In between keeping things going at work and hanging out more than usual with my kids (who are off from school on spring break), I've been trying to help out around the edges with Debian Installer this week. Probably the most significant thing I've done is to provide access to one of my hppa systems so that nightly builds of d-i for hppa can happen. However, trying to help out has finally gotten me to organize "my other rack" in a way that testing stuff like this will be easier in the future.

What I've done is to set up a modest test server with a private subnet behind it. The private subnet now has an APC Masterswitch remotely-controllable power switch, a Cyclades 16-port serial server, and a growing set of target systems representing different Debian architectures. The server provides DHCP and TFTP support for network booting the various target systems, my evolving conserver configuration makes it possible to access serial consoles on each target system, and the Masterswitch makes it possible to power cycle the target systems remotely. There's a bit of security work yet to do before I allow anyone else to play, but my intent is to allow other folks working on debian-installer to also have access to this lashup for remote testing of some of the less-readily-available system architectures...

My only gripe is that conserver is in non-free. I'm not entirely sure why, though, since the licensing appears at first glance to be a mixture of BSD-like with and without advertising clauses. Time to email the maintainer and ask...