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Anthony Towns writes about using an improved version of jigdo to download CD/DVD images [1]. His improvement is basically to pipeline operation for better performance.
Jigdo (the Jigsaw download) is a tool to download a set of files and then use them to create a CD or DVD image [2]. The idea is that [...]

Patrick Winnertz writes about the demotivating effect of unreasonable delays on joining the Debian project [1].
While I agree that things need to be improved in terms of getting people in the project in a timely manner (the suggestion of providing assistants seems good), I don’t think that anyone has a good reason for being demotivated [...]

Albert writes about software development and how much teamwork is used [1]. He makes an interesting clash of analogies by suggesting that it’s not a “team sport” because “its not like commercial fishing where many hands are used to pull in the net at the same time“.
I think that software development for any non-trivial [...]

Steve Kemp writes about security issues with C programs [1]. It seems obvious that if you are going to do something that is overly tricky (such as anything related to setuid programs) then you should have a good knowledge of what you are doing. Steve goes a little further and suggests that anyone [...]

My Etch back-port repository of SE Linux related packages (which I documented in a previous post) now has a complete set of packages for AMD64. From now on I aim to make AMD64 and i386 be my main supported platforms for SE Linux development.

deb http://www.coker.com.au etch selinux
The above sources.list line has all the i386 packages needed for running SE Linux with strict policy on Etch as well as a couple of packages that are not strictly needed but which are really convenient (to solve the executable stack issue).
gpg --keyserver hkp://subkeys.pgp.net --recv-key F5C75256
gpg -a --export F5C75256 | apt-key add [...]

I’ve just been experimenting with Google Custom Search [1]. Below are two custom search engines I created to generate searches for Planet Debian and Planet Ubuntu (for each Planet it searches all the blogs that are syndicated - and doesn’t just get the category that is syndicated). It’s interesting to compare search terms [...]

A common question is how to compare Fedora [1] and Debian [2] in terms of recent updates and support. I think that Fedora Rawhide and Debian/Unstable are fairly equivalent in this regard, new upstream releases get packaged quickly, and support is minimal. They are both aimed at developers only, but it seems that [...]

After getting Ethernet Bonding working (see my previous post) I tried to get it going with a bridge for Xen.
I used the following in /etc/network/interfaces to configure the bond0 device and to make the Xen bridge device xenbr0 use the bond device:
iface bond0 inet manual
pre-up modprobe bond0
pre-up ifconfig bond0 up
hwaddress ether 00:02:55:E1:36:32
[...]

This afternoon we had a Debian meeting in Melbourne (Australia) arranged through the Debian-Melb mailing list.
We met under the clocks at Flinders St station, had lunch at a good Japanese restaurant, decided not to play LASER games (like paintball but with LASER guns instead of paint guns) due to the queue. The LASER games [...]