Archive: Debian
Reinstalling at arm’s length
Published by Jon on December 19th, 2011 in Debian, Notes | Comments Off
Recently I had need to re-purpose a server and for convenience, I decided to do a complete wipe and reinstall since it had previously been used for all sorts of package testing, experiments, dak debugging, the list goes on. I took a careful backup and then cooked up some USB installation media, but it took so long to boot (USB1.1, yay) I ran out of time before the building was locked.
Since this box has two hard disks, and not being one to back down from a challenge, I eventually reinstalled it over the weekend with nothing – no install media, no reinstall robot or intelligent hands – just a reliable internet connection and a healthy dose of courage. Here’s how.
DebConf 11
Published by Jon on June 19th, 2011 in Debian | Comments Off
So, I got enough of the requisite sponsorship and finally booked some flights… So, I got enough of the requisite sponsorship and finally booked some flights…
StartSSL: finally, a trustworthy certifier*
Published by Jon on June 13th, 2011 in Debian, Tech | 7 Comments »
Matt Brown writes about StartCom, the Israeli issuer providing basic SSL certificates for nothing. In fact I’ve been using StartSSL certificates for about three years now, but I get them issued to Level 2 verification which incurs a fee. (It’s more expensive now than when I was first validated, but still good value.) StartCom are [...]
A little civil disobedience
Published by Jon on March 27th, 2011 in Debian | 2 Comments »
For many months I’ve wondered what would happen if one completed half a census return online and half on paper. Tonight, finally, I get to find out. (for international readers: it’s the night of the U.K. census, which with a little imagination has the potential for all sorts of fun.) For many months I’ve wondered [...]
Response from ALLOW Ltd.
Published by Jon on March 7th, 2011 in Debian, Tech | 1 Comment »
I’ve had a very courteous email from one of the founders of ALLOW, following my analysis of their password reset procedure. “Thank you for your feedback regarding the security of our platform. We are constantly reviewing these processes and regard our members security as paramount, whilst ensuring our processes are navigable to the majority of [...]
Privacy specialists should hire security specialists
Published by Jon on March 2nd, 2011 in Debian, Tech | 3 Comments »
I was interested to hear about a company here in the UK called ALLOW Ltd., offering marketing database management under a “we’ll get you off lists, then pay you to go back on at your pleasure” basis. That sounds a fair deal to me, so I decided to sign up for it. “Our technology is built [...]
Point Release Security Co-ordinator
Published by Jon on February 9th, 2011 in Debian | Comments Off
In ‘Bits from the Security Team‘ a few weeks ago, Thijs Kinkhorst wrote: Since a couple of years we’ve been handing off security issues of minor or theoretical impact but for which a fix would be desirable at some point, like certain classes of denial-of-service attacks, off to stable point updates. We’re looking for a [...]
RCBW, week… fourish.
Published by Jon on January 13th, 2011 in Debian | 1 Comment »
Just one this week: #609304 (pimd): backport the unstable fix for testing-proposed-updates (which nearly gave me heart failure when it FTBFS on mipsel, but it was an unrelated problem). Just one this week: #609304 (pimd): backport the unstable fix for testing-proposed-updates (which nearly gave me heart failure when it FTBFS on mipsel, but it was [...]
RCBW, week three
Published by Jon on January 2nd, 2011 in Debian | Comments Off
This week: #607958 (apt): replied and tagged ‘moreinfo’; jmm later downgraded it to normal #606951 (nsca): agreed with the submitter and reverted the change, uploaded straight to unstable #605784 (nagios-statd): thanks to the great debugging work of the submitter, uploaded a fix to DELAYED/2 (giving the maintainer time to make his own planned upload) #598588 [...]
RCBW, week two
Published by Jon on December 23rd, 2010 in Debian | Comments Off
This week: #606151 (nordugrid-arc-nox): cherry-picked a patch from upstream and uploaded to DELAYED/1 #606670 (minitube): removal bug filed at request of maintainer #607762 (dbus-glib): bumped the build-dependency and uploaded to DELAYED/7 (later pushed into DELAYED/0 at maintainer’s request) #607427 (opensc): applied security fixes from upstream and uploaded immediately Not quite one fix per day, as [...]