Thinkpad X1 Carbon

February 8, 2018 | etbe

I just bought a Thinkpad X1 Carbon to replace my Thinkpad X301 [1]. It cost me $289 with free shipping from an eBay merchant which is a great deal, a new battery for the Thinkpad X301 would have cost about $100.

It seems that laptops aren’t depreciating in value as much as they used to. Grays Online used to reliably have refurbished Thinkpads with manufacturer’s warranty selling for about $300. Now they only have IdeaPads (a cheaper low-end line from Lenovo) at good prices, admittedly $100 to $200 for an IdeaPad is a very nice deal if you want a cheap laptop and don’t need something too powerful. But if you want something for doing software development on the go then you are looking at well in excess of $400. So I ended up buying a second-hand system from an eBay merchant.

CPU

I was quite excited to read the specs that it has an i7 CPU, but now I have it I discovered that the i7-3667U CPU scores 3990 according to passmark (cpubenchmark.net) [2]. While that is much better than the U9400 in the Thinkpad X301 that scored 968, it’s only slightly better than the i5-2520M in my Thinkpad T420 that scored 3582 [3]. I bought the Thinkpad T420 in August 2013 [4], I had hoped that Moore’s Law would result in me getting a system at least twice as fast as my last one. But buying second-hand meant I got a slower CPU. Also the small form factor of the X series limits the heat dissipation and therefore limits the CPU performance.

Keyboard

Thinkpads have traditionally had the best keyboards, but they are losing that advantage. This system has a keyboard that feels like an Apple laptop keyboard not like a traditional Thinkpad. It still has the Trackpoint which is a major feature if you like it (I do). The biggest downside is that they rearranged the keys. The PgUp/PgDn keys are now by the arrow keys, this could end up being useful if you like the SHIFT-PgUp/SHIFT-PgDn combinations used in the Linux VC and some Xterms like Konsole. But I like to keep my keys by the home keys and I can’t do that unless I use the little finger of my right hand for PgUp/PgDn. They also moved the Home, End, and Delete keys which is really annoying. It’s not just that the positions are different to previous Thinkpads (including X series like the X301), they are different to desktop keyboards. So every time I move between my Thinkpad and a desktop system I need to change key usage.

Did Lenovo not consider that touch typists might use their products?

The keyboard moved the PrtSc key, and lacks ScrLk and Pause keys, but I hardly ever use the PrtSc key, and never use the other 2. The lack of those keys would only be of interest to people who have mapped them to useful functions and people who actually use PrtSc. It’s impractical to have a key as annoying to accidentally press as PrtSc between the Ctrl and Alt keys.

One significant benefit of the keyboard in this Thinkpad is that it has a backlight instead of having a light on the top of the screen that shines on the keyboard. It might work better than the light above the keyboard and looks much cooler! As an aside I discovered that my Thinkpad X301 has a light above the keyboard, but the key combination to activate it sometimes needs to be pressed several times.

Display

X1 Carbon 1600*900
T420 1600*900
T61 1680*1050
X301 1440*900

Above are the screen resolutions for all my Thinkpads of the last 8 years. The X301 is an anomaly as I got it from a rubbish pile and it was significantly older than Thinkpads usually are when I get them. It’s a bit disappointing that laptop screen resolution isn’t increasing much over the years. I know some people have laptops with resolutions as high as 2560*1600 (as high as a high end phone) it seems that most laptops are below phone resolution.

Kogan is currently selling the Agora 8+ phone new for $239, including postage that would still be cheaper than the $289 I paid for this Thinkpad. There’s no reason why new phones should have lower prices and higher screen resolutions than second-hand laptops. The Thinkpad is designed to be a high-end brand, other brands like IdeaPad are for low end devices. Really 1600*900 is a low-end resolution by today’s standards, 1920*1080 should be the minimum for high-end systems. Now I could have bought one of the X series models with a higher screen resolution, but most of them have the lower resolution and hunting for a second hand system with the rare high resolution screen would mean missing the best prices.

I wonder if there’s an Android app to make a phone run as a second monitor for a Linux laptop, that way you could use a high resolution phone screen to display data from a laptop.

This display is unreasonably bright by default. So bright it hurt my eyes. The xbacklight program doesn’t support my display but the command “xrandr –output LVDS-1 –brightness 0.4” sets the brightness to 40%. The Fn key combination to set brightness doesn’t work. Below a brightness of about 70% the screen looks grainy.

General

This Thinkpad has a 180G SSD that supports contiguous reads at 500MB/s. It has 8G of RAM which is the minimum for a usable desktop system nowadays and while not really fast the CPU is fast enough. Generally this is a nice system.

