Linux

puppet upgrade problem 0.25 "could not convert from pson"

After upgrading to 0.25, the following error occurs:
Could not retrieve catalog from remote server: Could not intern from pson: Could not convert from pson: Could not find relationship target ''
This turned out to be because of recipes using exec without naming the exec. Example
exec { "cat /that/file": unless => "something", path => "/bin", refreshonly => false }
should be rewritten as
exec { "cat that file": command => "cat /that/…

hard coding a library path into an executable while building an rpm

The problem I was trying to fix here was that I had a package that required a much newer version of a library than the system had installed on it. I didn't want to ruin the stability of the system by updating the library so I build it and placed it in a non standard location (harkening back to the solaris days I guess). If you can't guess what the problem was, I called the library package qt4-vlc...hint hint.

That part went fine, but whenever I tried to build my package that was supposed to use qt4-vlc, it would use the system libs in %{_libdir}/qt4...I tried to use rpath as…

building rpms, spec files, rpmbuild, simple tutorial on making rpms by example

I posted some additional material on building rpms in the appendix of the book. I cover how to build an example spec file from scratch. This is similar to what I did in my presentation, just with a lot more detail. I hope to expand this section to cover nested packages and kernel modules. Those sections are not done yet...read it here.

creating simple selinux module fails with assertion on line x violated by allow something_t fixed_disk_device_t

I'm still working with my own kvm implementation even though RedHat has released their own in RHEL 5.4, they are, however, at version 83, I'm on 88. I'd rather stay current since kvm is moving so fast that each new version fixes bugs and adds many new features.

I ran into a problem when applying the new selinux policy from RH, they have added support for qemu/kvm to the policy, which is great but blows up on my fibre channel disks. I tried to create an selinux module to fix the problem but kept getting this:

[root@hypervisor kvm]# semodule -i…

ip forward using iptables (port and host redirect)

I have a server that many people are mistaking for my login (ssh) machine, so I decided to forward attempts to ssh into this machine to my real login machine. I found a few posts on this but they were all somewhat incomplete for my purposes There are two problems here, you need to enable ip_forward in the kernel, and then you need to write a nat table for iptables. I'm going to assume you don't have a nat table to begin with.

Step 1, enable ip_forward.

[root@notlogin ~]# sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1 net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1 [root@notlogin ~]# echo…

a talk i gave on building rpms

Here is a talk I gave on creating/building rpms. It covers spec files and some basics of how an rpm is organized. Hopefully it's useful to someone. This includes a tutorial on how to make a spec. I plan of having a more detailed tutorial in the appendix to mybook, I'll post that here when I finish it. rpm-talk

Running Fedora 11 on an ideapad S10e

There's nothing special to do here, the only caveat is that you need to enable the non-free repo from fusion and install wl for the wireless driver. The problem I have is that the machine crashes on resume from sleep about 1 out of every 4 times, it's become very annoying. The machine boots fast, but it's nicer to just resume. I thought it was the wl driver, so I have gnome-power-manager taking the module out (I think). [thomas@ideapad pm]$ cat config.d/modules SUSPEND_MODULES="wl" [thomas@ideapad pm]$ AFAIK this should remove the module before suspending the…

recovering deleted files vfat linux - picasa deleted my pictures

Ok, I accept a little bit of the blame for this one. I started to import my photos using picasa. The first three pictures that were imported were poor, so I decided to delete them. At that point they were the only pictures in the folder, so Picasa decided to delete the folder, even though an import was going on to that folder. All the rest of the pictures went into the abyss. Pretty lame IMHO. Picasa should probably check that it's copying the files to a good location before deleting them from the card.

Luckily someone was nice enough to write an easy undelete,…

adding a tray to ppd for cups/samba (hp 2420dn) (InputSlot Tray3)

We share our printers out from cups using samba. It was working great until a recent update broke the drivers from the windows/samba side. I decided to redo the configuration and use the cups driver for everything. Only problem was that after doing that I couldn't add the third (optional) tray to our HP 2420DN. After reading a little about PPD and using cupsaddsmb to install the cups driver for windows clients, I came up with this hack job that appears to be working.

I added another tray InputSlot definition. By scouring other PPD's and the cups wiki I found that Tray3…

using a mimo um-710 on linux (displaylink) with udlfb driver

We've had this dream for some time of having a display that we can control from our desktops but mounted in the hallway. The idea would be to use the sign in place of post-it notes or some other sort of messageboard arrangement. We've tried the Kodak EX811 in the past with limited success, we used mediatomb to control the kodak, but wheneverthe wireless network had problems or the kodak got confused, it would just go to a blank screen, hardly useful.

In walks the mimo, it's a usb connected display, we found drivers for it here. You can extend your X desktop onto the screen…

Linux