Major sponsors for Ableton on Air include Green Mountain Support Services, empowering people with disabilities to live home in the community, Washington County Mental Health, where hope and support come together. Media sponsors for Ableton on Air include Park Chester Times, Muslim Community Report, WWW, this is the Bronx.info, Associated Press Media Editors, New York Power Online Newspaper, U.S. Press Corps Domestic and International, Anchor FM, and Spotify. Partners for Ableton on Air include the HOD of New York and New England, where everyone belongs, the Orthodox Union, the Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired of Vermont, the Vermont Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired, Center Vermont Habitat for Humanity, and Montpelier Sustainable Coalition, Montefiore Medical Center of the Bronx, Roosevelt Kennedy Center of Bronx, New York, Albert Einstein College of Medicine of the Bronx. Ableton on Air has been seen in the following publications, Park Chester Times, WWW, this is the Bronx.com, New York Power Online Newspaper, Muslim Community Report, WWW.H.com, and the Montpelier Bridge. Ableton on Air is part of the following organizations, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Boston, New England Chapter, and the Society of Professional Journalists. Welcome to the edition of Ableton on Air, the one and only program that focuses on the needs, concerns, and achievements of the differently abled. I've always been your host, Lauren Seiler. Sorry that Arlene could not be here today. Before we begin our wonderful show, and talking to our guest, Daniel Molin from Enough Ministries. We would like to say special thanks to our sponsors, Washington County Mental Health, Green Mountain Support Services, and many, many others, including the support and the partnership with Enough Ministries for today's program, and the Division for the Blind of Visually Imperative Vermont, the Association for the Blind of Visually Imperative of Vermont, and Higher Abilities of Vermont. Thank you, Daniel Molin from Enough Ministries of Bury for joining us on this edition of Ableton on Air, and thank you to your wonderful companion, Ransom there for joining us. So, let's start. Tell me a little bit about your challenge. You've been in the military, and let's start there. Yeah. You know, I served in the military for 32 years, retired as a colonel. I've done combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, and I am currently 70% disabled according to the VA. So, you know, obviously in ministry, we need to rely on the Lord to make up the rest of that and rely on His strength, and He has been so awesome in enabling me to do so much in our ministry and for the local community. So, let's talk about Enough Ministries. What is Enough Ministries? What are the missions and goals of Enough Ministries? So, Enough Ministries was planted more than eight years ago now. Enough Ministries was originally planted as a church for the homeless addicted in Hungary, in Bury, and we know that that is an unfortunately large population in Bury. And so, we have a number of sub-ministries within the organization that we assist people with. We have a food distribution ministry. We have a soup kitchen ministry and a clothing ministry. And we've also just started a, it's called Celebrate Recovery, which is an addiction recovery ministry as well. So, that's what we do. We take our name from the Bible first that says, Jesus is enough, God is enough, and He is sufficient for all of our needs and that's why we come up with Enough Ministries. And yeah, we've been, I think, a staple within our community for helping people with all sorts of, you know, kinds of issues and whatnot and just showing them God's love. When you say addiction and mental health, that's a large population in Bury, can you go through that particular thing? Why is it a large population? I know during the pandemic, mental health has been an issue. Can you talk about that for a little bit? So, I do believe that, and the statistics will bear out, that a large percent of the population that's homeless, addicted and hungry also suffer from some sort of mental health, you know, kinds of issues, social anxieties, you know, and other kinds of schizophrenia and whatnot. And that's unfortunate. Addiction, you know, is also a part of it. So, there's a mental health and physical health component that underlies a lot of that. I don't think that anybody would desire to be homeless or addicted or hungry. And so, it's something else that sort of brought them to that point. You know, perhaps they weren't able to afford, you know, some sort of healthcare procedure or whatever and that caused them to lose their housing or, you know, they have some sort of mental health challenges that make it difficult for them to work or stay in certain sort of situations or follow rules and, you know, all that kind of stuff. And so, yeah, I do think that, you know, we have a large population in Barrie. I think there's a large population everywhere that is largely sort of unseen. There's a lot of, for example, prescription drug abuse that goes on everywhere.  What do you mean by a functioning addict, if you don't mind me?  So the fact that you're able to continue life, at least for a while, in that addicted stage isn't to say that your addiction is any less than somebody who's on the street and, you know, however they're raising money for, you know, drugs or whatever and are homeless. Now, God is an able God. Amen. Do you think, in your opinion, now you have alcoholism, drugs, opioids, is there, but now there are different types of counseling. Is there a different type of counseling or is Christian counseling or religious counseling or a person who is religious to help counsel? Is that better than seeing a regular, quote-unquote, counselor of the secular world? So I think... Am I saying that right? Yeah, I went, I have a master's degree and counseling from Johnson. You have three master's degrees. One of them is in counseling, which is really Christian counseling. But in order, you know, that was my specialty. In order to do that, you learn a lot about secular counseling as well and you need to know some of the foundations of secular counseling as well in order to, you know, receive insurance payments and become a certified counselor and whatnot. But I think if you boil it all down, there's one sort of distinct difference and that is when you go to a secular counselor, if I went to a secular counselor and I said, hey, you know, I'm looking at breaking up with my wife and, you know, I just don't find her very attractive anymore or whatever and, you know, my girlfriend, you know, is asking me to move in and move out of my house and with the girlfriend. A secular counselor would probably take a tact and say, well, what makes you most happy?  