So, about a week ago I said Harper's budget looked sane. I was wrong. The cons have managed to drop two really useful programs. One is the main Energuide program and the other is the low income energuide program. Now if anyone we don't need more evironmental programs that hit every level of society, then explain the weather.

So now with obvious things to do: Bike on bike to work day and don't stop biking to work after that day.

One issue that has been the topic of some pointless discussion is whether a mail server should have an A record or an MX record. Mail can be delivered to a domain that has no MX record but simply an A record pointing to an IP address. But the most common practice is to have an MX record pointing to the name of the machine that serves the mail. A common use for this is to have a bulk mail hosting machine with multiple MX records pointing at it, which then allows you to have matching forward and reverse DNS entries for the machine name.

If you have no MX record for a domain then Postfix will do the following DNS requests:

IP postfix.34245 > DNS.domain:  3448+ MX? example.com. (32)
IP postfix.34261 > DNS.domain:  50123+ A? example.com. (32)

If you have an MX record then it does the following:

IP postfix.34675 > DNS.domain:  29942+ MX? example.com. (32)
IP postfix.34675 > DNS.domain:  33294+ A? mail.example.com. (37)

Now if there are multiple domains on a bulk mail hosting system then the A record might already be in a local cache on the sending machine, so having bulk mail hosting with MX records may reduce the number of DNS lookups, with the minumum number of lookups being half plus one.

If there is no bulk mail hosting then an MX record would still offer some slight benefits if the positive responses are cached for longer than negative responses. This would mean less lookups which gives faster and more reliable delivery of mail plus being more friendly to the net. I don't know what the cache behaviour is in this regard so I'm not sure if this would actually give a benefit (I'm sure someone will comment with the answer).

Now regardless of these issues I think that using an MX record is the better option. It's what most software expects and saves you from the excitement of discovering corner case bugs in various software that's out there on the net.

Ok, this list should be pretty old news by now, but — by definition — the content of it is not. Because... it's simply not in the news: The Top 25 stories ignored by media in past year (via Project Censored):

• Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media
• Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran
• Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger
• Hunger and Homelessness Increasing in the US
• High-Tech Genocide in Congo
• Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy
• US Operatives Torture Detainees to Death in Afghanistan and Iraq
• Pentagon Exempt from Freedom of Information Act
• The World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall
• Expanded Air War in Iraq Kills More Civilians
• Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed
• Pentagon Plans to Build New Landmines
• New Evidence Establishes Dangers of Roundup
• Homeland Security Contracts KBR to Build Detention Centers in the US
• Chemical Industry is EPA s Primary Research Partner
• Ecuador and Mexico Defy US on International Criminal Court
• Iraq Invasion Promotes OPEC Agenda
• Physicist Challenges Official 9-11 Story
• Destruction of Rainforests Worst Ever
• Bottled Water: A Global Environmental Problem
• Gold Mining Threatens Ancient Andean Glaciers
• $Billions in Homeland Security Spending Undisclosed
• US Oil Targets Kyoto in Europe
• Cheney s Halliburton Stock Rose Over 3000 Percent Last Year
• US Military in Paraguay Threatens Region

Full list with more details here... (via Boing Boing)

Thjis: This is the right time to automatically search for RC bugs. So was a year ago. Although we want the RC bug count to drop, an RC bug is still an RC bug regardless of whether we know about it or not. And many RC bugs didn’t exist a year ago. Take for example #392121. A package name change in a build-dependency caused my package to FTBFS. This bug would not have existed a year ago, but needed to get fixed for etch. Incidentally, when you go through a package rename for a development package, it would be nice to check what packages build-depend on the old package. A september changelog entry for cli-common says:

- Removed transition dependency for cli-common on cli-common-dev. (7 month for a package rename transition should be more than enough)

However, at no point in that seven months did anyone email me or file a bug report to tell me that the name changed. This bug wasn’t caught until someone rebuilding the archive noticed.
Actually, this might be a good idea for an infrastructural change. Would it be possible to set up a script that notices when packages are removed and sends a notice to the maintainers of any packages build depending on them?