It doesn’t have an Ethernet port which is really annoying. Now I have to pack a USB Ethernet device whenever I go anywhere. It also has mini-DisplayPort as the only video connector, as that is almost never available at a conference venue (VGA and HDMI are the common ones) I’ll have to pack an adaptor when I give a lecture. It also only has 2 USB ports, the X301 has 3. I know that not having HDMI, VGA, and Ethernet ports allows designing a thinner laptop. But I would be happier with a slightly thicker laptop that has more connectivity options. The Thinkpad X301 has about the same mass and is only slightly thicker and has all those ports. I blame Apple for starting this trend of laptops lacking IO options.

This might be the last laptop I own that doesn’t have USB-C. Currently not having USB-C is not a big deal, but devices other than phones supporting it will probably be released soon and fast phone charging from a laptop would be a good feature to have.

This laptop has no removable battery. I don’t know if it will be practical to replace the battery if the old one wears out. But given that replacing the battery may be more than the laptop is worth this isn’t a serious issue. One significant issue is that there’s no option to buy a second battery if I need to have it run without mains power for a significant amount of time. When I was travelling between Australia and Europe often I used to pack a second battery so I could spend twice as much time coding on the plane. I know it’s an engineering trade-off, but they did it with the X301 and could have done it again with this model.

Conclusion

This isn’t a great laptop. The X1 Carbon is described as a flagship for the Thinkpad brand and the display is letting down the image of the brand. The CPU is a little disappointing, but it’s a trade-off that I can deal with.

The keyboard is really annoying and will continue to annoy me for as long as I own it. The X301 managed to fit a better keyboard layout into the same space, there’s no reason that they couldn’t have done the same with the X1 Carbon.

But it’s great value for money and works well.

Update

It’s a X1 Carbon Gen 1, here’s the Lenovo site.

Here’s the Wikipedia page. It was released in 2012.

More About the Thinkpad X301

January 16, 2018 | etbe

Last month I blogged about the Thinkpad X301 I got from a rubbish pile [1]. One thing I didn’t realise when writing that post is that the X301 doesn’t have the keyboard light that the T420 has. With the T420 I could press the bottom left (FN) and top right (PgUp from memory) keys on the keyboard to turn a light on the keyboard. This is really good for typing at night. While I can touch type the small keyboard on a laptop makes it a little difficult so the light is a feature I found useful. I wrote my review of the X301 before having to use it at night.

Another problem I noticed is that it crashes after running Memtest86+ for between 30 minutes and 4 hours. Memtest86+ doesn’t report any memory errors, the system just entirely locks up. I have 2 DIMMs for it (2G and 4G), I tried installing them in both orders, and I tried with each of them in the first slot (the system won’t boot if only the second slot is filled). Nothing changed. Now it is possible that this is something that might not happen in real use. For example it might only happen due to heat when the system is under sustained load which isn’t something I planned for that laptop. I would discard a desktop system that had such a problem because I get lots of free desktop PCs, but I’m prepared to live with a laptop that has such a problem to avoid paying for another laptop.

Last night the laptop battery suddenly stopped working entirely. I had it unplugged for about 5 minutes when it abruptly went off (no flashing light to warn that the battery was low or anything). Now when I plug it in the battery light flashes orange. A quick Google search indicates that this might mean that a fuse inside the battery pack has blown or that there might be a problem with the system board. Replacing the system board is much more than the laptop is worth and even replacing the battery will probably cost more than it’s worth. Previously bought a Thinkpad T420 at auction because it didn’t cost much more than getting a new battery and PSU for a T61 [2] and I expect I can find a similar deal if I poll the auction sites for a while.

Using an X series Thinkpad has been a good experience and I’ll definitely consider an X series for my next laptop. My previous history of laptops involved going from ones with a small screen that were heavy and clunky (what was available with 90’s technology and cost less than a car) to ones that had a large screen and were less clunky but still heavy. I hadn’t tried small and light with technology from the last decade, it’s something I could really get used to!

By today’s standards the X301 is deficient in a number of ways. It has 64G of storage (the same as my most recent phones) which isn’t much for software development, 6G of RAM which isn’t too bad but is small by today’s standards (16G is a common factory option nowadays), a 1440*900 screen which looks bad in any comparison (less than the last 3 phones I’ve owned), and a slow CPU. No two of these limits would be enough to make me consider replacing that laptop. Even with the possibility of crashing under load it was still a useful system. But the lack of a usable battery in combination with all the other issues makes the entire system unsuitable for my needs. I would be very happy to use a fast laptop with a high resolution screen even without a battery, but not with this list of issues.

