Re: [CentOS] CentOS 8 virt-manager

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Sat, 12 Oct 2019, Ljubomir Ljubojevic wrote:

> On 10/12/19 4:57 PM, Tom Bishop wrote:
> > I am thinking about building a new host and trying to decide if
> > virt-manager is working on CentOS 8. I thought I saw previously on the mail
> > list that there were some issues but cannot find the thread right now. If
> > anyone has migrated some workloads from 7 and seen any issues let me know.
> >
> > Thanks :)
> > ___
> > CentOS mailing list
> > CentOS@centos.org
> > https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
> >
> MArk wrote that virt-manager is replaced by "cockpit" in EL8. Can not
> comfirm or deny.

  from RHEL 8 virtualization guide:

"The Virtual Machine Manager (virt-manager) application is still
supported in RHEL 8 but has been deprecated. The RHEL 8 web console is
intended to become its replacement in a subsequent release. It is,
therefore, recommended that you get familiar with the web console for
managing virtualization in a GUI."

rday

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[CentOS] moving from centos 8 to stream? (and possibly back again?)

[Robert P. J. Day]

  just installed stock centos 8 x86_64 and did "dnf update", now
reading up on centos stream, and wondering:

1) can i, at any time, decide to convert this system to centos stream,
notwithstanding any normal updates i've done in the meantime?

2) if i'm running centos stream and decide it's just too progressive
for me, can i dial it back to "regular" centos down the road?

rday

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Re: [CentOS] [LEARNING OUTCOME] Wi-Fi WPA Hacking Tool is Totally Useless on New Wireless Routers

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Mon, 19 Mar 2018, Turritopsis Dohrnii Teo En Ming wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am sharing my learning outcomes.
>
> Recently I downloaded Kali Linux 64-bit Version 2018.1 and ran it on
> my HP laptop with the integrated Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8260
> Wireless Network Card.

  ... snip ...

  you just posted this to the fedora users mailing list, why do you
think this content is appropriate for either of those mailing lists
since it has nothing to do specifically with fedora or centos?

rday
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[CentOS] yum list "available" versus "updates", and centosplus versioning

[Robert P. J. Day]

  quite possibly more a yum question than a centos question, but i'm a
bit confused about the difference between listing "available" packages
versus "updates" packages.

  short example -- listing what the yum man page suggests should be
"available" for installation, restricting myself to centosplus:

$ yum list available --disablerepo=\* --enablerepo=centosplus
... snip ...
Available Packages
kernel-plus.x86_643.10.0-693.17.1.el7.centos.plus  
centosplus
kernel-plus-abi-whitelists.noarch 3.10.0-693.17.1.el7.centos.plus  
centosplus
kernel-plus-devel.x86_64  3.10.0-693.17.1.el7.centos.plus  
centosplus
kernel-plus-doc.noarch3.10.0-693.17.1.el7.centos.plus  
centosplus
kernel-plus-headers.x86_643.10.0-693.17.1.el7.centos.plus  
centosplus
kernel-plus-tools.x86_64  3.10.0-693.17.1.el7.centos.plus  
centosplus
kernel-plus-tools-libs.x86_64 3.10.0-693.17.1.el7.centos.plus  
centosplus
kernel-plus-tools-libs-devel.x86_64   3.10.0-693.17.1.el7.centos.plus  
centosplus
perf.x86_64   3.10.0-693.17.1.el7.centos.plus  
centosplus
postfix.x86_642:2.10.1-6.0.1.el7.centos
centosplus
postfix-perl-scripts.x86_64   2:2.10.1-6.0.1.el7.centos
centosplus
postfix-sysvinit.noarch   2:2.10.1-6.0.1.el7.centos
centosplus
python-perf.x86_643.10.0-693.17.1.el7.centos.plus  
centosplus
$

  first, i always thought "yum list available" would list only
packages that i did not *already* have installed, and if i wanted to
list installed packages eligible for update, i would run:

$ yum list updates --disablerepo=\* --enablerepo=centosplus
Updated Packages
postfix.x86_642:2.10.1-6.0.1.el7.centos
centosplus
python-perf.x86_643.10.0-693.17.1.el7.centos.plus  
centosplus
$

  as you can see, the alleged updates are also listed as "available"
from the first command -- has it always been this way? if so, i guess
i just never noticed. (is there a way to list *only* available,
uninstalled packages with some sort of filter?)

  more curiously, some of the available packages from the centosplus
repo have a package version that says merely "centos", not
"centos.plus":

postfix.x86_642:2.10.1-6.0.1.el7.centos
centosplus
postfix-perl-scripts.x86_64   2:2.10.1-6.0.1.el7.centos
centosplus
postfix-sysvinit.noarch   2:2.10.1-6.0.1.el7.centos
centosplus
 ^^

  is that deliberate? it would seem to have the potential for
confusion if one searches later for packages based on that string.

  finally, the alleged update for python-perf:

python-perf.x86_643.10.0-693.17.1.el7.centos.plus  
centosplus

would seem to match *exactly* the currently installed numeric version
on my system:

  $ rpm -q python-perf
  python-perf-3.10.0-693.17.1.el7.x86_64
  $

that is, both seem to be "3.10.0-693.17.1.el7", so how would this
constitute an available "update"? perhaps there's something
fundamental about version numbering and the centosplus repo i'm
missing here.

rday

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Re: [CentOS] why does "rescue" mode bring me to runlevel 5 (multi-user target)?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Fri, 2 Mar 2018, John Hodrien wrote:

> On Fri, 2 Mar 2018, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>
> > finishing a week of teaching a comptia linux+ class off of centos
> > 7.4 and wanted to demo how to boot to "rescue" mode, so i rebooted,
> > selected "rescue" mode at grub menu, which still booted to full
> > multiuser, graphical mode. what am i doing wrong? or is this a dumb
> > question?
>
> It's is not what you think it is.
>
> $ yum info dracut-config-rescue
>
> It's not the same as the rescue mode off the DVD.

  ah, gotcha ... so the course manual is definitely misleading.

rday
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[CentOS] why does "rescue" mode bring me to runlevel 5 (multi-user target)?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  finishing a week of teaching a comptia linux+ class off of centos
7.4 and wanted to demo how to boot to "rescue" mode, so i rebooted,
selected "rescue" mode at grub menu, which still booted to full
multiuser, graphical mode. what am i doing wrong? or is this a dumb
question?

rday

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Re: [CentOS] How to update modules in iniramfs fastly

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Mon, 26 Feb 2018, wuzhouhui wrote:

> > -Original Messages-
> > From: "Steven Tardy" 
> > Sent Time: 2018-02-26 10:48:48 (Monday)
> > To: "CentOS mailing list" 
> > Cc:
> > Subject: Re: [CentOS] How to update modules in iniramfs fastly
> >
> > On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 8:29 PM wuzhouhui 
> > wrote:
> >
> > > I know dracut can update modules in initramfs, but I think it is too
> > > slow. So I'm wondering what is the fastest way to update modules in
> > > initramfs of CentOS 7?
> >
> >
> > `dracut` calls `mkinitrd` which rebuilds the initrd file. . . you could do
> > it manually but that is prone to errors (
> > https://access.redhat.com/solutions/24029).

  i think you have that backwards ... mkinitrd is simply a wrapper
around a call to dracut, which builds an initramfs.

> This solution does not work in CentOS 7, because initramfs in CentOS
> 7 is not a gzipped cpio:

  it is, but to get to the content, you need to use "skipcpio" to jump
over the initial tiny cpio archive. see, for example:

https://sites.google.com/site/syscookbook/rhel/rhel-kernel-rebuild

rday
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Re: [CentOS] what is the centos/elrepo policy toward LTS kernels?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Fri, 23 Feb 2018, Akemi Yagi wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 12:30 AM, Robert P. J. Day
> <rpj...@crashcourse.ca> wrote:
> >
> >   i'm sure there's a simple answer to this -- i already understand
> > that newer kernels than the ones shipped with the official release
> > aren't officially supported but there is the elrepo kernel repository
> > here:
> >
> >   http://elrepo.org/linux/kernel/el7/x86_64/RPMS/
> >
> > with a mixture of long-term (lt) and mainline (ml) kernels. i assume
> > that the mainline kernels pretty closely track the latest kernel
> > release but that's not the one i'm interested in.
> >
> >   if i was interested in the additional longevity of the LTS kernels,
> > i can see that 4.4 is available. but the most recent LTS kernel was
> > 4.14, was it not? so why is a 4.14 "lt" kernel not available in that
> > repository?
> >
> >   i am obviously unclear on the policy used to determine which kernel
> > versions end up in that repository.
> >
> > rday
>
> You want to ask elrepo-related questions on the elrepo mailing list.
>
> But here's the post that would answer your question:
>
> http://lists.elrepo.org/pipermail/elrepo/2018-February/004120.html

  ah, was not aware there was a separate mailing list for that, my
apologies.

rday
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[CentOS] what is the centos/elrepo policy toward LTS kernels?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  i'm sure there's a simple answer to this -- i already understand
that newer kernels than the ones shipped with the official release
aren't officially supported but there is the elrepo kernel repository
here:

  http://elrepo.org/linux/kernel/el7/x86_64/RPMS/

with a mixture of long-term (lt) and mainline (ml) kernels. i assume
that the mainline kernels pretty closely track the latest kernel
release but that's not the one i'm interested in.

  if i was interested in the additional longevity of the LTS kernels,
i can see that 4.4 is available. but the most recent LTS kernel was
4.14, was it not? so why is a 4.14 "lt" kernel not available in that
repository?

  i am obviously unclear on the policy used to determine which kernel
versions end up in that repository.

rday

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Re: [CentOS] a few simple questions about upgrading an "official" centos 7 release

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Thu, 22 Feb 2018, hw wrote:

> Robert P. J. Day wrote:

  ... snip ...

