Planet OpenVAS

Womble2 (Ben Hutchings) as one of your newest DDs! Quite a few people know him in the UK, and some of you may have met him over at DC5.

I'm not sure if I've got the subject of this post right, but it is meant to be Spanish, as we're so near DC6 :)

of people who have flooded Planet Debian.
I think I should be proud.

To join this highly exclusive^W^Wnot very exclusive^W^W^Wrather common club, simply fix some broken <link> tags in your RSS feed. Or, if using Blosxom, add/edit the config line $url.

To remove a old chroot, you can use rm -rf. However, make sure that /home isn't mounted under the chroot.

Care of SlayerXP from #uknot:

postfix

the bullet zips back and forth between pipes and processes and barely has enough momentum left to enter your foot

sendmail

There was a bang, and there's a pain in your foot, but you don't understand sendmail rulesets well enough to work out what happened

qmail

You shoot yourself in the knee, and it's your fault for not understanding mail systems as well as DJB that it happened. (and it's not a bug, oh no.)

Submissions being taken for others

I've got a IBM Thinkpad R50e. It's a very nice laptop, with a lovely keyboard. It does, however, have one farily large issue, as I discovered last night.
The control and alt keys are a little too easy to press at the same time. Therefore, it's very easy to press ctrl+alt+backspace when you've just spent an hour creating some minutes for a SPI board meeting and haven't saved your changes yet.

So, thanks to Priyadi Iman Nurcahyo's blog, I've added this to /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Serverflags"
Option "DontZap"      "yes"
EndSection

Well, I volunteered at the last SPI board meeting to re-do the SPI website, as it was old and outdated.

So, I posted a message over to spi-private and spi-www asking for ideas.

The main one that came up was using a CMS. Now, I've had a look at various CMSs in the past, and none of them have come up trumps. Also suggested were other options such as using Embperl and svn (which I use for the Debconf site), but this isn't user friendly enough for many people, and a wiki, but I'm not convinced a wiki is the best thing for a static site.

The main issue that I saw with using a CMS for the SPI site is the requirement for it to be truly multilinugual. Unfortunately, this does sort of knock out a SPI Project, Drupal. Another less important issue is the storage engine. Ideally, this should be postgres, as it's another associated project :) Thirdly, the software should be free (as in DFSG, not beer).

So, this leaves a few options. After many hours googling and lots of suggestions from the lists, I had a short list.

• SPIP
  It seems to handle multilingual sites ok, but has two problems. Firstly, it's a php3 site. Although it should work in php4 and php5, it's still not going to be optimised enough. Secondly, it's written in French. This means that I can't hack it if needed
• Flux
  PHP5, and using nice XML/XSLT. Has multilinugal capabilities, but it's admin interface is almost impossible to understand
• Brainfood
  The CTO of Brainfood contacted me to suggest Brainfood as a possible solution. However, it's not yet open source. It also doesn't seem to support multilinugal sites. It's also written in Java, and may not work in open source systems

This leaves one which I've found, Plone. It has issues, but it's the best I've found. Namely, it requires Zope. This means that every time you change it's skin, the entire Zope server requires a restart. Not even a reload, but a full restart. However, it's multilinugal facilities are very good, and it has a nice management interface. It does have lots of plugins that extend it's functionality, which is nice.

One of the problems I'm having at the moment is to get news items to have a 'Effective Date' of 1998, as the management interface only seems to go back to 1999, and I need to put old items on there. I also need to work out how to run it under Apache, and possibly use postgres as a storage engine.

So, all in all, Plone wins the day, due to it's ability to host multilinugal sites, and it having a management interface that doesn't suck.

For those that want a sneak preview, see the testbed, but don't expect it to work perfectly :)

A new Debian Developer, eriks! I got the notification through from the DAM today that he's got his account. Welcome to the conspiricy :)

As a side note, he's also my first NM to get an account, so I'm especially proud :)

You MUST reconfirm your attendance, or you won't get free lodgings and food.
The clock is ticking, you have about 2 hours left, ie: until 2006-04-03 23:59:59UTC.

Well, I've just got back from the first OpenVAS DevCon in Onsabrück in .de. More on that later.

However, this particular post is about STN airport. On the way out, I had a transfer in STN, and nothing could be easier. I got off the plane, was told to walk down corridor 'a', and I ended up right by the gate where my next flight was due. Easy, right?
However, on the way back, things didn't quite go to plan. I knew the day was going to start badly when I found myself wandering around Onsabrück at 2:30am in the rain, trying to find a random bus shelter that the airport bus stops at. I failed fairly miserably to catch the 2:56am bus, but at least it showed me where the bus shelter was, unlike the random drunk tramp that insited on trying to talk to me. The next bus was at 4:22am, so I did have quite a wait. However, this meant that I had 10 minutes before check in closed for the flight. I made it. Just.
The flight set off on time, and all was fine. When we landed at STN, there was a slight delay due to some 'confusion' over which gate we were heading into. So, I get off the plane and expect to head down a magic corridor somewhere. Well, it didn't quite happen like that. We climbed down the stairs instead of using a gangway, and then were ushered into a bus. This then took us to the other side of the airport and dumped us by passport control and arrivals, so no facility for transfer passengers.
This meant that I had to go through all of passport control and security checks again, and as the plane was late getting in, I didn't have much time. So, I finally manage to find where the departure gates are, and spot a HUGE queue to get in. I join it, and about 10 minutes later discover that there is an even longer queue inside to get through security. Never mind, I'll still make the flight if I run. So, the man who checks your boarding passes before letting you get to the security bit notices that I'm a transfer passenger, and tells me not to use this queue, but go straight to the 'Priority lane' which is used for first class passengers etc. I do this, and the man checking the tickets insisted that I don't have the right ticket, and to join the queue again. So, I do so, and 10 minutes later, I'm told to go to the 'Priority lane' again. WTF? I eventually manage to get the left hand to meet the right hand, and get through the priority lane.
Now, STN has a rather high-tech system with opening and closing corridors and routing people to the right gates. Today, however, it was very broken. So, a usual 5 minute walk to the gate turns into a 15 minute jog. I arrive at the gate, just as it says 'final call', and it's shut. They haven't even opened the gate yet. Eventually, I get on the aircraft, and look out the window. I'm on the same plane I got off, and sitting in exactly the same seat that I was two hours earlier.

Care of SlayerXP from #uknot:

postfix

the bullet zips back and forth between pipes and processes and barely has enough momentum left to enter your foot

sendmail

There was a bang, and there's a pain in your foot, but you don't understand sendmail rulesets well enough to work out what happened

qmail

You shoot yourself in the knee, and it's your fault for not understanding mail systems as well as DJB that it happened. (and it's not a bug, oh no.)

Submissions being taken for others