Next week I’m going to a conference and there’s no possibility of buying a new laptop before then. So for a week when I need to use a laptop a lot I will have a sub-standard laptop.

It really sucks to have a laptop develop a problem that makes me want to replace it so soon after I got it.

Designing Shared Cars

December 20, 2017 | etbe

Almost 10 years ago I blogged about car sharing companies in Melbourne [1]. Since that time the use of such services appears to have slowly grown (judging by the slow growth in the reserved parking spots for such cars). This isn’t the sudden growth that public transport advocates and the operators of those companies hoped for, but it is still positive. I have just watched the documentary The Human Scale [2] (which I highly recommend) about the way that cities are designed for cars rather than for people.

I think that it is necessary to make cities more suited to the needs of people and that car share and car hire companies are an important part of converting from a car based city to a human based city. As this sort of change happens the share cars will be an increasing portion of the new car sales and car companies will have to design cars to better suit shared use.

Personalising Cars

Luxury car brands like Mercedes support storing the preferred seat position for each driver, once the basic step of maintaining separate driver profiles is done it’s an easy second step to have them accessed over the Internet and also store settings like preferred radio stations, Bluetooth connection profiles, etc. For a car share company it wouldn’t be particularly difficult to extrapolate settings based on previous use, EG knowing that I’m tall and using the default settings for a tall person every time I get in a shared car that I haven’t driven before. Having Bluetooth connections follow the user would mean having one slave address per customer instead of the current practice of one per car, the addressing is 48bit so this shouldn’t be a problem.

Most people accumulate many items in their car, some they don’t need, but many are needed. Some of the things in my car are change for parking meters, sunscreen, tools, and tissues. Car share companies have deals with councils for reserved parking spaces so it wouldn’t be difficult for them to have a deal for paying for parking and billing the driver thus removing the need for change (and the risk of a car window being smashed by some desperate person who wants to steal a few dollars). Sunscreen is a common enough item in Australia that a car share company might just provide it as a perk of using a shared car.

Most people have items like tools, a water bottle, and spare clothes that can’t be shared which tend to end up distributed in various storage locations. The solution to this might be to have a fixed size storage area, maybe based on some common storage item like a milk crate. Then everyone who is a frequent user of shared cars could buy a container designed to fit that space which is divided in a similar manner to a Bento box to contain whatever they need to carry.

There is a lot of research into having computers observing the operation of a car and warning the driver or even automatically applying the brakes to avoid a crash. For shared cars this is more important as drivers won’t necessarily have a feel for the car and can’t be expected to drive as well.

Car Sizes

Generally cars are designed to have 2 people (sports car, Smart car, van/ute/light-truck), 4/5 people (most cars), or 6-8 people (people movers). These configurations are based on what most people are able to use all the time. Most car travel involves only one adult. Most journeys appear to have no passengers or only children being driven around by a single adult.

Cars are designed for what people can drive all the time rather than what would best suit their needs most of the time. Almost no-one is going to buy a personal car that can only take one person even though most people who drive will be on their own for most journeys. Most people will occasionally need to take passengers and that occasional need will outweigh the additional costs in buying and fueling a car with the extra passenger space.

I expect that when car share companies get a larger market they will have several vehicles in the same location to allow users to choose which to drive. If such a choice is available then I think that many people would sometimes choose a vehicle with no space for passengers but extra space for cargo and/or being smaller and easier to park.

For the common case of one adult driving small children the front passenger seat can’t be used due to the risk of airbags killing small kids. A car with storage space instead of a front passenger seat would be more useful in that situation.

Some of these possible design choices can also be after-market modifications. I know someone who removed the rear row of seats from a people-mover to store the equipment for his work. That gave a vehicle with plenty of space for his equipment while also having a row of seats for his kids. If he was using shared vehicles he might have chosen to use either a vehicle well suited to cargo (a small van or ute) or a regular car for transporting his kids. It could be that there’s an untapped demand for ~4 people in a car along with cargo so a car share company could remove the back row of seats from people movers to cater to that.

Huawei Mate9

December 14, 2017 | etbe

Warranty Etc

I recently got a Huawei Mate 9 phone. My previous phone was a Nexus 6P that died shortly before it’s one year warranty ran out. As there have apparently been many Nexus 6P phones dying there are no stocks of replacements so Kogan (the company I bought the phone from) offered me a choice of 4 phones in the same price range as a replacement.