> >oh, i appreciate the need for caution; on the other hand, it
> > always struck me that the training room is the *ideal* place for
> > students to experiment with things they're too nervous or unsure
> > of to try back at the office. this is typically why, when i'm
> > teaching, i save friday afternoon for trying things that are
> > typically not covered by standard courseware.
> >
> >so as long as one delivers the proper caution, i see no problem
> > with something like, "ok, you might never have to do this at your
> > site, but just in case you ever need to upgrade your kernel, let's
> > try it and see what happens." so if the need ever arises, at least
> > they can say they've done it once and know what the end result is
> > supposed to be.
>
> The students you need to teach things like this are the ones that
> will never become good admins.

  uh, that's kind of a condescending attitude to take towards students
who simply want to learn. are you this way with everyone?

rday
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Re: [CentOS] a few simple questions about upgrading an "official" centos 7 release

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Thu, 22 Feb 2018, Pete Biggs wrote:

>
> >
> >   finally, any concerns i should have about upgrading the kernel from
> > 3.10 to 4.14 or 4.15, as explained in a number of places like this:
> >
> > https://www.tecmint.com/install-upgrade-kernel-version-in-centos-7/
> >
> >   i simply prefer to run a current kernel but i can resist the
> > temptation if upgrading that on a centos 7.4 system would introduce
> > more problems than are worth it.
> >
> The only reason to use a kernel version that isn't provided with the
> distro is if the newer kernel provides features that you **NEED**.
>
> Remember, the whole point of something like CentOS is to provide a
> stable, solid OS. This requires a whole bunch of testing of the OS
> as a whole - and RHEL (and hence CentOS) does all that testing using
> kernels it provides. What's more RH will backport critical kernel
> updates if appropriate - so it's not the case that an older kernel
> is lacking in security.
>
> I seem to remember you said you were going to teach using these
> machines - surely you want those machines to be as stable and as
> standard as possible to the machines the students will find in the
> wild. I would definitely not encourage students to upgrade kernels -
> novices sysadmins don't need an extra level of uncertainty in their
> life!

  oh, i appreciate the need for caution; on the other hand, it always
struck me that the training room is the *ideal* place for students to
experiment with things they're too nervous or unsure of to try back at
the office. this is typically why, when i'm teaching, i save friday
afternoon for trying things that are typically not covered by standard
courseware.

  so as long as one delivers the proper caution, i see no problem with
something like, "ok, you might never have to do this at your site, but
just in case you ever need to upgrade your kernel, let's try it and
see what happens." so if the need ever arises, at least they can say
they've done it once and know what the end result is supposed to be.

rday
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[CentOS] a few simple questions about upgrading an "official" centos 7 release

[Robert P. J. Day]

  again, some fairly trivial(?) questions about working with centos
7.4, given my time immersed in fedora so i want to make sure i'm not
carrying over any bad habits.

  first, is there anything untoward in updating an installed version
of centos 7.4 with a simple "yum update"? i'm well aware of keeping in
mind the goal of stability with centos, so am unsure what the
philosophy is of pulling in new updates as cavalierly as i do with
fedora. currently, "yum list updates" shows me 206 possible updates;
should i have any concern about updating packages coming from the
standard centos repos?

  next, are there any issues replacing yum wihth dnf? i found this
piece:

https://www.vultr.com/docs/use-dnf-to-manage-software-packages-on-centos-7

which suggests it shouldn't be a problem. thoughts?

  finally, any concerns i should have about upgrading the kernel from
3.10 to 4.14 or 4.15, as explained in a number of places like this:

https://www.tecmint.com/install-upgrade-kernel-version-in-centos-7/

  i simply prefer to run a current kernel but i can resist the
temptation if upgrading that on a centos 7.4 system would introduce
more problems than are worth it.

  thoughts?

rday


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[CentOS] is the centos wiki "Additional Resources/Repositories" page reasonably up to date?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  (apologies for what will be some upcoming trivial questions, but i'm
jumping back into centos after years and years of living with fedora,
so i'm feeling fairly comfortable, just the occasional centos-specific
question.)

  is the wiki repos page fairly up to date?

https://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories

i ask since i note that its last edit was 2017-06-25, and things might
have changed in the last several months.

rday
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[CentOS] are there reference lists/cheat sheets for categorized commands?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  prepping to teach a 5-day CompTIA linux+ course next week with
CompTIA-supplied courseware and, given that it was my choice, i chose
to set up the classroom with centos 7.4 on all the student systems
since i assume most students are there to learn sysadmin and that's
the most likely platform they'll have when they get back to work.
also, most students are taking this course to prep for the subsequent
LPI exams to get their certification, which plays into my question.

  while the C/W is not bad, it's awfully verbose, and it would be
handy if there were concise cheat sheets of commands/files related to
the standard sysadmin they'll be expected to answer questions on. as
an example, regarding user/group management, i'm collecting all of the
relevant commands that they need to know about, in the sense of, "if
you understand these commands, you should be fine."

  regarding user/group admin, my tentative list of commands would be:

  * user{add,mod,del}
  * group(add,mod,del}
  * passwd, gpasswd
  * chage, chsh, chfn
  * pwck, grpck
  * pwconv, pwunconv

not sure what i'm missing here, i just typed those off the top of my
head.

  rather than scatter all of that over an entire chapter, are there
any official centos/rhel reference sheets like that? if not, i can
just write my own and post them at my wiki. thanks for any pointers.

rday

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[CentOS] should i (theoretically) be able to boot a git cloned kernel on 5.5?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  toward the end of a class on friday, just for fun, i showed the
students how to install git, clone the latest kernel source, and build
and install a new kernel.  since it was getting close to end of day, i
wanted to keep it simple and directed them to just make defconfig to
see what would happen.

  the configuration and build of the kernel and modules worked fine,
they installed the kernel and modules, then rebooted but the new
kernel panicked almost immediately, apparently whining that it
couldn't mount the root filesystem.  since they were all running
LVM-based systems, i assumed that perhaps we needed to explicitly add
LVM support during the config step.

  i'd still like to be able to build and boot a new kernel on an
updated centos box so, later today, i'm going to reinstall 5.5 on a
system without LVM (just define some fixed filesystems) to see if that
makes a difference.

  has anyone done this?  should i be able to?  to recap, all i want to
do on a fully-updated centos 5.5 box is

  * install the development tools
  * install git
  * clone the latest kernel repo
  * make defconfig
  * make
  * install new kernel and modules
  * reboot to new kernel

  i'm willing to accept that it won't be a perfect kernel and perhaps
some drivers will be missing, but at the very least, it should boot
without panicking.

  again, anyone else done this?  should it work?  i'll try this later
today as soon as i have access to my test system again.

rday

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Re: [CentOS] should i (theoretically) be able to boot a git cloned kernel on 5.5?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Sun, 10 Oct 2010, Akemi Yagi wrote:

 You can find the answer here :-)

 http://blog.toracat.org/2010/03/want-a-custom-kernel-on-centos-noo-really/

  that's it?  enabling deprecated sysfs?  cool, i'll check that later
and report back, thanks.

rday

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Re: [CentOS] should i (theoretically) be able to boot a git cloned kernel on 5.5?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Sun, 10 Oct 2010, Akemi Yagi wrote:

 You can find the answer here :-)

 http://blog.toracat.org/2010/03/want-a-custom-kernel-on-centos-noo-really/

 Akemi

  and that did it, thanks.  so now i'm curious -- do you know what
specifically requires the deprecated sysfs format during boot?  i
followed your blog links and i didn't immediately see an explanation
for *why* that fixed it.  again, thanks.

rday

p.s.  there were, unsurprisingly, a number of startup script failures
but that's something i can handle later.

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Re: [CentOS] RHEL 6 potential release date???

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Sun, 10 Oct 2010, BeartoothHOS wrote:

 On Fri, 17 Sep 2010 17:51:39 -0500, John R. Dennison wrote:
   []
 Redhat does not discuss release dates []

   Well, the beta is up :

 http://www.redhat.com/rhel/beta/

  that is already the *second* beta of RHEL 6, so it's not really
news.

rday

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[CentOS] recommended way to install source rpms?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  yes, i've read the online docs and followed a link or two to find a
simple way to do this, such as:

http://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/SystemTapOnCentOS

so, these days, is that the canonical way to download source rpms?
now, note that i'm not arguing about whether this is a good idea.  in
my circumstances, i want the ability to just yum download source
rpms so that i can have my students poke around in a source rpm and
learn how to build one, nothing more.

  so, is that reasonable?  to just manually add an extra repo file
according to that link above (which appears to work perfectly well).
frankly, the wiki page on downloading from source:

http://wiki.centos.org/PackageManagement/SourceInstalls

seems just a touch on the hysterical side.  i don't disagree that
installing packages from the source rpm is probably a questionable
idea.  but that doesn't justify simply not explaining how to do it
easily.

  my plan is to install yum-utils to get yumdownloader, add the repo
file suggested above, then have students:

  $ yumdownloader --source package

so they can examine the source of some packages.  is the approach i'm
suggesting reasonable?  thanks.

rday

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Re: [CentOS] recommended way to install source rpms?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Sun, 10 Oct 2010, Frank Cox wrote:

 On Sun, 2010-10-10 at 17:56 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
so, is that reasonable?  to just manually add an extra repo file
  according to that link above (which appears to work perfectly
  well).

