Err! I recently nuked and paved over my X41, with debian/lenny. When I wanted to use the wireless I was greeted by:

    ipw2200: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Network Driver, 1.2.0kmprq
    ipw2200: Copyright(c) 2003-2006 Intel Corporation
    ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:04:02.0[A] -> GSI 21 (level, low) -> IRQ 23
    ipw2200: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection
    ipw2200: ipw2200-bss.fw request_firmware failed: Reason -2
    ipw2200: Unable to load firmware: -2
    ipw2200: failed to register network device
    ACPI: PCI interrupt for device 0000:04:02.0 disabled

It turns out that I have not done any wireless twiddling recently and forgotten that I had to get the firmware before things started working again.

Using the ept-cache utility advertised on joey’s blog I was able to have a look at some packages on my site that are likely not on your system.

To get packages of inverse popularity which you have installed run:

    ept-cache search -t clean -s t- | less

Of interest are the following.

I have two boxes (i386 and amd64) in the lab that I use for testing of drivers I work on. Recently another Maxtor hard disk died on me, and I decided to get network booting working. I already have a file server from which I host my $HOME directories and do all backups from. It sounded like a win.

I’ve never done this before, so it took me a few hours to get the first host going, the second took 10 minutes plus the amount of time to build the kernel for it.

Below, I describe steps I took to get pxe-enabled hardware to boot a debian image, from a debian DHCP, TFTP and NFS servers.

I got this idea from a blog posting a few months back. I think the guy was using darcs. Unfortunately, I was unable to find the reference to link to him.

Anyway, here is how you can track your /etc directory with git, and have apt update it automatically each time a package is installed.

I started playing go. I tried cgoban and gtkgo. Both crashed a lot. Then I tried glGo… it’s much better.

Debian/unstable apt-get has this feature called pdiff files (or pdiffs). It downloads only the diffs between the previous day’s Packages and Sources indexes, which claims to improve downloads for regular use.

When you don’t update often you will find that your updates could take 30 minutes, plus.

You can disable use of pdiff files by running:

apt-get update -o Acquire::PDiffs=false

Ok, so in [last eppisode]{ldap-upgrade-to-2.3.23-brakage} we looked at how my Debian/testing upgrade of slapd killed my slapd install because I was using two incompatible schemas.

Now, I will show you how to limit what accounts are accessible to pam_ldap module on each host.

For some very stupid reason I decided to upgrade my fileserver, which happens to run my ldap database as well.

Setting up slapd (2.3.23-1) ...
  Backing up /etc/ldap/slapd.conf in /var/backups/slapd-2.2.26-5... done.
  Moving old database directories to /var/backups:

  Backup path /var/backups/dc=jukie-2.2.26-5.ldapdb exists. Giving up...
dpkg: error processing slapd (--configure):
 subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 slapd
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Frig!

So my [sbc]{tag/sbc} of choice these days is the WRAP 1C-2. This model is powered by a 266Mhz Geode and has 128M of RAM, a CF reader, 1 mini-PCI slot, a serial console and 3 10/100 Mbit NICs. I get mine (I have three now) from Xagyl Communications. Each was about $200.

This entry talks about bootstrapping debian onto a CF card.

Debiean-heads might find it interesting that Joey Hess has produced a detailed SecureApt article on how to use security features of apt-get.

The particularly interesting bits are:

• details about the security levels put into packages
• examples of how apt-key aught to be used
• timeline that the debian pgp keys will adhere to
• problems to be avoided and symptoms you will see if you have ’em
• links to relevant documentation