulz from FIC about OpenMoko and the FIC Neo1973. Very interesting ideas like some viral transmission/flashing of phones OS via some phone holding images ;) Besides the joke, he explained that many companies seem interested in managing the software stack deployed on a fleet of mobile devices inside the company, kinda custom distro for employees phones ? That may make sense, and explain interest of some for libre software phone stacks. All components in OpenMoko will be libre software, and the only part left proprietary should be the GSM driver stuff : guess what, operators/carriers don’t seem to want you and mess with the GSM protocols ;)

Interesting info : the Telenor operator and partners (including Trolltech) apparently want to provide free/gratis access to their GSM network for libre software developers ! Very valuable contribution indeed. More details at the places mentioned in Knut Yrvin’s slides.

We’ve been discussing new user interfaces in a BOF, also, which gave me the oportunity to talk about Internet rabbits (nabaztag/tag) as new kind of devices using new user interface models (RFID tags, voice recognition, etc.). Funny that these folks were not really aware of that wonderful toy.

I will try and update this post when I get pointers to new interesting presentation slides.

GET/INT new domain : new email address

Filed under: Uncategorized — Olivier Berger @ 21:52

We’ve got a new domain for GET/INT.

Instead of int-evry.fr, you may now use int-edu.eu. This is supposed to give us a more european image, I suppose ;)

Of course, this means my email-address is changing accordingly… just add the new suffix after olivier.berger@ (antispam counter-measure here ;) )

Also, my blog has a new address, then : http://www-public.int-edu.eu/~berger_o/weblog/

2/04/2007

Remote logging console in case of crashes

Filed under: Projects — Olivier Berger @ 11:48

I’ve tried and debug kernel crashes happening on one system, by sending its console messages to a remote machine.

I hope it will enable me to see what’s happening as it crashes, since most of the oops are lost when I look at the physical console.

Anyway, in order to do that, I configured the crashing machine’s kernel to use the netconsole module to output console messages on the network.

Here’s the setup in /etc/modules on the crashing machine (whose IP is 192.168.0.2) :

netconsole netconsole=6665@192.168.0.2/eth0,6666@192.168.0.1/00:12:34:56:78:90

It will instruct the netconsole module to dump the logs on port 6666 on system 192.168.0.1 whose MAC address is 00:12:34:56:78:90.

On the logging machine (192.168.0.1), I installed syslog-ng to be able to dump the logs coming from netconsole into a log file. Here’s the setup :

source netlog {
udp(ip(0.0.0.0) port(6666));
};
destination netlog
{
file("/var/log/netconsole.log");
};
log
{
source(netlog);
destination("netlog");
flags(final);
};

I had tried previously to use cancd, but i prefer to keep all logs in one single file.

Hope this helps

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