Previously I had chosen to avoid the extended warranty offerings based on the idea that after more than a year the phone won’t be worth much and therefore getting it replaced under warranty isn’t as much of a benefit. But now that it seems that getting a phone replaced with a newer and more powerful model is a likely outcome it seems that there are benefits in a longer warranty. I chose not to pay for an “extended warranty” on my Nexus 6P because getting a new Nexus 6P now isn’t such a desirable outcome, but when getting a new Mate 9 is a possibility it seems more of a benefit to get the “extended warranty”. OTOH Kogan wasn’t offering more than 2 years of “warranty” recently when buying a phone for a relative, so maybe they lost a lot of money on replacements for the Nexus 6P.

Comparison

I chose the Mate 9 primarily because it has a large screen. It’s 5.9″ display is only slightly larger than the 5.7″ displays in the Nexus 6P and the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 (my previous phone). But it is large enough to force me to change my phone use habits.

I previously wrote about matching phone size to the user’s hand size [1]. When writing that I had the theory that a Note 2 might be too large for me to use one-handed. But when I owned those phones I found that the Note 2 and Note 3 were both quite usable in one-handed mode. But the Mate 9 is just too big for that. To deal with this I now use the top corners of my phone screen for icons that I don’t tend to use one-handed, such as Facebook. I chose this phone knowing that this would be an issue because I’ve been spending more time reading web pages on my phone and I need to see more text on screen.

Adjusting my phone usage to the unusually large screen hasn’t been a problem for me. But I expect that many people will find this phone too large. I don’t think there are many people who buy jeans to fit a large phone in the pocket [2].

A widely touted feature of the Mate 9 is the Leica lens which apparently gives it really good quality photos. I haven’t noticed problems with my photos on my previous two phones and it seems likely that phone cameras have in most situations exceeded my requirements for photos (I’m not a very demanding user). One thing that I miss is the slow-motion video that the Nexus 6P supports. I guess I’ll have to make sure my wife is around when I need to make slow motion video.

My wife’s Nexus 6P is well out of warranty. Her phone was the original Nexus 6P I had. When her previous phone died I had a problem with my phone that needed a factory reset. It’s easier to duplicate the configuration to a new phone than restore it after a factory reset (as an aside I believe Apple does this better) I copied my configuration to the new phone and then wiped it for my wife to use.

One noteworthy but mostly insignificant feature of the Mate 9 is that it comes with a phone case. The case is hard plastic and cracked when I unsuccessfully tried to remove it, so it seems to effectively be a single-use item. But it is good to have that in the box so that you don’t have to use the phone without a case on the first day, this is something almost every other phone manufacturer misses. But there is the option of ordering a case at the same time as a phone and the case isn’t very good.

I regard my Mate 9 as fairly unattractive. Maybe if I had a choice of color I would have been happier, but it still wouldn’t have looked like EVE from Wall-E (unlike the Nexus 6P).

The Mate 9 has a resolution of 1920*1080, while the Nexus 6P (and many other modern phones) has a resolution of 2560*1440 I don’t think that’s a big deal, the pixels are small enough that I can’t see them. I don’t really need my phone to have the same resolution as the 27″ monitor on my desktop.

The Mate 9 has 4G of RAM and apps seem significantly less likely to be killed than on the Nexus 6P with 3G. I can now switch between memory hungry apps like Pokemon Go and Facebook without having one of them killed by the OS.

Security

The OS support from Huawei isn’t nearly as good as a Nexus device. Mine is running Android 7.0 and has a security patch level of the 5th of June 2017. My wife’s Nexus 6P today got an update from Android 8.0 to 8.1 which I believe has the fixes for KRACK and Blueborne among others.

Kogan is currently selling the Pixel XL with 128G of storage for $829, if I was buying a phone now that’s probably what I would buy. It’s a pity that none of the companies that have manufactured Nexus devices seem to have learned how to support devices sold under their own name as well.

Conclusion

Generally this is a decent phone. As a replacement for a failed Nexus 6P it’s pretty good. But at this time I tend to recommend not buying it as the first generation of Pixel phones are now cheap enough to compete. If the Pixel XL is out of your price range then instead of saving $130 for a less secure phone it would be better to save $400 and choose one of the many cheaper phones on offer.

Remember when Linux users used to mock Windows for poor security? Now it seems that most Android devices are facing the security problems that Windows used to face and the iPhone and Pixel are going to take the role of the secure phone.

Thinkpad X301

December 13, 2017 | etbe

Another Broken Thinkpad

A few months ago I wrote a post about “Observing Reliability” [1] regarding my Thinkpad T420. I noted that the T420 had been running for almost 4 years which was a good run, and therefore the failed DVD drive didn’t convince me that Thinkpads have quality problems.

