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

Hi folks .. just to confirm that some members of the CentOS crew will be present for the next Fosdem event in Belgium. We'll (as usual) have a dedicated booth and share the DevRoom with our friends of Fedora. If you want to come and talk, feel free to drop at the booth and/or attend one of the presentations. If you want to participate (at the booth and/or Devroom) feel free to add your name to the list on the CentOS Wiki : http://wiki.centos.org/Events/Fosdem2009. More details on that wiki page in the following weeks.

I just discovered a small "homepage uptime benchmark" done by Pingdom. They compared Corporate Linux and Community Linux distros homepage uptime versus Apple and Microsoft .. what are the results ?

More informations on their analysis page

I was interested in testing Spacewalk on CentOS 5.2 .. in fact it was on my (already too long) TODO list . So i followed the instructions from the Spacewalk Wiki but it failed during the yum process : "Public key for asm-1.5.3-1jpp.ep1.1.el5.2.noarch.rpm is not installed"

Hmm, i imported both EPEL and Spacewalk rpm signing keys so i had a look on the key used to sign that package : "asm-1.5.3-1jpp.ep1.1.el5.2.noarch.rpm: (SHA1) DSA sha1 md5 (GPG) NOT OK (MISSING KEYS: GPG#37017186)"

Hey, that's the Red Hat security team signing key ! Why was it used to sign a package in the Spacewalk repo ? I guess that it's imported by default on RHEL5 but you have of course to import it (and first verify it of course) : see the key 37017186 on the http://www.redhat.com/security/team/key/

And now the fun begins .. ;-)

I blogged some time ago about getting CentOS 5.1 installed on a dedicated server at Hetzner . Because the r8168 nic was not recognized, you had to remotely setup the box from another linux distro and with some preparation (including preparing a driver disk , etc ..)

I still receive questions about that from people not aware that actually CentOS 5.2 default kernel has the r8169 kmod that works on such chipset (have a look at the CentOS wiki page dedicated to that thread)  . And the other good news is that you don't need to setup first another small distro on the server prior to run the CentOS setup ... Indeed Hetzner has now CentOS 5.2 in their supported distro list .. cool

So don't ask me how to do it now : it's now working Out-Of-The-Box [TM]  :D

... but not packaged yet ! .. reason is simple. If you don't live in

Belgium you're probably not interested in this post .. but for people

like me it is : i was looking at the official belgium federal government

page about the belgium eidmiddleware and i

saw that a newer version was available . Great . We worked with

Dag to package the previous version (we had to

patch it but

that's another story) and provide it as an rpm for EL4/EL5 in the

RPMforge repository. But then the fun begins

in the previous version (up to 2.6.0) the linux version was provided only as source, which could be a pain to install/setup for the 'lambda' user but great for packager/maintainer.

But for a strange (and not explained) reason they decided to only deliver binaries now ... Of course i don't mind if the Belgian government would provide binaries but at least correctly built ! Quick and stupid example : they claim to provide the 'package' for both Debian , Fedora 9 and OpenSUSE11 but not as .deb nor .rpm ! .. and i'll not talk about stupid install.sh that doesn't even care about missing dependencies ... !

I'm not blogging now against the guy …

I decided to buy myself a new toy (like a lot of people surfing on the netbook 'hype') : the Asus Eee PC 900

Getting CentOS installed on the Eee PC needs more work than for a traditionnal laptop (there is not cd drive and CentOS kernel doesn't have the necessary module for the integrated nic) but it's of course doable.

I don't plan to detail all the involved steps here but just a link to the page i've created on the CentOS wiki .. It's still a draft but at least you know that work is being done for the Eee PC ... As always, ideas & comments are welcome :D

Some months ago i started to build PPC RPMS packages in the RPMforge effort. Packages were built against EL4/EL5 but i just wanted to have feedback .. if you use them, tested them, let us know on the RPMforge users list .

I recently told everybody that i planned on writing a page on the CentOS wiki about the features supported/non supported on the Intel-based iMac .. i've just created a draft page, but if someone is interested, feel free to add comments/experiences .. I'll update the wiki page as often as time permits, for example when i'll have the RPM ready to go for the isight-firmware-tools package that is needed to load the firmware in the iSight webcam ... (the goal is of course to provide the rpm through RPMforge).

Recently i had to extend the space in one of my Xen DomU paravirt guest. I usually create a LV on the Dom0 that is presented to the DomU as a block device. Of course you can extend on-the-fly the LV on Dom0 but how can you tell to the DomU that the underlying block device was modified/extended ? Hmmm .. okay, people will point me to the fact that it's possible to just create a new LV on Dom0 and give it live (aka block-attach) it to the DomU but that was not my question ... Or they can tell me that shutting down the DomU and `xm create` the DomU again will work (and yes, it works of course) but that was not the goal ...
On a real system (meaning non-virtualized) you can just rescan the scsi bus/adapter (or Fiber Channel if on a San storage through a LIP command) with just `echo '- - -' > /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/scan ` (assuming that host0 is the adapter that has the device you modified/added/extended/whatever ...) . So i expected to see the same behaviour in DomU .. but of course, block devices being not emulated because of the awareness of the DomU kernel …

I replaced recently my WiFi access-point at home and because the new AP (a Linksys WRT160n) supports WPA/WPA2 i tried to connect with WPA2 .. I had some stranges messages (in loop) from NetworkManager when trying to connect to the AP :

*NetworkManager:   Activation (eth1) Stage 2 of 5 (Device Configure) complete.
NetworkManager:   Activation (eth1/wireless): disconnected during association, asking for new key.
NetworkManager:   Activation (eth1) New wireless user key requested for network '\$wlan-name'.
NetworkManager:   Activation (eth1) New wireless user key for network '\$wlan-name' received. *

I was sure that the PSK was correct because i was able to connect with both my eeepc and my e51 nokia mobile phone.

Querying the great oracle (translate to `using google`) told me that a *lot* of people have the same issue with the ipw3945 wireless nic. (independently of the linux distro : CentOS, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu .....) but upgrading to a more recent wpa_supplicant (not available in the CentOS repositories !) package solved it for me.

Attention : The wpa_supplicant package available on RHEL/CentOS 5.2 is 0.4.8-10.2.el5 while Axel built version 0.5.8-16.el5 in his el5-testing repo .

As usual, read carefully instructions present on the CentOS wiki about the yum-plugin-priorities …