BenV's notes

So every once in a while you have to mess around a bit with new stuff. Window managers for example.
I’m quite happy with Fluxbox (been using it since I started with linux), but it’s nice to see something new once in a while. Especially since development on Fluxbox is kind of …. dead. Well, not completely, but there’s just not much to be added without totally changing the thing.
My brother mentioned Awesome a few weeks ago, and during HAR last year it was also mentioned as something that I might like.
Which means it’s time to check it out! (continue reading…)

Yesterday Slackware64-current gave me Firefox 3.6. So far I’m happy to note that this broke more than half my addons, but that’s to be expected with that addon-hell.
Wonder when they clean up that act and start including required stuff like firebug. Anyway, a while ago I built google gears for firefox 3.5. Since Google is too incompetent to provide a 64 bit linux version, you have to do it yourself, which I did. However, with the Firefox 3.6 upgrade this addon also broke. (continue reading…)

After a few days of waiting on a reply on the forums I got tired of waiting. So my possible solutions: Either switch to a newer glibc (which probably comes down to upgrading to slackware 13, not in the mood for that) or move the teamspeak server to a new domU. Since it couldn’t possible *cough* be kernel related, I figured the problem had to be in glibc somewhere. (continue reading…)

A week or two ago I installed the latest teamspeak 3 beta on our server to check out how well it works these days.
I was impressed by how far they have come. Back when I still played WoW we always used Ventrilo version 2. We never ugpraded to the new 3 version (even though thats illegal according to them….) because version 3 had a 10 slot limitation on the free server version. Of course they don’t tell you how much a license for version 3 costs, unless you want to host more than 1000 slots. Paying for Ventrilo would be fine, but paying for 1000 slots? Ha. And yeah, there are hosts that specialize in that (and make you pay through the nose for it), but we wanted to host it ourselves.

Anyway, Teamspeak 3 has a much better view of the world. They offer a -free- personal (that means non commercial!) non-profit license. This means if you’re a guild you can obtain a license
from them for free over here which allows you to host your own Teamspeak 3 server with 10 virtual servers and 512 slots. That’s more like it!
And if you ARE commercial, their licenses are well defined and very affordable. For instance a 1 year license for 25 slots is only $25. Compare that to Ventrilo 2 providers that ask you E10,- per month. Ha.
Oh, did I mention that they DO have a linux client? And windows and mac of course…. including the 64 bit versions. Lovely

However, as it’s still in beta I run into some problems every now and then. Today I was asked to upgade the b12 server to the latest. So I tried.
Result:

…. welcome back my friend…. BOOST …. always the fucking same with that piece of rubbish.
However, to be fair this could very well be a “learn to code” problem by teamspeak, but still… it’s always boost the brings the curses.
So what is it complaining now? I don’t have epoll? Seriously? Let’s see about that.

So that’s not it.
The forum has this thread suggesting it might be glibc that’s too old.
However, this particular slackware 11 server has glibc version 2.3.6, which should be old enough (according to that forum thread at least). Just in case it’s not I’ll try upgrading that later.
In the meanwhile I created a thread on this problem on the forums, let’s see what they suggest. I’ll put updates here.

This morning I noticed my torrent daemon (aka Deluge) was down. (continue reading…)

As I love to tinker around with apache/php installations to get them to work as fast as possible while still keeping some security in tact, I found myself messing around with FastCGI today. But why?! Here’s why:
On this machine I previously installed suPhP to get php scripts to run as a normal unix user instead of user apache (so users have the ability to completely lock out their database settings etc for other users on that machine). However, to speed stuff up on a magento webshop I wanted to have a PHP opcode cache running (I tried out APC). (continue reading…)

Don’t ask me why, but for some greasemonkey script that I wanted to run in Firefox I needed Google Gears.
So I went to the gears site with Firefox, and it told me that it needed to install some plugin. Yeah, whatever.
I hit the big Install Gears button, completely ignoring the tiny and almost invisible for my eyes 32-bit OS (64-bit not supported) notice below it.
Needless to say it went on to download a 3.5Mb package, started some popups and other junk after which it notified me of my grave mistake.
Aha. So for some reason Google is too incompetent to work with 64 bits software…. even microsoft can deal with that these days guys, geesh. (continue reading…)

Every now and then I like to leech something, and it happens to be that using bittorrent has a lot to offer in terms of availability and usability. However, as usual I have my demands. My demands for a torrent program are basically:

• It has to run on Slackware
• It has to run as a daemon (in daemontools if possible)
• There has to be an easy way to control and view the status, like a web based GUI.

(continue reading…)

That IS what it stands for, right?
Or maybe the last P is for Programs….. oh no, silly me. It’s for PEOPLE. Now I get it.
Anyway, the quote of the day:

configure: error: There is something wrong. Please check config.log for more information.