Since that time the plastic on the lid by the left hinge broke, every time I open or close the lid it breaks a bit more. That prevents use of that Thinkpad by anyone who wants to use it as a serious laptop as it can’t be expected to last long if opened and closed several times a day. It probably wouldn’t be difficult to fix the lid but for an old laptop it doesn’t seem worth the effort and/or money. So my plan now is to give the Thinkpad to someone who wants a compact desktop system with a built-in UPS, a friend in Vietnam can probably find a worthy recipient.

My Thinkpad History

I bought the Thinkpad T420 in October 2013 [2], it lasted about 4 years and 2 months. It cost $306.

I bought my Thinkpad T61 in February 2010 [3], it lasted about 3 years and 8 months. It cost $796 [4].

Prior to the T61 I had a T41p that I received well before 2006 (maybe 2003) [5]. So the T41p lasted close to 7 years, as it was originally bought for me by a multinational corporation I’m sure it cost a lot of money. By the time I bought the T61 it had display problems, cooling problems, and compatibility issues with recent Linux distributions.

Before the T41p I had 3 Thinkpads in 5 years, all of which had the type of price that only made sense in the dot-com boom.

In terms of absolute lifetime the Thinkpad T420 did ok. In terms of cost per year it did very well, only $6 per month. The T61 was $18 per month, and while the T41p lasted a long time it probably cost over $2000 giving it a cost of over $20 per month. $20 per month is still good value, I definitely get a lot more than $20 per month benefit from having a laptop. While it’s nice that my most recent laptop could be said to have saved me $12 per month over the previous one, it doesn’t make much difference to my financial situation.

Thinkpad X301

My latest Thinkpad is an X301 that I found on an e-waste pile, it had a broken DVD drive which is presumably the reason why someone decided to throw it out. It has the same power connector as my previous 2 Thinkpads which was convenient as I didn’t find a PSU with it. I saw a review of the T301 dated 2008 which probably means it was new in 2009, but it has no obvious signs of wear so probably hasn’t been used much.

My X301 has a 1440*900 screen which isn’t as good as the T420 resolution of 1600*900. But a lower resolution is an expected trade-off for a smaller laptop. The T310 comes with a 64G SSD which is a significant limitation.

I previously wrote about a “cloud lifestyle” [6]. I hadn’t implemented all the ideas from that post due to distractions and a lack of time. But now that I’ll have a primary PC with only 64G of storage I have more incentive to do that. The 100G disk in the T61 was a minor limitation at the time I got it but since then everything got bigger and 64G is going to be a big problem and the fact that it’s an unusual 1.8″ form factor means that I can’t cheaply upgrade it or use the SSD that I’ve used in the Thinkpad T420.

My current Desktop PC is an i7-2600 system which builds the SE Linux policy packages for Debian (the thing I compile most frequently) in about 2 minutes with about 5 minutes of CPU time used. the same compilation on the X301 takes just over 6.5 minutes with almost 9 minutes of CPU time used. The i5 CPU in the Thinkpad T420 was somewhere between those times. While I can wait 6.5 minutes for a compile to test something it is an annoyance. So I’ll probably use one of the i7 or i5 class servers I run to do builds.

On the T420 I had chroot environments running with systemd-nspawn for the last few releases of Debian in both AMD64 and i386 variants. Now I have to use a server somewhere for that.

I stored many TV shows, TED talks, and movies on the T420. Probably part of the problem with the hinge was due to adjusting the screen while watching TV in bed. Now I have a phone with 64G of storage and a tablet with 32G so I will use those for playing videos.

I’ve started to increase my use of Git recently. There’s many programs I maintain that I really should have had version control for years ago. Now the desire to develop them on multiple systems gives me an incentive to do this.

Comparing to a Phone

My latest phone is a Huawei Mate 9 (I’ll blog about that shortly) which has a 1920*1080 screen and 64G of storage. So it has a higher resolution screen than my latest Thinkpad as well as equal storage. My phone has 4G of RAM while the Thinkpad only has 2G (I plan to add RAM soon).

I don’t know of a good way of comparing CPU power of phones and laptops (please comment if you have suggestions about this). The issues of GPU integration etc will make this complex. But I’m sure that the octa-core CPU in my phone doesn’t look too bad when compared to the dual-core CPU in my Thinkpad.

Conclusion

The X301 isn’t a laptop I would choose to buy today. Since using it I’ve appreciated how small and light it is, so I would definitely consider a recent X series. But being free the value for money is NaN which makes it more attractive. Maybe I won’t try to get 4+ years of use out of it, in 2 years time I might buy something newer and better in a similar form factor.

I can just occasionally poll an auction site and bid if there’s anything particularly tempting. If I was going to buy a new laptop now before the old one becomes totally unusable I would be rushed and wouldn’t get the best deal (particularly given that it’s almost Christmas).

