I tried changing the perms on the content (via the gui as well as via attrib.exe), but the non-admin user still wasn't able to write.

It turned out that the issue was file ownership. I'm not too sure what the patchlevel of the XP system was, but a right click -> properties menu didn't bring up any tab where I could see or change file ownership.

The solution: download and install Cygwin, and then a simple "chown -R <NonAdminUser> /cygdrive/<driveletter>/*".

Reinforces my opinion that one really *needs* cygwin to make Windows usable!

when logging in via ssh, the ssh daemon checks some files in ~/,
so it can be done if the user already have a valid home directory.

The real reason why it doesn't successfully authenticate is because ssh does a getpwent() call to check if the user exists on the system. If you're using just a PAM solution (which doesn't provide accounts), that call fails if there isn't any such local user. sshd then sets the password to '^H ^M INCORRECT' before passing it to PAM, which obviously thinks it's the wrong password. The simple (and probably unscalable - but then you should be using something like nss_mysql) solution is to add local accounts to the machines for these users. That will make the getpwent() call succeed, and sshd will authenticate successfully via PAM.

I've mentioned this earlier.

gera@gera-laptop:~$ wtf is 3whs
Gee...  I don't know what 3whs means...
gera@gera-laptop:~$ wtf -t comp is 3whs
3WHS: three-way handshake

• looks for the term in the default wtf list
• if that doesn't work, looks for it in the comp list
• failing that, gets the wikipedia page for that term
• failing even that, launches a Google search for the term in a browser

gera@gera-laptop:~$ whatthefuck perl
perl: perl (1) - Practical Extraction and Report Language
gera@gera-laptop:~$ whatthefuck is perl
perl: perl (1) - Practical Extraction and Report Language

gera@gera-laptop:~$ alias wtf=`which whatthefuck`
gera@gera-laptop:~$ wtf is perl
perl: perl (1) - Practical Extraction and Report Language

• A wiki
• VPN
• A bug/issue tracker

• Apache doesn't like empty realms. This can be worked around by switching to Basic authentication where passwords are passed on to PAM and we ignore realm. Yes, Basic is worse, but there's always SSL. Thus, one can supply _any_ value of realm (the AuthName in .htaccess). The situation might improve if my pam_sql patch accepts realms and we manage to modify the Trac AuthManager plugin to use the same realm.
• SSH doesn't like to authenticate users which don't have an account on the machine. It does a getpwent() call, and if it fails, it sets the password to '^H ^M INCORRECT' (the ^H and ^M represent the control chars here, but this is what you see in your logs if you debug PAM). One (ugly, in my opinion) way out is to LD_PRELOAD your own getpwent() method for sshd. The other is to grant ssh access to people on a machine by machine basis. This doesn't scale beyond a point but is good enough for small setups and the most secure. We use this. The cleaner solution of course, is to use something like nss_mysql. This might be our next step, but not in the immediate future.

LOCATION=`grep -m 1 '-' /var/run/network/ifstate | awk -F '-' '{ print $2 }'`
t ls @$LOCATION

There's always SCMBug, but you can cook your own Git-Bugzilla integration very easily. SCMBug's fine, but it's a lot of code if all you want is simple cross-linking between Git, Bugzilla and Trac (btw - GitPlugin for Trac would throw up an error unless you have at least *two* commits in your repository - talk about undocumented easter bugs!).

Anyhoo - here's what I want :
1. Git should disallow any commit where the commit message does not have a bug number.
2. Git should add a comment to the corresponding bug on a commit, mentioning the author, the Trac changeset link, the commit message and the list of files which changed.

And here's the code to do it. First, the post-receive hook :

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

# A hook script which integrates with bugzilla. It looks for bug IDs in
# commit messages and adds the commit message as well as a link to the
# changeset as a comment on the bug.

# This program is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License
# version 2. A copy of the license may be obtained by emailing the author,
# or at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt
#
# The absolute lack of warranty and other disclaimers as per the license
# apply.
#
# Copyright 2008, Devendra Gera. All rights reserved.
#
# Author : Devendra Gera 

### user configurable section

# The bugzilla has contains the server, username and password for the targeted
# bugzilla installation. There's NO 'http://' in the server line.
my $bugzilla = {
        server          => "10.147.251.90/bugzilla",
        user            => "demonuser",
        password        => "daemonuserspassword",
};

# __PATH__ and __REVISION__ are replaced in $browser->{changeset} and
# $browser->{revision} to get the changeset and revision URLs respectively. 
my $browser = {
        changeset       =>
        "http://10.147.251.90/projname/changeset/__REVISION__",
        revision        =>
        "http://10.147.251.90/projname/browser/__PATH__?rev=__REVISION__",
};