Where as a Christian counselor, there's a biblical set of morals and ethics that are codified in the Bible and when somebody would come in and say, hey, I'm looking at leaving my wife to see this other woman, we would say, well, wait a minute, the Bible says that, you know, we don't do that and so the line of counseling would be even though that might make you more happy, let's work on the relationship that you're currently in and so there's, you know, sort of a different philosophy. I think, you know, Christians understand that this is a fallen world, it's not perfect. There is going to be disease and suffering and, you know, that kind of thing in this world and, you know, God has some truth for us, has an ultimate reward for us for following through in His commands and so, you know, we'd be encouraging people to follow up with those commands. Again, let's talk about, you know, because we focus on abilities of people on the show and everybody has an ability, especially to break out of addiction and other things, but how has, and we're going to go through some specific examples, Jesus Christ came down in the form of man. He became disabled, if you will, and shown the world how able he can be. How has media played a part in showing the Bible? Because, you know, the Bible is a big book and there's a lot of lessons. Go ahead. I think that... Specific examples. Yeah, I mean, there's obviously a number of different examples. I mean, you look at the popular series right now which is called The Chosen. You might have seen that but there's certainly examples that go way back, you know, in the media. Moses had a speech impediment. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of different examples of how the media has, you know, portrayed the Bible. I think it tells us in the Bible that we shouldn't add one word or subtract one word from the Bible. I think that alone makes it difficult to have an accurate portrayal of, you know, what is codified as what we know is truth in the Bible. I say that because, you know, you have a certain length of time that you're trying to do a movie about whatever kind of an event. Is it biblically accurate, though? Are they... Well, this is my point that it is hard to be 100% biblically accurate because there isn't enough material there to present a fully rounded sort of picture or storyline that lends itself to the Bible. For example, you know, in the early 1950s they had the Ten Commandments, you know.  We have a actor who is portraying Moses. One of the things that we know from Moses is that Moses was not eloquent in his speech. Charlton Heston is pretty eloquent in his speech. He's a good actor. And so it's hard to portray a totally biblically accurate, you know, kind of story. You know, sometimes things have to be left out because we only have so much time to tell the story and so we start chopping things out as the media does with any kind of story, you know, Top Gun, whatever. You know, they filmed a lot of stuff and a lot of it ended up on the cutting room floor. And so the question is, is when you film a movie like the Ten Commandments, Passion of the Christ, whatever it happens to be, some of that ends up on the cutting room floor and some of that is scripturally significant. Like the Scorching Scene in Passion of Christ. Before we show clips. Isaiah 53 is, you know, he was wounded for our transgressions and our iniquities. But when we look at the Scorching Scene, it was hard to watch. People were crying in theaters. People, you know, ripping skin, welts, all kinds of things that he endured. That was accurate, I'm assuming, because of what it says in the Bible. Well, it tells us that he went through, you know, that. We can surmise from what is written in the Bible that we can assume, you know, that the Romans, when they tortured him, used that similar devices into the similar extent. But I also believe that the Bible is, it's God-breathed, number one, and God breathed those words to the people who wrote them down and that every word in there is significant. And I also believe that every word that's not in there is significant. So in other words, in this particular context, I don't think that it was necessary for God to explain the degree and sort of gory detail that his son suffered.  And in order to make a movie, right, the Passion of Christ, all that sort of graphic detail was necessary. But I don't think it's necessary for us to believe in the personhood and in the godliness of Jesus to be in there. So there's different things, you know, I'm reminded of that series, Jesus of Nazareth. In 1977, which we'll show a clip, yeah, NBC back in 1977 did this wonderful miniseries of all of these stars that came to do this movie. That's my personal favorite. I mean, Passion of Christ, yeah, but because it told Jesus of Nazareth went through, it went through the birth, it went through the part where King Herod turned, you know, it went through everything in the Bible in a better sense of... Yeah, I mean, it is interesting. I mean, you say that and that series, I don't know exactly how long it was. It was broken up. The actual TV movie is actually six hours, but it was broken up into segments. So I mean, even in six hours to explain the whole personhood of Christ, there was stuff that was left out. Like what, for example? So Satan's temptation in the wilderness was totally left out. Another part that was totally left out that I thought was significant is the scene where Lazarus is being raised from the dead. We know that the shortest verse in the Bible is Jesus wept. It's a pretty significant verse, even though it's the shortest verse, because it shows that Jesus had compassion on people. He didn't just come down as God to sort of judge people and to pass his opinion on people or whatever, condemn people. It shows that, hey, you know, here's somebody that he cared about, who he loved, who is now dead, even though he knew he was going to raise him from the dead, he's still wept about that. I think that it is significant because it shows that Jesus cares about us. But as far as compassion, he also became angry at times, especially the part of Jesus of Nazareth when people are selling things in the temple. I mean, it's one thing to have, maybe in today's day and age, a bake sale to raise money for the church or a religious institution. But why did he get angry as well as compassion? Why did he have anger? Well, I think all this is to show that he was fully human as well as fully God. He isn't a remote, unfeeling, untouched God. He desires to be in relationship with us and whenever we're in relationship with somebody else, the things that we're going through have effect on one another. And certainly he demonstrated his strong relationship with the Lord and often referred to his father in the temple being his father's house. The command for the nation of Israel to have animal sacrifices in order to atone for their sins and basically all the animal owners and whatnot were in the temple. There were money changers there there were people from different countries and they had all set up an area that would normally be taken up by people preparing to worship was now taken up by this commercialism of well, you can be absolved of your sin just by this ox, this is a very fine ox. And I think that that is foreshadowing. He just scattered those people out of the temple. It says that he sat there and constructed a whip before he drove them all out of the temple.  And I think it also points to the fact, occasionally I'll hear people say, well, Jesus just wasn't known in Israel. They didn't have the media that we're talking about now to publicize the fact that Jesus was there and everything. But when you commit an act such as driving out all of the money changers and animal husbandry owners and that, yeah, I don't think probably there were any tax collectors there. There could have been. But at any rate, that act during Passover was certain to attract a lot of attention. That was the big high holy days in the temple and there would have been people from, you know, throughout that region of the world that would have seen and heard and been witness to what Christ was doing.  