 In my opinion, in most cases there is no particularly good reason to
 bother compiling a source rpm yourself unless it's something that's
 not already in a repository.

  but no one is suggesting that you always want to *compile* a source
rpm.  perhaps you just want to examine the source, or do a prep, or
something.

  more to the point, it's a little disturbing that the general
attitude here seems to be one of, we don't think you should be doing
something, so we're not going to tell you how to do it.  and some
people here wonder why others might want to write their own online
centos howtos rather than contribute to centos.org?  geez, feel free
to stop wondering.

  if it makes it easier, perhaps that wiki page could be retitled
something more general, such as working with source rpms.  then it
could cover simple repo setup and downloading and, with a suitable
warning, also cover building.  but it's a little high-handed to not
explain how to do something because you've decided it's not something
you want *others* to know.

rday

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Re: [CentOS] recommended way to install source rpms?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Sun, 10 Oct 2010, John R. Dennison wrote:

 On Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 05:56:47PM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
 
my plan is to install yum-utils to get yumdownloader, add the repo
  file suggested above, then have students:

   Are these students paying for whatever training you are
   supplying?

  and on that patronizing, condescending note, this list has pretty
much outlived its usefulness.

rday

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[CentOS-docs] but what if i don't care about centos 4?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  absolutely serious question -- i appreciate that it's important to
still document how things are done in centos 4, but i have precisely
zero interest in that.  given how long centos 5 has been out, and that
centos 6 is not that far down the road given the alleged release
schedule for RHEL 6 (rumoured end of year), i plan on investing my
time in centos 5 and 6 exclusively.

  so while i'm more than happy to write/update docs, i won't be
spending any time whatsoever with centos 4.  so what does one do under
those circumstances?  again, this is a perfectly serious question.  i
know it's not fair to short-change centos 4 -- i just have no interest
in it.

rday

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[CentOS-docs] update HOWTO page for how to copy ssh pub keys

[Robert P. J. Day]

  here:

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Network/SecuringSSH

the recipe for how to copy your id_rsa.pub file to a remote system is
given as:

Copy the public key (id_rsa.pub) to the server and install it to the
authorized_keys list:

$ cat id_rsa.pub  ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

  i suspect it would be better if that were rewritten in terms of
using ssh-copy-id, just to be simpler and less error-prone.

rday

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Re: [CentOS-docs] update HOWTO page for how to copy ssh pub keys

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Thu, 7 Oct 2010, Ned Slider wrote:

 On 07/10/10 12:29, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
 
 here:
 
  http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Network/SecuringSSH
 
  the recipe for how to copy your id_rsa.pub file to a remote system is
  given as:
 
  Copy the public key (id_rsa.pub) to the server and install it to the
  authorized_keys list:
 
  $ cat id_rsa.pub  ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
 
 i suspect it would be better if that were rewritten in terms of
  using ssh-copy-id, just to be simpler and less error-prone.
 
  rday
 

 Thanks for volunteering :-)

 Please submit your proposed changes to this list and we can make it
 happen.

   ok, since i don't have edit access to the wiki, do i simply post
proposed changes to this list in terms of precisely what text should
be replaced by newer text?

rday

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Re: [CentOS-docs] update HOWTO page for how to copy ssh pub keys

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Thu, 7 Oct 2010, Dag Wieers wrote:

 On Thu, 7 Oct 2010, Robert P. J. Day wrote:

   here:
 
  http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Network/SecuringSSH
 
  the recipe for how to copy your id_rsa.pub file to a remote system is
  given as:
 
  Copy the public key (id_rsa.pub) to the server and install it to the
  authorized_keys list:
 
  $ cat id_rsa.pub  ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
 
   i suspect it would be better if that were rewritten in terms of
  using ssh-copy-id, just to be simpler and less error-prone.

 Remember that this was likely written for CentOS 4, which did not
 have that tool as part of openssh. So we might want to provide an
 option for both cases ?

  ah, good point.  i suspect the most effective rewrite would be 3
parts:

  * a general description of what is being done, files involved,
what's copied, proper file/dir permissions for it to work
properly, etc.
  * the manual way it's done on centos 4
  * the newer, simpler centos 5 way involving ssh-copy-id

and that would do it.

rday

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[CentOS-docs] a general suggestion for all of the doc pages

[Robert P. J. Day]

  generalizing somewhat from my earlier note about the securing SSH
page:

  http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Network/SecuringSSH

i don't know what level of intro a page like that should have but when
i've presented things like this to classes i've taught, or written
short online tutorials, the very first thing i document are the
packages involved.

  in this case, the first section might be something as simple as
showing the output from:

  $ rpm -qa openssh*

and, given the list of packages, a one-line description of what it's
for, which ones are necessary, and which ones simply add extra
functionality.

  and after that, i typically list every important file and directory
that will come into play at some point, again with a short
description.

  so for ssh, i would list the packages:

  * openssh
  * openssh-server
  * openssh-clients
  * openssh-askpass [optional]

then list what the reader will eventually have to work with:

  /etc/ssh/ssh_config
  /etc/ssh/sshd_config
  ~/.ssh

once the intro covers that sort of thing and maps out the terrain,
every subsequent section is almost trivial.  i'm just saying that that
approach has worked very well for me.

rday

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Re: [CentOS-docs] update HOWTO page for how to copy ssh pub keys

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Thu, 7 Oct 2010, Phil Schaffner wrote:

 Robert P. J. Day wrote on 10/07/2010 07:51 AM:
 ...
 ok, since i don't have edit access to the wiki, do i simply
  post proposed changes to this list in terms of precisely what text
  should be replaced by newer text?

 Perhaps it is time to remedy that situation.  Have you created a
 WikiName (RobertDay might be a good choice) and requested edit
 rights to a page or pages?

  i asked for those rights once and was told i wasn't getting them.
so i'm just posting suggestions.

rday

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Re: [CentOS-docs] update HOWTO page for how to copy ssh pub keys

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Thu, 7 Oct 2010, Phil Schaffner wrote:

 Robert P. J. Day wrote on 10/07/2010 07:51 AM:
 ...
 ok, since i don't have edit access to the wiki, do i simply post
  proposed changes to this list in terms of precisely what text should
  be replaced by newer text?

 Perhaps it is time to remedy that situation.  Have you created a
 WikiName (RobertDay might be a good choice) and requested edit
 rights to a page or pages?

  BTW, i do have a wiki username: RobDay.  i simply don't have edit
rights.

rday

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[CentOS-docs] suggestion for HOWTO: bonding multiple NICs

[Robert P. J. Day]

  a student in my RHEL admin class this week specifically asked how to
use multiple NICs to add fault tolerance.  a good question, i thought.
perhaps adding a short HOWTO on that wouldn't be out of line,
something like this:

http://www.how2centos.com/how-to-set-up-network-bonding-with-centos-5x/

  i could even add that as a lab for future classes, where i simply
add two USB network adapters to the student's machine and make it an
exercise to set up bonding across them.  just a thought.

rday

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Re: [CentOS-docs] update HOWTO page for how to copy ssh pub keys

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Thu, 7 Oct 2010, R P Herrold wrote:

 heh -- as Robert P. J. Day is [and was, and for a long time has been
 at least reputationally ;) ] known to me for a long time, we've
 spoken, etc I am quite sure I would have remembered a flat turndown
 if I had seen it

 But the issue is: global edit rights for a relative newcomer
 (publicly) to CentOS who has not previously sought to be part
 of this culture

 and global edit rights is not going to happen 'out of the
 gate' for reasons copiously talked about, blogged about, etc

  which is actually fine with me.  really.  i'm good with just posting
suggestions and fixes for the time being.

rday

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[CentOS] does ssh-copy-id not use id_rsa.pub file by default?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  yesterday, i was demoing how to use ssh-copy-id on centos 5.5 to
copy one's public key to another machine and account so you don't need
to type the password anymore.  i used ssh-keygen to create the
standard RSA-format files, then checked the man page for ssh-copy-id,
which reads:

  ssh-copy-id [-i [identity_file]] [u...@]machine
  ...
  If  the  -i  option  is  given   then   the   identity   file
  (defaults   to  ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub)  is  used

the above seems to suggest that, as long as i'm happy copying over the
default id_rsa.pub file, all i need type is:

  $ ssh-copy-id -i bar...@192.168.2.19
  /usr/bin/ssh-copy-id: ERROR: No identities found
  $

  clearly, that doesn't work.  but if i simply add in the name of the
file, it's fine:

  $ ssh-copy-id -i .ssh/id_rsa.pub bar...@192.168.2.19
   ^^^
any reason for that?  the man page clearly states that that file is
the default, but it's obvious i still need to type its name.  am i
missing something?  is the man page wrong?

rday

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Re: [CentOS] does ssh-copy-id not use id_rsa.pub file by default?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Thu, 7 Oct 2010, John Doe wrote:

 From: Robert P. J. Day rpj...@crashcourse.ca

If  the  -i  option   is  given   then   the   identity   file
 (defaults   to  ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub)  is  used

 My man page says: ~/.ssh/identity.pub...

  argh ... sorry, i was logged into the wrong system when reading the
man page, i was connected to my ubuntu system.  interesting that
different distros have different default files for the same command.
i will definitely remember that.

rday

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Re: [CentOS] does ssh-copy-id not use id_rsa.pub file by default?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Thu, 7 Oct 2010, Robert Heller wrote:

 At Thu, 7 Oct 2010 07:23:55 -0400 (EDT) CentOS mailing list 
 centos@centos.org wrote:

 
  On Thu, 7 Oct 2010, John Doe wrote:
 
   From: Robert P. J. Day rpj...@crashcourse.ca
  
  If  the  -i  option   is  given   then   the   identity   file
   (defaults   to  ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub)  is  used
  
   My man page says: ~/.ssh/identity.pub...
 
argh ... sorry, i was logged into the wrong system when reading the
  man page, i was connected to my ubuntu system.  interesting that
  different distros have different default files for the same command.
  i will definitely remember that.