In a comment on a previous blog entry I was described as an active Fedora advocate, I don't think that is an accurate description. I advocate it to appropriate people, which is mostly non-programmers - but as I mentioned that means a larger proportion of the population than to whom I can advocate Debian. It's not that I'm trying to advocate Fedora, just that it fills a need for many people. I believe that the term Fedora advocate means someone has an objective of increasing the use and to use Fedora, I don't have such an objective. I am a Linux advocate, a Free Software advocate, and sometimes a Unix advocate (Unix meaning the entire family of Unix-like operating systems). Merely promoting something does not make you an advocate for it. I don't think of myself as a Debian advocate at this time, but as I am a Debian developer this may change.

It seems that the people who run the Fedora Planet think that my blog has suitable Fedora content, it's been added to that planet. Also the Fedora Planet appears to be running an older version of the Planet software as it has the same problem with my blog that Debian Planet had before the upgrade.

Now on the issue of gratis vs libre: As I am not a Red Hat employee I can't maintain a kernel-xen-nopae package and give it the same status as the kernel-xen package. Even when I was a Red Hat employee I couldn't have done that - it would require some amount of management approval. I believe that this fundamentally makes Fedora less of a libre distribution. There is no room in Fedora for someone who is an upstream developer and who just wants to maintain their own package. There is Fedora-Extras, but that has a second-class status. Only Red Hat employees can maintain packages in Fedora Core. This makes Fedora fundamentally less libre than Debian. I am not trying to suggest that Red Hat change things in this regard, I believe that Fedora is meeting all it's goals and that making Fedora as libre as Debian is not possible given the goals of making a profit on selling support of RHEL.

Chris made a good point. I also believe that MP3 codecs should not be in Debian/main. But I believe that people making mistakes about some issues is not a factor in judging the entire project. I believe that Debian is more libre although some bad decisions were made - largely due to lack of overall management. Fedora has hierarchical management, so when the legal team declares that some software can not be distributed then it gets removed without debate. I guess I could propose a GR to exclude MP3 codecs from main.

Also it should be noted that RHEL Extras has some of this software that is not in Fedora (RealPlayer for example). The Red Hat legal advice was that MP3 codecs need a license, so they ship a licensed version in their commercial distribution. This is the right thing to do for their customers (it's handy to have and I'm sure that they get a good deal by paying license fees for all their customers) and removing such things from Fedora is the right way to offer a gratis product without unreasonable legal liability.

Naturally Fedora is much more libre than any secret-source OS. Every user has the option of downloading the Fedora source and recompiling it as they wish. I could compile Fedora with a Xen kernel that runs on my hardware and with SE Linux policy that is more restrictive than that which Fedora currently has. I could build custom Fedora install CDs to install things the way I want (which I considered doing when I worked for Red Hat). But the liberty to fork a project does not compare to the liberty to join it, and the liberty to create your own packages in extras does not compare to the liberty to add your own packages that do things differently to the default package.

There are of course positive and negative aspects to this. I started work on SE Linux in Debian in 2001. In 2003 I joined Red Hat to work on SE Linux, in Red Hat I was not the only person dedicated to SE Linux work and other people spent part of their time working on it. The SE Linux work in Red Hat soon eclipsed that of Debian because there was management support. There was no possibility for a package maintainer to refuse to fix a bug that affected SE Linux simply because they didn't care for it. The positive side of this is that the SE Linux work proceeded quickly and efficiently. The negative side of this is that things which don't have management support don't appear in Fedora Core. Exim is a fine MTA but is not in Fedora Core. Some people think that AppArmor is a better option than SE Linux, they are wrong - but in Debian any developer has the option to add AppArmor support and neither I nor any other DD can prevent them. The libre nature of Debian means that as long as basic technical criteria are met DDs can add any package that they wish to the distribution.

These issues however are all related to people who are actively involved in Free Software development. For a typical Free Software user it often doesn't make much difference, until of course your favourite program doesn't get management approval to appear in Fedora Core. But the counter argument is that the quality of some of the >10,000 packages in Debian is not so high. You can install a Fedora Core package and have a reasonable expectation about how well it works, but Debian packages are sometimes rather experimental.

I also don't believe that Debian is a very functional Democracy. Some of the problems of Direct Democracy are demonstrated in Debian. In many ways it is more anarchistic, anarchy gives you liberty for good and bad. Maybe we should consider a Representative Democracy model for Debian.

