Whenever I want to login to a Debian porterbox to figure out some architecture-specific issue I typically do not care which particular host I am going to login to, just what architecture the host is.

After discovering that it is not yet easy for the Debian sysadmins (DSA) to add aliases to DNS for this purpose, I whipped up a quick script to grab the relevant data about Debian machines from the Debian LDAP server and work around this in my OpenSSH config.

To use the script you should run the script and place the magic comment lines suggested by the script into your ~/.ssh/config file and then run the script again, which will contact the Debian LDAP server using python-ldap, download the relevant information and replace the relevant part of your ~/.ssh/config file with some OpenSSH configuration directives to map Debian architecture names to hostnames. Within just a few seconds you will be able to login to armel, powerpc.port or kfreebsd-amd64.port.debian.org instead of needing to manually look up which servers to login for a particular architecture.

Update: paravoid mentioned his dsa-porterbox script (see below) which is much simpler, does not need to modify your OpenSSH configuration and can be run as like ssh $(dsa-porterbox armel | head -n1). I'm hoping we can add this and a possible ssh-porterbox to the devscripts package.

#!/bin/sh
test -z $1 && exit 1

exec ldapsearch -LLL -x -h db.debian.org -b ou=hosts,dc=debian,dc=org \
 "(&(purpose=porterbox)(architecture=$1))" hostname | \
 sed -n 's/^hostname: //p'

DebConf9 is getting closer so I was browsing the Internet and the DebConf9 wiki for information. When I'm travelling I enjoy having maps to be able to get around and not get lost. For DebConf8 I relied on TangogGPS with OpenStreetMap on my OpenMoko Freerunner since my laptop is fairly cumbersome and has relatively little battery life these days. For DebConf9 I'll probably do the same since navit doesn't seem too reliable for me yet. During my information gathering for DebConf9 I came across the DebConf9 map overlay and the Madrid free Wi-Fi map. I wanted to have these available in TangoGPS so I wrote a short python script to import them into the TangoGPS POI (points of interest) database. It requires the feedparser and beautifulsoup python modules. First download the GeoRSS feeds you are interested in and then run the script on the machines where you want to use TangoGPS with the filenames as arguments. It only handles points, not lines or polygons since TangoGPS doesn't allow that. Hopefully it will be included in TangoGPS upstream or the Debian TangoGPS package soon. If you want to update the feed you'll need to manually delete the relevant points from the database or remove and recreate the database and then import the feed(s) again.

pfremy:

Tried request tracker?

Here is a site that's been up and used for a while: http://rt.indymedia.org/

hypatia:

Try the following css too (works for css 2.1 browsers, and mozilla, falls back to <p> styles for non Mozilla/CSS2.1 browsers):

pre { white-space: normal; }
pre { white-space: -moz-pre-wrap; }
pre { white-space: pre-wrap; }

braden:

try adding the 'shortname=mixed' to the mount options in /etc/fstab