The new wpa_supplicant packages have removed the /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf file. Wireless LAN is now configured via special commands from /etc/network/interfaces, which looks like an elegant Debian way to do things. While setting this up, I have learned the following:

• an ESSID starting with “+” is not accepted
• You don’t enter the passphrase verbatim into /e/n/i, you use wpa_passphrase to hash it
• wpa_supplicant debugs surprisingly well

Well done, maintainers! Thanks! Next time I’ll figure out how to configure wpa_supplicant to automatically associate to the correct wireless LAN regardless of location

Anthony Towns will be Debian’s next project leader. I am not happy with that outcome at all. With just a tiny margin, aj has won over Steve. Steve was not my favorite candidate as well, but he’d be better than aj, who in my opinion stands for the cabal that is running Debian from their positions of power for years now. Only 421 DDs have cast their vote, which is 43.3128% of all possible votes. Voter participation has thus been lower than the historic low Germany’s state Sachsen-Anhalt recently had in its Landtag election. More than half of the DDs do not seem to be interested in who makes Debian’s external policy and who represents the project to the outside. On the other hand, debian-vote sees a number of people who are not currently allowed to vote, but regularly contribute to Debian. It looks like the people who could vote don’t, while people who do good things to Debian are not allowed to vote. Bad. But, IMNSHO, the really bad thing is the new DPL itself. I think he has won the election with saying that he will increase Debian’s speed. On the other hand, he is member of ftpmaster, the team that might be one of the biggest causes for Debian’s slow speed. He is generally regarded to be close to the “Cabal”, which of course does not exist. I don’t see how the speed increase is can be accomplished giving this background. However, the vote can easily be interpreted as a vote of confidence in the Cabal, which in itself is a good thing. It shows that even the voting DD’s are comfortable to be ruled by the secret club of most senior DDs. I don’t have to like it, but I’ll have to live with it. aj is also one of the founders of #debian-tech, an IRC channel which has been created as a “nice” channel for technical discussions. The channel has a very strict code of conduct, and people are being removed from the channel if they do not comply. I am really really really afraid of this “be nice or else” attitude being extended to other Debian communications media during aj’s term. Being robbed of the right to speak one’s mind might adversely affect many people’s motivation to spend time with Debian in the future. In a nutshell: This is a sad day for Debian. But, otoh, every project gets the leadership it deserves. And it looks like Debian didn’t deserve any of the better candidates. jftr, I voted 63571824 Be warned: I have a bad history of mis-judging new DPLs just after their election. A year ago, I was quite happy about Branden being elected, and was convinced that things would change during his first term of DPLship. I really believed that he could remove the Cabal from the power, and that Debian would change to a more co-operative environment. I surely hope that I am as wrong this time as I was a year ago. It’ll be more positive this time.

I am wondering whether it is currently possible to run a personal laptop with Debian unstable and some init scheme that allows parallel startup of the services. Naturally, it would be very good to start the X server early to be able to log in faster. Is this concept ready for testing and use? Which packages should I investigate? Any URLs that might be enlightning?

The last days, Debian suffered a bug in the reportbug package which made it fail in postinst. This bug was promptly fixed, but reported like THIRTEEN times as a bug in the BTS. If I were reportbug maintainer, I’d have gone ballistic at this ignorance of bug reporters. Guys, all of you who have reported this bug are running Debian unstable, an unreleased development version of your distribution. Is it asking too much to follow basic etiquette to look in the BTS whether a fatal bug might already been reported? I mean, THIRTEEN nearly identical reports?

My notebook is an hp compaq nc8000 running Debian unstable, and I’d like to know whether it is “already” possible to use software suspend (hibernation). To my knowledge, there is a lot of different ways to do suspension, all of them differently broken and/or incompatible. I’t like to run with an unpatched vanilla kernel, use suspend-to-ram and suspend-to-disk according to my choice at suspend time, and have the notebook wake up with the X session unhampered and the important hardware (sound, synaptics) still useable. Additional bonus points if wireless and/or wired network remains useable and USB/PCMCIA devices don’t need an unplug/plug cycle. Which solutions should I investigate, which web pages should I read?

A few months ago, I have reported about getting the winmodem in my hp compaq nc 8000 to work. Aside from the abysmally slow performance, the dependency on out-of-tree, non-free modules has been cause of grief since it has almost constantly forced me to keep an outdated kernel version around just in case that I would need the modem. Fortunately, this is over now since more recent kernel versions (I suspect somewhere in the 2.6.16 era) support my winmodem natively without out-of-tree modules. All I need to get only on a POTS line is sl-modem-daemon, which is reasonably painless.

