gregoa's blog

I've just written a tiny nanoblogger plugin that shows the "last movie" I've seen (taken from my movie diary feed) in my blog's side bar.

ignoramusses shouldn't play with iptables; I just locked myself out from the Debian box at the office (while flushing(!) a chain).

*sigh*

update:

1. went to the office & did a hard reset on the server. *urgs*
2. played with iptables again. now the portforwarding stuff works.

— 2006-04-23

upgraded to x.org 7 today. no big deal, some minor adaptions were necessary, then almost everything worked. with one exception: my hand-crafted xkbd-variant is not "found" anymore. & xmodmap -e 'keycode bla = foo bar baz' was not my friend either.

& I had to accept the removal of mgp & xli due to unsatisfied dependencies. & I lost axyftp but that was my own fault.

well.

update: fixed the keyboard: xlibs -> xkb-data, /etc/X11/xkb/ -> /usr/share/X11/xkb/. not really difficult ;-)
& I substituted xli with xloadimage at the only occurence where I used it. — 2006-04-23

during the easter weekend I had fun (more or less) with our three Debian packages (fullquottel, mimetic, & mailtextbody — cf. my last blog entry on this subject). a short chronology:

• I had contacted debian-mentors@l.d.o on staturday one week ago in order to find sponsors - no reaction; I tried it again this saturday.
• on saturday afternoon tony mancill contacted me & said that he would upload fullquottel and check the other two packages as well. shortly afterwards he uploaded fullquottel; thanks!
• a short time later I got two REJECTs - one for fullquottel ("is already in the NEW directory"), & one for mimetic ("missing .orig.tar.gz").
• it was not until sunday morning that I found out that christoph haas was the one who had uploaded these two packages; thanks! — no further actions on sunday except for some mails & me preparing a new version of the mimetic package.
• on monday I suddenly got two new mails concerning uploads: a confirmation for mimetic & a REJECT for mailtextbody: ".orig.tar.gz is already in the NEW directory". this time it was martin würtele who did the uploads; thanks!
• no further actions up to now except from a clarification mail from me to our three sponsors on monday ...

summary of the weekend: 3 days, 3 packages, 3 sponsors, 5 uploads, 2 confirmations, 3 REJECTs.

situation: fullquottel's new revision is in unstable, mimetic is in the NEW queue waiting for ftp-masters' approval, and mailtextbody is in the NEW queue with an obsolete version, the new revision needs to be uploaded at the latest when mimetic is accepted.

it's almost like a thriller :-)

update: tony mancill has uploaded the new version of mailtextbody; thanks! so everything's done at the moment; mimetic & mailtextbody are awaiting ftp-masters' approval. — 2006-04-21

update: mimetic has passed ftp-masters' approval & has entered unstable. — 2006-04-30

we have an old red hat computer at the office, and I've been thinking about migrating it to Debian for a long time.
today I took another old machine (PII-200, 96 MB RAM, 2x2 GB HD on some adaptec SCSI controller, winbond NIC, IDE CD-ROM) and installed Debian. some notes:

• downloaded the sarge net-install iso.
• in the meantime I grabbed a keyboard and a monitor, booted and went to the BIOS - oops, no CD-ROM in the boot options (well, the box ist from 1996 ...).
• the Debian CD-ROM really didn't boot.
• downloaded Debian floppies.
• reset. "boot failure".
• still no success after re-writing the boot disks; neither with tom's rtbt floppy.
• then I found sbm.bin on the Debian CD - a floppy image with a funny boot loader.
• yeah, I could boot with the floppy and tell it to use the Debian net-install CD-ROM!
• "expert26 $funny_kernel_&_boot_options" - "too many parameters".
• "expert26".
• I tried LVM for the first time. funny.
• no network for apt - huh? well plugging the ethernet cable into the correct socket helped.
• writing the boot loader (no grub because of LVM) - installation of lilo threw errors. I continued the installation nevertheless.
• reboot. well ... no bootable device.
• tried some things. no success.
• then - ähemm - I re-enabled booting from hard disk in BIOS; & - it worked. good to know that LVM (from debian-install) & lilo work.
• aptitude install less joe ssh
• locales, .bash*, ...

now I just have to plan the further steps (replacing the old red hat box, running both, changing the network/masquerading stuff, ..., ?) - but I can do all this from home via ssh ;-)

update: one week later the old red hat box died (I guess it was the PSU - at least something smelled not really fresh) - it was really good to already have a Debian box on cold standby :-)
btw: spamassassin (with a well trained bayes db) rocks! — 2006-05-01

there are people who keep asking what floopy drives could be useful for nowadays. one (additional) answer is: automatic debian installation (IOW: preseeding the debian-installer and putting the config on a floppy).

• on friday & saturday I worked on some perl packages: adopting orphaned packages (libclass-factory-perl, libclass-inner-perl, libstring-koremutake-perl), new upstream versions (libfont-ttf-perl) & an upstream bug (libi18n-charset-perl).
• today I took a look at the RC bug list & sent patches to some bugreports (#356888, #354945, #355395, #352210, and #356842).

libmail-gnupg-perl, libmarc-perl, libmarc-record-perl, and libnet-amazon-perl (packaged by me for the Debian Perl Group) were accepted by the ftpmasters and moved from the new queue to incoming this night.
libnet-z3950-perl is still in the new queue.

short report on the state of Toastfreeware's Debian packages:

• fullquottel went into unstable approximately one week ago (& received it's first bugreport).
• mimetic was rejected yesterday (but only due to inappropriate binary package names).
• mailtextbody depends on mimetic, therefore it is still in the new queue.

some days ago guinan seemed to have died. today I merged her data & parts of her hardware with david's playground machine and reanimated her hereby.

in fact this is guinan's third host body but AFAICS she doesn't mind ;-)