I wore my Tux shirt today (which has a penguin and the slogan "Linux - for IQs higher than 95" embroidered) and she said something like 'hmm, I guess I've got an IQ higher than 95 then!'; her new EEE pc thingie which comes with Linux was quite nice and so on.
...the non-geeky middle-aged checkout chick at Aldi starts chatting
to you about her now using this Linux Thing, and that being quite cool.
After the almost-fiasco of upgrading
my Ultra2 to Etch, I've ended up with a number of useful things to
know and remember about Etch and/or this kind of setup. Share and Enjoy,
I say, so here goes.
...because while Sarge-to-Etch wasn't too ugly
a transition, it nevertheless isn't something I want to do too
often for all the boxes I'm responsible for.
(As a matter of fact there's a few I'll leave running Sarge.)
Here's all the notes I've made during the upgrade; maybe useful
to others, maybe not.
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Some time ago I mentioned a big mess
in debian's sudo regarding the environment cleanup.
The mess is even worse: run
sudo env and you'll either get
a single PATH that is SECURE_PATH (and thus not yours) or you'll get two bad PATHes for the price of one! Hurry! This offer ends soon! *ahem*
Guess what is implied by the env_reset/env_keep fix for losing all your other variables... The problem affects all the 1.6.8's, that means sarge/security's p7-1.3 is as borked as sid's p12. p7-1.2 didn't force you to use env_reset so you didn't feel the problem as badly.
I'm a perfectionist. Not only do I now know exactly what is broken, I also have a fix. It requires recompiling sudo.
This recent advisory
suggests that one updates his sudo installation. With the subsequent
result of being trapped in a mess of obscure, badly documented
env_something options, a suggestion of env_check which
doesn't work and no way of
passing environment variables to the sudo'd process.
Great.
Much cursing later it turns out that only this makes sudo tick again:
Defaults env_reset, env_keep="XAUTHORITY DISPLAY"
or, more to my liking in the case of unrestricted sudo, env_keep=*
The original list is
there and deals
with the US Army, but Debian seems to be going there rather quickly.
Damn politics. So, while there are no 213 things yet, it likely won't
take long. Sigh.
- Not allowed to post about Ubuntu on d-d-a.
- Not allowed to post about a posting about Ubuntu on d-d-a.
- Especially if the post doesn't mention Ubuntu at all and is somewhat sarcastic.
- Must not imply the listmasters are sarcasm-impaired as they don't like this.
- I must not expect democratic behaviour in the Project.
- Not allowed to post anything containing non-politically-correct words (like "lesbian") on d-d-a.
- Debian does not have a Cabal.
- Not allowed to request an update on the stalled GFDL argument with the FSF. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
- I am not authorized to question authorities.
- Especially not debian-admin.
- Not allowed to call an RC bug an RC bug, if it happens to affect the scum architectures.
Well, more than a few - and some kooks, as usual. debian-devel feels
like nan-ae at times...
This is how my email load went up after the infamous "proposal" hit the nets
(blue being spam, green being real mail):
That TINC is not true for Debian is unfortunately pretty obvious by
now, even to a non-political tech like me; that there are voices of reason
left in high places is good to see reinforced, however.
So thank you, Martin Schulze, for that post. You put the concerns of lots of us in words very nicely.
i hate spam, i said that already, and last weak i got over 200 spams
on a single day. then i decided that it's time to implement my long-time
plan of firing up spamassassin on my two old servers, and to do it
right and run it as a sendmail milter.
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I've given a talk about Debian at SAGE-AU's annual conference in 2003.
The paper and presentation slides are avaliable here.
It was very well received, and I'll give some follow-up presentations at this year's Tasmanian Summer IT Conference as well as the SAGE-VIC IT Symposion
Debian is my favourite
open source project.
The structure of stuff in Debian very much pleases my sense of perfectionism.
Plus, Debian is perfect for server machines.
I'm supporting the project by packaging and maintaining various stuff, most notably kuvert my mail privacy tool.
This list shows the packages I'm currently maintaining and a bit of technical status for each of them.