(continue reading…)

Yeah, I bet you didn’t know that. You’re so stupid. (continue reading…)

Slackware recently upgraded the MySQL version from 5.0 to 5.1, from the Changelog:

Sun Oct 4 00:17:50 CDT 2009
ap/mysql-5.1.39-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
This bumps the version of the shared libraries to .so.16.0.0.

Yeah, that’s all great, but for me this broke on several of my machines. (continue reading…)

Now that we have Xenbro up and running with a domain attached to it and a bunch of toy domU’s running, we soon ran into the need for a dns server and mailer.
Needless to say I don’t like the default Sendmail and Bind junk very much (wonder why Slackware still ships it…), and my experiences with Exim and Postfix aren’t all too great either.
Sure, they work, but they’re too complex for my liking. I like to know what’s going on, so I still use my trusty old Qmail and Djbdns for mail and dns.
However, since those packages haven’t been updated in years, some newer features are missing. So I patch them 4 times over and stab them a bit so they work the way I like (continue reading…)

This weekend we’ll be going to some abandoned part of the country because we’re “celebrating” the 50th birthday of Lotjuh’s mom. (celebrating the fact that someone is a year closer to death…. weird rituals people engage in…). Anyway, since it’s in the middle of nowhere (“Limburg”, might as well be germany or belgium as far as I’m concerned) and the information page of the abandoned place we’re staying at didn’t hint anything about internet, I’m assuming the worst. Which means no wireless, no wired, only mobile phones. (and singing people *sigh*).
However, there is still hope to play Billy vs Snakeman this weekend.

Through a mobile phone! (continue reading…)

Yesterday evening after getting tired of playing the Aion open beta (it was the last night of the open beta, so we felt like at least reaching level 10, which we did… and then we could ~FLYYYY) we decided to go downstairs to watch some series on our beamer. So we fire up the machine connected to it, which runs everything from NFS. It didn’t take long for the boot screen to come up and after the default selection was made for us it ran through the boot process spewing out the usual kernel messages….. (continue reading…)

Yesterday I found a release notice in the pulseaudio mailinglist announcing version 0.9.16.
Today, I found another release note in the mailinglist that announced pulseaudio version 0.9.17. Gee, another fuckup? (but that’s part of the release process I guess )

Anyway, I decided to upgrade my 0.9.15 installation since it still glitches every now and then. (continue reading…)

After toying around a bit on the news sites I decided it would be interesting to see if qBitTorrent would run on slackware 64.
So we go to the download site, copy the url, and see if Slackbuild likes it. Slackbuild leeches, untars, gives the configure options (which are a bit buggy, I know, will be fixed next release), runs configure. Configure crashes out with “blabla boost blabla”. (continue reading…)

Another day, another time for fun!

Since we got Xen up and running yesterday, it’s now time for actually having some fun with it.
The goals are:

1. Getting xend started automagically when booting without destroying my network connection
2. Getting a domU up and running with a network connection
3. Getting an internal network between the domUs and dom0, shielded from the big bad internet.

(continue reading…)

So I was bored and went through the usual slashdot, kernel.org, freshmeat.net, etc.
Once reading through the news on happypenguin.org I noticed it must be mario season or something.
After checking the descriptions I decided to check out Super Mario^W^WSecret Maryo Chronicles.
(continue reading…)

Here we are today, trying to do a very simple thing. Print a stupid little PDF document so our customers can pay their bills.
Easy huh? Especially after the previous cups drama?

So we fire up xpdf on the document, hit the print icon, lpr, GO!
*time passes*
Mhm, what is it now?
*check http://localhost:631*
Nope, no document there, seems like it was handled by the printer.
*check cups error_log*
Heaps of garbage there.

Remember that we had this issue left in our previous cups story? Something about PDF printing causing issues? (continue reading…)

This keeps bugging me:

Now it -will- run through configure. Thanks. (yeah yeah, it’s hidden in the docs somewhere).

Of course you’re already thrilled by my slackbuild.pl script, but this one thing keeps popping up.
“How do I get configure to get my system paths right without giving it a line that’s 2389472389 arguments long?”
Simple, install a site config.
“A what?!”

It’s a tiny little shell script that takes the configure options and barfs out some prefixes and stuff based on the options presented to it.
So when I tell it prefix=/usr, it will decide that sysconfdir=/etc instead of sysconfdir=/usr/etc.

You can get my my version here:
config.site - Version 0.1 - SHA: {meta-shasum}

Now the important tidbit. In order for configure to automagically use this script, you wil need to set the environment variable CONFIG_SITE.
Personally I do this through a profile file. Download the config.site script, put it in /etc and put the profile file in /etc/profile.d. Logout/login, done.
Oh, here’s the profile file:
config_site.sh - Version 0.1 - SHA: 3a6145987d03811f274ace34f5d08738f266f131

Now if everything worked out allright, running configure should start with something like this:

Wonderful isn’t it?

