Announcing Mirrorkit – frontend to debmirror and possibly other mirroring softwares

Posted on 2009/03/09 by Stéphane Graber

After deploying it at a couple of customers at Revolution Linux I thought it’d be a good idea to finally release it publicly.

So here it’s, Mirrorkit now has it’s Launchpad project setup and Michael Jeanson is now working on getting it packaged for Karmic.

So what’s it exactly ? Mirrorkit is a simple frontend to debmirror with a user-friendly (I hope) configuration file helping you create your own Ubuntu/Debian mirror.

It’s a python script that basically takes an xml file as input describing both general and per-mirror configuration including proxy, help pages for the user, log output as html files and user-readable (I hope) definition of the mirrors.
When run (usually from a cron job) it’ll parse the .xml file and generate the debmirror (or in the future other mirroring softwares) command line, run it, parse the output and generate a report as an html page.

Today, I’ve released version 0.1 that can be downloaded here: https://launchpad.net/mirrorkit/+download
An example of its output can be found here: http://www.stgraber.org/download/mirrorkit/example/
And its commented configuration file here: http://www.stgraber.org/download/mirrorkit/mirrors.xml

I’ve been running it for over a year now in my previous school and it’s working like a charm (thanks to debmirror mainly).

Suggestions and bugs can be reported on Launchpad, here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/mirrorkit/+filebug
Code (GPLv2+) can be found here: https://code.launchpad.net/mirrorkit

Posted in mirrorkit, Planet Ubuntu | 2 Comments

Pastebinit 0.11 is out

Posted on 2008/12/28 by Stéphane Graber

It’s been a long time since pastebinit 0.10 was released.
Some people have been asking me when I planned to finally release 0.11, fixing most of the reported bugs, getting it properly translated and add more pastebins.

Well, it’s now done, these last weeks I’ve been integrating all the proposed patches on Launchpad, had some help updating the manpage, updated the translations and finally tagged 0.11.

For those of you who don’t know what pastebinit is, it’s a small python script that simply sends whatever you give it to an online pastebin and gives you the URL in return. It’s useful when doing IRC support (when you don’t want one to paste a 200 lines log) or when working on a command line box with no way to SSH in it.

So a quick changelog. There actually is nothing new in pastebinit itself, only a minor change that some of you may find annoying is that you now always have to use the “-i” parameter. This one can either be “-” for stdin or be a filename. This had to be done to fix some issues with reading from stdin.
All bugs reported on Launchpad have been closed (most of them being about adding new pastebins) the result being:
– 13 supported pastebins
– 13 complete translations
– 9 partial translations

I updated the Launchpad project page and added the new release to the download page. You can also download it directly from the usual place.

For the next release, I plan to improve the way pastebins are handled, at least by moving the different pastebin definition to an xml file for each pastebin (containing the list of URLs and html fields) or if I find the time, having something more clever handling the different pastebin engines and guessing what fields to fill with what value depending on the index page of the URL the user entered.

Until then, feedback is as always welcome and bugs can be filed on Launchpad.

Posted in pastebinit, Planet Ubuntu | 6 Comments

Pastebinit update, translation needed

Posted on 2008/12/06 by Stéphane Graber

For a long time now people have been poking me on IRC/mail/IM to get an updated pastebinit released.
The pastebinit currently in Ubuntu shows some bug (piping data often fails), doesn’t support most of the newest pastebins and isn’t translated in more than 2 or 3 languages.

I fixed most of these bugs thanks to all the patches attached to the bug reports, I now just need to update the manpage with the new supported pastebins. But before I release version 0.11, I’d like to get as many supported languages as possible.

So if you like translating and want pastebinit to speak your language, all you need is a Launchpad account and go to: https://translations.launchpad.net/pastebinit/ to translate it.
I’ll then export the .po from Launchpad and include them before releasing 0.11

Thanks

Posted in pastebinit, Planet Ubuntu | 3 Comments

Computer names

Posted on 2008/09/13 by Stéphane Graber

To continue with the meme that’s going on Planet Ubuntu, here is my computers name:
– Dakara
– Vagonbrei
– Castiana
– P4X-123 (Will be used for DHCP client 123) (Milky way galaxy)
– P3R-123 (Will be used for VPN client 123) (Pegasus galaxy)

You may have recognized those names, they are all taken from Stargate SG1 and Atlantis, series that I watch for several years now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planets_in_Stargate

For ISO testing, I’m usually using: – so ubuntu-i386 for example.
For my development Xen VMs, I use the boring but efficient naming: xenXX (xen04 is the test VM for Ubuntu Brainstorm and the QA team websites)

My LAN routers are usually called with router- so I currently have:
– router-roubaix (Roubaix, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, FR) (VPN gateway)
– router-bevaix (Bevaix, NE, CH) (Family house)
– router-neuchatel (Neuchâtel, NE, CH) (Grandma’s house)
– router-sherbrooke (Sherbrooke, QC, CA) (Home)

And other LAN computers are usually named after their owner and their type, using –. (Standard boring naming)

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Feedback on iTalc in Intrepid

Posted on 2008/09/13 by Stéphane Graber

Intrepid’s release is approaching pretty fast now.
I have (indirectly :), thanks Oliver) uploaded iTalc 1.0.9 to Intrepid’s main repository in late July and got so far no new bugs on Launchpad.
I know some of you are using it and while I consider the current upstream code and packaging to be quite good, I really doubt we have a bugfree release there 🙂

Can you, user of italc, please give me some feedback on the problems you currently are observing with the latest version ?
To report your bugs, https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/italc/+filebug is the place.

To learn more about iTalc and the various ways of installing it, you can read: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/iTalc (work in progress)

And if you want to help testing iTalc but don’t want to upgrade to Intrepid, you can try the packages from our PPA: https://launchpad.net/~edubuntu-italc-devel/+archive

The main difference from what’s currently in Hardy and what we have in Intrepid is avahi support meaning your computers should now automatically appear in iTalc as long as the keys in /etc/italc/ are the same.

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