Who knows, I might even find something newer and better on an e-waste pile. It’s amazing the type of stuff that gets thrown out nowadays.

Observing Reliability Last year I wrote about how great my latest Thinkpad...
I Just Bought a new Thinkpad and the Lenovo Web Site Sucks I’ve just bought a Thinkpad T61 at auction for $AU796....
Thinkpad T420 I’ve owned a Thinkpad T61 since February 2010 [1]. In...
Is a Thinkpad Still Like a Rolls-Royce For a long time the Thinkpad has been widely regarded...
Thinkpad T61 I’ve now had my new Thinkpad T61 [1] for almost...

Work Stuff

November 3, 2017 | etbe

Does anyone know of a Linux support company that provides 24*7 support to Ruby and PHP applications? I have a client that is looking for such a company.

Also I’m looking for more consulting work. If anyone knows of an organisation that needs some SE Linux consulting, or support for any of the FOSS software I’ve written then let me know. I take payment by Paypal and Bitcoin as well as all the usual ways. I can make a private build of any of my FOSS software to suit your requirements or if you want features that could be used by other people (and don’t conflict with the general use cases) I can add them on request. Small changes start at $100.

Logic of Zombies

October 30, 2017 | etbe

Most zombie movies feature shuffling hordes which prefer to eat brains but also generally eat any human flesh available. Because in most movies (pretty much everything but the 28 Days Later series [1]) zombies move slowly they rely on flocking to be dangerous.

Generally the main way of killing zombies is severe head injury, so any time zombies succeed in their aim of eating brains they won’t get a new recruit for their horde. The TV series iZombie [2] has zombies that are mostly like normal humans as long as they get enough brains and are smart enough to plan to increase their horde. But most zombies don’t have much intelligence and show no signs of restraint so can’t plan to recruit new zombies. In 28 Days Later the zombies aren’t smart enough to avoid starving to death, in contrast to most zombie movies where the zombies aren’t smart enough to find food other than brains but seem to survive on magic.

For a human to become a member of a shuffling horde of zombies they need to be bitten but not killed. They then need to either decide to refrain from a method of suicide that precludes becoming a zombie (gunshot to the head or jumping off a building) or unable to go through with it. Most zombie movies (I think everything other than 28 Days Later) has the transition process taking some hours so there’s plenty of time for an infected person to kill themself or be killed by others. Then they need to avoid having other humans notice that they are infected and kill them before they turn into a zombie. This doesn’t seem likely to be a common occurrence. It doesn’t seem likely that shuffling zombies (as opposed to the zombies in 28 Days Later or iZombie) would be able to form a horde.

In the unlikely event that shuffling zombies managed to form a horde that police couldn’t deal with I expect that earth-moving machinery could deal with them quickly. The fact that people don’t improvise armoured vehicles capable of squashing zombies is almost as ridiculous as all the sci-fi movies that feature infantry.

It’s obvious that logic isn’t involved in the choice of shuffling zombies. It’s more of a choice of whether to have the jump-scare aspect of 18 Days Later, the human-drama aspect of zombies that pass for human in iZombie, or the terror of a slowly approaching horrible fate that you can’t escape in most zombie movies.

I wonder if any of the music streaming services have a horror-movie playlist that has screechy music to set your nerves on edge without the poor plot of a horror movie. Could listening to scary music in the dark become a thing?

Anarchy in the Office

October 26, 2017 | etbe

Some of the best examples I’ve seen of anarchy working have been in corporate environments. This doesn’t mean that they were perfect or even as good as a theoretical system in which a competent manager controlled everything, but they often worked reasonably well.

In a well functioning team members will encourage others to do their share of the work in the absence of management. So when the manager disappears (doesn’t visit the team more than once a week and doesn’t ask for any meaningful feedback on how things are going) things can still work out. When someone who is capable of doing work isn’t working then other people will suggest that they do their share. If resources for work (such as a sufficiently configured PC for IT work) aren’t available then they can be found (abandoned PCs get stripped and the parts used to upgrade the PCs that need it most).

There was one time where a helpdesk worker who was about to be laid off was assigned to the same office as me (apparently making all the people in his group redundant took some time). So I started teaching him sysadmin skills, assigned work to him, and then recommended that my manager get him transferred to my group. That worked well for everyone.

One difficult case is employees who get in the way of work being done, those who are so incompetent that they break enough things to give negative productivity. One time when I was working in Amsterdam I had two colleagues like that, it turned out that the company had no problem with employees viewing porn at work so no-one asked them to stop looking at porn. Having them paid to look at porn 40 hours a week was much better than having them try to do work. With anarchy there’s little option to get rid of bad people, so just having them hang out and do no work was the only option. I’m not advocating porn at work (it makes for a hostile work environment), but managers at that company did worse things.

