This worked fine, until today, when I noticed apt-listbugs complaining, and causing the script to fail to dist-upgrade.

Not a problem, thought I. I’m sure others have had this issue too. Being lazy, I thought first point of call would be the internets. I’d have thought something like:


"DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive" "apt-listbugs"


might have done the trick. It didn’t (that I could find).

So I went back to doing what a lot of the new-breed of ‘devops’ fail to do, and what I’m quite hypocritical of; looking at the manpage.

The manpage provides us with this gem:

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
o APT_LISTBUGS_FRONTEND If this variable is set to “none”
apt-listbugs will not execute at all, this might be useful if
you would like to script the use of a program that calls
apt-listbugs.

So there we go.


for M in $MACHINES
do
echo "Connecting to ${M}.no2id.net"
- ssh root@${M}.no2id.net 'export TERM=xterm; export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive; apt-get update && echo "" && echo "" && echo "This is "'${M}'".no2id.net" && echo "" && echo "" && apt-get dist-upgrade'
+ ssh root@${M}.no2id.net 'export TERM=xterm; export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive; export APT_LISTBUGS_FRONTEND=none; apt-get update && echo "" && echo "" && echo "This is "'${M}'".no2id.net" && echo "" && echo "" && apt-get dist-upgrade'
done


hopefully, this will help others, whose first port of call is the internets, and not manpages.

You may, however be sensible — and have had the time to roll out Puppet (ugh, when did they change their website! Why‽) or Chef though.

I did. And couldn’t see anyone else’s script to steal, so here’s a really ugly way to do it


# arpinfo:
# pull hardware info from the arp() table
#
# Copyright (c) 2010 Adam McGreggor. Some rights reserved.
# Email: Web:
#
# $Id:$
#

arp | awk '{print $3}' | awk -F: '{print $1"-"$2"-"$3}' | while read ARP
do
grep $ARP ${DOC}
done
arp


Works for me… although it could do with a tidy-up. As a quick and dirty thing, mind…

Anyhow, I would appear to have these firefox extensions installed:

• Adblock Plus
• AutoPager
• BetterFlickr
• Better YouTube
• Delicious Bookmarks
• DownloadHelper
• Echofon
• Extended Statusbar
• Fast Video Downloader (with SearchMenu)
• Firebug
• Firefox (default)
• Firefox (en-GB)
• Flagfox
• Flashblock
• Gmail Manager
• Greasefire
• Greasemonkey
• Image Download
• Image Zoom
• Inline Code Finder for Firebug
• is.gd Creator
• JavaScript Options
• keyconfig
• Magic’s Video Downloader
• oldbar
• Password Exporter
• Save Image in Folder [sic]
• ShowIP
• SkipScreen
• TinyUrl Creator
• Ubuntu Firefox Modificiations
• URL Fixer
• VMware Remote Console Plug-In
• Xulrunner (en-GB)
• YesScript

A few of those don’t have links I can identify from the URI.

Want some code that vaguely does this for you?

#!/bin/sh
#
# ffexts:
# list firefox extensions: names and URIs for download/homepage
#
# Copyright (c) 2010 Adam McGreggor. Some rights reserved.
# Email: <adam@amyl.org.uk> Web: <http://blog.amyl.org.uk>
#
# $Id: ffexts 119 2010-01-10 00:38:04Z adam $
#

# grab the interesting bits from the RDF file
for K in name homepageURL
do
# nice fix-up, eh?
grep "NS1:${K}" ${INFILE} | sed -e "s/NS1:${K}=//" \
-e 's/"//g' -e 's/>//' \
-e 's/^[ \t]*//' | sort | uniq > ${OF}-${K}
# using wc here is entirely optional
wc -l ${OF}-${K}
# append
cat ${OF}-${K} >> ${OUTFILE}
done


To work around my hatred of PBWiki’s “notification” system, I’ve just re-appropriated (and made ‘ukgovweb-check‘) my dell-order-checking script to work for the wiki-page; changelog is that the script now uses lynx instead of wget, and that we send the difflog, rather than the whole-bloody-changed file.

If you’re still in the dark-ages like me, and haven’t written one yourself, here you go. If there’s a demand and people are feeling lazy, I suppose I could whip up a list.

Let me know if you do.

There’s some discussion going on on email, I do believe.

Remove the crap from old installs, in your ~/.mozilla directory. And by crap, well, I mean:

• appreg
• mozver.dat
• pluginreg.dat
• plugins/

cd .mozilla
rm -rf plugins/
rm appreg
rm mozver.dat

cd firefox/
rm -rf pluginreg.dat

Astonishingly, by removing a couple of bits of pelt, the uploads worked for the guys.

Seeing as this is my blog, and people expect me to be miserable, here’s my whine: why the fuck don’t people SEARCH THE FUCKING ARCHIVES on forums before posting a new question? I gave up, and went back to old-fashioned testing.

Oh, and I should probably plug a fairly new site I recently discovered: stackoverflow — about all I can whine about with that is that is uses OpenID…

RSS.

I say kinda, ‘cos, despite having finally found something non-intrusive, and with a UI that doesn’t suck, I still don’t check the webpage it makes. Despite it updating.

Of course, I should have thought “I know who would have written something useful” donkey’s years ago. But I never did. Only recently, when hunting for Matilda did I think about it. *sigh*

So, there we have it. Next up is working a fix for it, to handle rss feeds which require basic-auth (trac-tastic!), and getting xkcd to display inline…

Next up: populating it a bit more, and then unsubscribing from some lists… well, maybe filter ‘em out…

As this blog doubles up for my memory pad, here’s the list of stuff that I’ve just installed:

• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• WinSCP
• PuTTY
• Spybot
• Avast
• OpenOffice
• Pidgin
• XChat (silverx’s)
• The MS PowerToys
• Flash Player
• AIR
• Acrobat Reader
• GVim
• GIMP
• iTunes
• VLC

SP3 (given that my Windows disk is Slipstreamed with SP2)

I guess there will be more stuff to install — the MS Viewers seem likely, as will another 400Megs of patches and things…