Today I went to HantsLUG at IBM Hursley. I delivered a talk on the Debian Perl team aimed at end users, which was well received - I got a head start by getting people in #debian-perl to review the slides beforehand, which was very helpful. I'm told there will be a video uploaded in a month or so. I also plugged SmoothWall Express on Debian to some new people, and there was interest....
Here in the UK we've had a bank holiday weekend. Usually I would have gone to Cambridge for the Debian BBQ, but this year I joined forces with Thomas Adam for some SmoothWall Express on Debian hacking. There are several challenges involved in moving the SWE3 code from its native distribution to Debian; this weekend we worked around some of the permissions problems. On SWE3, the web server and most of the service daemons run as the user 'nobody'....
SmoothWall Express is a GNU/Linux distribution geared towards firewalling, with an installer, a web interface, and some common software like squid that can be useful when running a small business router. It is theoretically the basis for the corporate products of SmoothWall Ltd., who happen to employ me; but all opinions here are my own, and I'm not speaking for them. Unfortunately, the SmoothWall Express kernel is somewhat "stable", which leads to problems installing the distro on modern hardware....
Part one of an occasional series about SmoothWall Express (SWE). The SmoothWall Express source tree contains two NTP daemons - both ntpd and OpenNTPD. SWE uses the openntpd daemon, but installs the ntpdate and ntpq utilities from the ntpd package. This is justified because openntpd is apparently more lightweight than ntpd. But note that ntpq does not work with openntpd. On my machine, the saving in memory is not massive. As observed in the thread, openntpd needs to run two processes (with one running as root), while ntpd can use Linux capabilities....