One company I worked for appeared (from the non-management perspective) to have a management culture of doing no work. During my time there I did two “annual reviews” in two weeks, and the second was delayed by over 6 months. The manager in question only did the reviews at that time because he was told he couldn’t be promoted until he got the backlog of reviews done, so apparently being more than a year behind in annual reviews was no obstacle to being selected for promotion. On one occasion I raised the issue of a colleague who had done no work for over a year (and didn’t even have a PC to do work) with that manager, his response was “what do you expect me to do”! I expected him to do anything other than blow me off when I reported such a serious problem! But in spite of that strictly work-optional culture enough work was done and the company was a leader in it’s field.

There has been a lot of research into the supposed benefits of bonuses etc which usually turn out to reduce productivity. Such research is generally ignored presumably because the people who are paid the most are the ones who get to decide whether financial incentives should be offered so they choose the compensation model for the company that benefits themselves. But the fact that teams can be reasonably productive when some people are paid to do nothing and most people have their work allocated by group consensus rather than management plan seems to be a better argument against the typical corporate management.

I think it would be interesting to try to run a company with an explicit anarchic management and see how it compares to the accidental anarchy that so many companies have. The idea would be to have minimal management that just does the basic HR tasks (preventing situations of bullying etc), a flat pay rate for everyone (no bonuses, pay rises, etc) and have workers decide how to spend money for training, facilities, etc. Instead of having middle managers you would have representatives elected from each team to represent their group to senior management.

PS Australia has some of the strictest libel laws in the world. Comments that identify companies or people are likely to be edited or deleted.

Process Monitoring

September 28, 2017 | etbe

Since forking the Mon project to etbemon [1] I’ve been spending a lot of time working on the monitor scripts. Actually monitoring something is usually quite easy, deciding what to monitor tends to be the hard part. The process monitoring script ps.monitor is the one I’m about to redesign.

Here are some of my ideas for monitoring processes. Please comment if you have any suggestions for how do do things better.

For people who don’t use mon, the monitor scripts return 0 if everything is OK and 1 if there’s a problem along with using stdout to display an error message. While I’m not aware of anyone hooking mon scripts into a different monitoring system that’s going to be easy to do. One thing I plan to work on in the future is interoperability between mon and other systems such as Nagios.

Basic Monitoring

ps.monitor tor:1-1 master:1-2 auditd:1-1 cron:1-5 rsyslogd:1-1 dbus-daemon:1- sshd:1- watchdog:1-2

I’m currently planning some sort of rewrite of the process monitoring script. The current functionality is to have a list of process names on the command line with minimum and maximum numbers for the instances of the process in question. The above is a sample of the configuration of the monitor. There are some limitations to this, the “master” process in this instance refers to the main process of Postfix, but other daemons use the same process name (it’s one of those names that’s wrong because it’s so obvious). One obvious solution to this is to give the option of specifying the full path so that /usr/lib/postfix/sbin/master can be differentiated from all the other programs named master.

The next issue is processes that may run on behalf of multiple users. With sshd there is a single process to accept new connections running as root and a process running under the UID of each logged in user. So the number of sshd processes running as root will be one greater than the number of root login sessions. This means that if a sysadmin logs in directly as root via ssh (which is controversial and not the topic of this post – merely something that people do which I have to support) and the master process then crashes (or the sysadmin stops it either accidentally or deliberately) there won’t be an alert about the missing process. Of course the correct thing to do is to have a monitor talk to port 22 and look for the string “SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_”. Sometimes there are multiple instances of a daemon running under different UIDs that need to be monitored separately. So obviously we need the ability to monitor processes by UID.

In many cases process monitoring can be replaced by monitoring of service ports. So if something is listening on port 25 then it probably means that the Postfix “master” process is running regardless of what other “master” processes there are. But for my use I find it handy to have multiple monitors, if I get a Jabber message about being unable to send mail to a server immediately followed by a Jabber message from that server saying that “master” isn’t running I don’t need to fully wake up to know where the problem is.

SE Linux

One feature that I want is monitoring SE Linux contexts of processes in the same way as monitoring UIDs. While I’m not interested in writing tests for other security systems I would be happy to include code that other people write. So whatever I do I want to make it flexible enough to work with multiple security systems.

Transient Processes

Most daemons have a second process of the same name running during the startup process. This means if you monitor for exactly 1 instance of a process you may get an alert about 2 processes running when “logrotate” or something similar restarts the daemon. Also you may get an alert about 0 instances if the check happens to run at exactly the wrong time during the restart. My current way of dealing with this on my servers is to not alert until the second failure event with the “alertafter 2” directive. The “failure_interval” directive allows specifying the time between checks when the monitor is in a failed state, setting that to a low value means that waiting for a second failure result doesn’t delay the notification much.