Our server in the datacenter is running slackware (duh) with a nice Xen installation on it.
Still running with Xen 3 using PAE since the last time I updated/upgraded it without any major problems for over 2 years now
(ignoring the time that the power supply let go of the the magic smoke)

So after the latest local root exploit thing, and testing it on some machines during har2009, I figured it might be nice to get the patch into my kernels. Running a webserver usually means you’re at risk after all, especially when it’s running wordpress

So I grabbed the latest kernel that had that patch and went for the usual make menuconfig ordeal. After half an hour of selecting “yes”, “maybe”, “I guess so”, and
some XEN options (CONFIG_PARAVIRT_GUEST=y, CONFIG_XEN=y, CONFIG_HVC_DRIVER=y, CONFIG_XEN_BLKDEV_FRONTEND=y, CONFIG_XEN_NETDEV_FRONTEND=y, CONFIG_XEN_KBDDEV_FRONTEND=y, CONFIG_HVC_XEN=y, CONFIG_XEN_BALLOON=y, CONFIG_XEN_SCRUB_PAGES=y, CONFIG_XENFS=y, CONFIG_XEN_COMPAT_XENFS=y) I built the thing.
As I usually build bzImages I also did so here. make bzImage modules modules_install.
Half an hour later I had a shiny bzImage. Let’s try it on a test domain!

I copied the bzImage to /boot, changed the kernel = "/boot/vmlinuz-xen-old" option to the new place, and GO!
This is what it told me:

Huh, where’s my console?
Checking xm list it seemed to be there… but paused… and with constantly increasing ids. Waaait a minute!
Checking the log files (xend.log in this case) revealed a secret:

Note the ‘WARNING’ line. Crashed?!
Gee, that’s … interesting. Why? Took me 5 minutes to find the other log file, but xend-debug.log had a magic line:
ERROR Invalid kernel: xc_dom_find_loader: no loader found
… great. Another why.
In case you’re wondering, the increasing status in ‘xm list’ was caused by the on_crash = 'reboot' line in the xen host config.
I quickly destroyed the doman and changed it to a oneshot try: on_crash = 'destroy'

After some searching another hint presented itself. Aren’t they nice?
This hint was: “Xen is a retarded piece of cancer and can’t decypher the bzImage format, try vmlinux instead”. Aha!
Back to the kernel, make vmlinux, copy, and another try to boot it. Obviously this was way too simple. It still crashed.
Checking my old kernel that works for both dom0 and domU with file I noticed that gz should at least work.

Some more details about the crashing domains can be found using xm dmesg
It gave me something like:

As you can see, that’s really useful…..

A useful page with some info can be found here. It confirms that a gz kernel should work (but bz probably doesn’t) since I’m still running Xen 3.2. However, I can’t find a good reason for why it won’t work.

Google to the rescue! Hard to find a useful keyword, since most xen kernel issues seem to be similar, but eventually I found this tidbit:
tiny kernel patch.
Weird that this should be needed, one would hope that basic shit like this would work after 8 kernel versions, but obviously they’re all retards when it comes to this.
Thanks Jeremy Fitzhardinge for the patch!
Just for quick reference, this is the actual patch:

So much for ‘vanilla’.

However, it boots now:

and a lot more yadieyada until it hits a new wall: root device.
Well, that sounds solvable.

In fact, here’s a solution. What you say?
“AAAAH, I GET NOTHING, IT WON’T EVEN CRASH ANYMORE, JUST NO OUTPUT???!”
Ah yeah, I forgot to mention: they changed the console device as well as the block device. So here’s a solution for both issues:
Edit your xen host config file and make it so:

(xvda1 is what used to be sda1, you can figure out the rest).

And after all this: HAHA! Success is mine!
Except of course for the undeniable fact that my domU has a fucked up fstab and all, but no issues there
Now go mess up your own system! Oh, I see… you already did. Good luck fixing it

Update

I just tested a testing kernel — 2.6.31-rc8, and it seems like they fixed it. Probably has been fixed in the testing branch for quite a while now, but still not in stable 2.6.30
Let’s hope they release 2.6.31 soon.

We tried to do something that seems fairly simple. “Print out these tickets for HAR2009“, where we went last weekend and had a great time
The tickets were delivered to me by mail in PDF format. Sounds easy huh?
Note that this story was written the day before we went there, just not finished, so timing might be a bit awkward. Here are the details. (continue reading…)

Messing around on one of my machines I checked a timestamp on a file…. and noticed “Huh, didn’t I just touch it?”.
ls told me the file was about 12 hours old. Interesting, since it was just created.

What the…. CDT ? When did we move?

Well, not recently… that’s for sure. (continue reading…)

Just wrote a page about my latest tool – slackbuild.pl

Go view it if you run slackware, or get bent if you run anything else.