Dealing with bashisms in proprietary software

Sometimes it happens that for one reason or another there's a need to use a proprietary application (read: can not be modified due to its licence) that contains bashisms. Since the application can not be modified and it might not be desirable to change the default /bin/sh, dealing with such applications can be a pain. Or not.

The switchsh program (available in Debian) by Marco d'Itri can be used to execute said application under a namespace where bash is bind-mounted on /bin/sh. The result:

$ sh --help
sh: Illegal option --
$ switchsh sh --help | head -n1
GNU bash, version 4.1.5(1)-release-(i486-pc-linux-gnu)

Simple, yet handy.

Almost one million requests per day

In the first 48 hours after its log files were rotated last Sunday, http.debian.net handled almost 2 million requests, for an average of 11 requests per second.

In the last weeks before the release of Debian wheezy the number of requests had dropped slightly below 2 million per week.

Debian is alive.

A single address to get Debian Wheezy while it's hot

Already preparing to install or to upgrade to Debian Wheezy?

You can use the http.debian.net redirector to install Debian Wheezy or upgrade to it from Squeeze and make use of Debian's ever-growing 370-large mirrors network to get it.

APT one liner (to be used in your /etc/apt/sources.list file):

deb http://http.debian.net/debian wheezy main

During the installation process you can also choose to use it by manually entering http.debian.net as an HTTP mirror and /debian/ as the path.

Get it while it's hot!

An ever-growing mirrors network, a year later

A year ago I wrote about Debian's ever-growing mirrors network, so it is time to review the numbers.

Compared to the numbers from last year, today Debian is being served via http by about 370 mirrors world-wide, and is also available via ftp from 330 mirrors. So that's an increase of 40 mirrors in one year!

The number of countries with Debian mirrors also increased to 76, 3 more since last year.

This has only been possible thanks to the sponsors hosting the mirrors.
During this year some sponsors have had to retire their mirrors, sometimes ceasing years of contributions to the project and its community.

A big thanks is deserved to past and current sponsors.