Crazy Or Genius?: Tag linux

Because Screwing Up Only One Server At A Time Is Child's Play........

Sean — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 00:51:00 +0100

So the Dal-ACM hosted another Installfest on Saturday. Rather than be a simple spectator of cool stuff and mooching off the nice spread of snacks, I decided to be an actual PARTICIPANT this time.

So, the Dal-ACM has this ‘development server’ (of the desktop machine variety) called mblast. In times past (2 Installfests ago) Gentoo was installed on it for some reason. Every time this was upgraded, something broke. More importantly, since almost everyone could sudo su - for root, packages were installed and upgraded with impunity, resulting in things breaking often. Funnily enough, the DSU opt-out site was run from this machine, and someone actually upgraded it while the opt-out period was running.

So, flash forward back to the present. Since the Dal-ACM aquired slammer, more people have shifted their user accounts to that machine, leaving mblast somewhat underused with the exception of some of my own work. I figured, since with the exception of a few Ruby On Rails Cookbook tutorial instances, I was the only person using the machine, I could wipe it and play with a few things I have been thinking about for a while (and yes, I asked to make sure there was nothing critical and performed a backup anyway).

So, what did I end up doing? I decided to try my hand at virtualization. Set up Debian Stable as a host machine, installed Xen, set up a host server from disk, and started that up…....... two machines running on one machine’s hardware. It was pretty sweet to get running. Of course, it wasn’t as easy as reading those lines. I somehow screwed up a minimal Debian install, had problems with mblast’s hardware, some misinterpretation of the hardware, and oh yeah, the pain in the ass of backing up everyone’s data before wiping that sucker the first time.

In the end it was done, it was cool, and as soon as I figure out how to install other operating systems besides Debian (since I used debootstrap for that) and to have the virtual hosts actually accessible to the internet, I will be able to set up any operating system (well, linux or bsd really, unsure about Solaris) for people, and then they can screw it up to their heart’s content without affecting someone else’s work (assuming that work is on a different virtual server). Yeah, learning all that is what reading week will be partially for.

The other cool thing at Installfest was Roomba hacking. Several people in the CSB, including my friend Oliver, bought a Roomba (a programmable robot vacuum cleaner) a wireless router, and other items. Their goal is to power the router from the Roomba, install linux (WRT Firmware) on the routers, and then be able to control the Roombas remotely via wireless. Add in some USB ports on the router and you can do a lot of things with that.

At the installfest, most of the time was spent deconstructing the Roombas without breaking them. Towards the end, they actually experimented with powering the router from the Roomba. One problem: the router partly starts up and then…. dies. The Roomba is currently blamed, the theory being that, while the specs say 2 amps of current can be drawn from the Roomba, there is probably some regulator somewhere that doesn’t allow more than a percentage of that out of the power interface they are using. A set back to be sure, and I am looking forward to seeing how they solve it, and having those Roombas running around the CS building.

Scientific Linux - Distro Updates Done Right?

Sean — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 09:10:00 +0200

For my trip to New Jersey, my boss dropped off an old Dell Inspiron 2500 and a set of Scientific Linux 4.0 CDs. Since I didn’t have any other install CDs except Fedora Core 3, I figured I would give this new distro a try. The first thing I noticed is that it appears to be based on Fedora (a deeper inspection seems to indicate it is actually based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux). The second thing I noticed is that it had zero problems installing on this laptop. Some small problems have been encountered, such as not initially being able to set resolution to 1024×768 (fixed by changing the default monitor to a Dell 1024×768 Laptop Display Panel), not being able to put the laptop into hibernate or standby, and the media buttons not working (though do any of those special buttons work properly out of the box on any distro?). So far so good.

Going to their site, I noticed that Scientific Linux 4.1 has been released. Also, they have instructions (though kinda out of date) of how to upgrade from one minor revision to another. This I must try. Step 1) Set up proxy access at work. Step 2) Realize that the proxy is screwing up the compressed yum metadata files. Step 3) Hey, it’s a laptop, I can take it home. Step 4) Start updating.