 My my (CentOS 5.5) man ssy-keygen:

  ~/.ssh/identity.pub
  Contains the protocol version 1 RSA public key for authentica-
  tion.  The contents of this file should be added to
  ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on all machines where the user wishes to
  log in using RSA authentication.  There is no need to keep the
  contents of this file secret.

 identity.pub is *OpenSSH V1* public key file. How old is the ubuntu
 system? Is OpenSSH V1 or V2 installed?  The V1 RSA protocol is old
 available for older systems...

  ubuntu 10.10 (yes, really, development version constantly updated to
track upcoming 10.10).  in short, really new.  so the current
centos 5.5 ssh-copy-id command clearly(?) still has openssh V1 default
set.  not a big deal, just surprised me.

rday

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[CentOS] how to get ASUS USB-N13 802.11n net adapter working on 5.5?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  first, the short form of the question -- has anyone got that
wireless adapter working on centos 5.5 and associated with an access
point that uses WPA/WPA2 security?

  and the details.

  in a classroom where there is *no* wired networking at all, all PCs
have only that wireless net adapter, which works fine on windows but,
after installing centos 5.5, unsurprisingly, we have no networking.
there is no backup wired network, and no other adapters.

  there is a CD that came with the adapters, with a Linux directory,
so it was easy enough to dump that onto my personal centos 5.5 box,
and run make which generated the loadable rt3070sta.ko module.
and, yes, that module loads.  so far, so good.

  however, that still doesn't do it as based on what i've read
online), because the access point here uses WPA/WPA2, i need to
use wpa_supplicant to be able to configure the wireless interface for
that.  and that's about when i got kicked out of the classroom as they
were closing for the evening.

  thoughts?  any advice humongously appreciated.

rday

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Re: [CentOS] how to get ASUS USB-N13 802.11n net adapter working on 5.5?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Tue, 28 Sep 2010, Akemi Yagi wrote:

 On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 5:13 AM, Robert P. J. Day rpj...@crashcourse.ca 
 wrote:

   however, that still doesn't do it as based on what i've read
  online), because the access point here uses WPA/WPA2, i need to
  use wpa_supplicant to be able to configure the wireless interface for
  that.  and that's about when i got kicked out of the classroom as they
  were closing for the evening.
 
   thoughts?  any advice humongously appreciated.

 These CentOS wili pages will help:

 http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Laptops/NetworkManager

 and

 http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Laptops/WpaSupplicant

  *sigh*.  i really need to check the wiki first before asking stuff
like this.  thanks.

rday

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[CentOS] couple questions about initrd.img

[Robert P. J. Day]

  here's hoping this is on topic.  as part of the extra goodies i'm
going to give my RHEL/centos basic admin class this week, i'm going to
get them to open up the standard initrd.img file and see what's
inside.  i just did that myself and have a couple simple questions.

  first, while the cpio archive physically contains a number of basic
/dev special files, the top-level init script runs mknod to create
them all, anyway.  not a big deal, but is it fair to say that
populating the initrd.img with those initial /dev files is redundant
since init creates them all, anyway?

  also, i note that that init script appears to call a couple
scripts/commands that don't exist in the initrd, such as hotplug and
mkblkdevs.  again, not a big deal but if i show the students what's in
that initrd, chances are someone's going to notice the above and ask
about it, so i might as well have an answer.  thanks.

rday

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[CentOS-docs] Updates for Tips and Tricks/YUM and RPM page

[Robert P. J. Day]

  (hoping this is the right way to submit updates for wiki pages.)

from this page:

  http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/YumAndRPM

first, there's this line:

  yum --disable * --enable rpmforge list available

i'm guessing that should be:

  yum --disablerepo * --enablerepo rpmforge list available

also, near the bottom (Method B):

  For CentOS-5 - A package for rpmdevtools does not seem to be
available.

  actually, there's one in EPEL for 5.5, but i don't know if you're
counting packages that come from EPEL.  in any event, there's
certainly an rpmdevtools package that's installable on 5.5.

rday

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[CentOS-docs] why the weird avoidance of the name red hat?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  i'm reading the FAQ:

http://wiki.centos.org/FAQ/General

and i'm familiar with the deliberate avoidance of using the name red
hat, but it seems a bit weird given that point 1 clearly avoids it
while point 2 boldly uses the name right in the question.  so what's
the point of being so coy, but not all the time?

rday

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[CentOS-docs] any chance of getting edit permission on the wiki?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  just to fix obvious and trivial typoes that i'm running across, like
on this page:

http://wiki.centos.org/FAQ/CentOS5

  notwithin
  you did not chose to reserve

simple stuff like that.  anything more involved, i'll post.

rday

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[CentOS-docs] possible additional comment regarding newer PHP

[Robert P. J. Day]

  again, from here:

http://wiki.centos.org/FAQ/CentOS5

regarding a newer version of PHP, a number of PHP experts that i know
of suggest that, if you truly need an up-to-date version of PHP, you
should:

 rpm -ivh http://rpms/famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-5.rpm

while remi collet's repo isn't official, it's accepted by numerous
developers as a reliable source of newer PHP packages (5.3.3), so it
seems that could be added with the appropriate disclaimer.

rday

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[CentOS] does having a centos wiki acct grant edit access?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  i just registered for a centos wiki account, and was wondering if
this gives me edit capability.  i'm prepping for the first of a number
of RHEL/centos basic admin courses and currently working my way thru
the wiki, collecting neat tricks and ideas and, occasionally, i'll
stumble over typoes -- some minor, some not so much.

  for instance, here:

http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/YumAndRPM#head-61731905d2e34ac343baeef06e5dd296aeed67b9

the command is listed as:

  yum --disable * --enable rpmforge list available

i'm guessing that should actually be:

  yum --disablerepo * --enablerepo rpmforge list available

no?  but even if i got edit access, i'd still be happier if someone
eventually checked out any changes i made to validate them.  whatever
works best.

rday

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Re: [CentOS] does having a centos wiki acct grant edit access?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Sat, 25 Sep 2010, Ned Slider wrote:

 No, an account does not automatically give you edit rights, and you
 need to take this to the centos-docs list where a wiki editor will
 be happy to make the edits for you.

  thanks muchly.

rday

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[CentOS] Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Oracle Linux!!!

[Robert P. J. Day]

http://blogs.computerworld.com/16997/oracle_rips_red_hat_and_sort_of_launches_a_new_linux

oracle:  just another centos wanna-be?

rday

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Re: [CentOS] Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Oracle Linux!!!

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Mon, 20 Sep 2010, m.r...@5-cent.us wrote:

 Robert P. J. Day wrote:
 
  http://blogs.computerworld.com/16997/oracle_rips_red_hat_and_sort_of_launches_a_new_linux
 
  oracle:  just another centos wanna-be?
 
 Um, this is news? I thought Oracle pushed Unbreakable Linux out
 the door at *least* last year.

  read the article carefully.  this isn't unbreakable linux, that *is*
old news.  this is oracle's (alleged) followup.

rday

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Re: [CentOS] Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for OracleLinux!!!

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Mon, 20 Sep 2010, Karanbir Singh wrote:

 On 09/20/2010 08:24 PM, mattias wrote:
  And you are a moderator?

 I am yes. Your point being ?

  karanbir's right, my post wasn't related to centos so it wasn't
appropriate here.

rday

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Re: [CentOS] looking for cool, post-install things to do on a centos 5.5 system

[Robert P. J. Day]

  i'm not ignoring all of the suggestions so far (i'm taking note of
all of them) but as rp herrold suggests, a lot of this is getting
pretty far afield, so let me drag this back on-topic.

  i'm looking for cool things that can be added into a very generic
5-day course in basic RHEL (centos) administration that wouldn't
normally be covered.  i've provided the outline on which the 3rd party
courseware is based -- it was written to mimic red hat's RH 131
course:

https://www.redhat.com/courses/rh131_red_hat_linux_system_administration/

so you can see what's already there, and i'm after cool tips, tricks
and utilities that people who are long-time RHEL/centos admins have
learned that they think are terrifically useful that i can sneak in as
bonus content.

  the caveat is that i don't want to add topics that would take longer
than, say, a half day since i can always take a topic like that,
extend it to a full-day course, and market it *separately*.

  case in point:  virtualization.  the course already covers
virtualization *very* briefly and i don't want to make that section
any longer since i can easily see having a full-day course on that
topic.

  *possibly* the same thing with puppet or cfengine (both excellent
suggestions).  i'm thinking of at least demoing one or both and,
depending on the interest, perhaps suggesting a full day course in
enterprise-wide administration.

  anyway, i appreciate all of the ideas so far, and i'm definitely
going to use some of them.  thanks muchly.

rday

p.s.  one stupendously trivial idea i had was to give each student a
cheap USB drive and use that as the vehicle for playing with
filesystem utilities.  with an $8 2G drive, i can demonstrate concepts
like hotplugging, udev, LVM and so on, knowing i'll never risk the
contents of the hard drive.

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Re: [CentOS] looking for cool, post-install things to do on a centos 5.5 system

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Sat, 18 Sep 2010, Eduardo Grosclaude wrote:

 On Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 5:06 AM, Robert P. J. Day rpj...@crashcourse.ca 
 wrote:

  p.s.  one stupendously trivial idea i had was to give each student
  a cheap USB drive and use that as the vehicle for playing with
  filesystem utilities.  with an $8 2G drive, i can demonstrate
  concepts like hotplugging, udev, LVM and so on, knowing i'll never
  risk the contents of the hard drive.

 That reminds me of a sysadmin course where we set up minimal,
 console-only QEMU virtual machines with two virtual disks, and
 taught fdisk, mkfs, RAID, LVM and the like.

  interesting ... is this course publicly available?  be fun to take a
look at it.

rday

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[CentOS] looking for cool, post-install things to do on a centos 5.5 system

[Robert P. J. Day]

  (note:  i asked this a few days ago but it *appears* that that post
was tossed due to getting excessive bounces from my account.  so i'm
posting it again, apologies if you're seeing it a second time.)

  over the next several weeks, i'm teaching some courses in RHEL admin
but (unsurprisingly) i'll be using centos 5.5.  it's a
decently-written, 3rd party course, all the generic, standard admin
topics but it does leave me about a 1/2 day to throw in any cool stuff
i want to add.

  so, any recommendations for neat things that people here have done
in the way of what can be added to or configured on a centos server
system?  the course covers all the standard topics -- installation,
package management, service management, filesystem maintenance, that
sort of thing.  so i'm looking for bonus, neat stuff that others here
do as a matter of course when putting together a centos system.

  logging utilities?  intrusion detection?  monitoring?  anything that
leaps to mind that i can use to fill up a few more hours.  i'm already
thinking of showing how to build and boot a new kernel.  other ideas?
thanks.

rday

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Re: [CentOS] looking for cool, post-install things to do on a centos 5.5 system

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Fri, 17 Sep 2010, Frank Cox wrote:


 On Fri, 2010-09-17 at 03:39 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
  other ideas?

