CRCnet Configuration System
Now that the CRCnet Configuration System is nearing a releasable state, we’ve had approval from the University’s commercialisation arm that we are allowed to release it under the GPL. This is good, I’ve been working on the system for the last year at least and it is nice to know that it will be available to the community at large. I think what is going to be most interesting to me is to see whether there is any interest in using it from external people and particularly how easy they find it to use.

The current plan is to release version 1.0 at LCA’06 in conjuction with our talk of everything that the CRCnet Project has achieved over the last few years.

Debian Stuff
Haven’t made a lot of progress with my NM application over the last month. I think both Alexander (my AM) and myself have been too busy with other things. Alexander did get the latest PHPwiki packages that I had prepared uploaded and there have been no new bug reports yet, so I think we’re making progress. This package made use of the wwwconfig-common functions developed by Sean Finney which was a great help and we’re much closer to having a robust PHPwiki package (and one that is up to date) than we were a few months ago.

The next step for the PHPwiki packages will be to try and migrate to the dbconfig-common structure for database creation and management. The hold-up there is that dbconfig-common does not support sqlite or sqlite3 at the moment. We use sqlite as the default database for the Debian PHPwiki package to save having to install a heavy-weight system such as mysql or postgresql. Reading the dbconfig-common documentation it seems that it will not be too difficult to add sqlite support so hopefully I will find some time for that over the Christmas break.

I wrote some scripts to nicely automate VAP creation with the new madwifi-ng drivers for Atheros wireless cards and posted them to the Atheros mailing list. Kel Modderman picked them up and pointed me towards the pkg-madwifi alioth project where madwifi packaging for Debian is being co-ordinated. It will be good to get involved with that as working with madwifi is a fairly large part of my job at the moment, so it will be easy for me to justify spending time on Debian packaging tasks for it.

The key issue we need to sort out here is whether udev rules or ifupdown hooks are the most appropriate way to create the VAP devices, or whether a combination of the two is required.