Raskas’ blog

A new version (v0.6) is now available for download and can be found in the scripts section of my blog (link is at the top of every page).

Besides the dumping of a ldap, mysql and postgresql database and creating a dump of the rpm-package list and the partition table, it is now possible to dump all ownerships and permissions of all files.

This is done by an external script: allrights.pl. More information of this script can be found here.

There are also some minor improvements in the script: The db_dump directory is automatically created and the temporary directory is moved to /tmp and is deleted at the end of the script.

Any comments, remarks, feature-request, success-stories, … are welcome. I appreciate every feedback.

In my last post I listed my WordPress plugins. Now I will give you an overview of the firefox plugins I’m currently using.

Nagios Checker will show you the status of your nagios instance(s). It will flash and/or make some noice when a service of host changes it’s state.
AdBlock Plus will block all the annoying banners. I noticed it really improved the loading speed of some pages.
SwitchProxy makes it able to easily switch the proxy configuration without going to the preferences screen.

Some time ago Anders Holte Nielsen announced that he would stop developping counterize. He suggested to use Firestats, which is an other wordpress plugin, launched out of Counterize.

I installed and tested Firestats. It has some nice features but also some downsides, it’s missing graphs. It’s all text, text, text with a nice ajax layout. I’m not happy enough to completely move to Firestats, at the moment I’m still using both Counterize and Firestats.

A couple of weeks after the previous mentioned post Anders Holte posted already 2 patches submitted by some Counterize-lovers. This showed that counterize wasn’t ready to die. And indeed Counterize II was born. It moved from Denmark to Germany in the hands of Steffen Forkmann.
I updated my old Counterize version to version 2.0.3 and noticed that there were already some added features.
Counterize shows some graphs but imho it shows the wrong information. I don’t want to know how many people visited my site on the 5th of every month. I want to see how many visitors have visisted yesterday, the day before,… This way I can see if the number of visitors is increasing or decreasing. The graph showing only this months hits is a good thing, it would even be better if it was showing the last 30 days.

Keep up the good work, Steffen!

Meanwhile I activated Akismet (an anti-spam plugin). It will check every posted comment with the central database. You need to register to wordpress.com to receive an API-key, but it is worth the effort.
I also installed DB-Manager which allows you to manage the wordpress database from inside the controll panel. You can backup the database, drop some tables, optimize all tables or execute any query and many more.

For a special task I needed to run a perl script on a specific machine, the problem was… there is no perl on that system.
This can be easily solved with the compilation of the perl script.

Fred tested the perl compilation with perlcc together with me. He has summarized the results in his “perl binary”-blog post. At the end he added the pp (Perl Packager) which also compiles perl scripts.

I tested this and at the first sight it worked fine, but at second sight some strange things happened.

The binary I created on my machine (Fedora Core 6) worked fine on my machine but gave a “Floating point exception” on any other machine. When I tested it on an other FC 6 it worked without any problems.
When the binary is created on an other machine it worked on all machines, including mine. I repeated this test with different machines (CentOs, Debian, Suse) and those worked fine. They also worked on the system without perl.

When comparing the binaries compiled on the different system I noticed that libresolv.so.2 shows up in the output of “ldd” only with the FC6 binaries.
When creating a chart of all systems with the check result, I added the glibc version of the system. It appeared that the version differs on the systems. On FC it was a newer version (2.5) then the other hosts (2.3).

I added glibc in my search query on google and I found following warnings on cpan.org:

Linux and other libc-based platforms
* Try to avoid running pp on a bleeding-edge version of the OS
* Older versions with an earlier libc won't work with new ones

This means that perl compilation with pp with the bleading edge version of glibc (2.5) may not work on other systems. If you compile it on a system with a more stable version of glibc, it will work on all systems. (or at least on the systems with the same glibc).

A Mediawiki has it’s own authentication, the users and all user information is stored in the database. Our current infrastructure has our users stored in a central ldap database and the authentication happens by apache’s Basic Auth.