 LTSP

  an intriguing idea, but that might be a bit ambitious and might also
cut into future marketing.  one of my plans is that, after this
week-long course is over, i want to market to the same client some
quick, 1-day courses that go further and each cover a very specific
topic.

  for example, i can imagine a 1-day course in virtualization.  maybe
a 1-day course in server security.  a course in monitoring and system
tuning.  and perhaps a course in advanced networking that would
incorporate LTSP.

  so i'm more looking for ideas that are nice add-ons to the generic
course, but that don't jump so far ahead that they might take a bite
out of a future course that i could market.

rday

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[CentOS] should vsftpd be disabled in favour of sftp for security reasons?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  (another in an ongoing list of things i just want to clarify for the
sake of future courses taught on centos.)

  from this RHEL doc page:

http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/html/Deployment_Guide/s1-openssh-server-config.html

the reader is advised to, for the sake of security, remove/disable
vsftpd, ostensibly in favour of sftp/sftp-server.  really?

  i can obviously see disallowing stuff like telnet and rsh and
rlogin, that's a no-brainer.  but advising against vsftpd for the sake
of security?  i'm not sure i see the logic in that.  thoughts?

rday

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Re: [CentOS] looking for cool, post-install things to do on a centos 5.5 system

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Fri, 17 Sep 2010, Michel van Deventer wrote:

 Hi,

 
 
  On Fri, 2010-09-17 at 03:39 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
   other ideas?
 
 Maybe a crash course in troubleshooting using the rescue CD ?

 I don't know exactly which subjects are covered in your course ? Can
 you be more precise ? :)

  sure.  while it's a 3rd-party courseware manual, it was obviously
written to emulate fairly closely red hat's admin course here:

https://www.redhat.com/courses/rh131_red_hat_linux_system_administration/details/

so the best way i can sum it up is that it's a perfectly decent admin
course that covers all the standard admin topics you'd expect to see.
all i was interested in was any additional packages or configuration
that people on this list have used to great effect that most people
would *not* have thought of or heard of.

  for instance, is anyone version controlling their system config
files with a utility like, say, etckeeper?  that sort of thing.  i
just want to pad out some of the sections with a few more items.

rday

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Re: [CentOS] should vsftpd be disabled in favour of sftp for security reasons?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Fri, 17 Sep 2010, Michel van Deventer wrote:

 
(another in an ongoing list of things i just want to clarify for the
  sake of future courses taught on centos.)
 
from this RHEL doc page:
 
  http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/html/Deployment_Guide/s1-openssh-server-config.html
 
  the reader is advised to, for the sake of security, remove/disable
 vsftpd, ostensibly in favour of sftp/sftp-server.  really?
 
i can obviously see disallowing stuff like telnet and rsh and
  rlogin, that's a no-brainer.  but advising against vsftpd for the sake
 of security?  i'm not sure i see the logic in that.  thoughts?

 As FTP is a clear-text protocol, I would surely advise against
 leaving it on :) I only run a vsftpd server on one of my machines
 for the customers comfort, but that will change in the near future !

 I can easily image scenarios where unencrypted traffic with
 usernames/passwords is disallowed.

  but you can configure vsftpd to have secure connection:

http://wiki.vpslink.com/Configuring_vsftpd_for_secure_connections_(TLS/SSL/SFTP)

would that not address that issue?  i'm not arguing against secure
communications, only that that manual page so cavalierly dismisses
vsftpd when it seems clear that you *can* configure vsftpd to be
secure.

rday

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Re: [CentOS] looking for cool, post-install things to do on a centos 5.5 system

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Fri, 17 Sep 2010, Keith Roberts wrote:

 Adding Multimedia capabilities

 Using SQLite3 from the command line
   Creating a Database
   Creating and populating a table
   Selecting, inserting, updating and deleting data in the
   database

 Remote login sessions using ssh -X

 Intro to nmap, nessus and Metasploit

 Intro to Firefox plugins, eg Firebug
 How to find and install other usefull FF plugins.

 Obviously the list is endless really.

  not entirely.  keep in mind that this is an *admin* course for
RHEL/centos so any additional topics should be primarily
server-oriented.  that suggests that things like multimedia would have
little value.  heck, even graphical utilities might be irrelevant
since, as a server, the system might not even have X installed.

  so, yes, i realize this is still being a bit vague.  i'm just
interested in what others have found as being really, really useful in
the context of setting up a server.

rday

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Re: [CentOS] looking for cool, post-install things to do on a centos 5.5 system

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Fri, 17 Sep 2010, Les Mikesell wrote:

 On 9/17/2010 8:24 AM, m.r...@5-cent.us wrote:
 
  Proper scripting abilities are perhaps beyond reach for a short
  course, but you could at least show off some one-liners or those
  short, stunningly useful examples to help them get the idea that
  they definitely should get their feet wet on it sooner or later.
 
  awk, awk! Perl's a day, minimum, by itself, but awk you can do in
  an hour or two, and have immediate results.

 But awk is a dead end that can't do a lot of things by itself.  And
 learning how to embed awk into other scripts is even more
 syntactically obscure than just using perl in the first place.
 Besides, perl's '-c' check and debug facilities make it much more
 usable to beginners than awk's propensity to find errors mid-run
 (and worse, mid-some-other-script because you had to embed it).

  i will probably throw in an hour or so of shell scripting, just
enough to whet their appetites and make them want an actual course.
:-)

rday

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[CentOS] can i run NFS *exclusively* off of v4?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  is it possible to set up NFS on centos 5.5 so that it uses *only*
version 4?  i tried this not that long ago on fedora and was surprised
to see a complaint when i tried to start the server and was told that
i was missing required functionality of NFSv1, or something equally
weird.  i'll check the /etc/init.d/nfs script, but i think what got me
into trouble was trying to use the entire set of options:

  --no-nfs-version 1 --no-nfs-version 2 --no-nfs-version 3

  i'm going to try it again this afternoon on centos 5.5, but has
anyone else tried this?  should it *theoretically* work?

rday

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Re: [CentOS] looking for cool, post-install things to do on a centos 5.5 system

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Fri, 17 Sep 2010, Jim Wildman wrote:

 On Fri, 17 Sep 2010, Robert P. J. Day wrote:

   i've already added a section on EPEL, just so i can install
  things like git.  and i know there's an entire page at centos.org
  on extra repos.  any there that you *particularly* recommend?
  i'll revisit that page later today but i'm thinking that, for the
  sake of this first-level admin course, EPEL might be sufficient
  for now.

 How to identify and work your way out of rpm conflicts.  (without
 using nodeps of course).

  i've already added some of that, using things like --replacepkgs and
--replacefiles and so on.

rday

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Re: [CentOS] can i run NFS *exclusively* off of v4?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Fri, 17 Sep 2010, Robert P. J. Day wrote:


   is it possible to set up NFS on centos 5.5 so that it uses *only*
 version 4?  i tried this not that long ago on fedora and was surprised
 to see a complaint when i tried to start the server and was told that
 i was missing required functionality of NFSv1, or something equally
 weird.  i'll check the /etc/init.d/nfs script, but i think what got me
 into trouble was trying to use the entire set of options:

   --no-nfs-version 1 --no-nfs-version 2 --no-nfs-version 3

   i'm going to try it again this afternoon on centos 5.5, but has
 anyone else tried this?  should it *theoretically* work?

  as an actual example of what i'm talking about, if you take a look
at /etc/sysconfig/nfs on centos 5.5, consider these lines:


# Define which protocol versions mountd
# will advertise. The values are no or yes
# with yes being the default
#MOUNTD_NFS_V1=no
#MOUNTD_NFS_V2=no
#MOUNTD_NFS_V3=no


  theoretically, should i be able to uncomment all of those lines so
that mountd advertises only V4?  i would have thought so but, if i do
that:

# service nfs restart
Shutting down NFS mountd:  [FAILED]
Shutting down NFS daemon:  [  OK  ]
Shutting down NFS quotas:  [  OK  ]
Shutting down NFS services:[FAILED]
Starting NFS services: [  OK  ]
Starting NFS quotas:   [  OK  ]
Starting NFS daemon:   [  OK  ]
Starting NFS mountd: Usage: rpc.mountd [-F|--foreground] [-h|--help]
[-v|--version] [-d kind|--debug kind]
[-o num|--descriptors num] [-f
exports-file|--exports-file=file]
[-p|--port port] [-V version|--nfs-version version]
[-N version|--no-nfs-version version] [-n|--no-tcp]
[-H ha-callout-prog] [-s|--state-directory-path path]
[-t num|--num-threads=num]
   [FAILED]
#

  on the other hand, if i re-comment just the V1 line:

# service nfs restart
Shutting down NFS mountd:  [FAILED]
Shutting down NFS daemon:  [  OK  ]
Shutting down NFS quotas:  [  OK  ]
Shutting down NFS services:[FAILED]
Starting NFS services: [  OK  ]
Starting NFS quotas:   [  OK  ]
Starting NFS daemon:   [  OK  ]
Starting NFS mountd:   [  OK  ]
#

  now that's just silly, no?  i can start the mountd daemon as long as
i allow it to advertise NFSv1?

rday

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Re: [CentOS] looking for cool, post-install things to do on a centos 5.5 system

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Fri, 17 Sep 2010, Les Mikesell wrote:

 Agreed that it's good to know how - but 'there isn't any rpm' should
 really mean there isn't any rpm at any well-maintained location, not
 just in the base system or that you didn't bother to look.  Every
 time you build something yourself you are taking on the job of
 maintaining it forever and probably leaving people in a lurch when
 you leave and someone else has to figure out what non-standard
 things you did.

  i agree with this.  i'm looking for extra goodies that don't involve
possibly violating corporate IT policy by downloading and building new
packages to be installed on mission-critical servers.  there are
certainly enough existing packages at trustworthy repos that i don't
need to go beyond that.

rday

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[CentOS] how to show that a filesystem is ACL-enabled?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  currently reading the RHEL deployment guide and i have a short
question about ACLs that i can test on my centos 5.5 box.

  here:

http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/html/Deployment_Guide/ch-acls.html

the manual clearly claims that, in order to use ACLs on a filesystem,
that filesystem must be mounted with the acl mount option, and even
shows a sample /etc/fstab entry that represents that.

  however, i just verified that i can use setfacl to give my non-root
account read access to /etc/shadow so, clearly(?), the root filesystem
supports ACLs, but the mount entry for that filesystem in /etc/fstab
reads only defaults and, as i read it in the man page for mount,
the defaults option is not listed as including the acl option.

  can someone clarify this?  is there a command that shows whether a
filesystem is currently acl-enabled?  and is the mount man page
simply incomplete in that respect?  thanks.

rday

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Re: [CentOS] how to show that a filesystem is ACL-enabled?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Thu, 16 Sep 2010, Miguel Medalha wrote:


   can someone clarify this?  is there a command that shows whether a
  filesystem is currently acl-enabled?  and is the mount man page
  simply incomplete in that respect?  thanks.

 tune2fs -l /dev/[hda1,sda1]

 The values between [ ] are an example only. Replace, of course, with
 your own storage device.

