Lance’s Ramblings

As some of you may have noticed, I’ve been a little distanced from Gentoo lately. Between work keeping me busy, and me finding more things to do in my free time, its been harder to be motivated. I think a part of me just needed a break from all the hoopla of Gentoo and step back to get a new look on things. I’ve been continuing to maintain our infrastructure as much as I can to ensure that none of the developers have problems. Gladly, we’ve done a decent job (knock on wood) of keeping most of our services up in the last few months. Its always nice as an administrator to have stuff actually working as aspected for once.

I keep hoping I’ll find time to fit Gentoo into where I work now, but it seems as though I spend more time putting out fires there than finding ways of using the power of Gentoo there. For me, the biggest thing I’d like to be able to use is portage as a solaris package mechanism. We have a homegrown set of scripts that work pretty well, but its not nearly as flexible as portage. I’m glad to see other folks inside of Gentoo working on prefix support (no matter what other un-named people will say about it). I should probably find some free time and play with it some.

Anyways, just thought I’d finally update a few things from the Gentoo side of things!

Well, it has seem like ages since I’ve done anything to my blog. Anyways, I have some excellent news for the folks that like using our viewcvs to access our source. I’m in the final stages of implementing the new viewcvs layout with some of our svn modules included! Most of our developers have already known about the test site, but this is the first chance I’ve been able to make a public ‘announcement’ per say about it.

Please take a look at it and give me any feedback!

Hey all, I know its been a while since I’ve posted to the planet. I’ve been pretty busy lately with a lot of personal stuff going on. The big thing lately is that I accepted a new job at Kansas State University being a UNIX System Administrator for their Enterprise Server Technologies group. I’m really excited about this opportunity of getting to dedicate most of my work on the *nix side of things. I’m also looking forward to moving back to my alma mater! (Go Wildcats!)

Anyways, onto Gentoo related stuff. Lately I’ve been working on totally revamping how our web nodes update and function. We’ve been using cfengine to do most of the hard work, but I’ve found for parts of it, its just not the right tool. So I’ve created a few scripts to be run under cron to make things a bit more predictable. I’m hoping to get this whole process implemented on our nodes in the next few weeks. Of course, that depends on how much time I have between moving and my new job.

One of the areas I’ve been trying to improve is our viewcvs implementation. I noticed the ebuild had been neglected for a while, so I decided to help manage it and make a new 1.0 branch snapshot of it. I also have been working on making the look more like our website and other sites. Take a look at the snapshot!

Please let me know what you think! I’m still working on the css styles and the template, but I like what I see so far

I’m sure most of you all are getting annoyed at most of these recent virus emails (especially if you aren’t able to use clamav or something similar). Thanks to lcars, I’ve got a crude simple procmail rule you can use that will catch most of these.


:0
* ^Content-type: (multipart/mixed|multipart/report)
{
:0 B
*^Content-Disposition: (attachment|inline)
*filename=".*\.(ocx|vbs|wsf|shs|exe|com|bat|chm|pif|vbe|hta|scr|zip)"
{
:0
.viruses/
}
}


If you still want to get those attachments but just axe these viruses, you can probably add another rule that matches the first line of the attachment. This is far from perfect, but its definately gotten my mailbox under control. Infrastructure is considering getting clamav on our dev box, so look for that in the near future. We’ll only be using it if the load on the box isn’t too bad from it.

Cheers!

Recently my boss has wanted to make some more sites for our company. He mainly only knows ASP and didn’t want to spend time learning something new. So I suggested we give Mono a try so we could possibly get our sites away from IIS. (ick, i know). It’s been a rough ride but I finally got most of the pieces working together. I decided to try the newest mono version out there (1.1.6) along with the newest version of mod_mono (1.0.8). I had to do a bump in my overlay for mod_mono but everything seems to be working so far.

