I've decided to give Catalyst a try. I am not a big web-head, but occasionally I want to put stuff up on my site... and would like most of the work to be done for me, but not so much of the work that I cannot control what is happening. I was not ready for a new scripting language so Ruby on Rails and Turbo Gears were out.

Catalyst is available from CPAN -- the real reason why anyone would be crazy enough to use perl. But running CPAN stuff on Debian is a pain in the ass, more so then Debian taught me is an acceptable level of ass pain, because perl stuff in Debian tends to lag behind CPAN; even in testing.

I've started writing a debian authentication from ldap tutorial. Here is the unfinished text:

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Wasted some time this week converting my server to LDAP directories and renumbering UIDs/GIDs to the “Debian numbering ranges” from the RedHat ranges that I have lived with for 7 years – I have a lot of data to migrate over to the new IDs… data is intact.

LDAP is so ugly after you used SQL, and is a bitch to setup, but after a few hours I managed to get it working with PAM and NSS. I will have to document my steps because I had to read ~10 documents on the web to finally get things working – the Debian packages do not do all the work for you in this case.

I've just realized that I never have to burn another stinking Debian installer CD.

Why bother, if I can just boot into Knoppix and run debootstrap.

Just look how easy the process is:

1. boot into knoppix.
2. mkdir /1
3. mke2fs -j /dev/sda1
4. mount /dev/sda1 /1
5. debootstrap sarge /1 http://ftp.debian.org/debian

Of course this will not boot, so I will have to build the kernel. But I would do that anyways right after I rebooted the first time into any install anyway.

A few of us, Debian veterans, started naming off cool tools and tricks on IRC for the benefit of a newbie. One person suggested to put this list up somewhere... so here goes:

• apt-file - APT package searching utility -- command-line interface
• auto-apt - package search by file and on-demand package installation tool
• apt-show-versions - Lists available package versions with distribution
• cron-apt - Automatic update of packages using apt
• deborphan - Find orphaned libraries
• apt-listchanges - Display new Debian changelog entries from .deb archives
• apt-spy - writes a sources.list file based on bandwidth tests
• dpkg-repack - generates a .deb from an installed package

Tools for keeners and developers: