Crossed Wires

Vic’s Blog

Archive for March, 2008

SLES, you make it so hard to like you

Mar 15

Posted by Vic in Linux, Soapbox | No Comments

Just wended my way through another SLES 10 install on s390x. It’s b0rked though, and I’ll probably have to redo it. I had some kind of I/O error during the install which seems to have resulted in a couple of the filesystems being remounted read-only. Not too much trouble you’d think…

Some things aren’t starting because of missing binaries in /usr, frustrating but probably recoverable. The network startup is totally clagged though, and I can’t even begin to work out how what happened… happened.

During bootup, at the time it tries to configure the network interface, I get streams of error messages about problems running the “ip” command. The error text is full of garbage that the init script is trying to parse as text configuration–it looks like a corrupted filesystem or a binary file.

I manually configured the network (not a trivial task in s390x, it must be said), and started to poke around. I got this when I logged in as root:

Last login: Sat Mar 15 12:48:36 2008
/usr/X11R6/bin/xauth: error while loading shared libraries: libXau.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
-bash: read: read error: 0: Is a directory
lxs0za01:~ #

Okay, so I won’t get funky X-based YaST.  No problem, I’ve spent more time in the ncurses-mode YaST anyway…

lxs0za01:~ # yast
warning: the ncurses frontend is installed but does not work
You need to install yast2-ncurses to use the YaST2 text mode interface
lxs0za01:~ #

WHAT!!! What the @#!$ happened there?!?!?

Okay, so I’ve calmed down about that, so I go looking for the problem with the network initialisation…

lxs0za01:~ # cd /etc/sysconfig/network
lxs0za01:/etc/sysconfig/network # ls -go ifcfg*
-rw-r–r– 1   141 2006-06-17 07:30 ifcfg-lo
lrwxrwxrwx 1    16 2008-03-15 02:23 ifcfg-qeth-bus-ccw-0.0.0f00 -> /lib64/ld-2.4.so
-rw-r–r– 1 27470 2006-06-17 07:30 ifcfg.template
lxs0za01:/etc/sysconfig/network #

Priceless. You can’t make this stuff up. I cannot for the life of me work out how this could possibly have happened. I guess I just blame it on a whacked-out filesystem and move along.

Okay, so both of these issues probably have extenuating circumstances unrelated to SLES or YaST… but it’s nice to have a vent now and then. I’ll write up something a bit fairer once I fix this b0rkedness. :)

Are we letting Microsoft define our industry?

Mar 10

Posted by Vic in Operating Systems, Soapbox | No Comments

I’ve been trying to solve a problem at work for a few weeks now — one of those tricky “it’s only software so it shouldn’t be this hard” sort-of problems for which you know the solution is just a matter of putting the right bits and pieces together. At work, I’m more-or-less forced into using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (the distro formerly known as RHEL), and one of the pieces I’m looking at is OpenLDAP.

My first stage in the process was to get OpenLDAP set up with the right config — but when I started it, slapd complained about an error in slapd.conf. The overlay I was trying to use, it claimed, was not found. I spent the next couple of hours trying to find additional packages, trying different things, reading doco, searching Google, to no avail. The overlay I want is missing from Red Hat’s build of OpenLDAP.

So “boo hoo”, you say, “just build from source”. Well, remember how I said I was forced into RHEL? The corollary to that is that I am only allowed to use exactly what the Shadowman ships on the DVD. No build-from-source, no other OSS, is allowed.

But what does any of this have to do with Microsoft?

In my research, I found the release notes for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. In it was the following text (highlighting mine):

OpenLDAP Server and Red Hat Directory Server
Red Hat Directory Server is an LDAP-based server that centralizes enterprise and network data into an OS-independent, network-based registry. It is set to replace OpenLDAP server components, which will be deprecated after Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. For more information about Red Hat Directory Server, refer to http://www.redhat.com/software/rha/directory/.

You guessed it: Red Hat Directory Server is a pay-for product. So Red Hat’s setting a direction here: server platforms comprising only the base OS, and additional function provided through extra-cost modules — now where have we seen this before?

Does this now mean that on RHEL-next, in order to run a Samba server with an LDAP IDMAP backend, companies will have to pay for RDS? That won’t fly at my work: “we already have a corporate directory, we’re not paying for another” will the customer sayeth.

“Okay”, you say, “so don’t use Red Hat”. As far as I’m allowed (this is at my employer remember) the only other choice is SLES… from Novell… that organisation that felt the need to cross-licence with Microsoft to “protect” against undisclosed and unproven patent infringement.

(Note that this post is not about Novell-Microsoft, nor is their deal a reason not to use SLES in my opinion. The thought only popped into my head because I was already thinking about Microsoft as a result of the Red Hat thing with RDS.)

So it seems like the two biggest names in corporate Linux are marching to Microsoft’s drum. Have I misread something? Am I overreacting?

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New job

Mar 10

Posted by Vic in Work | No Comments

Well it’s official now — or at least, my current boss announced it to the team, so that more-or-less makes it official. :) I will be starting a new job in about a month’s time — still at the same shop, but no longer in Services. I’ll be with the team that does technical pre-sales in the System z arena.  Lots of talking with customers, lots of designing and building and planning, a bit of travel, and lots of nerves to start with as I get used to a totally different work mindset. I’m looking forward to it!

