Maps has tiles again

This is a short post to inform you all that Maps has tiles again. We now get our tiles from Mapbox, with whom we have made an agreement going forward. We access Mapbox through a GNOME based redirect, so that we could redirect to something else if a similar situation would arise again.

Maps has been released with the new tiles in the versions:
3.21.4
3.20.2
3.18.3
3.16.3
3.14.3

And I think at least Fedora has been updated.

So, while it was unfortunate that MapQuest closed down for us and we were caught off guard. We now have a better tile setup than before and more options going forward.

More information about our setup with Mapbox will come from a blog post on Planet GNOME soon. I will leave you with a taste of the new tiles.

Getting a network trace from a single application

I recently wanted a way to get a network packet trace from a specific application. My googling showed me an old askubuntu thread that solved this by using Linux network namespaces.

You create a new network namespace, that will be isolated from your regular network, you use a virtual network interface and iptables to make the traffic from it reach your regular network. Then you start an application and wireshark in that namespace and then you have a trace of that application.

I took that idea and made it into a small program, hosted on github, nsntrace.

> nsntrace
usage: nsntrace [-o file] [-d device] [-u username] PROG [ARGS]
Perform network trace of a single process by using network namespaces.

-o file     send trace output to file (default nsntrace.pcap)
-d device   the network device to trace
-u username run PROG as username 

It does pretty much the same as the askubuntu thread above describes but with just one step.

> sudo nsntrace -d eth1 wget www.google.com
Starting network trace of 'wget' on interface eth1.
Your IP address in this trace is 172.16.42.255.
Use ctrl-c to end at any time.

--2016-07-15 12:12:17--  http://www.google.com/
Location: http://www.google.se/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=AbeIV5zZHcaq8wfTlrjgCA [following]
--2016-07-15 12:12:17--  http://www.google.se/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=AbeIV5zZHcaq8wfTlrjgCA
Length: unspecified [text/html]
Saving to: ‘index.html’

index.html                                         [ <=>                                                                                                   ]  10.72K  --.-KB/s   in 0.001s 

2016-07-15 12:12:17 (15.3 MB/s) - ‘index.html’ saved [10980]

Finished capturing 42 packets.

> tshark -r nsntrace.pcap -Y 'http.response or http.request'
16   0.998839 172.16.42.255 -> 195.249.146.104    HTTP 229 GET http://www.google.com/ HTTP/1.1
20   1.010671    195.249.146.104 -> 172.16.42.255 HTTP 324 HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily  (text/html)
22   1.010898 172.16.42.255 -> 195.249.146.104    HTTP 263 GET http://www.google.se/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=AbeIV5zZHcaq8wfTlrjgCA HTTP/1.1
31   1.051006    195.249.146.104 -> 172.16.42.255 HTTP 71 HTTP/1.1 200 OK  (text/html)

If it is something you might have use for or find interesting, please check it out, and help out with patches. It turns out I have a lot to learn about networking and networking code.

All the best!

Maps and tiles

Hello all!

Right now we are having infrastructural problems with Maps. We can no longer use the MapQuest tiles, see mail thread from maps list archive here for more information.

We are working on getting past this and getting a working Maps application released soon. But this is also showing us more clear that we need to get a better grip around the tiles infrastructure if we want to have a Map application and/or a Map infrastructure in GNOME. We are having good discussions and I think we will get through this with a nice plan forward to prevent stuff like this happening. And also with a plan to do better in the future and do cooler stuff with tiles.

All the best!