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 
<a href="http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer">Debian Installer</a>
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 <a href="http://www.apc.com/">APC</a> 
Masterswitch remotely-controllable power switch, a 
<a href="http://www.cyclades.com/">Cyclades</a> 
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 
<a href="http://www.conserver.com/">conserver</a> 
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...

[[!tag tags/debian]]