Cern Week 14

I came back from my Girlfriends place in Berlin on Wednesday. So I literally only worked two days. On Thursday I started fixing some Quator modules. These are basically Perl scripts that get called from the underlying framework. In particular I had a look at accounts.pm and kerberos5.pm. I created a little patch set that will hopefully be committed into production by next week. I added some error catching and some extended options. Further there were some serious bugs, like that usermod didn't check if there was a home directory and if it should be created through the 'creatHome' flag. Then I did some research in the carpool project I want to start at Cern. I am now contributing to an open source project (https://launchpad.net/carpool/) to create a nice little app, which can be used at Cern. I spent most of Friday listing to talks about projects at Cern. They were really interesting. The first one was on how to create and distribute virtual machine images around the network. The talker had invented a method where the images are hashed and then only little parts are transferred, through this he could save up to 90% bandwidth. Really intelligent stuff. Further I listened to a talk about IPMI and 'The dark side of vitalisation'. Then I started to debug a Perl script that kept crashing when using Ldap. After a few hours of debugging I found that the getpwent() method in Perl is broken. I am currently trying to fix the bug and then create a Patch.