Back to work on Debian now. Released an updated security advisory, which seemed to work out OK despite the archive changes. Some of my packages have new maintainers. The rest I will go through and upload with the maintainer set to QA tomorrow. Some coding issues to resolve in the next day or two:

mod_ifier

This apache module is utterly broken with regard to POST data. How I managed to use it in production for so long and not notice is beyond me. Short version: The module intercepts incoming HTTP requests and filters them according to a set of user-defined rules. It allows you to block incoming requests with particular CGI parameters (get vs. post). However once the module has read the POST data it is destroyed - and unavailable for use by the CGI itself. Apparently I must use the Apache API to use buckets/brigades to read only a copy of the submitted data, so that when the module is finished processing the data is still available. I can find no understandable code for doing this. But I’m trying.

xen-tools

I need to rework some of the error detection so that roll-back will work when installation fails.

I need to find time to write more articles for the debian-administration site, but I think that will be difficult for the next week or two. I feel like I need a holiday…. despite just having had one. I guess that is because of the aftermath, but still .. ugh.

Lars Wirzenius seems to be seconding my idea for using wikis to solve contentious issues.

My latest idea in this regard is to have several wiki pages, one for each opposing view and one for agreed facts. If an issue has multiple parties debating it then there could be multiple pages for the areas on which different sub-groups agree.

The plan is that each faction edits their own page along with email discussion with other factions and then the page of agreed facts is updated when agreement is reached on some points.

I was curled up around Angie list night sleeping, and I guess I was crowding Sprout , since it kicked out. Funny after several weeks of Angie talking about feeling it to actually do so myself.

According to http://healthlink.mcw.edu/article/923526833.html:

On Saturday, October, 14th, you will be 21 3/7 weeks pregnant.

We'll have pictures soon!

Martin "Joey" Schulze posted what seems to be his last issue of DWN at the end of September. Is this the end of its 8 year run? I founded Debian Weekly News in 1999 with the intent of helping Debian developers keep up with what was going on in Debian as the volume of the project grew beyond what could be easily followed by everyone in the mailing lists. That goal later grew to encompass also keeping users informed of what was going on in Debian. By the time I left VA, I was getting burnt out writing it. Besides, I was no longer able to do it on company time. (Yes, there is a delicious irony here.) So I passed it on to Joey, who's done a great job keeping it going over the years. I've considered taking over writing DWN again. However, it's not clear to me that DWN is still relevant enough to be worth the large amount of work it takes to maintain it. A lot of communication is done on Planet Debian, wikis and in other forms that were not around when DWN was started, and that may be a better way to keep up with what's going on in Debian than DWN. If there is a gap left by DWN, I'd feel more comfortable filling it by blogging something each week about what'd going on in Debian without necessarily trying to cover parts of the project that I'm not deeply involved in. (For example, I'm ignoring everything to do with debian-vote right now.) This approach seems more scalable, modern, and likely to take much less time. We could even have a special aggregator with feeds from other people doing the same.

I recently installed Xubuntu on a Pentium 166 MMX. While I can somehow see that this machine is regarded as "slow", I still think that, given that it has hardware 2D and 3D acceleration, it should at least render menues at an acceptable speed. Do we need an "ultrafast, ultralight" toolkit?

At this school, every friday morning one member of staff holds a speech full of wisdom, insight and motiviation. While usually I find these quite transparent and full of good-sounding, not-very-helpful advices, today's speach by a history teacher was different.He talked about how africa keeps blaming the European colonialisation for it's current state, and that it should rather look ahead and "forge forward" (I didn't even know you could use "forge" as a verb implying movement, and dict.leo.org doesn't know either). He listed other countries with a devastating event in their history who were successful afterwards: Japan, after the the atomic bombing, became an industrial giant , German's economic miracly after being bombed to ashes and the Jew's will to go on after the holocaust.He assumed that if the bombs had been dropped on an African country more than half a century ago, people would still be blaming their current problems on the bombs, and demanding compensation, which some Africans do now regarding the slave trade, and which the teacher thinks also displays of lack of own initiative. Again, he compared that to Germany and Japan who did not think of expecting compensation (but then, these two have started the war that caused their bombing, so this comparision is, in my opinion, not entirely valid)Also interesting was the thesis that if these days a large slave ship would land on an African harbour, and announcements would be made that 200.000 slaves would be needed to work on American farms, people would thrash forward to go on that ship. Although it was probably a citique on the mentality of some Africans, it could also be seen as a reference to the state of affairs in Africa, where to some work as a slave might be the better choice.All in all a very interesting point of view that I wanted to share with you. It definately made more impression than my talk about Free Software, but that one went ok as well, I think.

