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dglog.pl, deep13.org and ncftp

I have been seriously inactive these past couple weeks, but things I put in motion a few weeks back have come to fruition and it’s a great feeling.

First off, I got an email today, my first Debian package is now in the unstable repository. Glee!

R2Q5, my 450mhz P3 that previously was being used as a sound recording server has been reinstalled with Debian unstable as a test station. Michael set it up to dual boot with Gentoo so he could work on it as well. Debian and Gentoo on the same old box, quite the blasphemy huh?

Well, I booted up the machine this evening specifically to run updates and check out my new baby.

elizabeth@r2q5:~$ apt-cache show dglog
Package: dglog
Priority: optional
Section: web
Installed-Size: 80
Maintainer: Elizabeth Krumbach
Architecture: all
Version: 1.0-1
Depends: perl-modules, libcompress-zlib-perl, perl
Filename: pool/main/d/dglog/dglog_1.0-1_all.deb
Size: 11394
MD5sum: df4847d0f477da9dcd46b4eb955f8131
Description: CGI log analyzer for DansGuardian
A CGI log analyzer for the web content filter DansGuardian.
.
Homepage: http://www.tiger.org/technology/dg/

And there it is!

It really is just a perl script that can be used by users of DansGuardian, so a very small subset of the Debian population confined mostly to companies and organizations who need web content filtering. But it gave me a wonderful taste of the complex process involved in packaging something for Debian, even something as simple as a perl script.

Also, about a month back announced he was going to give up working on Deep13.org. It is the website for the channel #deep13 on xelium, and irc.deep13.org is one of the original servers that irc.clockbot.net back in the day (the thrilling history of the server linking can be read about here). #Deep13 was one of those old school SciFi channels, along with #13thHour, and one of the few that still survives. I actually became a member in 2002, and have been a regular contributer of MST related content for over almost 2 years. It was only natural for me to take the next step and do the routine maintenance and updates that it would need. Rob decided on the weekened of April 1st that I was indeed the right person for the job and handed the keys to the site over to me.

Now the only access for this site is via sFTP. No ssh. This was troubling at first, I’ve never worked on a site without ssh access before! But it led me on a quest to find a good way to edit the sites. I started with the simplest GUI solution, install gFTP and click away. Unfortunately I quickly discovered that gVim does not play nicely with gftp’s edit option (it won’t save), and I absolutely loathe gEdit, which does work with gFTP. I installed BlueFish, but was annoyed with the complexity. I don’t need a web development suite! I need something that would mimic editing via ssh.

I’m familiar enough with ncftp to be happy with that as an ftp interface, but it does not come with any sort of edit option. So I did a google search for: nctfp edit and found: NcFTP – Remote file editing with the NcFTP client – a patch that would allow me to use vim in ncftp! Brilliant! I installed it on my laptop and it works like a charm. I’m very pleased. I’m doubly pleased to discover that Gentoo, which runs on our server, comes with a version of ncftp with the patch already applied. Very nice.

And now I need to get to bed.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 13th, 2006 at 10:17 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.