This means that when a user tries to access the wiki for the first time he has to authenticate to the apache, then he needs to create an account on the mediawiki and he has to login on the mediawiki. The other times he still has to login 2 times.

These 2 things (mediawiki registration and authentication) can go automatically, you only need to edit 1 file and add 1 file.
read more »

I updated my dump script.

2 features are added:
* dump a package list of the rpm database (command: rpm -qa)
* dump the partition table (command: sfdisk -d)

The different dump-commands are now placed in a “if” structure, this means you can define at the top if you want to run that specific dump or not. The next thing I will change is to let the script decide you can dump something or not. So if the specific dump command exists it will run it otherwise it will just skip that dump-section.

You can find the dump script here. More Information about the dumping of the partition table can be found on MDLog:/sysadmin.

After several delays, Fedora Core 6 is released and can be downloaded from the redhat downloadpage. I expect the mirrors will be opened within several minutes.

btw: it’s now 20 minutes before the official release which is planned at 14:00 GMT

These screenshots confirm that it is possible to have aiglx on your FC6 box.
I won’t be available by a default install, but with installing some extra packages and changing some config it should work. I guess in a couple of months there will be some howto’s to get those effects working. (Maybe I even post some guidelines to get it working).

On this page all FC6 graphics are gathered (and you can download them in several formats). In another directory of the same users webspace you can find the graphics for RHEL5 which will be released in a couple of months.

Fedora Core 6 will be released in 2 weeks (11 october). I wanted to see what the new FC has to offer. The Fedora Core 6 Tour and the Fedora Core 6 Release Summary give some information about the upcoming FC release.

The video and slideshow on the Fedora Core 6 Tour page showed mainly the installation process, which hasn’t changed much. But I noticed they added, at least, 2 features. The first one is the ability to choose where you want to install from (cd, http, …), the other feature will let you add repositories during the installation.
I saw the first one somewhere on the video, but can’t find it anymore.

Watching the screenshots and video’s showed the new grub-bootscreen, login-screen and default background. It is now mainly black (a bit too dark, but that’s only my opinion) with the fedora logo on the right side. This time the logo is caught in a DNA string.

The performance of the package installation is improved and they added an applet which notifies you when new updates are available (This was already available in Ubuntu, it’s nice to have it now in FC).
The imap support in evolution is improved, maybe it’s time to take another look at evolution… if they also improved the calendering part.
They say something about AIGLX framework and compriz and Xorg7.1. I, at least, hope my laptop-screen can be shown on a beamer without any problems and can use dual head. I also hope the wobbly effect will be possible, but with the current specification I don’t know if it will be possible with a standard install.

The Virtual Machine Manager is also in the list of new packages. This seems a very nice tool to maintain Xen images. With this tool it is possible to install a virtual machine from a cd, it is also possible to whatch the screen through an embedded vnc-client. In the overview of you virtual machines you can see the resources used for every instance.

This is only a limited list of new features in Fedora. There are more items listed on the fedora wiki and I guess even that list won’t be complete. We just have to wait and see what has changed.

Kris has posted his top 10 here is mine…

[johan@raskas ~]$ history|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}uniq -c|sort -rn|head -10
    248 ls
    189 cd
     88 cvs
     71 rm
     55 ssh
     54 ll
     41 vi
     30 host
     27 cp
     24 scp

All basic commands nothing special. But my ‘ls’ habit shows up.
Every time I open a console I type ‘ls’ sometimes multiple times, or if I don’t know what I was doing I just type ‘ls’.
But it seems I’m not the only one with that habit.

Now for the root-user

[root@raskas ~]# history|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn|head -10
    227 ls
    209 cd
     96 vi
     66 ll
     49 minicom
     37 /etc/init.d/network
     21 exit
     20 cat
     17 yum
     17 scp

Here are 2 “strange” things.
The first is the minicom, I don’t really use it much. But when you have the only laptop with a serial connector at the office …. (I guess this is from a couple of weeks ago when there where some cisco-switch-problems)
The /etc/init.d/network stuff is obvious… when I leave the office I suspend my laptop, I resume at home within an other network so a restart of the network is required.