Let's talk more about enough ministries. As you had told me off air, enough ministries merged with another church. Why was that? Was that because of the pandemic? No. So enough ministries had grown rapidly on Summer Street and Berry. We had originally started in a storefront, you know, location. And we were doing our soup kitchen ministry and our clothing ministry and our food ministry and also church and essentially one room. One small building. One small, yeah, one floor of one small building.   And we knew that we had to look for a larger facility in order to accommodate everybody. And we looked for quite a while to find appropriate rental space or to buy a space someplace. And finally, we approached the first Baptist church in Berry who has a wonderful building and asked if we could rent space from them for the church and that discussion changed fairly rapidly to a merger discussion. They were having some challenges with outreach and tithing and other kinds of things and it looked like it would be a good match. We could bring in some of the things that we were doing and they could bring in some of the stuff that they were doing and make it overall more attractive to the community. We would extend our ability to reach our community and support our community and also provide us an opportunity to be able to worship in a larger space and frankly to join together with both churches add to the size of the church and make it a stronger entity instead of two weaker entities to make one stronger entity out of the two. So between the two churches how many people are part of enough ministries? More than a hundred? So we run about 75 on any given weekend. We have in the rolls I think it's somewhere around 150 or so members but the tradition today is Gallup polls tells us that people consider themselves to be regular attenders at church if they attend twice a month. So that's quite a change from the historical if you were a regular attender you were there every Sunday or at least more Sundays than you weren't there and now our culture has gone to a point where it's like 50-50 so we don't necessarily see the same people every weekend. You're still doing online services? We still do online matter of fact we had a baptism last Sunday and the mother of this child was in Florida and she was able to watch the service online in Florida in real time we also had another feed that was going to Waco, Texas we had a mission team come up from Waco, Texas this summer and poured into this young man before he decided to accept Christ and so they wanted to be part of that baptismal service so yeah on Sunday we were connected with Texas and Florida and a bunch of people in Vermont and other places around so certainly the rise of streaming and the ease of streaming has certainly supported churches and we find people will check us out online first see what it's all about and how the service goes and what's the music like and all that kind of stuff before they step in the door so that gives them an opportunity to sort of check things out safely before they come in. So two questions getting back to people with special needs what are the misconceptions like I asked this of all my guests what are the misconceptions around people with special needs when people first meet them you know about being scared and all and you having challenges yourself yeah I mean I think that there is an anxiety amongst people who aren't used to being around others that have some kind of disability you know the reality is is that we're all going to have some kind of disability sooner or later I forget what the statistics are for hospitalization but sooner or later most everybody ends up in the hospital at one time or another for something I believe the statistic that I last read in one of my counseling journals is that 75% of all Americans will have an event in which they should, could approach someone for mental health counseling in their lifetime so you know we're reminded once again that this is not a perfect world this is a broken world and there are broken people in this world some are physically broken some are emotionally broken or spiritually broken or other kinds of things so since you say that do you think people sorry do you think people and mental health has been a big problem during the pandemic do you think yes do you think yes there could be more mental health counseling or a better way of approaching it to help more people so you know from my point of view and the people that I see I think that the push to a lot of telemedicine has both been helpful and hurtful how so helpful because it has allowed people to remain in touch with people who were getting counseling before but through whatever reasons maybe a spike in COVID whatever it happens to be transportation issues whatever that they can't come and meet but it says also it tells us in the Bible not for sake meeting in public as some are prone to do so it's also we opened up the church as soon as we could post COVID even though there were a lot of restrictions about space and temperature and questions beforehand and having to keep a ledger who was there and all those kinds of things but it was important for us to do that because there are some things that you can't do virtually you know you can't lay hands on somebody and pray for them you have a much more difficult time understanding when somebody is in sort of distress or pain it's easier to observe their body language when you're physically present with them it's easier to ask them questions about accountability with whatever you know substance abuse or alcohol or other triggering you know kinds of things when you're in fellowship one with another if you neglect that opportunity to gather together you lose out on a lot of the benefit I believe you know for some people who already have an established relationship with a counselor then to go virtually is less a fact but for people who are initially seeking you know support and assistance it's very difficult you know I know that a lot of the AA meetings and stuff went virtual and some of them are still ongoing virtual but it's you know it's hard to tell if you know somebody who's at a distance on your computer smells of alcohol you know or other kinds of substances are really struggling in that way so So would you say that for example I deal with epilepsy during the pandemic telemedicine session with a neurologist is really hard they need to see you they have to write down your medic you know help you with more stuff so yeah I kind of understand that Ransom when we were going through his service dog training was training with another dog who was an epilepsy service dog and so we're sort of familiar with that the let's see yesterday we had a professor from Norwich University come in the engineering department who suffers from epilepsy and he has a service dog as well to help him you know alert when he's going to have seizures and stuff so yeah you know service dogs are hugely helpful you can't really effectively do any of that kind of training you have to be able to experience that the trainer has to be able to help you through the issues of training I think that there