I've read quite a few blog posts about someone leaving Debian and whether they should remain on Debian planet. An official policy on these matters has now been posted which stated what I expected, if you feel that you belong and meet technical criteria then you are welcome.

Not that this solves much, the next debate will be about what content is suitable for Debian-planet with the expected answer being "anything which meets technical criteria and doesn't offend many people or break any laws". I've already had some comments on my blog from people who want me to change topics. I don't know if other people get this or whether doing an average of one post per day gets me more attention from the loons.

I started blogging after leaving Red Hat. I considered asking for my blog to be added to the Fedora Planet, but wasn't sure whether I would be posting much about it. I just checked and it seems that my old Advogato blog is aggregared on the Fedora Planet and there is no mailto URL on that site to allow me to get it changed. I've just put a final blog entry on Advogato to inform everyone of the change.

I'm not sure if it's worth adding my blog to the Fedora syndication. I have just decided to change my main desktop machine from Rawhide to Debian/unstable. The reason is that Fedora is mostly a Gratis distribution and Debian is more Libre. For most computer users there is no real difference as they don't have the skills to use the liberty that Debian offers. But for people who can code (note that we are in a small minority of computer users) the difference is significant.

The final issue that forced me to this decision is this bugzilla entry about Xen. In Debian there are kernels for Xen on i686, Xen on AMD K7, and Xen on i686 with vserver (doesn't Xen make vserver redundant?). In Fedora there will be one Xen kernel which won't boot on the machine that is most important to me and which ironically is the machine that was issued to me by Red Hat (and sold to me when I left).

This issue of a lack of choice is quite understandable from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux side of things. It's OK to say to a customer who wants to pay for a RHEL-AS license that they need a machine less than 3 years old if they want to use all the features. Adding new kernels adds support costs and I think that most RHEL customers want to have a smaller set of supported options with a higher level of support. I often recommend RHEL to clients and I will recommend that clients use Xen on RHEL-5 - and that they purchase recent hardware to do so.

But for home and hobby use it's a different matter. I provide all the support I need, I can compile my own kernels without much effort - but it saves time to have someone else do it. Fedora simply lacks choice here by design. I still support a bunch of Fedora and RHEL machines and will still develop RPMs for them. I will put everything I develop under http://www.coker.com.au/rpms/ for anyone who wants it.

Given that if the Fedora Planet people want to syndicate my blog I am more than happy to have them do so. I don't dislike Fedora, in fact I still recommend that people use it. It's just that Debian suits my personal needs better than Fedora does. I expect that I'll have more Debian content than Fedora content on my blog, but there will also be a lot of Linux content that's not distribution specific.

It will be interesting to see what the Fedora Planet people do.

It is always nice to get feedback from people using your work. It happens that a long time ago (February 2002) I wrote a tiny little program called "udp-broadcast-relay" that does nothing but hauling udp broadcast packages from one local network to another one. I wrote it because I needed it then, and did not care for it after somewhen in summer 2002, when I did not need it any more.Yesterday, I got this message:

Von:	<xxxxxxxx@mail.ru>
An:	Joachim Breitner <mail@joachim-breitner.de>
Betreff:	udp_forward_relay
Datum:	Wed, 11 Oct 2006 19:59:23 +0400 (15:59 GMT)

Hello Joachim,
Thank you on your programm udp_forward_relay.
Best regards
  Alezander

And today:

Von:	<xxxxxxxx@mail.ru>
An:	Joachim Breitner <mail@joachim-breitner.de>
Betreff:	Respect
Datum:	Thu, 12 Oct 2006 22:39:07 +0400 (18:39 GMT)

Hello,
> Thanks for the mail. It's always good to hear that people are using
> it. What do you use it for, if I may ask?  
Im us if on a router with 6 network segments for relaying broadcast packet from quake3,
war3 and VyPress Chat. Im from Russian and live in "NNSU" universety hostel,
in Nigniy Novgorod state. All peoples from my hostel send respect for you...
P.S. Sorry for my english...
Best regards
   Alezander        

That feels good. I once got a similar thing from pakistan, too. Strange selection of countries...

