Arrfab's blog Some tips and tricks, mostly around CentOS

I was searching on eBay for a Mac G4 (G5 is definitively better but more expensive .. except if you want to make me a donation .. ;-) ) because i wanted to play a little bit with Linux on the PowerPC archictecture. Surely because CentOS 5.1 ppc is in the pipeline (when 5.1 i386 and x86_64 will be released of course ...) and that i want to be able to test it .. and surely also because i have from time to time to setup RHEL on bigger IBM ppc64 based machines (aka IBM system I) . In the meantime i decided to setup Fedora Core 6 PPC (yes, i had a ppc tree on one of my disks ....) on a G4 400Mghz with 512Mb . Everything ran smoothly .. until the machine had to reboot .. and then nothing ...  I was almost sure that i had added a Applebootstrap partition during the anaconda setup ... but nothing.

I forget to say that i was installing on another (and bigger) ide drive than the one originally in the machine. And that was my (stupid) problem. I had of course first to boot in rescue mode, use parted to put a mac label on the drive (it had the …

I had recently to support remotely a customer using a Juniper/Netscreen SSL gateway as a vpn solution. Normally you point your browser to a https:// website , sign in and then a java applet should start and modify your routing table automatically passing all the traffic through a tun device in ssl mode ..

I was surprised that the Juniper Network Connect applet detected my OS as being Linux (i feared that a M\$ machine was needed to connect ...) and it launched a xterm box asking my root password to setup the Network Connect client. It installed the java jar archives in a \~/.juniper_networks/network_connect folder but nothing happened after that ... I should receive a pop-up window starting the connection itself but nothing.

After analyzing the .sh scripts inside of the /.juniper_networks/network_connect/ folder and searching with strace, java -jar NC.jar , i saw a executable file : ncdiag. okay, surely a missing lib : ldd ./ncdiag pointed me directly to the missing libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3 .. so really easy to troubleshoot with `yum provides` .. (why do still a lot of packages rely on older libraries ? ...)

Then the java applet opened .. but i received a nice 'Unable to load library libncui.so' …

I had to update some customers' machines running official RHEL5 to RHEL5.1 ... i've just discovered that the reposync tool (included in the yum-utils package) is now included (CentOS had it already included even for the 4.x branch ...).

That means that with just reposync and createrepo (also available by default on rhel5) you can create very quickly an internal 'updates' repo without having to use :

• either the RedHat solution to have a commercial version of rhn/proxy satellite inside of your network

• either use mrepo  (even if mrepo can do more things that reposync ...)

Now the underlying question for the CentOS team will be : 'which version will we ship in extras : our previously rpm packaged version or the one released upstream ?' ...

Can you smell the newer CentOS 5.1 cooking ?

I do : some of us are busy right now trying freshly rebuilt srpms that will be integrated in CentOS 5.1 ... Some new features announced Upstream seem interesting : to name a few : newer libvirt and xen packages (updated to 3.1.0) , cifs module updated to correct a known bug , some new added drivers (like the Areca ones) , and also the newly added iscsi-target feature (i'll test it as soon as it will be available for QA members ....).

The newer kernel corrects also a number of bugs, notably the vga= parameter that was not working anymore (why did they remove vesa_fb ?)

List is too long .. and no ETA yet for CentOS 5.1 ... but that won't be too long i hope ;-)

A recent article on Slashdot (is CentOS hurting Red Hat ?) forced some people to explain their opinion on/about CentOS ... Here is a good link from a Red Hat employee .

And yes, i personnaly like Red Hat, that's the main reason i switched to CentOS for my own machines/servers .. but i continue to install RHEL for customers wanting support ... and CentOS for the others ...

I had some time to spend on testing newer NX/FreeNX packages for CentOS before they got released and also doing some tests/builds on the eid-belgium package newer version 2.6.0. It's now working and it will appear in RPMForge as soon as i can submit the modified spec upstream ... In the meantime you can download/test from here for the i386 version . Now a patch allows the package to be installed without the pcsc-lite-devel package ...

I had to install the eid-belgium package that we prepared with Dag and that was working on previously on el4 but now on el5 ... not working out-of-the-box .. Then i saw that a newer version (2.6.0) was available ... But the patches previously working are not working anymore .. i really like when developers hard-code value in the sources , like for example /usr/local/lib .. :-(

I'm currently modifying the spec file and will post the result when a clean spec file will be usable ...

Okay, this isn't very technical ... but i've just found this old picture i tooked at the company i'm working for when we had a meeting with Dag Wieers just before the Fosdem 2007 event ...

When we scheduled that meeting with Dag, i didn't know which other company should visit us (the company i mean, not Dag an myself ... ;-) ) ... i let you guess the name of the other company, and their faces when they saw the 'welcome screen' when entering the building ... ;-)

After googled at bit, i've found that newer libgpod (svn version only !) can support newer iPods. I've so rebuild it (as well as gtkpod itself) and packages are now sitting in my testing repository (only for i386 at this time, x86_64 will follow)
Attention, you'll have to remove first the libgpod package (if already installed) with `yum remove libgpod` (it will also remove rhythmbox !) and then you can install gtkpod and libgpod (svn version)

You have to know also that to correctly write informations in the iTunes DB file sitting on the iPod, gtkpod needs to know the 'FireWire id' of your iPod. You can easily discover it with `sudo lsusb -v|grep -i serial` . Write the 16 character long string down on the iPod so that gtkpod knows it for a correct synchronisation. For example , mine is 000A27001A484CF8 so i created the following file /media/ARRFAB\
IPOD/iPod_Control/Device/SysInfo (Arrfab Ipod being my iPod's name in case you were wondering ... ) with the content being : `FirewireGuid: 0x000A27001A484CF8` (notice the 0x in front of the 16 characters string) .

Now you can fire up gtkpod and upload music to your iPod .... Enjoy

I'll try to put it in the clean repo …

* the good (news) : i've received as a gift a iPod Nano 4gb (latest generation) ... normally receiving a gift can be considered as a good news ...

* the bad : latest firmware of the iPod (on latest generation) is not compatible with standard linux tools available for CentOS 5 ...

* the ugly : i've rebuilt newer versions of all the opensource software that can normally handle the iPod database (gtkpod, banshee) but unfortunately, none of these tools can already manage it . Plus the fact that some of these tools requires newer libs than those available in CentOs 5 [base] ...
Who said that receiving a gift is always good ? it's a shame that i needed to find a XP machine so that i could upload music on my iPod ... I'll wait for Fedora 8 to be released on which i'll update/overwrite banshee and all other tools until i'll be able to enjoy this gift ...
Thinking of the day : 'welcome to a free world' ...