are a lot of real challenges with the telemedicine concept although it's better than not having any kind of access to service for sure The last question two last questions since you have a service dog how has it been working for you and do you recommend that for other people going through the same thing you are if you want to talk about that yeah I mean I think I can only speak from my own experience and from you know people that I meet but service dogs are amazing the service dog that was getting trained with ransom for the seizure would not only alert the owner that they were about to have a seizure but also would curl up sort of underneath her neck so that when she was having a seizure she didn't bang her head on the floor and I observed a few seizures which were quite violent and the dog I assume the dog must have been very uncomfortable with this woman sort of thrashing around on top of the dog and it was amazing protected her from injury I think that service animals can be quite significant the VA has in the time that I've had my experience with the VA the VA has really started to open up a much better understanding about service dogs and their capability to help service members and a whole variety of different situations it's not uncommon when I'm at the VA to see other service dogs you know walking around the VA it's more of a expected kind of situation than an unexpected one What are the future goals of a lift ministry? Future goals I would pray that we would continue to follow the lead of the Lord and what we're doing we have a long standing vision that we think that we have received from them which is to help all the communities along the Route 2 corridor have a evangelistic church that is close to their community and so you know at some point in the future we'd love to have another church and like Danville and St. Johnsbury and continuing out that way and so we're just keeping our ear to the ground Right now we're really involved with servicing our community there's 370 something homeless people that are put up in local hotels around central Vermont we have a food ministry to bring food and support to them there's been a lot of economic impact From what I understand like for example we can mention them for a minute they are now taking old hotels taking old hotels and turning them into apartments that's another issue that's huge I think for the first time Vermont is at a a place where they're providing some services for a large portion not all certainly but a large portion of the homeless community and I would hope that in that they would use those resources to address the issues of homelessness I think homelessness is much more about not having a home for you to live in it's about those underlying issues of mental health and abuse and trauma and social anxieties and those kinds of things that keep people perpetually locked in homelessness so I do hope that they can help address those issues Last thing, let's talk about the food ministry that you guys have and go into your website What is that about? Since we started we had a small food ministry just a closet on Summer Street and when we moved to our new place we created a much larger shelter for that a shed that's beside the building and we included the opportunity to do refrigerated and frozen foods as well and as the pandemic wore on we gradually were able to increase the amount of food that we were helping support in our community Today we're doing about 500 pounds of food a day and that's in it every day 7 days a week 365 days a year we put out food for people to take and we've seen people drive up a brand new Ford pickup truck and I've sort of been like what's going on and have the guy come out and be like I really appreciate the opportunity where you know I've been laid off I can't work right now the payments on my truck and my mortgage take up all of my unemployment and you know my kids would start if I wasn't able to come down here and pick up food and stuff so it has had a significant impact on the community to be able to provide food Well I would like to thank you for joining us on this edition of Ableton On Air for more information on enough ministries and their work you can go to www.enuffministries.org that's www E-N-O-U-G-H ministries.org and for more information on Ableton On Air you can go to www.orgamedia.net Is there a number for enough ministries or is it just a website? There's a website there that we answer there's a variety of email addresses and phone numbers available there we're also on Facebook at Enough Ministries Barry on Facebook and we can be reached there as well again for more information on enough ministries www.enuffministries.org We would like to thank Pastor Daniel Mollind and Ransom for joining us on this edition of Ableton On Air We would like to thank our sponsors Washington County Mental Health Green Mountain Support Services and many others including the Association for the Blind of Vermont the Division for the Blind of Vermont the entire Abilities Vermont and also the great partnership with Enough Ministries of Barry I'm Lauren Seiler Arlene couldn't be here today see you next time on the next edition of Ableton On Air I'm Lauren Seiler Major sponsors for Ableton On Air include Green Mountain Support Services empowering people with disabilities to live home in the community Washington County Mental Health where hope and support come together Media sponsors for Ableton On Air include Park Chester Times Muslim Community Report www this is the Bronx.info Associated Press Media Editors New York Parrot Online Newspaper U.S. Press Corps Domestic and International Anchor FM and Spotify Partners for Ableton On Air include Yachad of New York and New England where everyone belongs the Orthodox Union the Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired of Vermont the Vermont Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired Central Vermont Habitat for Humanity and Montpelier Sustainable Coalition Montefere Medical Center of the Bronx Rose of Kennedy Center of Bronx, New York Albert Einstein College of Medicine of the Bronx Ableton On Air has been seen in the following publications Park Chester Times www this is the Bronx.com New York Parrot Online Newspaper Muslim Community Report www.h.com and the Montpelier Bridge Ableton On Air is part of the following organizations the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Boston, New England Chapter and the Society of Professional Journalists


