Monday 27 September 2004

Apologies for the instability

Sorry that the site is so unreliable at the mo... I'm trying to get the blosxom script called from a mason dhandler so I can post-process the output, but I'm not having much luck at the mo...

The dhandler is working a treat on one of my other sites, but doesn't want to play ball here :(

A quick mini-howto on setting up gpg-agent and mutt

meta-listening: Jack Off Jill — Covet

There aren't many docs around for gpg-agent (due to it only being in the 1.9.x development version of gpg). I managed to get it set up today, so I thought I'd put up a mini-howto.

Installing gpg-agent. First download a 1.9.x version of the GPG sources from the gnupg ftp server . I used 1.9.10, your mileage may vary with other versions.

Install any dependencies. On my Debian Unstable box, all the dependancies were available from the unstable distribution, only gpg-1.9.x itself wasn't available.

The configure script with the 1.9.x distribution includes an option --enable-agent-only, to build the agent without building the other GPG 1.9.x components (i.e. no gpg2 or gpgsm). I did this for minimal impact on my system.

Once made and installed, add code similar to the following to your .xsession, .profile, .bash_profile files, etc.

if test -f $HOME/.gpg-agent-info && \
kill -0 `cut -d: -f2 $HOME/.gpg-agent-info` 2>/dev/null; then
GPG_AGENT_INFO=`cat $HOME/.gpg-agent-info`
export GPG_AGENT_INFO
else
eval `gpg-agent --daemon --pinentry /usr/bin/pinentry-gtk`
echo $GPG_AGENT_INFO >$HOME/.gpg-agent-info
fi
GPG_TTY=`tty`
export GPG_TTY

Update your ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf file to include the use-agent option.

Update your ~/.muttrc to include the following line:

set pgp_use_gpg_agent

And you should be good to go... That's what it took for me, your mileage may vary :)

Using OpenPGP subkeys in Mutt

meta-listening: Anthrax — Antisocial

By default mutt ships with a config suited to most users without enabling too many confusing features. Unfortunately it's not suitable for using multiple openpgp sub-keys for signing messages.

In order to get my mutt do sign using a specific sub-key, I had to set the following in my .muttrc:

set pgp_ignore_subkeys=no
set pgp_sign_command="/usr/bin/gpg --no-verbose --batch --quiet --output - --passphrase-fd 0 --armor --detach-sign --textmode %?a?-u %a!? %f"

Wednesday 22 September 2004

A blosxom plugin to allow links to a kwiki

meta-reading: The Subversion book

I've done away with the writebacks plugin on my blosxom installs, and have instead written a plugin that uses the Kwiki module to insert links to new pages based on the filename of the post.

Needs to be pointed at a basic kwiki config file with the "script_name" and "database_directory" settings defined.

Sunday 19 September 2004

Another day, another website

meta-date: 200409192343

Well I thought I'd pretty much retired this site, and then lo and behold my hosting ran out on ccie.org.uk, so I find this is my primary again.

Working on packaging some modules for CPAN at the mo. Got my PAUSE account, but have buggered up the version numbers on the modules I uploaded. I think I'm getting the hang of subversion now, but I really should have thought things through more before publishing a file to CPAN with a version number taken from the subversion revision number... Version 23 of a module doesn't really look right.

Have now come to the conclusion that having to manually specify the version number when you build the distribution isn't such a bad thing. I'll keep $ Id:$ in my files, but I won't be using it to build version strings automagically any more.

Am making a start on getting my POE Jabber bot ready for publication to CPAN too. Too many hours gone into it to just leave it running in the background on my jabber server. Not that it's really ready for heavy use, but at least if it gets in the index I might have a chance of some feedback ;)