Archive for the 'Debian' Category

Our GSoC project has been accepted - yahoo! :)

Monday, April 21st, 2008

This is pretty exciting. I have never bothered about Google’s Summer of Code and have literally been forced (curse you, Kumar) to propose my project I’m working on.

And in the end I have a promising student and Google accepted our proposal. Watching #gsoc while everybody was waiting whether they got accepted caused more traffic than #freenode-newyears. Looking forward to days and nights of my spare time vanish for a fancy T-shirt. :) Nah, seriously. A lot of people have asked for an easy-to-handle web-enabled package repository. It will surely be very helpful as a clean and featureful basis for mentors.debian.net as well as the replacement for PPAs and REVU. And this will be my first large open-source Pylons project, too. I’m excited.

pgadmin3 - now it’s getting personal

Monday, February 18th, 2008

I really don’t mind if Debian lags behind with package versions. And I’ve gotten used to running an ancient version of “pgadmin3″ (the GUI client for PostgreSQL). But now that I upgraded a few pgsql servers from 8.2 to 8.3 and started pgadmin3 I was surprised - in a not at all fun way. Several warnings were displayed. Googling a little I found the cause:

“pgAdmin 1.6.x doesn’t support PostgreSQL 8.3.x. Upgrade to 1.8″

How funny. pgadmin3 in Debian depends on wxwidgets and apparently the current version of wxwidgets didn’t make it into Sid for stability reasons or whatever. So now I’m running into trouble with PostgreSQL 8.3. Somehow I can’t laugh about that. Alright… downgrading to 8.2 again. Is that even possible? Okay, pg_dropcluster and get my backup tapes out.

Debian Basement

Sunday, December 30th, 2007

My wife is a pretty good paintress and for Xmas painted a Debian logo at the wall of my basement terminal room. Now that’s comfy. :)
debian-basement.jpg

Handy Firefox/Icewasel keyword searches for (packages|bugs|*).debian.org

Saturday, December 22nd, 2007

Just wanted to drop a tip on you about the Firefox keyword search feature. I use it to quickly access packages.debian.org on package information or to retrieve the BTS page for a bug number. With it you can use “bts 123456″ instead of “http://bugs.debian.org/123456″. May not appear much shorter but I like it anyway. Here an example on how to add a search keyword for packages.debian.org:

  1. Locate a search form (like on packages.debian.org), set all the select options like you want (e.g. only package in “unstable” and from “main”) and then right-click on the actual text field where you enter the search query and select “add a keyword for this search”:
    Iceweasel context menu to add a keyword search bookmark
  2. Give the bookmark a name (does not matter) and the keyword (should be short):
    name the bookmark
  3. Now you can use that keyword in the location bar (where you normally type the URL you want to surf to) and add the word that you search for:
    Using the bookmark in the location field
  4. You will be redirected to http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=contents&keywords=cream&mode=path&suite=stable&arch=any

So basically getting the package page for this “cream” package means pressing Ctrl-L to highlight the location bar and just enter “pdo cream” and pressing Enter.

For me that was the second most valuable tip when using Firefox. The best tip would probably be how to make that monster take less than 10 seconds to react to mouse clicks on the menus when you have 20 tabs open simultaneously and to consume less than ridiculous 500 MB RAM or freeze up every minute when you use flashy sites like youtube. I really wish 3.x will finally fix that.

P.S. I wonder why wordpress shrinks all my images. I hope you can still guess what I meant.

Tracking down Postfix breakage due to a libnss-ldap.conf upgrade

Monday, December 17th, 2007

Now this has really been a waste of time. Months ago I convinced myself that NIS isn’t really a modern way to keep my user accounts network-wide - be it even only my home network. So I tried libnss-ldap and read wiki.debian.org on LDAP and literally found dozens of documents that describe how to do LDAP authentication for your users with NSS. Unfortunately most of them didn’t work for me. But finally I managed to get it working (after a few days) and was happy.

And then came the day that I decided to install Etch’s security updates and upgraded libnss-ldap 251-7.5 to 251-7.5etch1 in the process. Everything seemed to work well and I could log in. Just that Postfix somehow refused to deliver mails locally any more. The “local” daemon died repeatedly. After some careful Postfix debugging I found that I get a traceback that ended with “0×404841d8 in ?? () from /lib/libnss_ldap.so.2″. To cut a long story short: the upgrade set a “binddn” in the “libnss-ldap.conf” but no “bindpw”. But what really seemed to get Postfix mad was that the “libnss-ldap.conf” wasn’t readable for all any more (0600). Apparently the current libnss-ldap package in Sid sets that permissions right but on Etch that has really broken things. Recommendation from #postfix: “dont you never ever let debconf manage LDAP”. Not good.
No idea how that happened as I’m pretty new to nss and ldap but I wished I could have spent that evening differently. So in case anyone else happens to encounter “postfix/qmgr[10043]: warning: premature end-of-input on private/local socket while reading input attribute name” then try to “chmod a+r /etc/libnss-ldap.conf”. Just check that you don’t have a bind password in there. :) Once I fully understand that I’ll check if I can contribute to the Debian wiki article or was just too dumb. If I were sure what’s going on I’d file a bug report, too.