The fact that the the program is housed in two institutions, the NIH and and the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health was really one of its strengths when I decided to come here, but I have to admit thinking about working at two huge institutions was sort of daunting. Yeah I can imagine that it is, and it's like double the adjustment when you come into a program that you've got two places to learn. And while I do have to admit that there are extra cultural and logistic adjustments that have to be made when you're learning two large institutions, I also can think of a lot of ways in which this benefits our students having these two institutions. And since you've just lived through it I wonder if you would mind talking a little bit about what your experience has been like. And one of the things that comes to mind is the the clinical rotations and and the advantages that we have as students to be involved with both the NIH and the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. So while I was able to do rotations with scientists and clinicians here at the NIH, I was also able to take advantage of opportunities at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, which is one of the most well-known academic hospitals in the country. So that was definitely one thing that's really clear in my mind about the benefits of being at both institutions. Yeah I'm glad you raised that because I do think our students really do benefit from having a multitude of clinical rotation experiences because we have these these two homes really. And in addition to that I think I'd like to just highlight that you have the access to a lot of faculty experts in both institutions as well. So that helps us in our teaching that we have people at the NIH who can teach really high level genetics and genomics courses and also help to advise our students in those areas. And then at Hopkins we're situated within a school of public health but in a department of health behavior in society where there are more than 40 faculty who are doing a wide variety of different kinds of public health research through a social science lens. So both institutions really do bring different kinds of advantages to our students. And it's it's wonderful because it feels like you're getting the best of both worlds. And in terms of the the academic opportunities I mean they're they're vast. You know we get invitations and and emails all the time to different academic talks and lectures and things. I mean really it's almost too much to to handle at times but it's it's great knowing that it's available. And even though we are sort of straddled between these two institutions I think the the genetic counseling program has really done quite a good job at finding its home with both. You know and you know really developing relationships with with people at the School of Public Health and the Health Behavior and Society Department and then also here at the NHGRI. So it's been something I've actually really appreciated about the program.


So, good morning. Thanks a lot for joining. A lot of people are here, so it seems we have a lot of users of ETC. I think everybody touched in configuration file in ETC already. My name is not Thorsten Kukuk, and I'm not a distinguished engineer. I'm Ignace Foster. I'm also working for SUSE in the same department. Thorsten is sick today, so I'll try to have his presentation. So, ETC, why do we think or why are we having this talk at all? First of all, we, as open SUSE, as an RPM-based distribution, has RPM files, which declare configuration files as a special configuration file. We have the same mechanism in other distributions, in Debian-based distributions, and I guess every distribution will mark configuration files as special. So, what does that mean? If we want to declare a configuration file and we update the system, we'll get a conflict if the administrator also decided to update that system. So, the question is, what should be done? Depending on what the package maintainer decided to do, we'll either get an RPM save file. In that case, the modified file will be moved away, and the configuration file distributed with the package will be put in place. Or it can be the other way around. The new configuration file will be moved onto the site with an extension.rpm new, and the configuration file modified by the administrator will stay in place. In both cases, we have a conflict, because you can't be sure what actually changed in the configuration file, and the administrator has to actually touch that and check for the differences. So, it has been that way for a lot of years, so that may lead to the assumption that everything is perfectly fine there. But, as I said, it may not be ideal, because the administrator has to do some manual search for those files on every update, and he has to check for the differences, and merge all those changes manually in there. Oh, by the way, I'm sorry, that's a very text-heavy presentation. I hope we can get into some discussion and may use that as a reference. So, if those configuration file changes actually contain the security update, we now have two cases. Either the security update won't be applied because the administrator modified file will just stay in place, and the security configuration option just won't get updated, or the administrator will just lose this configuration completely without even asking, and that's not ideal, we think. The talk is also referencing atomic updates, so what is an atomic update? An atomic update, we have some atomic distributions, we have the most famous one, probably Core S, on the open source side we have Micro S and Cubic, on the Fedora side we have Fedora Core S now, the atomic host, on the Ubuntu side we have Ubuntu Core, I think. All of those distributions are designed to be automated in some kind of way. So, what does that mean? That means that an update has to be atomic, in a sense that it is either fully applied or not applied at all, which usually means you have a read-only root file system, and then you'll just update the system and reboot into the new system, that's the atomic part. I'll be having a talk about that later today at 1450 if you're interested. But the essential part is it's meant to be automated, and the second part which we'll just talk about now is we have to wait until a reboot, until that configuration is actually applied, so that makes everything worse than it already may be, depending on your point of view, because if the update was applied somewhere in the background, then that configuration file which an update may have done is not visible. In the meantime, the administrator or your configuration management software or whatever may change the configuration files within the running system. So, if you reboot, then that's the question which configuration file should be applied. The various distributions have taken various ways to solve that, but the point is we do run into problems in any case. We have to resolve that situation somehow, and the question is how should we do that? I already told so, there are a lot of distributions, most major distributions also provide such an atomic update mechanism, but each distribution is doing its own thing basically. So, if anybody is approaching an upstream project and says, oh, we want to change something, could you please modify whatever we need? Then probably the answer is does it work for all distributions? And the answer is no, so there's basically no interest in doing distribution-specific patches, usually at least. So basically, it's all left to the user again. The user has to just check for conflicting files again to all the manual work, and that completely destroys all the intended automation which was supposed to be done. So, what will I be proposing today? By the way, that's open for discussion, you can always interrupt me, and if you have better ideas or want to suggest something, we would need a mechanism which would separate the configuration done by the package or the upstream project, and the configuration specifically or intentionally done by the administrator. In that case, it says two directories, etc., and something below user. Why below user? Because that's obviously not meant to be touched by the administrator, at least that's what the FHS says. We