The host hosting blog.zugschlus.de, ivanova.notwork.de, was down due to a network failure in the hoster’s network for a few minutes today around 2 pm CEST. After returning, I found a lot of my syndicated articles anew on Planet Debian, known as the “flood” phenomenon. Is it possible that the Planet software does react in a non-graceful way when an RSS feed cannot be pulled? Mako, can you investigate this?

My notebook’s DHCP setup seems to be a challenge for DHCP servers around the world. Looks like almost no server implements the standard in a decently complete way. My notebook has a wired Fast Ethernet, and a wireless 802.11bg network interface. Of course, both interfaces have their own MAC address. I want the thing to work at least at home, regardless of whether wired or wireless is in use, with preferably the same static IP address, and on the office wired network, again, with the static IP address allocated to me there. Configuring this is considerably harder than I expected. At home, I am using a Linksys WRT54G router with OpenWRT, which has dnsmasq as DHCP server. Unfortunately, dnsmasq does not support the case where multiple MAC addresses are statically assigned to the same IP address: Only the first dhcp-host statement in the configuration file is honored, all others are ignored. So we need to resort to using a dhcp client-identifier. In DHCP request option number 61, the client can send an identifier, which the Server can then use to determine the client’s identity and assign a static IP address. The client identifier, according to RFC2132, is to be treated as an opaque string by the DHCP server. This works fine with dnsmasq, solving the issue at home. But it causes more grief in the office network. My office is the kind of place where a non-Microsoft solution is rarely considered. Thus, our network is fully buzzword compliant and the network infrastructure, including DNS and DHCP servers, is based on Windows Server System. I am the only one using a non-MS operating system in my work environment. When I plugged my notebook into the network this morning, I noticed that I didn’t receive my static IP address but a different one from the dynamic pool. After verifying that the Windows guys didn’t touch the DHCP server in the last days, I began to think what I changed locally and naturally remembered configuring the DHCP client identifier. Removed it for testing, got my normal static IP address, so the client identifier was quickly pinned down as the culprit. After my Windows colleagues decided that it must be a client issue, I began investigating how to configure the Windows DHCP server to honor a client identifier. MS Knowledge Base article #172408, “Custom DHCP Client Identifiers for Windows NT”, is a high hit on Google, but is like three years old and shows that somebody at MS has badly misunderstood the DHCP standard - they think that the Client Identifier is a 4 byte number in little endian order. I couldn’t believe that and investigated further. But it looks like the Windows DHCP server really cannot handle free-form client identifiers at all. I tried coding my free-form identifier in ASCII and entering it as MAC address, big endian, little endian, to no avail. So, I have come to the conclusion that MS has - again - only partly implemented a very important protocol for their network software. “Embrace and extend”, my <censored>, DHCP wasn’t extended at all. Looks like they stopped developing after the first developer box had successfully received an IP address, and shipped the resulting code. Woah. If somebody can tell me how to configure the Windows DHCP server to properly handle a free-form string DHCP client identfier, I’ll be most graceful for that information. I finally resorted to setting the DHCP client identifier of my notebook to the MAC address of the wired ethernet interface, which has at least brought my static IP address at the office back. I hope that the dnsmasq at home will successfully grok this or I am - again - back to square one. All software sucks

To keep non-Debian-related articles from showing up on Planet Debian, my blog used to have a Debian-English category which was subscribed to Planet Debian. This also meant that only English-Language, and Debian-related articles showed up there which made my kind of an irregular contributor. I’m going to change this. Recent Serendipity have the possibility to free-tag articles and generate RSS-Feeds for these tags. After using tags for a few weeks, I am now reasonably comfortable to put them to real use. A new tag planet-debian will be generated and subscribed to Planet Debian. And then I’m going to tag articles that I decide to put up to Planet Debian with this tag. To avoid old articles from showing up again, I’ll refrain from tagging them planet-debian. This also means that the “Debian-English” category is going to disappear and to be replaced by “Debian” (or even other categories). An additional tag “english” is going to appear on english language articles. So you can now choose whether you want to read only my english articles. btw, what’s the stance of Planet Debian about non-Debian articles and/or native language (in my case: German) on the Planet?

