Password-less unattended CVS+SSH sessions

You may have the need some day to issue CVS commands (same stands for SVN I think) using the SSH connection (such as CVS_RSH=ssh and so on) in a crontab. The problem may be that you need to type a password to get granted the SSH connection. With SSH public keys and ssh-agent it’s easy, but in a crontab, that will no longer work 🙁

It’s pretty easy… well… doable at least 😉

The trick is to launch the CVS commands with a “ssh” script in the PATH, which will be something like this :

#! /bin/sh

export SSH_ASKPASS=/whereveryouwant/my-ssh-askpass
export DISPLAY=:0
unset TERM
exec setsid /usr/bin/ssh $*

and where the my-ssh-askpass script will simply do :
#! /bin/sh
echo yourpreferredpassword

Hope this helps 🙂

Debian package for TWiki LDAP contrib adapter (a bit outdated though)

Currently considering my intention of becoming maintainer of some Debian packages, I realized I had not blogged about the packaging I made for TWikiLdapContrib, an adapter for users and groups management in TWiki based on a LDAP directory.

See https://picoforge.int-evry.fr/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Picoforge/Web/TwikiLdapcontribDeb for more details on this package made for PicoForge.

I should add that it’s a bit outdated wrt the upstream package… but it seems to work for our use in PicoForge 😉

Update 20071005 :

I’ve issued a RFS for version 1.11 of the package, which is the current version advertised on twiki.org.

I’m also working on packaging the future 2.0 version provided by the author.

All details in the link above in Picoforge’s wiki.

Selecting from multiple X configurations (layouts) automatically at GDM startup or at boot

I’m trying to use different configurations on my laptop :

  • standard linux kernel with proprietary nvidia driver
  • and Xen to allow developping/testing in a hosted dom-U Debian distro, in which case I switch back to the libre nv driver

When using the proprietary nvidia driver, I may use two kind of configurations :

  • having several screens in “clone” mode, i.e. replicated view on screen and beamer, for instance (classical use of Fn+F8 clone display)
  • or having both screens assembled into one to use twinview with dualhead, which provides (through Xinerama) and being able to switch windows from one to the other

This means I configured several layouts in the same xorg.conf file, which will describe each a different Xorg configuration.

Update 2008/02/10 : reorganized that post to be able to manage kernel-passed LAYOUT variable
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