need to see because that's where the configuration files are nowadays going anyway. We'd need some guidance for new developers to get things right, and also for the distributions, of course, and the goal would be to migrate existing packages to use that configuration mechanism which would be splitting up those configuration files, one package at a time. So, of course, it would be obvious to start with the packages included in the atomic host and then extend it to the complete distribution. Leonard Petering wrote a blog post several years ago about a stateless system, and that's basically what that's trying to do, and you can just delete etc., and you still have a working system which will just use the default settings. I'm not sure if it's Leonard here, I don't think so. Oh, yes, if that's still a current thing you were thinking about. But yeah, that's basically what that could be reachable by that if everything's working as intended. So, in the end, the administrator should just be notified if something got updated. It should be visible what the administrator was actually changing, and it would be ideal if those changes would just be applied automatically. So proposals, what are we suggesting? I should note we've already discussed several things within the OpenSUSE community, and we are trying to get into more, to reach out to other communities now. I think that's a perfect opportunity here. In the end, we have SystemD already, which is doing exactly that. SystemD will provide its default configuration files in the userlib systemD system, or userlib systemD somewhere, and then it's possible to override either complete files by placing a file of the same name in ETC or around, but I'll ignore around for now. And you can also override just snippets of a configuration file by appending .d, by creating a directory with the suffix .d. So in that case, we have etcapplication.conf, or we could also just put a file in etcapplication.conf.d slash something.conf, and we could just override whatever we want there. So in the end, it depends a lot on the application, what actually needs to be done, or if an application is able to support such a mechanism at all. For example, the drop-in part may not be trivial. If you think of Apache, that's a configuration file which is really complex and just merging parts of it will probably simply not work, but what would be possible in almost all applications is to use two directories to actually read the configuration. And if you have a look around on the system, we noticed that a lot of applications, also basic system implications, support such a mechanism already, but at least an open source, it's simply not used. If you have a look at PAM, PAM already is reading from userlib.pamd and etc.pamd. We have sysctl, which is even supporting drop-in files. LDconfig is also using several directories, also with drop-in files or with extension files. And there are dozens of others which will just read configurations from multiple files, usually with that .d syntax. We have a few special cases, for example, a few things about etc, RPC or etc services or etc protocols. The question is, is that a configuration file at all, because mainly it's a static database which will not be touched but only extended. In that case, it should be trivial to also support that to just add additional files into additional directories. Did I forget something? No, not really. There's one special case which we don't know how to handle yet in a good way, and that's the whole user and password logic. Especially etc passivity, etc group and etc shadow. The problem is, how do you want to actually split that up? Because if you do, as I just suggested here, put all these system accounts in userlib, whatever, you have the problem that you just blocked the administrator and will not be able to touch those or remove those accounts anymore. And you still have one file which would contain all the passwords, so there's no real separation which could be done reliably. One of those problems, by the way, is that if you would split it up into several files, NSS Compat, in case anybody is using it, but I think customers will actually do, wouldn't work with that approach. The second suggestion or the second idea we had was to just do it as we suggested, use .d directories to allow applications to each define their own user and just put it in the .d directory, for example, etc pass vd, pass vd dot d, sorry, and etc group dot d and etc shadow dot d. But that's really incompatible with everything and would need a lot of work to actually get it done. I don't think that will be a realistic goal to actually change that. So if anybody has any idea how to solve that user, do you have a microphone? Like at least for exposing new users, dynamically you could use NSS, but that doesn't solve how to do the password stuff, they need some stuff in PAM. So you could have your own custom module that reads from other locations as well as groups and users from there, or however you manage users. Yes, and just the password file would be still shared among all files. Yes, that would be an option. So about the whole bike shedding part now where to actually store such a file. We were discussing a lot of, oh, just a second. Yeah, that will be the next slide. What should such a location look like? We don't want to have a binary file which is not searchable, I guess. So it has to still be grappable to actually find the values, that's what we just assumed. And it shouldn't be spread around the complete file system. Ideally it wouldn't conflict with the FHS, and it should be obvious for administrators what that directory is actually doing because in the end all the administrators have to work with it and accept that. And yeah, for the package configuration part it should be obvious that the administrator really shouldn't touch that. So we had a look at various other distributions and tried to come up with several paths and we discovered that we have a lot of paths already in place. If we have a look at clear Linux and some existing packages which are part of distributions already we'll see that those are using user share defaults and then something. If we have a look at CoreOS, or the old CoreOS I should mention, the container Linux part, then we have user share and something. On Ubuntu Core we have writable something. On our own distribution we are using user etc. something and it's also used by the new Fedora CoreOS thing but for a slightly different purpose. One obvious suggestion would be user sysconfig but the problem is sysconfig is already taking the name basically and we have several tools which are using user share MISC already. Torsten said it's not compatible with the FHS so I guess that's correct. So we all suggested all those directories to the open SUSE community as a first step and all of them were rejected. But almost everyone agreed that user etc. It's in the heading. Yeah, it is. User etc. would be an excellent idea because that's what is short. It is below user so it's obvious it shouldn't be touched. And yeah, it sounds easy and it was suggested quite independently. We didn't suggest user etc. by the way even though it's mentioned on the previous slide. Exactly, user etc. would just be a duplicate of etc. but contain basically what's currently installed by packages by default and etc. itself would be empty ideally. And that's what we are