- <div class="entry">
- <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/listadmin__the_quick_way_to_moderate_mailman_lists___nice_free_software.html">listadmin, the quick way to moderate mailman lists - nice free software</a></div>
- <div class="date">22nd October 2014</div>
- <div class="body"><p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
-alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
-operate. First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
-and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
-and various options for each email address. This take a while for
-every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
-job as a list moderator. But there is a quick alternative,
-<a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
-listadmin program</a>. It allow you to check lists for new messages
-to moderate in a fraction of a second. Here is a test run on two
-lists I recently took over:</p>
-
-<p><blockquote><pre>
-% time listadmin xiph
-fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
-fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
-
-real 0m1.709s
-user 0m0.232s
-sys 0m0.012s
-%
-</pre></blockquote></p>
-
-<p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
-there are no message in the moderation queue. Every morning I
-currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
-minutes. When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
-ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue. It took me
-less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
-program.</p>
-
-<p>If you install
-<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
-package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
-with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
-
-<p><blockquote><pre>
-username username@example.org
-spamlevel 23
-default discard
-discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
-
-password secret
-adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
-mailman-list@lists.example.com
-
-password hidden
-other-list@otherserver.example.org
-</pre></blockquote></p>
-
-<p>There are other options to set as well. Check the manual page to
-learn the details.</p>
-
-<p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
-the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
-generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
-variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
-
-<p><blockquote><pre>
-PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
-</pre></blockquote></p>
-
-<p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
-can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
-initial screen dump (the xiph argument). Using an argument, only
-lists matching the argument string will be processed. This make it
-quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
-email.</p>
-
-<p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
-mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
-process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
-time I could spend elsewhere over the years. It truly is nice free
-software.</p>
-
-<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
-activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
-<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
-
-<p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
-configuration example. Also, I've been told that the
-PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone. Not
-sure why.</p>
-</div>
- <div class="tags">
-
-
- Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
-
-
- </div>
- </div>
- <div class="padding"></div>
-
- <div class="entry">
- <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a></div>
- <div class="date">17th October 2014</div>
- <div class="body"><p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
-problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
-And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
-Normally something more is needed. But thanks to
-<a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
-package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
-to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
-
-<p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
-firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
-the kernel modules for the hardware). (It can also install user space
-programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
-of this story.)</p>
-
-<p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
-values are needed. First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
-into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
-in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system. This is done by
-preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
-isenkram-cli package. The package name is next passed to debootstrap
-for installation. With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
-will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
-packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
-isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
-
-<p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
-most firmware unfortunately is non-free. This is done by preseeding
-the apt-mirror-setup step. This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
-hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
-
-<p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
-firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
-
-<p><blockquote><pre>
-base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
-apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
-</pre></blockquote></p>
-
-<p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
-both firmware and user space packages when using this method. It also
-do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later. Installing both
-firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
-want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
-and one for user space programs. The firmware task is enabled by
-default, while the one for user space programs is not. This split is
-implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
-
-<p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
-this recipe work for you. :)</p>
-
-<p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work. First and
-foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
-files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/. So the
-isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find. First there
-is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
-
-<p><blockquote><pre>
-Task: isenkram-packages
-Section: hardware
-Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
- Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
- proposed.
-Test-new-install: show show
-Relevance: 8
-Packages: for-current-hardware
-
-Task: isenkram-firmware
-Section: hardware
-Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
- Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
- packages are proposed.
-Test-new-install: mark show
-Relevance: 8
-Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
-</pre></blockquote></p>
-
-<p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
-should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
-/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/. The scripts use other scripts to get a
-list of packages to install. The for-current-hardware-firmware script
-look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
-
-<p><blockquote><pre>
-#!/bin/sh
-#
-PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
-export PATH
-isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
-</pre></blockquote></p>
-
-<p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
-tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
-
-<p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
-installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
---new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
-install.</p>
-
-<p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
-pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
-install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
-</div>
- <div class="tags">
-
-
- Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
-
-
- </div>
- </div>
- <div class="padding"></div>
-
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