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Sat, 14 May 2005

Small improvement...

... to Lolo's small squid url rewrite hack: Download all packages with priority required, standard and important nighlty.

Netinstall base system in less than 10 minutes guaranteed...

postet at 23:50 into [Debian/events] permanent link


Squid Redirect rules!

As I bloged before: I'm here at a small development gathering in Guetersloh. Here are people from quite different regions, and therefore with quite different /etc/apt/sources.list files. So, what is the easiest way, to allow them to get their packages from one fast mirror?

Interesting problem. Of course you could just tell them to point their sources list entries to the fastest mirror in your experience - there are even tools to find the fastest mirror like netselect-apt or apt-spy, but that isn't the most elegant solution, isn't it?

Of course you can just create a local mirror (for example with debmirror or with the script linked at http://www.debian.org/mirror/ftpmirror), but that's a bit overkill, isn't it? Especially, if you have only one dsl-line. And everyone still needs to change the /etc/apt/sources.list.

If you run a proxy like squid, you could just think, that often requested packages, will be in the cache, so you still let it be as it is. But if two people install the same package using different mirrors, it would still be downloaded and cached twice (since it would have different URLs).

A really elegant solution is to add a rewrite script to Squid, so that URLs from one mirror are transparently rewritten to your favourite mirror. Florian Lohoff just wrote hacked a nice script: Let's take the mirror list from Debian, to know which hosts we should rewrite (since we won't touch other server). Then take our Package-File and extract all file name from all packages, and now if someone wants to access http://ftp.foo.bar/debian/pool/main/b/baz_0.0-1_baz.deb this URI is rewritten if and only if ftp.foo.bar is in our list of known hosts AND if pool/main/b/baz_0.0-1_baz.deb is in our known packages. Hosts like security.debian.org and packages like baz_0.0-1ubuntu3.deb are ignored.

So you only need to force everyone to use the proxy (one trivial rule on your router), and now everyone does not even to touch their configuration, they can use (nearly) any mirror in their sources.list, and won't even notice, that they indeed downloading their packages from e.g. ftp.de2.debian.org. Of course you should tell them, what you have done ;)

And you should do some fine tuning, e.g. you might want to increase the max size of save objects in your squid config (to catch some bigger packages, too), and give your squid quite same space to storage his objects.

If you want to know details of this nice little hack, you should contact Flo directly, he did it, he knows it a bit better than me ;)

postet at 18:35 into [Debian/events] permanent link


Arrived in Guetersloh yesterday...

...took me 5 hours to get there. Well, it's quite nice here, the main train station is circa 10 minutes by foot from the Skolelinux Testzentrum in Germany, there is a nice pub 10m away, and if you need a small recovery time, you can take a small walk in a nearby park.

I only wished, it would take me less time to get here from my hometown near Frankfurt / Main.

This time it went quite bad: Beside the problem, that I couldn't book my train tickets in advance (I had a meeting, and didn't know, which train I would take), my train needed to be redirected (I think a suicide jumped before a previous train), and therefore I missed my connection, waiting for nearly an hour...

But hey, I finally arrived, and could join the already accumulated team, meeting old friends again, start to work on various topics, learn from them, and teach them a bit of what I know...

postet at 13:12 into [Debian/events] permanent link


Wed, 11 May 2005

[DebConf] CfP: Debian-Day at DebConf-5

You might have already heard about it: We are organizing a day with "normal" talks right before DebConf-5. Target audience will not be the developers and experienced users visiting the DebConf, but other interested people, including press, sponsors and people who don't know much about Linux at all.

Although we have some nice talks so far (including what is free software, what is Debian, how to help Debian), we could use some more ;)

So if you would like to do an English, more general talk for a non-technical audience, please get in contact with me. Especially, if you are from Finland and could add some local stuff ;)

Some topics I could imagine for this are for example:

  • Greeting by the DPL (I still wait for the answer to my mail, Branden ;)
  • First steps with your Debian System
  • A quick overview over custom Debian distributions and Debian derivatives

Of course that is only what I could think of. If you have other ideas (of course you can just propose topics without doing a talk yourself), please drop me a mail.

postet at 23:06 into [Debian/events/DebConf-5] permanent link


Tue, 10 May 2005

Skolelinux / Debian-Edu Working-Weekend in Guetersloh

This long weekend will be again a working weekend in the Skolelinux-Testzentrum in Guetersloh / Germany. Topics are amongst others:

  • Sarge installationtest
  • Working on the SkoleLive CD
  • KDE setup: customizing desktop for students and teachers
  • celebrate the German translation of the Documentation
  • some housekeeping
  • having fun
  • ... all that you would like to do

If you are interested in joining a bunch of guys hacking on Skolelinux Debian-Edu and Debian in general, you can find further information in the wiki.

postet at 18:13 into [Debian/events] permanent link


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About

Alexander Tolimar Reichle-Schmehl lives in Tuttlingen / Germany. He works as IT manager (specialized on Unix and SAN/Storage) for an international automotive supplier.

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