Some years ago I heard about Scheme and was fascinated by the (at that time at least for me) strange syntax. As this was not yet the time of WWW, I even bought a book to learn more about it.
Unfortunately priorities changed and I needed to spend my time on other things. As I now found that orphaned package I would like to give it a second try and at least keep it rolling.
bind configuration
Today I had to do some bind9 configuration and here are the results for my future self.
Nowadays the Debian bind package is prepared to use IPv6. In case your server has no IPv6 connectivity yet, lots of errors appear in the logs. Most of them can be ignored, but at least they look ugly. So if you know that you do not need IPv6 add ‘-4’ to the OPTIONS-line in /etc/default/bind9.
If you get an error like “refused notify from non-master” and the IP of non-master is your own host, you need to accept notifies from yourself. Just add something like ‘allow-notfy { n.m.o.p; };’ to the options{}-section (n.m.o.p should be your own IP). On Debian systems this is in /etc/bind/named.conf.options.
exim4 and catchall mailbox
Of course there are millions of posts with similar content. But instead of storing a bookmark in one browser, I prefer to collect such knowledge at a central place.
In case you are working with Debian Wheezy and exim4 and want to create a mailbox, that gets all emails to unknown addresses, the following has to be done:
- edit /etc/exim4/exim4.conf.template and look for router/400_exim4-config_system_aliases
- change line data = ${lookup{$local_part}lsearch{/etc/aliases}} to
data = ${lookup{$local_part}lsearch*{/etc/aliases}} - add all valid users to /etc/aliases (like heinz: heinz)
- call update-exim4.conf
- restart exim4 /etc/init.d/exim4 restart
Disadvantage:
- You need to insert all local users to /etc/aliases, but this could be managed during user creation
- This does not work in case you set dc_use_split_config to ‘true’
Debian Med advent calendar
I would like to anounce the Debian Med advent calendar 2012. Just like last year the Debian Med team starts a bug squashing event from the December 1st to 24th. Every day at least one bug from the Debian BTS should be closed. Especially RC bugs for the oncoming Debian release (Wheezy) or bugs in one of the packages maintained by Debian Med shall be closed. Anyone shall be called upon to fix a bug or send a patch. Don’t hestitate, start to squash :-).
DOPOM: a56 – Motorola DSP56001 assembler
Since I first looked at the list of orphaned Debian packages (available at http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/orphaned) some time ago, the package a56 has been the lonely leader of the list.
This package contains a freeware assembler for the 56000 architecture. These chips have been very popular in the 1980s (used in NeXT, Atari Falcon and SGI Indigo Workstations).
Updated versions are still used in today’s devices like some mobile phones (-> http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/homepage.jsp?code=563XXGPDSP)
So, being a bit nostalgic, I adopted this package and brought it to shape. There was even a small bug that I was able to close.
BOM: overflow in ent
Recently I got a bug report for package ent. The internal counter of processed bytes has just type long. In case you feed enough bytes to ent, there will be an overflow after about half an hour (of course that depends on your type of CPU, the bug was reported on architecture i386).
As modern C (C99) introduced a new type long long, I changed the type of some variables from simple long to unsigned long long. The overflow disappeared for now, but it will reappear just some trillion bytes later.
So, are there any recommendations on how to handle such a situation better?
DSOM: vera++ – Programmable verification and analysis tool for C++
This software is a programmable tool for verification, analysis and transformation of C++ source code.
It is mainly an engine that parses C++ source files and presents the result of this parsing to scripts in the form of various collections. Afterwards the scripts are actually performing the requested tasks.
This is a link to the Debian PTS page.
DOPOM: greylistd – Greylisting daemon for use with Exim 4
I was really amazed that a package like greylistd does not have an active maintainer anymore.
Further looking at popcon, this package is only installed on just a few computers. The reason might be that it is only installed on servers that do not take part in popcon.
Anyway, this package needs a maintainer and here I am.
My first upload to ‘experimental’ mainly takes care of lintian warnings and closes a few bugs:
- #375504: don’t expire entries every check: the fix was contributed by Steven A. Reisman and verified by Jason Cormie.
- #585231: do not use Python strings exceptions anymore
The next step will be to take care of bugs with patches and than reduce the number of other bugs.
Please feel free to help fixing bugs or volunteer for becoming a comaintainer :-).
Here you can find the PTS page.
BOM: libctl
During my adoption of setserial, I was able to close 9 bugs for that package. So the compulsory exercise is already finished and the free program can start.
As a new version of libctl and meep unexpectedly appeared, the BOM of July shall be the new upload of libctl. Unfortunately the soname changed and the library package needs to go through the new-queue. So the bug is resolved but not yet closed.
DTPOM: cluster3 – reimplementation of the Eisen-clustering software
As the task list of the Debian Med team is rather long and lots of packages are waiting for action, I again choosed a package from this team.
This month the winner is cluster3, which is needed to analyze genomic datasets.