 Look at Filesystem features and Default mount options.

  ah, excellent, i can see that default mount options includes
acl, and i'm going to guess that that's a kernel config option
that's selected on a per-filesystem type basis.  thanks.

rday

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[CentOS] why does automounting removable media always have options nodev, noexec, nosuid?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  i'm experimenting with some basic removable media mounting
exercises for an upcoming class, and i read that, while you can use
gconf-editor to change some of the mount options in cases like that,
there is no way to override the mount options of nodev, noexec and
nosuid.  for example, that claim is made here (admittedly for fedora,
but it appears to be true for centos as well):

  http://scrolls.mafgani.net/2007/03/gnome-automount-options/

is there somewhere that one could see and verify that those options
always hold for mountable filesystems on removable media?  thanks.

rday

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[CentOS] xen vs kvm for virtualization on centos/rhel?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  as i'm reviewing the courseware for the rhel (centos) course
i'm teaching next week, i'm going to ask the occasional question,
possibly technical, possibly more policy.

  first one involves the choice for virtualization.  the course has a
short section involving virt using xen but everything i've read
suggests that red hat is concentrating on kvm for virt.  thoughts on
that?  i have the freedom to replace the xen section with one covering
kvm instead.

rday

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Re: [CentOS] xen vs kvm for virtualization on centos/rhel?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Mon, 9 Aug 2010, Karanbir Singh wrote:

 On 08/09/2010 07:06 PM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
 as i'm reviewing the courseware for the rhel (centos) course
  i'm teaching next week, i'm going to ask the occasional question,
  possibly technical, possibly more policy.

 how much of this courseware is open source licensed ? Would you be
 willing to contribute some /all of it towards the CentOS wiki / docs
 effort ?

  sorry, it's not my C/W, it's being licensed for this course.

rday

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Re: [CentOS] xen vs kvm for virtualization on centos/rhel?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Mon, 9 Aug 2010, Karanbir Singh wrote:

 On 08/09/2010 08:16 PM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
  how much of this courseware is open source licensed ? Would you be
  willing to contribute some /all of it towards the CentOS wiki / docs
  effort ?
 
 sorry, it's not my C/W, it's being licensed for this course.

  From whom ?

  i don't think there's any issue in admitting that it's courseware
from http://onsight.com.  i was called in to teach a course in RHEl
admin, and that was the courseware that was chosen.  i have a copy of
the manual and it's actually not bad.  and i'm not one to gratuitously
compliment other peoples' courseware.  :-)

rday

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[CentOS] what people really mean when they say they're running 5.3?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  more a terminology usage question than anything else, but in a
couple of weeks, i'll be teaching the first of a few sessions on RHEL
admin and, unsurprisingly, i'll be using centos (as i've done in the
past).

  when i asked the organizer to identify the specific version of RHEL
that was being used at the client site, i was told 5.3 so i can easily
install 5.3 on the classroom machines, but i'm curious about something
and i'll have my contact look into it:  if people *initially* install
5.3, is it standard behaviour to still regularly upgrade as new
releases come out?

  obviously, i have to ask my contact to verify what the client has
been doing all this time but, in general, what's the normal behaviour
for people running centos/rhel?  and is there a way to examine an
install to see how updated it's been since that original installation?

  i just don't want to teach off of 5.3, only to find out later that
they've been keeping up to date and 5.5 would have been a more
appropriate choice.  thanks for any tips.

rday

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[CentOS] [OT] introductory online kernel programming course

[Robert P. J. Day]

  yes, it's OT but just in case folks here know someone who might be
interested, i'm writing and publishing a course to introduce people to
the joys of linux kernel programming:

http://www.crashcourse.ca/introduction-linux-kernel-programming/introduction-linux-kernel-programming

  and, no, it's not free -- six months worth of course will cost you
all of $39 (CAD), but the first four lessons are free so you can see
what you're getting into and decide whether you think it's worth it.

  this is the only mention i'll make of that here.  if you want to
keep up with new developments, feel free to follow me on twitter.

rday

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Re: [CentOS] [OT] introductory online kernel programming course

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Sun, 13 Jun 2010, Karanbir Singh wrote:

 On 06/12/2010 10:33 PM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
 
 yes, it's OT but just in case folks here know someone who might be
  interested, i'm writing and publishing a course to introduce people to
  the joys of linux kernel programming:
 

 please leave commercial postings of this nature off this list.

  sorry, my apologies.

rday
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[CentOS] how to build a centos kernel?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  a couple folks on the local mailing list were asking about the
mechanics of building a kernel for a centos system, and they seemed to
suggest that there were some intricacies involved as opposed to other
distros.  i've never tried it -- is there a trick or something?  got a
pointer to the canonical web page that has the directions?  thanks.

rday
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Re: [CentOS] RHEL 6 beta manuals online

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Thu, 22 Apr 2010, Dominik Zyla wrote:

 Anyone knows which kernel version will RHEL-6 use?

   based on the contents of my ISO image, 2.6.32.

rday
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Re: [CentOS] RHEL 6 beta manuals online

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Wed, 21 Apr 2010, Kwan Lowe wrote:

 On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 7:07 AM, Jim Perrin jper...@gmail.com wrote:
  On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 6:44 AM, Jure Pečar pega...@nerv.eu.org wrote:
 
  Yes but it doesn't show up under 30day trial subscription. Is it available 
  for accounts with paid subscription?
 
  I don't see it in my channel listings (for paid subscription) yet.
 
 

 http://press.redhat.com/2010/04/21/red-hat-enterprise-linux-6-beta-available-today-for-public-download/

 It's a public beta..

  still a few bugs in the system or something.  from here:

https://inquiries.redhat.com/go/redhat/rhel-6-beta

if you choose to skip registration, you get:

  550 Failed to change directory.

or am i missing something?

rday
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Re: [CentOS] RHEL 6 beta manuals online

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Wed, 21 Apr 2010, Kwan Lowe wrote:

 On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 8:18 AM, Robert P. J. Day rpj...@crashcourse.ca 
 wrote:

   still a few bugs in the system or something.  from here:
 
  https://inquiries.redhat.com/go/redhat/rhel-6-beta
 
  if you choose to skip registration, you get:
 
   550 Failed to change directory.
 
  or am i missing something?

 It's up there now... I haven't started a download but I can navigate
 the tree fine.

  yes, it's working now.

rday
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[CentOS] issues with 3rd party repos for centos

[Robert P. J. Day]

  i'm reading the lowdown on 3rd party repos with respect to centos
here:

  http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories

and i have a couple questions and observations.  first, the entry for
centosplus reads:

Popular packages from this repository include: postfix with database
support, a rebuilt kernel with additional drivers  filesystem
support, php5 and mysql5.

however, i popped over to the centosplus packages site:

  http://mirror.centos.org/centos-5/5.4/centosplus/

and checked under x86_64, but i don't see any php or mysql packages.
am i misreading something?

  next, regarding remi collet's repo:

Has been recommended on the mailing list and forum for mysql 5.1 and
php5.2.9.

however, if you check over there (say, under x86_64):

http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/5/remi/x86_64/repoview/development.languages.group.html

remi appears to already be up to php 5.3.1 (and even 5.3.2 under the
test link), so the centos wiki page is a bit out of date.

  finally, all i want is to install PHP 5.3.x (and, obviously,
dependent packages) on a stock centos 5.4 system.  is remi collet's
repo a good choice for that?  the centos wiki recommends extreme
caution for that repo, which makes me nervous.

  more to the point, are there any serious issues involving bumping up
php to 5.3.1 on a stock centos 5.4 system while leaving everything
else where it is?

rday
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[CentOS] another small glitch regarding 3rd party repos -- samba sernet link broken

[Robert P. J. Day]

  (sorry, i'm not *trying* to be a pain, i am merely succeeding.)

once again, here:

  http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories

there's a reference to The SerNet Samba 3 Repository -- that link is
broken, the directory structure over at
http://ftp.sernet.de/pub/samba/ has changed somewhat.

  also, the current dirs over there go up to samba 3.4 but, as of
today, samba 3.5.0 is out:

  http://news.samba.org/releases/3.5.0/

i'm sure someone else will look into that. :-)

rday
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[CentOS] [OT?] recommendation for simple wiki S/W to run on centos 5.4?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  any testimonials for some simple wiki software to run on centos 5.4
on an intranet?  all i'm after is something uncomplicated that
(ideally) yum installs, and that others can start using to start
sharing useful info, nothing more.  thoughts?