# The bug_regex should extract the bug id from the commit message and place
# it in $1
my $bug_regex = 'bug #(\d+)';


##### End user configurable section

use WWW::Bugzilla;

my $input = <>;
chomp $input;

my ($oldrev, $newrev, $refname) = split /\s+/, $input;
my $commit_msg = `git-whatchanged $oldrev..$newrev`;

# prepare the changeset URL
my $changeset_url = $browser->{ changeset };
$changeset_url =~ s/__REVISION__/$newrev/g;

# author
my ($author) = ( $commit_msg =~ /^Author:\s+(.*)$/m );

# files
my @filelist = grep ( /^:/, split( /\n/, $commit_msg ) );

# prepare comment
$commit_msg =~ s/^.*?Date://s;  # eat everything till the Date: heder
$commit_msg =~ s/^.*?\n//m;     # eat the date line completely
$commit_msg =~ s/^:.*?$//mg;    # eat the file list from the msg.
chomp $commit_msg;
my ($bug_number) = ( $commit_msg =~ /$bug_regex/ );

my $comment = <<END_COMMENT;

------------------------------------
changeset $newrev [ $changeset_url ]
    by $author :

$commit_msg
------------------------------------

Files changed :
END_COMMENT

$comment .= join("", @filelist) . "\n";

my $bz = WWW::Bugzilla->new(
        server          => $bugzilla->{ server },
        email           => $bugzilla->{ user },
        password        => $bugzilla->{ password },
        bug_number      => $bug_number
);

die "cannot connect to bugzilla" unless defined $bz;

$bz->additional_comments( $comment );

$bz->commit;

And here's the update hook :

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $refname = shift;
my $oldrev = shift;
my $newrev = shift;

my $commit_msg = `git-whatchanged $oldrev..$newrev`;

# check if the commit message contains a bug number
if($commit_msg !~ /bug #\d+/) {
        exit -1;
}

exit 0;

The TODO :
1. Push every configurable thing to git's config file and access it via git-config.
2. Code cleanups. One definition of the bug regex (which is hardcoded in the update for now).

edit : the here doc in the code was causing a problem with formatting, eating up some of the code. Fixed now.

@@ -614,6 +614,7 @@
     my $mech = $self->{mech};
 
     if ($self->{bug_number}) {
+        $mech->form_name( "changeform" );
         foreach my $field ( keys %update_field_map ) {
             $mech->field( $update_field_map{$field}, $self->{$field} ) if defined($self->{$field});
             # handle special cases

First, there's the /etc/network/interfaces file :

# we always want the loopback
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# mappings
mapping eth0
  script /etc/network/map-scheme
  map dhcp eth0-dhcp
  map emergency eth0-emergency

mapping ath0
  script /etc/network/map-scheme
  map office ath0-office
  map home ath0-home

iface eth0-dhcp inet dhcp
  up iptables -F
  up lokkit -n -q --high --dhcp
  up /etc/init.d/lokkit restart

iface ath0-office inet dhcp
  wpa-driver madwifi
  wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/office.conf
  up iptables -F
  up lokkit -n -q --high --dhcp
  up /etc/init.d/lokkit restart

iface eth0-emergency inet static
  address 10.9.5.201
  gateway 10.9.4.1
  netmask 255.255.254.0
  up iptables -F
  up lokkit -q --high
  up echo nameserver 172.31.6.5 > /etc/resolv.conf
  up echo nameserver 203.197.12.30 >> /etc/resolv.conf

iface ath0-home inet dhcp
  wpa-driver madwifi
  wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/home.conf
  up iptables -F
  up lokkit -n -q --high --dhcp
  up /etc/init.d/lokkit restart

Notice the mappings section (and see 'man interfaces') - that allows me to say :

NETSCHEME="home" sudo ifup ath0

or

NETSCHEME="office" sudo ifup ath0

because the specified script (/etc/network/map-scheme) just looks up the NETSCHEME environment variable and spit out the correct mapping to go to. This thing, by the way, could be rigged to do arbitrarily complex tasks (look in /usr/share/doc/ifupdown/examples/ for sample scripts, including one which tries to ping some known IPs, and decides its location/profile based on successful pings - you could write one which looks for all known wireless SSIDs and then decide which profile to switch to). Here's my trivial script :

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $scheme = $ENV{NETSCHEME} || "home";

while(<>) {
        if ( s/$scheme\s+// ) {
                print;
        }
}

The conf files in /etc/wpa_supplicant/* are of course wpa_supplicant configuration files. See 'man wpa_supplicant.conf' for details.