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Showing posts from November, 2008

Mumbai Nov 2008 Terror Attacks

"Terror attack on Mumbai" -- this is the headline on every news channel, be it Indian or foreign since the last few days. People seem to have got accustomed to indiscriminate killings and bombings every now and then, terror attacks have become almost a part of our daily life. Some discussion about the need to combat terror after every attack, some blame-game and finally everything settles down. Everything returns back to normal, until another attack kills a few hundred more. The cycle then repeats. People blames the Govt. for being ineffective, state Govt. will blame center, center will put the blame on state, both will then blame neighboring countries. The drama soon gets over, people forget the incident, Govt. forgets the culprits and things move on. Go to a mall, restaurant, railway station or board a train, you never know the next moment you might be blown up in several pieces or reduced to ashes. We just hope we are lucky enough not to meet that fate. Each time a massacr...

Setting up local Ubuntu & Debian mirror using apt-mirror

Prologue: Our institute was moving to it's new campus. For a central Govt. run research institute, the huge land requirements forced it to be located quite far off from the city. It is a remote place around 50km from Kolkata, WB, India. Leased line internet connectivity is there in the Institute, but there was a "rumour" that internet connectivity will not be provided in the student's hostel. There is a large number of Ubuntu and Debian GNU/Linux users among the students. Whether the rumour was true or not, I could not have taken any chance. I had a spare 60GB Seagate USB HDD. It was big enough to hold the main, universe, multiverse and restricted packages for Intrepid and the main, contrib and non-free packages for Lenny. In addition to that I also mirrored a few other extra stuffs. We had a about a month to go, before we left for the new campus, so I set out for finishing the job before that. Ofcourse the biggest hurdle was bandwidth. We had a 2Mbit/s ADSL link in ...