I played around some with with
vmdebootstrap,
my little toy to generate a disk image with a pre-installed Debian system.
I added some more features, and to show them off, created a simplistic,
proof-of-concept image to demostrate what
FreedomBox might do.
The image includes Apache and an SSH server, and a pre-configured
user. You can use SFTP to put files on the server, and HTTP to access
them. An instant file-sharing appliance.
A real FreedomBox should, of course, do all sorts of other things,
and this filesharing should probably be done differently, too. This
is not a demonstration of the FreedomBox. It's a demonstration of
vmdebootstrap.
The following command builds the image. Passwords are fixed, so you'll
want to not run the image on a public network.
sudo vmdebootstrap \
--log fboxlite.log \
--log-level debug \
--image fboxlite.img \
--hostname fboxlite \
--size 1G \
--verbose \
--enable-dhcp \
--package ssh \
--package apache2 \
--mirror http://mirror.lan/debian/ \
--customize=./fboxlite-customize \
--root-password=password1
You'll need the following customization script as well:
#!/usr/bin/python
import crypt
import os
import subprocess
import sys
def runcmd(argv, stdin='', ignore_fail=False, **kwargs):
p = subprocess.Popen(argv, stdin=subprocess.PIPE,
stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE,
**kwargs)
out, err = p.communicate(stdin)
if p.returncode != 0:
msg = 'command failed: %s\n%s\n%s' % (argv, out, err)
if not ignore_fail:
raise Exception(msg)
return out
print 'Customizing fboxlite'
rootdir = sys.argv[1]
# Create a fboxlite account.
runcmd(['chroot', rootdir, 'adduser', '--gecos', 'Freedombox Lite',
'--disabled-password', 'fboxlite'])
encrypted = crypt.crypt('password1', '..')
runcmd(['chroot', rootdir, 'usermod', '-p', encrypted, 'fboxlite'])
# Create /srv/shared for holding shared files.
shared = os.path.join(rootdir, 'srv', 'shared')
os.mkdir(shared)
runcmd(['chroot', rootdir, 'chown', 'fboxlite:fboxlite', 'srv/shared'])
os.chmod(shared, 0775)
# Configure Apache to serve /srv/shared as /shared.
conf = os.path.join(rootdir, 'etc', 'apache2', 'sites-available', 'default')
text = open(conf, 'r').read()
lines = text.splitlines()
new_lines = [
'Alias /shared "/srv/shared"',
'<Directory "/srv/shared/">',
'Options Indexes',
'</Directory>',
]
lines = lines[:-1] + new_lines + lines[-1:]
text = ''.join('%s\n' % line for line in lines)
open(conf, 'w').write(text)
If you're using libvirt with KVM, you can then use the following command
to deploy the disk image:
virt-install --connect qemu:///system -n fboxlite -r 512 \
--os-type linux --os-variant debiansqueeze \
--disk $(pwd)/fboxlite.img --vnc --import
Log in via the emulated console, and run
ip addr to see what
the IP address of the virtual machine is (and if you can find a way
to query libvirt what the address is, please tell me). Then you can
use the following URLs (in, for example, Nautilus):
sftp://fboxlite@192.168.122.133/srv/shared/
http://192.168.122.133/shared/
Replace the correct IP address in the above URLs and off you go.
Particularly around local government, but also some not-for-profits and universities, I m trying to persuade people to stop using huge Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) lists that they keep in their address book and switch over to using mailing list manager software. Our co-op even gives some simple mailing list hosting away with web hosting. I think good mailing list software is better because:
Firstly: If you want to buy a computer to run Linux on, don't buy a Mac.
This year Debconf is a bit 
P.S. I must say thank you Accenture for paying for my plane tickets.
Imagine you have a old postgresql database. Further imagine it has
it's encoding set to something like LATIN-1 but some PHP web
application has put in UTF-8 strings. Now what would you do if you
have some python application actually respecting the encoding and
recoding the db content from latin-1 to UTF-8 giving you
garbage. Seems you can easily trick postgresql to now believe it is
UTF-8:
This has been several months since I didn t use much my laptop, an
Asus 
Here is the configuration that I bought:
As previously announced in 
Hi, been offline for a while and now after my mid-term exams I m glad to tell that I ll be working on this year s GSoC project called: Compute Clusters Integration for Debian Development and Building . The main idea for this project is to give Debian developers and downstream developers a set of tools for helping them to leverage the power of a cloud-based infrastructure for their development duties. This is specially targeted to porters, multi-arch and cross-development, So I ll ask such teams for feedback on the subject over the next days.
People at Eucalyptus has been very helpful and willing to cooperate with us to make this project a success. We expect to get them involved on the packaging and probably as Debian contributors, if not developers, also. Next week is the official coding phase start, but I ve been talking and working together with my mentor Steffen and the Eucalyptus people already. We ll be starting working on the qemu ARM images, reusing and resuming the job did by Dominique Belhachemi in the past GSoC.
Of course I welcome as much feedback as you might find useful. I plan to post a project update every two weeks.
Images Moved
Back indoors this week, took a shot of my wife, daughter and my own hands. I wanted an image for our bedroom wall that represented our family.
A while ago, MusicBrainz used a technique called
That was a damn busy week.
It was mostly centered about attending 