The biggest hurdle was making a mysql connector work with the version of mysql we were running (4.1.11). Apparently the built-in connector (ByteFX) doesn’t support anything above 4.0.x. Another hurdle was the fact that the official connector from MySql was based on Windows (though, it was written in .Net). To my surprise, when I unpacked the source zip file, the project had a nant build file in it! After some work, I finally got the darn thing to build so I gave the new connector a try. It worked and there was much rejoicing. Once I clean up the process of building the connector, expect an official mysql connector ebuild for dot-net in the future.

Aside from Mono being spawned from a Microsoft product, I think it has a lot of potential. The biggest complaint I have thus far is their lack of adequate documentation on mod_mono and getting everything working with ASP dot-net. Maybe if I get time I can write a short document on how to get this all working so you don’t have to go through the same headaches as I did.

Hopefully I can finally get my company to using more open source alternatives through using Mono!

Recently, I got around to finally getting cactid into portage for those cacti lovers out there. Its a great alternative to the php based snmp poller with a significant improvement on speed. If you use cacti, please give cacti-cactid a try!


echo "net-anaylyzer/cacti-cactid ~x86" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
emerge cacti-cactid


Let me know if you have any issues.

As you all may or may not know, Gentoo has recently switched from using ezmlm as our mailing list software to something new and different called mlmmj. Its taken us quite a while to doing some extensive testing and debugging of the software to get where we’re at today. I would like to thank Andrea Barisani (lcars) for all the hard work he’s done to make this happen. We’re currently fully on the new system and on new hardware thanks to lcars!

With that being said, a lot of folks (particularly Gentoo developers) keep asking who is in charge of mailing lists now. Just for the record, Andrea (lcars) is now the main person in charge of mailings lists. If you’d like to see some stats that this server is doing, please feel free to check it out. Also, we’ve updated our mailing list page to reflect how you deal with interacting with mlmmj.

Please let Andrea know if you have any suggestions or requests that are related to our mailing lists!

Thanks to Albert Hopkins (marduk) packages.gentoo.org is now on a new server located at OSL. The site should respond faster now because the database is now housed on OSL’s main database server that we use for bugzilla and the forums. In other news (though most people already know), I did get an SSL enabled version of bugzilla going a few days back. It’ll be nice to finally login to a session and not worry about things getting sniffed!

Well, as beejay noted earlier we are very close to releasing 2005.0 to the masses. I can’t wait to try out the stages and livecds! It seems like the releng team has been working extremely hard to make this release the best ever, lets hope it is! I started staging the release last night and will continue today. What this means is that all the data will be on the mirrors, just won’t be viewable to the public until the release date. (So don’t go rushing to your local mirror asking for a copy, just be PATIENT) This helps on the load for mirrors so they aren’t getting hammered because they’re still grabbing our stuff while our users are hammering their system.

In other news I haven’t been able to do much Gentoo work this week because of crazy stuff going on at work. I hope to try out Brian Herring’s mirror-dist script sometime this weekend. I’m also looking forward to possibly offering diff’d portage snapshots as a precursor to diff distfiles.

We needed to reboot serveral of our web servers today for a kernel upgrade and it should have gone smoothly. Instead, it seems like everything was going wrong. The first box didn’t come back because apparently the kernel decided to switch the ethernet interfaces again (even though I had set something to prevent that!). After that, it looked like we were having problems connecting to the database server. It appears the config file for networking was incorrect and a route had been entered incorrectly. The fun didn’t stop there … we then noticed that some of the ifconfig settings weren’t exactly correct, so we had to work around that. To make things more fun, there’s apparently a bug with stunnel to where it won’t restart correctly. I’ll have to find the time and make a bug and possibly troubleshoot the problem myself. Kudos to Corey Shields for making several trips to the machine room to make things work.

I apologize for the extended downtimes you may have encountered for bugs and forums. These things just happen sometimes! Anyways, I look forward to the weekend coming up and possibly nailing down some more infra bugs and issues.