I have just experienced a nightmare with a watch file. The phpmyadmin upstream dumps all released files onto a single web page, and they use version numbering a.b.c-foon, which foo being beta, rc, or pl, and of couse a.b.c for a release version.This has resulted in the following (probably incorrect) watch file version=3 opts= uversionmangle=s/0\.tar/0-5.tar/;s/beta/0./;s/rc/1./;s/pl/9./,dversionmangle=s/0\.tar/0-5.tar/;s/beta/0./;s/rc/1./;s/pl/9./ http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/phpmyadmin/ (?:.*/)?phpMyAdmin-([-0-9\.a-z]+)\.tar.gz$ 2.7.0-pl2 uupdateAs Germans say: Gesundheit

To debug a ksynaptics crash, I need to install -dbg packages for all dependencies of ksynaptics. We do not have a tool for automatically doing so, right? If I am right, the following scriptlet seems to do the trick.

#!/bin/bash
set -e
PARENT=“$1”
DBGPACKAGES=“”
for package in $(debfoster -d $PARENT   tail -n +2); do
  for source in $(grep-available --no-field-names --field=Package: $package --show-field Source); do
    DBGPACKAGES=“$DBGPACKAGES $(grep-available --no-field-names --field=Source: $source --show-field Package  
grep -- ‘-dbg$’   true)”
  done
done
echo $DBGPACKAGES

I am open for suggestions.

Christian Kurz, an ex-colleague of mine and one of my mentors who brought me to the Debian project, has recently retired from the project. Actually, he is probably the DD who has spent the most time in educating me about the project - it was easy for me since I only needed to speak up in the office to reach him. He has been sponsoring my first uploads back in 2001. Chris, thanks, for doing so much for Debian, and for me. You were a great help, and I’m looking forward to getting bug reports from you. It is a great honor to know you.

Looks like this was a successful day. Good timing.

Well, that’s it, folks. People who helped to make it happen are too numerous to mention here, but I would like to specially thank Joshua, Marc and Andres for guidance and mentoring, another Marc for being a great AM, and Joerg and James for doing awesome DAM work.

... you type blog.debian.org while actually meaning bugs.debian.org.

I have again worked on the automatic package build, test and publishing process for clamav-data, which runs twice an hour on a volatile.debian.net host. Details of the process are described in VUA 2-2 on debian-volatile-announce The “backup” copy on http://people.debian.org/~zugschlus/clamav-data now has accurate mtimes in the directory, and actually the last three published packages are available from here. The rsync process was previously broken in a way that only the current package and two older ones from middle of July (from before the automatisms were in place) were available there. The publish process now barfs if the specially hacked katie which is used to move the new clamav-data package into volatile.debian.net without a maintainer signature leaves the publication directory (which is to be considered part of queue/unchecked for katie’s environment) in a non-empty stage. This will hopefully catch more katie errors than the parsing of katie’s output, which is of course still being done. After a new package has been built and sucessfully published, the package build directory is cleaned up. All files belonging to changes files older than 60 days are deleted to keep the disk from filling up badly. But that’s an internal matter only which you shouldn’t be noticing at all. Additionally, after the last changes, I have hiked up the verbosity level of the package build process for a while so that I can notice when the new process dies or encounters new challenges. That shouldn’t be noticeable outside my personal mailbox though. One issue that is still left is that the automatic clean up of the Pool doesn’t seem to work for source packages. Binary packages that are not referenced by any Packages file are supposed to be removed after 15 days, but the source packages seem to stay around. I cannot do anything about that, and am targetting aba on this issue.

exim4, sarge’s default MTA, uses gnutls for the obvious license reasons. However, gnutls does seem to have issues of interoperability, which have manifested themselves in a list of bugs, most prominently being #297174, which we are at a loss to debug. Neither Andreas nor me have the knowhow to debug gnutls, and Upstream uses openssl - the gnutls patch was contributed and the author of the original patch doesn’t seem to be around any more. Can anybody help?

Thanks to J rg Hoh, who submitted a number of cleanup patches against adduser, the package has changed quite bit. This is the reason for the 3.68 upload going into experimental. Please go ahead, test, report bugs, submit patches. Thanks!

Could someone please fix the incompatibility between Serendipity and Planet Planet? Nico and I haven’t found the cause of the problem yet but old posts of other developers keep reappearing. I don’t know why it doesn’t happen with my own instance of this weblog system, but I saw it in relation with quite some sites now.