To deal with this I’ve been thinking of making the ps.monitor script automatically check again after a specified delay. I think that solving the problem with a single parameter to the monitor script is better than using 2 configuration directives to mon to work around it.

CPU Use

Mon currently has a loadavg.monitor script that to check the load average. But that won’t catch the case of a single process using too much CPU time but not enough to raise the system load average. Also it won’t catch the case of a CPU hungry process going quiet (EG when the SETI at Home server goes down) while another process goes into an infinite loop. One way of addressing this would be to have the ps.monitor script have yet another configuration option to monitor CPU use, but this might get confusing. Another option would be to have a separate script that alerts on any process that uses more than a specified percentage of CPU time over it’s lifetime or over the last few seconds unless it’s in a whitelist of processes and users who are exempt from such checks. Probably every regular user would be exempt from such checks because you never know when they will run a file compression program. Also there is a short list of daemons that are excluded (like BOINC) and system processes (like gzip which is run from several cron jobs).

Monitoring for Exclusion

A common programming mistake is to call setuid() before setgid() which means that the program doesn’t have permission to call setgid(). If return codes aren’t checked (and people who make such rookie mistakes tend not to check return codes) then the process keeps elevated permissions. Checking for processes running as GID 0 but not UID 0 would be handy. As an aside a quick examination of a Debian/Testing workstation didn’t show any obvious way that a process with GID 0 could gain elevated privileges, but that could change with one chmod 770 command.

On a SE Linux system there should be only one process running with the domain init_t. Currently that doesn’t happen in Stretch systems running daemons such as mysqld and tor due to policy not matching the recent functionality of systemd as requested by daemon service files. Such issues will keep occurring so we need automated tests for them.

Automated tests for configuration errors that might impact system security is a bigger issue, I’ll probably write a separate blog post about it.

[1] https://doc.coker.com.au/projects/etbe-mon/

Converting Mbox to Maildir

September 23, 2017 | etbe

MBox is the original and ancient format for storing mail on Unix systems, it consists of a single file per user under /var/spool/mail that has messages concatenated. Obviously performance is very poor when deleting messages from a large mail store as the entire file has to be rewritten. Maildir was invented for Qmail by Dan Bernstein and has a single message per file giving fast deletes among other performance benefits. An ongoing issue over the last 20 years has been converting Mbox systems to Maildir. The various ways of getting IMAP to work with Mbox only made this more complex.

The Dovecot Wiki has a good page about converting Mbox to Maildir [1]. If you want to keep the same message UIDs and the same path separation characters then it will be a complex task. But if you just want to copy a small number of Mbox accounts to an existing server then it’s a bit simpler.

Dovecot has a mb2md.pl script to convert folders [2].

cd /var/spool/mail
mkdir -p /mailstore/example.com
for U in * ; do
  ~/mb2md.pl -s $(pwd)/$U -d /mailstore/example.com/$U
done

To convert the inboxes shell code like the above is needed. If the users don’t have IMAP folders (EG they are just POP users or use local Unix MUAs) then that’s all you need to do.

cd /home
for DIR in */mail ; do
  U=$(echo $DIR| cut -f1 -d/)
  cd /home/$DIR
  for FOLDER in * ; do
    ~/mb2md.pl -s $(pwd)/$FOLDER -d /mailstore/example.com/$U/.$FOLDER
  done
  cp .subscriptions /mailstore/example.com/$U/ subscriptions
done

Some shell code like the above will convert the IMAP folders to Maildir format. The end result is that the users will have to download all the mail again as their MUA will think that every message had been deleted and replaced. But as all servers with significant amounts of mail or important mail were probably converted to Maildir a decade ago this shouldn’t be a problem.

etbe – Russell Coker

Linux, politics, and other interesting things

Author Archives: etbe

Thinkpad X1 Carbon

CPU

Keyboard

Display

General

Conclusion

Update

More About the Thinkpad X301

Designing Shared Cars

Personalising Cars

Car Sizes

Huawei Mate9

Warranty Etc

Comparison

Security

Conclusion

Thinkpad X301

Another Broken Thinkpad

My Thinkpad History

Thinkpad X301

Comparing to a Phone

Conclusion

Work Stuff

Logic of Zombies

Anarchy in the Office

Process Monitoring

Basic Monitoring

SE Linux

Transient Processes

CPU Use

Monitoring for Exclusion

Converting Mbox to Maildir