currently trying to implement. We just started implementing it and now the question to the general public audience is that something which should be proposed also for other distributions, is that something you can live with? I see some people nodding. The question was, the comment was if you go one slide back it's already in use by something else. Exactly, it's already in use by Fedora CoreOS. Leonard is approaching so I think you may have something to say. Just to mention this, if you don't specify a source where you copy from we default to user share factory which is what we thought should be the right path actually. So you didn't even list it there. Okay, let me add that. And actually system.dev.stream ships some basic files there so that even the crappiest distribution can still boot up with that. So this is what we thought should be the right one. Like the idea is that either you simulink or you copy from there to Etsy. But it's not the place where application should just directly open. So we have user share factory now? Yeah. So that's basically the temp files template directory. Yeah, it's about templating. It's about copying from there to Etsy if it's not there or simulinking from there to Etsy if it's not there. It's what we thought would make the most sense and documented as part of that. Okay, cool. Another thing to consider. Additionally, what we currently are doing is NixOS is not installing stuff as specified in the FHS but every package is installed in its own prefix. So we kind of do your user etc but for each package we have its own prefix so it would be kind of nice if that were relative directory to its installation directory of each package. So we have, for example, slash nix, slash store, hash, I don't know, cups. And then below that we have been cups and we have etc default configuration files which we don't necessarily use but we build our own configuration file but kind of having this relative directory to some etc default being used would be nice. Which distribution is that? That sounds like Ubuntu but... NixOS. NixOS, okay. Okay, so yeah, we have, as I said, we have several completely different approaches to that already and yeah, the question is how can we get some common criteria? I mean, in the end it's not that important because if we get the applications to support such a mechanism then we have the ability to just change the second path via a configuration option when compiling the application so if we couldn't agree on one path we could just say at least we get the applications to support that and everybody is able to use a custom path. I think it's not ideal because every distribution will have a different mechanism to actually configure things and it won't make it easier for an administrator. So yeah, the question is where can we find an agreement? You have another opinion? Well, more of a question really and do correct me if I'm wrong but how much of the problems go away if you use portable systems given that then everything is wrapped up in its own thing? So both the user story, because a couple of slides back you already mentioned like we could use system D users but that doesn't work because users are only present on reboot I think no problem is going away because also in portable systems you still want to have an administrator or user-adjustable configuration file somewhere so if you are packaging for the supportable app where are you actually storing the user configuration file? So let me answer that in portable services the idea was always that you mount some specific directory from Etsy into the portable service so that both the system and the host see that if you want to make the configuration like this but what I don't really get like changing back to that what I don't really get is like it was always our intention that sooner or later applications would need the second configuration directory but would just run with defaults if they find their configuration files missing in Etsy Why do you need the directory? For us user share factory was just the fallback if it wasn't easy to patch the software like for example Glypsy is very hard to patch because the upstreams used to be quite complicated so it wasn't easy for us to teach Glypsy that it would not read anything but defaults from slash user but we always thought that it should be up to the applications individually to put that somewhere and use a share or use a lipo wherever they wanted Why have a common directory there if it's not just for the stopgap to support the few components that still don't default to built-ins Because we have a lot of applications which depend on files in etc Sure but I mean you asked you wanted to agree on some directory here so that the various applications can be changed to go there instead of Etsy but my assumption was always they should just either have built-ins that they use if the files in Etsy don't exist or they should read whatever they want from user share user lipo if they have a private directory there I mean we have two problems here first of all if the application is only using its internal defaults in my opinion that's not so great because you can't see what the administrator can adjust if you have a basic etc configuration file which will just list all the things you can adjust then it will make it easy for an administrator to just change the corresponding values I mean yeah we do have main pages listing all those options but yeah just I mean what you're suggesting is getting rid of user etc or whatever completely and just using etc with all those remaining artifacts the administrator wants to have changed from the default yeah but then I mean for me this appears to be a documentation issue right like another question is if you have user etc around as documentation I'm pretty sure that if you build immutable images and deploy them in the wild they probably shouldn't come with documentation so they shouldn't be there right like you see what I mean if that's correct but if you change that you'll also change existing systems which are basically those you're changing the many there because they don't know user etc right it's a new thing which also has consequences for existing systems at least on open source we don't distinguish between regular old-fashioned systems and container hosts both of them are built on the same core I know it's a bit different from Atomic Host but basically we are using the same base I just want to respawn what Landon was saying I think you are conflating a bunch of stuff in that list I can speak at least for container linux the thing is the last one that you have in there are defaults that are kind of like application specific so the application knows about that that's the system this style then what you have in user etc for Atomic is not the same thing it's the result of a three way merge in that one is kind of like version as well what you have in the first the second line in container linux it's another different thing which is application doesn't know about that but the first time that you build the machine we are copying those files in another place in ATC and then there is another category of application that are like they can use defaults that are sim linked directly to user so it's kind of like there are at least four different categories into this list and I do agree with what Landon was saying which is I prefer to have ATC as user customization