Got my new Debian Woody workstation set up. Foolishly decided to try a UDMA100 drive, since I'd seen on kernel list that this was well supported. This may be true in theory, but none of the Debian boot disks spoke UDMA100. Hard to install a system when you have one machine that doesn't work, and one whose drives you can't access. I ended up building a kernel at work and stuffing it onto a Debian rescue floppy.

Now, with a functioning workstation, it was time to try setting up My First Lan. (I had all the parts, and was about to begin when the old box started flaking out.) For all the years I've used Lans, I've never rolled my own before. This was a lot of fun, and (mostly) went smooth as silk.

At last, after over a month of running on a crippled, all-but-dead box, I was ready to return to active duty with Debian. (Fortunately, Takuo Kitame had volunteered to make some NMUs for me while my box was down. I owe him some sincere thanks.)

I happened to notice that a couple of programs I use had been orphaned within the Debian project, so, with my new box all ready to start crunching on new code, I posted my intention to adopt them, and grabbed the source & patches. The first (WMMail) seems to be produced by an author who doesn't grok the CVS export function. (An all too common problem in OSS projects, I'm afraid.) The second (WMRack) exposed a hole (at least I think it's a hole) in the Debian cvs-buildpackage system. I'm investigating workarounds, but for now, I'm maintaining both packages without the benefit of CVS, which is less than thrilling.

I've still got a little catchup to do on some of my older packages, and I've got one that needs some massive cleanup (perhaps a complete repackaging from scratch), but at least I'm back on track and moving in the right direction once again.

Yay.