pterjan's diary

  Zarb unavailability

Zarb.org, the server hosting a few projects like PLF, JPackage, EasyUrpmi, Planet Mandriva, ... and this blog was not available during the last week-end. On Friday night a disk of the RAID5 volume containing user homedirs died (the one with projects was not impacted). Unfortunately the RAID controller put the volume offline... (fortunatly I was in Lille, without Internet access so I did not spend too much time on it :) ).

The failed disk was replaced on Monday and we had to restore the daily backup because the ext3 filesystem was highly corrupted (14GB data out of 26 were still available, but all in /lost+found).

Sorry for the 3 days of service interruption and for losing your Friday work that was on the server in your home (between the backup and the crash).

  NKM talks about Mandriva

Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, current Secretary of State to the Prime Minister, with responsibility for Forward Planning, Assessment of Public Policies and Development of the Digital Economy in the French government (I stole the English translation from Wikipedia), was recently interviewed by ZDNet.

She talks about various topics regarding what France should/can/will do, like IPv6 migration, optical fiber deployment, ... and near the end talked about Mandriva!

She said:

Je pense au logiciel, on est quand mￜme un des pays qui a la possibilitￜ, avec le Linux franￜais Mandriva, de savoir crￜer un systￜme d'exploitation grand public, c'est pas donnￜ ￜ tout le monde.

which in English would be something like

I think to the software, we are a country that has the possibility, with the french Linux Mandriva, to create an operating system for end-users, this is not given to everyone.

. That's nice to hear that she knows we exist and even that it's worth mentioning.

This part of the video is here (French).

  LiveJournal

I finally got a livejournal account in January to be able to comment, and now I get this email...

Hi pterjan,

pterjan's birthday is coming up on June 21!

You can:

    * Post to wish them a happy birthday
    * Send them a virtual gift
    * Gift them with a paid account

So nice of them... They don't wish me a happy birthday but ask me to do it myself...

  I love Europe

I'm currently in UK for the week-end and this morning my French mobile phone operator (SFR) sent me a wonderful SMS: WAP sessions within European Union are charged 1.20 euros for the first 50kB and then 5 euros per MB. I was so happy to learn that the prices are still crazy...

Then a friend pointed me to this Europe press release. It tells that starting on July 1st, the maximum price in Europe will be €1/MB, then it will decrease to €0.80 in 2010 and to €0.50 in 2011. SFR had not the nice idea to inform me about this price drop (5 times cheaper) which will happen in 34 hours...

This decision also tells that sending SMS in Europe will not be charged more than 0.11€ (before VAT). That explains why SFR was so proud to annouce me one month ago that starting on July 1st they will decrease the price of SMS in Europe from 0.30€ to 0.13 (VAT included).

I hope the 4th mobile license will be given soon and real competition will enter French mobile market, so that we don't need European laws to have reasonable prices (mobile prices in UK are so low compared to France...).