Final verdict: After rebooting, I have an updated system behaving as expected! A big difference over my botched Fedora upgrades. If only more distros had such a well defined, documented, and tested transition between minor revisions, instead of primarily through downloading the latest 4 (and becoming 5) CDs, I am sure a lot of users would be happy.

For Better Or For Worse

Sean — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 00:56:00 +0200

If you hadn’t heard by now, Novell is releasing ‘public betas’ of the SUSE linux distribution (openSUSE). This is a similar to Red Hat’s Fedora program.

How is this different from Fedora? From the FAQ:

The openSUSE project explicitly looks beyond the technical community to the broader non-technical community of computer users interested in Linux. The openSUSE project creates—through an open and transparent development process—a stabilized, polished Linux distribution (SUSE Linux) that delivers everything a user needs to get started with Linux. (SUSE Linux is consistently cited as the best-engineered Linux and the most usable Linux.) To fulfill its mission of bringing Linux to everyone, the openSUSE project makes SUSE Linux widely available to potential Linux users through a variety of channels, including a complete retail edition with end-user documentation. Only the openSUSE project refines its Linux distribution to the point where non-technical users can have a successful Linux experience.

I haven’t tried out this new version of SuSE (I used to use 9.2), but from looking at the package list and reading some commentary, I am somewhat leary. Some of the packages seem to be bleeding edge builds (including Samba, Xen, Openoffice, GCC) and it looks like they are going to use openSUSE as a testbed for items to include in their corporate distribution. Just like Red Hat. Granted, Ubuntu has become successful being based off of Debian Unstable, but….....

Regardless, I plan to give it a spin as soon as 10.0B3 comes out (which, if it comes out as soon as Beta 2 did, should be shortly after I get back from New Jersey) and see how that goes. My past experience with SUSE was not bad by a long shot. Here’s hoping that SUSE doesn’t drop the ball.

Fedora: A Mixed Blessing

Sean — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 19:13:00 +0200

Over the summer, I have been using 2 operating systems on a regular basis: Windows 2000, which has been running on my home machine for 3.5 years now, and Fedora, which is running on both my work machine and my campus machine. At the start of the summer they were both running Fedora Core 3. I had no problems with these set ups, as I didn’t need them to play media like movies or mp3s. These were development desktop systems and they worked well. The only big addition to my work machine was the inclusion of apt, because yum doesn’t want to work through the http proxy here for some reason (and yes, I did make sure to set it up so that it should).

Recently, I decided I wanted to upgrade from Core 3 to Core 4. I installed the main Fedora4.rpm (or whatever it is labeled as), pointed apt at Core 4 rpm repositories, and ran apt-get update followed by apt-get install. As the upgrade included a new version of gnome, and I wanted to test some modifications I made to my rc.local file, I decided to restart my machine as well. Logging in, I was faced with the X Windows manager, instead of Gnome. Seems apt-get dist-upgrade removed a bunch of the core gnome packages instead upgrading them. Performing apt-get remove gnome followed by apt-get install gnome however, didn’t make any difference. Finally, I discovered that gnome-session wasn’t installed. A quick apt-get install fixed that and everything was better.

On campus, I decided to upgrade using yum. This was worse than apt-get. It completely destroyed my system. And by completely, I mean COMPLETELY. I wasn’t even able to log in via the command line as it apparently decided to remove the default shells as well. Thankfully, There was very little information I actually needed saving, and a LiveCD allowed me to retrieve that. The system itself, however, got a complete reinstall. Hmmmmm… since nothing is basically being run on it now, maybe I should try another linux distro…

ATI Drivers For Linux

Sean — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 00:42:00 +0200

The other day ATI released new linux drivers for their Radeon cards, complete with a new graphical installer. In the past, I have had nothing but gried with ATI drivers, never successfully getting 3D acceleration working. However, this time, once I went through the process and ran the configuration, when the display server restarted, and I loaded up Tuxracer (hey, everyone uses it as an indication on whether acceleration is working), what I got was smoothe graphics.

Now, if the same process that I used on my lab machine works on my home machine, I might not need to use Windows anymore.

On a side note, my Windows machine has been running for almost 2 months now with no major problems, but since Win2k support is being discontinued, I wonder how long that is going to last.