rday
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[CentOS] recommendations for SMS/EMS/MMS software simulation?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  perhaps an open-ended request, but i'm looking for (if it even
exists) some centos 5.4 software that will let me completely simulate
the sending and reception of MMS messages on a local network which
(AFAICT) would require the simulation of the MMS centre as well
(MMSC).

  so far, i've run across (yum-installable) gammu and i'm just
starting to take a look at it.  but if anyone out there has already
been down that road, i'm open to recommendations.  i'm just getting
immersed in the world of messaging systems and if there's something
that would allow me to simulate all of this on a local network, i
would be a deliriously happy puppy.  thanks.

rday
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[CentOS] how to push the bounds and get newer packages for centos 5.4?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  i've just started looking after a (virtual) centos 5.4 server that's
hosted at rackspace and, unsurprisingly, it was set up with all the
standard defaults.  part of the work i'll be doing involves php and,
as i read it, the standard php version with centos 5.4 is php-5.1.

  if i *wanted* to move up to a more recent version (say, php-5.3),
obviously, i'd need to go outside the limits of the standard centos
yum repos.  in my travels, i ran across this site:

http://blog.famillecollet.com/pages/Config-en

with the corresponding instructions:

wget 
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm
wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-5.rpm
rpm -Uvh remi-release-5*.rpm epel-release-5*.rpm

  i'm suitably leery of 3rd-party repos but i recall that someone else
(on this list?) recommended that site.  and i can see that it has an
x86_64 version of php-5.3 ready to go for centos 5.4:

http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/5/remi/x86_64/repoview/php.html

  what are the recommendations for well-respected 3rd-party repos for
centos 5.4 if i want to get newer packages?  the centos 5.4 system in
question is purely an internal development system so i have the
freedom to customize it to some extent if newer packages are called
for.  thanks.

rday
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[CentOS] [OT?] diffs between mysql 5.0 and 5.1, and upgrading to mysql 5.1?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  being used to mysql 5.1 on my fedora system, i'm suddenly looking
after a centos 5.4 box with mysql 5.0.77.  before i start digging into
the mysql 5.0-5.1 changelog, do i have a lot to worry about in terms
of mentally backing up one version?  or is simply upgrading the centos
box to mysql 5.1 an option?  (i realize that mysql 5.1 is *not*
officially supported in centos 5.4.)

rday
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Re: [CentOS] is yum a complete substitute of rpm?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Sat, 13 Feb 2010, Jim Green wrote:

 Dear Centos community, I am new to centos/redhat and I would like to
 know on a centos system, can I use yum alone to do all package
 management? I don't want to learn two systems and confuse myself, I
 understand yum is much better than rpm if is the case?

  yum is simply a layer built on top of rpm.  it's nice if you can do
everything you want with yum, but it doesn't hurt to learn the basics
of rpm anyway.

rday
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Re: [CentOS] is yum a complete substitute of rpm?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Sat, 13 Feb 2010, Jim Green wrote:

 On 13 February 2010 10:13, Ron Loftin relof...@twcny.rr.com wrote:
 
  On Sat, 2010-02-13 at 10:00 -0600, Jim Green wrote:
  Dear Centos community,
  I am new to centos/redhat and I would like to know on a centos system,
  can I use yum alone to do all package management? I don't want to learn
  two systems and confuse myself, I understand yum is much better than
  rpm if is the case?
 
  I expect that you will get a bunch of replies on this.
 
  The short form is that yum lives on TOP of RPM.  It is not a replacement
  for RPM.
 
  Yum does most of the thinking for you as far as dependency
  management. It is much more user-friendly, and is the preferred
  mechanism for software installation and maintenance because it
  does the dependency resolution for you, and saves much in the way
  of headaches, elevated stress, confusion, and RSI from excessive
  keyboard use.
 
  All that being said, there are times when you do want to use RPM
  by itself, without Yum.  If you stay with CentOS and/or RedHat
  long enough, you will run across this situation now and then.

 Thank Robert and Ron, Could you list an example where I need to use
 rpm command alone? I used rpm to install stand alone package if that
 is the case.

  i suspect there are yum alternatives for some of these but here's
some stuff i like:

  $ rpm -qa # list all installed packages
  $ rpm -qR pkgname   # list dependencies of package
  $ rpm -ql pkgname   # display list of files in package
  $ rpm -qf filename  # what package is filename from?

and many others.

rday
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[CentOS] where is MySQL-zrm-client rpm package?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  i was looking at options for backing up mysql databases across the
net, and ran across this:

http://www.zmanda.com/download-zrm.php

clearly, there are two rpms for linux:

  * MySQL-zrm-2.2.0-1.noarch.rpm
  * MySQL-zrm-client-2.2.0-1.noarch.rpm

but on a centos 5.4 system, if i do

  # yum search zrm

i see only MySQL-zrm.noarch.  anyone know why the centos repo would
only know about one of those packages?  i suspect that, to be safe, i
should download the ones from the zmanda site.

rday
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[CentOS] dm-crypt/LUKS the state of the art for block device encryption?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  it's been a while since i've played with filesystem encryption so,
on centos 5.4 (and other linux distros), is dm-crypt/LUKS considered
to be the state of the art WRT encryption?  i remember other solutions
like loop-aes and others, but what's considered the gold standard
these days?

rday
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Re: [CentOS] dm-crypt/LUKS the state of the art for block device encryption?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Tue, 2 Feb 2010, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:

 On Tue, 2 Feb 2010 at 12:00pm, Robert P. J. Day wrote

   it's been a while since i've played with filesystem encryption
  so, on centos 5.4 (and other linux distros), is dm-crypt/LUKS
  considered to be the state of the art WRT encryption?  i remember
  other solutions like loop-aes and others, but what's considered
  the gold standard these days?

 dm-crypt/LUKS is what the installer in Fedora sets up these days, so
 I'd say it's still the standard solution.

  i suspected so, i just thought i'd confirm.  thanks.

rday
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Re: [CentOS] any significant differences between centos and OEL?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Sat, 23 Jan 2010, Jim Perrin wrote:

 On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 7:47 AM, Robert P. J. Day rpj...@crashcourse.ca 
 wrote:
 
   someone just pointed out to me that there is a distro called
  oracle enterprise linux which is effectively a re-branded RHEL,
  so i'm curious -- has anyone here used both centos and OEL and
  would there be any differences that would be worth caring about?
 
   the only thing i can think of that might be worthwhile is that
  OEL might change some of the default kernel parms thru
  /etc/sysctl.conf that make that distro more appropriate for
  running large oracle databases.  beyond that, i have no idea.
 
   thoughts?

 CentOS is essentially a doggedly faithful rebuild of RHEL. OEL adds
 some tweaks, php-oracle, and various other mods they feel are
 appropriate. Last I looked, it was available for free, but the
 updates and support came with a price tag attached. This may have
 changed, and I make no claims as to its stance.

  ok, that's useful to know.  my original question was meant to
address only the *technical* differences, but knowing about mandatory
support and/or licensing is also useful.

 There's also a moral implication. RH's staff has vocally supported
 CentOS, and we contribute back to the RH community though bug
 reporting, bug fixes, suggestions, patches, etc. We don't charge for
 CentOS support, so we don't impact RH's business. Oracle on the
 other hand DOES offer paid support, which impacts RH's business, and
 I don't see any substantive attempts by oracle to give anything back
 to the community at large.

  again, not really a technical issue but good to know, thanks.

rday
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Re: [CentOS] The directory that I am trying to clean up is huge

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Sat, 23 Jan 2010, Marcelo M. Garcia wrote:

 Robert Heller wrote:
 
  -bash: /usr/bin/find: Argument list too long
 
  'man xargs'
 
  find mumble -print | xargs rm
 
 Hi

 Just curious. What is the difference between the command above and find
 numble -exec rm -f {} \; ?

  the find ... -exec variation will invoke a new rm command for
every single file it finds, which will simply take more time to run.
beyond that, the effect should be the same.

rday
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[CentOS] any significant differences between centos and OEL?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  someone just pointed out to me that there is a distro called oracle
enterprise linux which is effectively a re-branded RHEL, so i'm
curious -- has anyone here used both centos and OEL and would there be
any differences that would be worth caring about?

  the only thing i can think of that might be worthwhile is that OEL
might change some of the default kernel parms thru /etc/sysctl.conf
that make that distro more appropriate for running large oracle
databases.  beyond that, i have no idea.

  thoughts?

rday
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Re: [CentOS] any significant differences between centos and OEL?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Sat, 23 Jan 2010, Fabian Arrotin wrote:

 Robert P. J. Day wrote:
someone just pointed out to me that there is a distro called oracle
  enterprise linux which is effectively a re-branded RHEL, so i'm
  curious -- has anyone here used both centos and OEL and would there be
  any differences that would be worth caring about?
 
the only thing i can think of that might be worthwhile is that OEL
  might change some of the default kernel parms thru /etc/sysctl.conf
  that make that distro more appropriate for running large oracle
  databases.  beyond that, i have no idea.
 
thoughts?
 

 Price ?