which is something completely different like user distribution defaults and the fact that right now there are some distribution like Atomic or Fedora Koras that are doing this three way merge in order to version ATC it's kind of like a stopgap solution from my point of view like it works mostly but it's not the same thing as the other stuff that you are doing so I think that like we are speaking past each other because you are putting all of these into the same category the question is which directory we wanted to use we know that use ATC is for the three way merges in Atomic in Fedora Koras sorry all the name changes and that's why we hesitated to use that as the default directory for OpenSUSE in that case now but that doesn't mean that it's supposed to be the same thing we just recognized the name Clash and it's used for similar things mainly which is somehow getting a configuration file merge do we have so first comment about the problem with sysusers and the users being created after a reboot so this is essentially a self-program in Mantriva they split out the sysusers configuration to a separate package and have a trans files trigger to create the users when the package is installed so that when the package that actually has files owned by those users is already there so it's not really a blocker and as for the general thing there are two things one is moving stuff out of ETC and I think that we all agree that this is a good thing and we want to do that and the other thing is the details of the naming which is something that we clearly disagree on but it's not really that important so as long as you push people to move stuff out of ETC one by one this is for me the most important part and we will all benefit from it thanks a lot for the summary that's what I also wanted to say I think we all agree that something should be done about the ETC situation not a lot of people are nodding trust the second as well we still have more time for questions and comments don't worry just the last slide I wanted to show we do have a temporary wiki page on the OpenSUSE wiki for packaging for user ETC but the most important link is the second link which is Thorsten's original proposal with all the motivations for the chest to use that repository for further discussion as we didn't come to an agreement nor we can discuss during the conference we can also set up a buzz of a feather or a buff session for anyone who's interested the problem is I will not be here on Sunday so you'd have to discuss without me that's not a problem but and the last link is a link to a project called LibEconf if applications want to use the new mechanism then if they see a C++ application they can just use the LibEconf to read configuration files with one library call which will then just read all the corresponding places let's say alpha software but we're working on that to make that transition easier so I have five minutes left that's my presentation I don't think we have questions we have for discussion yeah so thanks for the presentation I do agree completely with the problem statement what I'm asking myself a bit is if files really cut it anymore or if we need some kind of different storage for configuration files first of all when we are merging things together we have different formats some configuration files might be for instance in XML which is not so easy to merge just by appending files together for instance I think Cubs solved this problem by not having a root element in Cubs printer files and so on but there might be other programs with that problem another issue is that we still want to run for the administrator of the system whenever there is a change needed then it needs to be propagated from USR ATC I don't care much about the naming what we choose factory or whatever to a custom change he made in his own ATC and it looks like this kind of problem has been tackled before like I'm thinking about decon for instance a binary format for configuration files or even I'm going to name the devil I mean the windows registry so what do you think about do files still cut it for our current needs in my opinion yes because it's a really simple format which is quite obvious to search for if you are thinking about the windows registry that's in my opinion a really bad example of how to do it because it's almost not searchable in an efficient way and yeah you simply don't find anything in there now with the different configuration files you have one directory or one file usually at least per application so if you're looking for your application you can just search the default the default directories in the ATC and you will find all the configuration files belonging to that a registry would have one advantage namely being that you get a standard for all the applications it would force applications to obey to those rules of that format but again a lot of linux applications especially ported to windows will still keep reading their own configuration files because it's simply not possible to squeeze everything into that format so we won't get rid of files in ATC anyway in my opinion you have to have some way of configuring it of having extended configuration formats does that answer the question so yeah I think configuration files are easy to understand and to edit yeah that's why I think they should be preferred compared to binary only format but that's my opinion something else I'll point out that config files make it a lot easier to deal with config management so if you run something like Puppet or Chef or Ansible or whatever and you need to write out configs you can use templates you can templateize the configs it's very evident what's happening you can see diffs of what's happening if you're doing this in other environments where you don't have this possibility you end up having to deal with amorphous concepts that mutate the system and while the end result is roughly the same in terms of what you can do with it I think we can all agree that it's definitely harder to understand in a lot of cases it's harder to understand how to get from here to there I think we still have one minute last question we'll come in we're just responding to that too the problem is also with things like gconf and deconf they have sematical problems because they store every bit of information separately and evolution for example you know this email program from the ground people then famously ended up sticking XML configuration into one key because they wanted to have atomic updates and you just think okay then yeah you have to give up so all these things like registry and these things ended up having semantics that are not compatible with how most people who understand and have non-trivial programs actually want to do stuff because they want more atomicity and be able to change the whole configuration at once and yeah files are crap but they kind of allow you to deliver this in some way or another so yeah it's a complicated issue and I don't think any yeah I mean there have been attempts to unify on something like Electra or something there was a project like this all failed and deconf is certainly the most successful one because it has most of known behind it but I see no way in the world that's a political thing where the semantics are not strictly better I would not want to fight that fight all right thank you we've actually run out of time thank you Thorsten