Ok, so I am going to be in Bolivia next week - or so I hope ;-)
I don't usually take care to do this, but being it Lloyd A reo Boliviano (more on this later), and having heard first-hand and even almost lived stories of ticketing errors, I decided to call the airline to confirm my flight details.
...Only that the airline does not have a web site any more - It was grabbed by an online casino. Or maybe... Am I getting a casino ticket? Holy crap, no, it's a casino evangelism blog, explaining you how fun and interesting it is to lose your money online, how fair are the online slot machines, and such crap... Unbelievable. Anyway, I found Lloyd's Mexican office phone number in some online directory, and called. My ticket was, yes, reserved - It was not paid, though. Or maybe yes - the clerk told me that sometimes tickets get paid in Bolivia and they don't know about that. That could explain why lvaro almost lost his flight. Ok, we got that point fixed in ~20 minutes (thanks to Dydier and Ramiro, in Sucre and Potos respectively). I called again Lloyd, and yes, I'm confirmed. Phew.
About Lloyd: I flied with them two years ago, when I went to the IV National Free Software conference in Sucre. The only problem I had was due to myself: I spent some days travelling around after the conference, and my plane back was set to depart from La Paz, change planes in Cochabamba, then change planes in Santa Cruz, then on to Mexico. As I was in Cochabamba already, I decided to skip the first hop - Well, that accounted for a couple of hours on the phone getting my ticket back to life once it had been cancelled as a no-show :) However, Lloyd has went through a serious financially troubled period, and its reliability seems to have gone seriously down. Even two years ago, when we both were in Bolivia (in the conference I just mentioned), lvaro had to spend over a week he didn't plan on in Bolivia, as Lloyd's transatlantic plane was being repaired (!!). I found a similar report about an Argentinian passenger stuck for a day in Mexico and three further days in Santa Cruz due to broken aircraft... I can only hope for the best ;-)
Anyway, in Bolivia I'll have quite a packed schedule. As I've told to Dydier, I don't care too much about the details on what will we do each day (my hosts are free to own 100% of my time), but I'll give at least five talks (three in CCBOL in Potos and two to diverse auditoriums in Sucre). Of course, this is prone to change somehow, but the plan is I'll have a tutorial on PostgreSQL, a set of talks regarding computer and network security, and a talk about Free Software as a model of knowledge production rather than as a technical or social movement. Of course, wherever I go I talk about Debian as well at every possible chance ;-)

Just did an awesome install of Debian etch onto Maggie's laptop, which had stopped having working wifi in windows for unknown reasons. Everything worked great in the installer and the resulting desktop felt very nice for a regular user, the only things I had to add were madwifi (non-free..) and network-manager. It was probably my most painless and happy Debian installation ever. (Details on the page for ?phoenix, and in the installation report linked to from there.)

The day 2 picture had an NSA coffee mug in the background. I purchased it from the gift shop of the National Cryptologic museum at Ft Meade, Maryland. I highly recommend that museum, it has free entrance, hardly any visitors (I've never seen more than 5 people in there) lots of interesting displays, and some really intelligent and well-informed tour-guides. If you are interested in technology then you should visit the Cryptologic museum and the Smithsonian every time you visit Washington DC.

Last time I visited the Crypto museum they had a new display about fingerprint scanning. It displayed what the machine read and indicated whether the fingerprint was regarded as a match or not. I learned that I could get a false negative by changing the angle of my finger by about 20 degrees, but apart from that it seemed more accurate than I had expected.

Here is a picture of me touching an Enigma at the Crypto museum! There is also a picture of me sitting on a Cray with some Japanese friends, but I haven't got a copy of that one.

In regard to Shintaro's comment about thinking I had a beard after reading backup.te, I was a little surprised, I would have thought that mta.te (which is fairly complex) or chroot.te (one of the most complex and least used policy modules I ever wrote) would have inspired such a comment. backup.te seemed rather mundane by comparison.

The following phrase jumped out at me from a post Rafe Needleman made earlier today about Google Docs & Spreadsheets:

Google is going to “take a shot” at a disconnected version, for users who want to access files when they are offline.