The events leading up to it becoming official were what led to the first installment of the Fractured Fable. Now that the issues have been resolved, the mood has changed so it’ll be tough to maintain the energy for Part Two. :)

Thinking of a Gentoo desktop

Mar 3

Posted by Vic in Linux | No Comments

I know I’m going to cop a beating on the Planet for this post, but here goes…
For a long time I ran a desktop system built on Gentoo Linux. A while back I tried Ubuntu, and I’ve been running that as my desktop ever since. Every now and then, though, I feel an inclination to pop back to Gentoo — usually it will be because of some package I want to be able to install, or later versions of packages that don’t make it into the usual binary-distro world without introducing “dependency hell” (I’m having this problem at work, with a distro based on RHEL 5.1 and hardware that’s just too new for it… Even if I wanted to build drivers from source, the libraries the drivers link against are too old as supplied, meaning I’d have to rebuild the libraries too, which probably means something else will be too old…).

I run Gentoo on both my “servers” at home. At the time I got my dual-Opteron, Gentoo was the only “free” distro around that had a x86_64 version ready to roll. When it came time to build my phone-and-TV server, it got Gentoo as well because it was the only way I could get the right combination of all the versions of code (Apache, PHP, Asterisk, MySQL, MythTV, ccxstream, etc) that I needed and have them all maintained in the distribution’s package management system (Debian has no ccxstream package, for instance). I don’t run Gentoo because I’m a ricer. Portage has the right package mix for me, and its ability to control the configuration of packages through USE flags gives me an opportunity to control the options that are enabled in the packages I install.

I have blogged previously about some hardware I bought that I haven’t been able to put to good use. I decided to give it another try by building a Gentoo system on it, because an ebuild for the bleeding-edge ATI driver that is supposed to support the graphics chipset in this clunker is in Portage.

Let me say, it’s been a while since I built a Gentoo system from scratch. You don’t even do it truly from scratch anymore either — the days of starting with a stage-1 tarball are over apparently, and stage-3 is always the way to go. Even so, this system took a whole weekend to get to the stage where I could log on and get a KDE desktop (to be fair though, there was a lot of kicking off an emerge, coming back to it a couple of hours later to find it had died ten minutes in, fixing the issue and restarting… so it wasn’t 48 hours solid time spent).

Unfortunately the ATI driver still doesn’t support XVideo on this chipset, so I still can’t use this board for its intended use as a MythTV frontend (I do have an old PCI nVidia 5200 card that, even though it’s at least three years old, I’m sure will run rings around this stinking ATI 1250). So the point of the whole exercise was, unfortunately, lost. But I did get a refresher in the amount of effort a Gentoo build would take.

After that weekend’s effort, I was a bit put off by the thought of building up an entire desktop system from scratch. When I thought about it though, my concerns were for nothing. The compiling? The kind of systems I’m building on (modern dual-core chips) will chew through compiling most software in a snap — heck, for simple packages I can install on a Gentoo system quicker than yumex can initialise its repositories. I’ve got running systems I can use as a model to get USE flags right, and my NFS-shared Portage tree means that I sync once and use everywhere (even downloading source packages happens only once).

Plus, now, I know Gentoo. Sure, APT on a Debian-based distro is nice, but I still am lost when it comes to the right dpkg command to locate what package provides a certain file, for instance. I get frustrated when something fails to build on Gentoo because some other package wasn’t built with the right USE flag, but I know how to fix that, and its fixed in a flash. Likewise for rebuilding some system library that causes a bunch of other packages to fail without warning, and likewise for the strange b0rkedness that happens in Portage sometimes when packages change versions (gnupg is a recent example). I know how to fix Gentoo when it breaks — I can’t say that with much confidence for other distros.

Some might say “use a distro that doesn’t break in the first place”, which is a fair comment. But if I have to choose between an occasional hiccup and missing functionality, then hand me the Eno (Pepto-Bismol, Tums, etc)… ;)

Which brings me to my dilemma — apart from the fact that I have crappy unaccelerated non-video graphics and I haven’t been able to run Compiz for ages (a problem that Gentoo wouldn’t solve for me anyway), Ubuntu isn’t really broken for me. There’s not a compelling reason for me to throw Gutsy out, and with Hardy around the corner there’s even less reason to switch right now.

So, I’ll wait. And watch. Having to work on more Red Hat systems at work is reacquainting me with their particular mojo, perhaps even enough to try Fedora. Also, I’ve just scraped together some parts to make an openSUSE 10.3 build for something work-related so I’ll catch up with things there (since I haven’t really seen a SUSE system as a desktop since SuSE Linux 7).

I love this about Linux — freedom to choose!

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Happy Birthday Nicholas!

Mar 3

Posted by Vic in Family | No Comments

Our not-so-little guy turned four today! He had a McDonalds party on Saturday, with a few of his best mates from day-care in attendance. Today he took a cake to day-care for everyone to share (and he had great fun taking it around the playground to show everyone when he arrived!). The only low point was when we popped in to the doctor for his immunisations — but he was so brave! Not a tear, not even for the second of two needles! We eased whatever grief there may have been with a trip to the pizza shop for dinner. Best wishes little man, and lots of love from Mum and me!

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