  OEL 5.4 is freely downloadable so i'm guessing that's not it.

rday
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[CentOS] centos courseware?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  does anyone here have pointers or access to courseware that could be
used to teach centos (5.4, i believe)?  publicly-available, free C/W
would, of course, be ideal, but if you have some decent training
manuals that you're willing to license on a per-manual basis, i'm
still willing to chat.

rday
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[CentOS] followup to request for centos C/W

[Robert P. J. Day]

  just to follow on my earlier post, i have pointers to a couple
commercial C/W manuals for RHEL administration, but both of them use
an entire chapter discussing virtualization using Xen.  i'm under the
impression that RH is firmly in the KVM camp (at least for now), and
that learning Xen on red hat/centos wouldn't be as useful as learning
KVM.

  thoughts?

rday
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Re: [CentOS] centos courseware?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Wed, 20 Jan 2010, b.j. mcclure wrote:


 On Wed, 2010-01-20 at 10:31 -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
 
does anyone here have pointers or access to courseware that could be
  used to teach centos (5.4, i believe)?  publicly-available, free C/W
  would, of course, be ideal, but if you have some decent training
  manuals that you're willing to license on a per-manual basis, i'm
  still willing to chat.
 
  rday

 I find the RHEL Deployment Guide very helpful in this regard.
 Sorry. I don't have the link handy at the moment but it's available
 on the RH website.HTH.

  yes, i've already bookmarked those.  i was curious in that there are
some deployment guides at the centos site:

http://www.centos.org/docs/5/

but they stop at 5.2.  any reason for that?

rday
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[CentOS] why no centos 5.3 or 5.4 online manuals?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  i zipped over to centos.org to check out the 5.4 manuals, and what i
found was:

http://www.centos.org/docs/5/

which stops at 5.2.  now, i don't really see this as a problem since i
can always get what i need here:

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/

i'm just curious as to whether centos is just not bothering to rebrand
the manuals since it's just as easy to get that info from red hat.

rday
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Robert P. J. Day   Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

Linux Consulting, Training and Kernel Pedantry.

Web page:  http://crashcourse.ca
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[CentOS] centos vs rhel vs scientific linux

[Robert P. J. Day]

  i'm prepping to teach a 5-day intro class in linux starting in about
3 hours, and the courseware is clearly designed around RHEL
(apparently 5.1).  but since i'm not being provided with RHEL DVDs,
i'm just going to hand everyone a centos 5.4 DVD and take it from
there.

  as part of the intro, i want to briefly discuss the varieties of
linux related to RHEL, so obviously i want to mention what centos is
all about.  in a nutshell, it's simply RHEL with any RH-proprietary
branding removed, yes?  what's the simplest way to sum up the
difference in a sentence or two?

  and i've never used SL but, again as i understand it, it's also RHEL
unbranded but, IIRC, SL is more open to producing updates, whereas
centos is rigourous about tracking the corresponding RHEL version.

  does that sound about right?

rday
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Robert P. J. Day   Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

Linux Consulting, Training and Kernel Pedantry.

Web page:  http://crashcourse.ca
Twitter:   http://twitter.com/rpjday

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[CentOS] proper protocol for installing a *really* new package?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  what is the proper approach to install on centos 5.4 a package
that's newer than the currently supported one?  at the moment, AFAICT,
the latest poppler-utils package for centos is 0.5.4.  however, the
source is up to version 0.12:

  http://poppler.freedesktop.org/

which matches the current fedora version, but that's not surprising
since, naturally, fedora zips right along keeping up with that sort of
thing.

  however, i have a case where it's important that a newer version of
poppler-utils (and, consequently) poppler be installed on a centos 5.4
box.  someone has claimed he's done it by (gack!  choke!) installing
the fedora package.  that just creeps me out.  in any case, what would
be the proper solution under centos?  is there a rawhide/dev
equivalent for centos?  thanks.

rday
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Robert P. J. Day   Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

Linux Consulting, Training and Kernel Pedantry.

Web page:  http://crashcourse.ca
Twitter:   http://twitter.com/rpjday

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Re: [CentOS] proper protocol for installing a *really* new package?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Fri, 4 Dec 2009, Nicolas Thierry-Mieg wrote:

 Robert P. J. Day wrote:
 
 what is the proper approach to install on centos 5.4 a package
  that's newer than the currently supported one?  at the moment,
  AFAICT, the latest poppler-utils package for centos is 0.5.4.
  however, the source is up to version 0.12:
 
 http://poppler.freedesktop.org/
 
  which matches the current fedora version, but that's not
  surprising since, naturally, fedora zips right along keeping up
  with that sort of thing.
 
 however, i have a case where it's important that a newer
  version of poppler-utils (and, consequently) poppler be installed
  on a centos 5.4 box.  someone has claimed he's done it by (gack!
  choke!) installing the fedora package.  that just creeps me out.
  in any case, what would be the proper solution under centos?  is
  there a rawhide/dev equivalent for centos?  thanks.

 You could get an SRPM from fedora and tryo to rpmbuild --rebuild
 it. Since poppler is a library, you may have to also rebuild any
 packages that depend on it (evince, poppler-utils and xfig on my
 system, maybe others on yours). You should do this as non-root,
 check out the centos wiki and list archive for details on that.

  oh, i've built my share of rpms from source on fedora, that's not a
problem.  i'm just thinking of possible dependency issues.  given how
much newer the source rpm would be, i can only imagine what that new
binary rpm might need in the way of newer dependencies that don't even
exist under centos.

  i'll give it a shot and see what happens.  thanks.

rday
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Robert P. J. Day   Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

Linux Consulting, Training and Kernel Pedantry.

Web page:  http://crashcourse.ca
Twitter:   http://twitter.com/rpjday

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[CentOS] the ongoing wait for centos 5.4

[Robert P. J. Day]

  at the risk of picking at that scab a bit longer, i'm going to toss
out a comment regarding people still waiting for the public
availability of centos 5.4.

  here:

http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2009-October/083743.html

we read:

The last status (from twitter) is 2 days old with the '5.4 is baked!
centos internal network will start syncing up today. Release ~ soon!'.
Any ETA?

followed by the response:

Just relax and wait, this is a _volunteer_ based project. Want a
release date? Go pay for RHEL.

  not to put too find a point on it, but that reply is more than a bit
dickish.  it doesn't *matter* if it's a volunteer project.  as i see
this, this is turning into an issue of credibility.

  once someone posts that the 5.4 release is allegedly baked and
syncing is beginning, then it's not unreasonable that people will
start getting anxious to see it hit the mirrors.  and as the days go
by, it's not unreasonable for those people to start wondering what the
heck is going on.

  again, whether people are being paid to do any of this work is not
relevant.  it's important, from the perspective of reputation, that
everyone see the centos project as being efficiently and competently
run, and making what *appears* to be an announcement of completion and
the beginning of syncing servers, followed by days of awkward silence
and increasingly defensive rhetoric, is not the way to do it.  it just
looks bad.

rday
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Robert P. J. Day   Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry.

Web page:  http://crashcourse.ca
Twitter:   http://twitter.com/rpjday

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Re: [CentOS] the ongoing wait for centos 5.4

[Robert P. J. Day]

  amusingly, only 41 minutes ago, this from centos twitter:

we ran into a few issues on internal centos.org machines - all
resolved now :) we should start seeding to external mirrors shortly

and *that's* what i was talking about -- we just want to be kept
informed.  thanks.

rday
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Robert P. J. Day   Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry.

Web page:  http://crashcourse.ca
Twitter:   http://twitter.com/rpjday

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Re: [CentOS] the ongoing wait for centos 5.4

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Sun, 18 Oct 2009, Miguel Medalha wrote:

 I am burning the DVD ISO image to disk right now. It is available
 from some mirrors.

  i've checked a couple dozen random mirrors, and have yet to find it.
i'm almost tempted to ask, any idea on when 5.4 will be available?,
but i just *know* that would get me in trouble.

rday
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Re: [CentOS] the ongoing wait for centos 5.4

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Mon, 19 Oct 2009, Robert P. J. Day wrote:

 On Sun, 18 Oct 2009, Miguel Medalha wrote:

  I am burning the DVD ISO image to disk right now. It is available
  from some mirrors.

   i've checked a couple dozen random mirrors, and have yet to find
 it. i'm almost tempted to ask, any idea on when 5.4 will be
 available?, but i just *know* that would get me in trouble.

  i'm going to echo an earlier sentiment and say that, as much as i
grouse about this release confusion and frustration, i appreciate the
efforts of the centos folks and maybe i should stop grousing and
volunteer to help out.

  just FYI, my impatience at getting my hands on 5.4 is based on the
fact that i'm scheduled to teach a small class next month on RHEL, and
the students are indifferent as to whether it's actual RHEL or centos,
and they're also good with it being 5.3 or 5.4, so i was hoping to get
centos 5.4 ASAP and play with it just to make sure i'm comfortable
with the changes.

  if i teach off of 5.3, it's not a big deal, but 5.4 would just be a
bit more fun.

rday
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Robert P. J. Day   Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry.

Web page:  http://crashcourse.ca
Twitter:   http://twitter.com/rpjday

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[CentOS] so when's 5.4 going to be out? :-)

[Robert P. J. Day]

  no, no, just kidding, but this is interesting:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10376762-16.html

rday
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Robert P. J. Day   Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry.

Web page:  http://crashcourse.ca
Twitter:   http://twitter.com/rpjday

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[CentOS] fully open source ECM? yup.

[Robert P. J. Day]

  it's all about the open source, baby.

http://candyandaspirin.blogspot.com/2009/09/next-adventure-in-ecm-begins.html

DISCLAIMER:  the lady in question is a good friend of mine.  but don't
let that scare you off.  :-)

rday
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Robert P. J. Day   Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry.

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[CentOS] RHEL, centos and seeing if i now understand this

[Robert P. J. Day]

  ok, given the flurry of responses to my original post, let me see if
i have a handle on this as i think i've finally figured it out and,
yes, it does make sense.

  the scenario is that there is a very large software company in the
area whose only officially supported linux platform is currently suse.
however, they are getting increasing call to have their product run on
red hat.

  for most of their clients (who are fairly sizable) who will want
official support, RHEL will be the obvious choice and the software
company will advertise that RHEL is what they support.  the SW company
will be happy, the clients will be happy, and red hat will be happy.

  on the other hand, if there is the occasional client who is perhaps
not as large, or doesn't have a budget for RHEL, centos will be the
obvious option if they're prepared to do their own support.  that
scenario will, i'm guessing, not be that common so red hat has nothing
to worry about it in terms of cutting into their revenue stream in any
significant way.

  and, finally, for any client that chooses centos, that will
represent a possible support contract for independent linux
consultants.

  sound about right?

rday
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Robert P. J. Day   Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry.

Web page:  http://crashcourse.ca
Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/rpjday
Twitter:   http://twitter.com/rpjday

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