While I was digging around trying to figure out where he got this, Garett Rogers posted his own discovery:

As you probably know, I really like to dig through source code and sometimes I find things. […] I will start with the most interesting piece of code I found. Google is working on a solution that will allow you to install Writely on your local machine:

    if (location.host.indexOf("localhost") > -1)
     
      if (location.host.indexOf("Prefactor") > -1)
        return "http://localhost:8180/Prefactor/" + page + paramString;
      else
        return "http://localhost:8180/Docster/" + page + paramString;
      else
      return "http://" + location.host + "/" + page + paramString;

This is absolutely huge news. Regular readers of my blog know that I view Google’s lack of an offline story (in all but a few areas anyway) as its biggest hole, particularly when stacked against Microsoft, where that’s arguably its greatest strength. So, the fact that Google is working on this is big news is itself. I’m also intrigued by the method they’re apparently using, namely a localhost web server, rather than a thick client or persistent storage via a browser extension. I’ve been thinking for a long time about the offline problem, and I’ve come to the conclusion that localhost web servers (which I first saw used to great effect in Radio Userland—credit where credit is due) are the ideal solution. Thick clients play to Microsoft’s strength (not to mention the OS issue), so that’s not the best approach. And the notion of adding persistent storage to the browser opens up a host of cross browser compatibility problems. And while it may be possible to come up with a standard API that works across Firefox, IE, and other browsers, such a standard is likely years away, particularly given that we haven’t even begun the “competing implementations battle it out” phase yet.

I've bought a new camera; thanks to my friends at Nikon, I can now make photos instead of snapshots. I've used it since Friday, and have not been disappointed: the D70s is an easy to operate camera with the right possibilities for automatic and manual operation. Results of a quick test round are availble; I'm very satisfied thusfar.

Right now I'm just starting to break new personal records for hairyness.

I've been surprised that the GIMP isn't as difficult to use as I had previously thought. I particularly like the preview feature for saving JPEGs. I can use a slider to set the quality of the image and see a preview of viewing the file before saving. In the past with less capable software I used to go through a laborious process of saving a JPEG, viewing it in a separate program, and then repeating until I achieved an acceptable balance of file size and quality. Now I can adjust the slider and see what the result would be in terms of both quality and file size.

Recently I was doing sys-admin work for a company where Windows was the desktop standard. Often we had to send around screen-shots of various problems and the way of doing this was to use CTRL-PrtSc to copy an image of the window in question and then paste it into a MS-Word document because the Windows image had no other program that was capable of dealing with image data. One significant problem with MS-Word is that it doesn't allow expanding the image or modifying it, so you see it at about half the original resolution. It seems that what I should have been doing is pasting the image data into the GIMP and then saving it as a PNG file (PNG is loss-less compression which avoids the ripples you get from JPEG compression of text and it's also very efficient at compressing the regular data that is typical in a screen-capture). PNG files would take much less space than MS-Word documents and allow efficient viewing by many programs (including web browsers which are on all machines).

I have just uploaded mindi and mondo 2.20 (version numbers are now the same for mindi and mondo).

This release marks a bit of a milestone in that we can ship the pristine upstream source in Debian for the first time because the busybox binaries were removed upstream. This together with the numerous bug fixes and stability improvements and combined with the fact that there are no revolutionary new features (despite the version number jump) made me decide to try and push the new upstream version into etch.

'Try' because although I've tested things quite thoroughly on both amd64 and i386, there is always a residual risk (one of my favourite alliterations ;-) ) of something bad slipping through. I think that taking this risk is justified, though, because 2.20 should be a definite improvement over 2.09. Bruno and I worked really hard to get this released in time for etch (Thank you, Bruno, for making my priority your priority!).

While testing, I found #389931, #389729 and #390653 (Thanks for your great help, Russ!). I've also found that archiving to tape doesn't work for me (still gathering more information, so no bug report yet), but it also fails with 2.09, i.e. there is no regression.

Main testing was performed on:

• sid, amd64, linux-image-2.6.18-1-amd64 (2.6.18-2), with NFS & AFS mounts, LVM, RAID1 & RAID5, onto NFS

• sid, i386, linux-image-2.6.18-1-k7 (2.6.18-2), with NFS & AFS mounts, onto DVDs

Oh, and this also contains the fix for RC bug #391127.

People seem to be using Mondo Rescue on 'vintage' versions of Debian which is presumably due to Mondo Rescue being disaster recovery software. So, I've made a change to post-nuke suggested by Augustin Amann (Thank you, Augustin!) to make people using the latest packages on sarge happier. I'm still in two minds about adding versioned depends on grep and binutils to make the life of woody (!) users a bit easier as well.