Sometimes, it is nearly as frustrating to use Debian than it is to use commercial software. For example, when one sees a simple bug completely unreacted on for more than one year. #405040 has passed its first anniversary since it was reported and touched for the last time. Visible reaction of the package maintainer: Nil.
It's a small thing, but an annoying one. And I still consider it unacceptable to let bugs rot for a year without the slightest trace of action.
In a nutshell: If your system is kind of older than sarge (as in installation date, updates done in the mean time don't matter), beware of 2.6.23.x or update your grub boot sector, which Debian doesn't do automatically on package installation.
Judging from the long list of exim4 bugs, especially #446036, I find myself between a rock and a hard place, and having to choose between staying with GnuTLS and accepting a probably continuing flow of technical issues, or moving over to OpenSSL, setting an example against GNU software, and probably generating a new flow of license issues.
Dear Lazyweb, which burning hoops need I to jump through to be able to listen to music played by Amarok without having to disable the KDE sound system in Control Panel before?
If I don't, Amarok complains that it cannot initialize any sound driver."
In the last few days, I have replaced the two 20 inch CRT monitors that I have hardly used the last years with two 20 inch TFT displays, and my company (finally) gave me a 19 inch TFT display to accompany my notebook display at work. Maybe I should take that as a hint that they want to see me in the office more frequently rather than in my home office which I generously use these days. At home, I built a "new" computer from mainly used parts to drive the two 20 inchers.
I have learned a lot about X in the last days, but spent too much time with it.
My systems run cron-apt with an hourly rhythm, running off ftp2.de.d.o. Once in a while, some of them complain about invalid signatures on release files:
CRON-APT LINE: /usr/bin/apt-get update -o quiet=2
W: GPG error: http://debian.debian.zugschlus.de lenny Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG A70DAF536070D3A1 Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (4.0/etch)
W: GPG error: http://debian.debian.zugschlus.de sid Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG A70DAF536070D3A1 Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (4.0/etch)
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems
This usually happens in the late evening CEST. In the next cron-apt run, things are fine again. What's going on here? Is this part of a mirror update process where the Release and Release.gpg files are inconsistent?
Last thursday and friday, I spent around eleven hours in the InterCity Express (ICE) of Deutsche Bahn. I was online, using Simyo GPRS, during this entire time. Thanks to the cellular network repeaters in ICE's coach 3 and 23, this has worked reasonably well and has cost me EUR 5,27 - in a tariff with no basic charge and no commitment.
The DDs reading this might know the situation: You are subscribed to a gazillion of mailing lists, and spend quite some time answering questions of people using your packages. That's fine, service to your users. Occasionally, users take great pains in finding out a personal mail address (for example, by googling, and finding the webmasteridiot mail address on my personal web page) to ask their question in private e-mail. This prevents the answers from showing up in mail archives and deprives the public of a possibility to find a solution to this question themselves in the future.
I have uploaded exim4 4.67-2 to experimental. Lots of changes and improvements. Quite some changes have gone into the Debconf stuff (for example, the split/unsplit config question is not asked first any more), and into update-exim4.conf (including input sanitazion, transformation of input to lower case, and getting rid of the DEBCONFsomethingDEBCONF stuff in the configuration).
I'd like you to test the experimental package before I upload to unstable (probably on sunday). Please report your findings.
One of my dedicated servers was in bad need of major LVM surgery today. Since the rescue system delivered with the server by the housing provider suffers from lack of LVM support, I needed to pull a creative stunt with grub and grml to accomplish this.
After asking for useable CA Software, I have finally settled on using EasyRSA. This is what I did to come across the packaging shortcomings of EasyRSA in Debian.
Description: SMTP command-line test tool
swaks (Swiss Army Knife SMTP) is a command-line tool written in Perl
for testing SMTP setups; it supports STARTTLS and SMTP AUTH (PLAIN,
LOGIN, CRAM-MD5, SPA, and DIGEST-MD5). swaks allows to stop the SMTP
dialog at any stage, e.g to check RCPT TO: without actually sending a
mail.
.
If you are spending too much time iterating "telnet foo.example 25"
swaks is for you.
A very important tool which makes debugging e-mail a breeze. A must for every mail admin.
Ich sitze hier gerade in einem Vortrag über Open Source im Auswärtigen Amt.
Der erste Satz, den ich - knapp zehn Minuten zu spät kommend - auf der Folie sehe, ist "Debian als führendes Betriebssysem".
Auf der nächsten Folie steht dann "Nagios, Munin als Ablösung für HP OpenView". Ich glaube, mein Tag ist gerettet.
