BenV's notes

One of my older (stable, works like a train) database servers still on Slackware 11 — well, heavily modified Slackware 11 😉 — is running MariaDB 5.1.something. Because I was tinkering with mysql settings I decided ‘hej, let’s see if upgrading to the latest version is a fun project!’.
Well, it sure is 😉

First of all, the newer MySQL and therefore also MariaDB versions have dumped a perfectly fine autoconf system for Cancer Make aka CMake. Well, that’s just great. There’s no cmake in Slackware 11, so I figured to grab the latest slackware cmake sources and build it myself. No big deal, except in order to use the latest slackware sources you’ll need tar with xz support. Well, while we’re at it anyway might as well build them. So I headed over to the nearest slackware repository and built myself a new xz, tar, findutils and pkgtools using the slackware 14 build scripts (slightly helped/modified to handle the absense of xz in my old system). There, now back to cmake. (continue reading…)

If Opera continues living the way it does right now it’ll die within a few years. At least, that’s what I expect. Every new release there are more and more little nuisances. New features? Yeah, they have plenty of new garbage slowing the browser down.
Soon they’ll dump their rendering engine for Webkit. Who knows, it might even improve the browser, but then again… soon I might jump to Chrome or another piece of garbage.
I wonder why browser vendors have determined they all have to inject cancer into them. Must be contageous or something.

Anyhow, my Opera issue for today: Webfonts.
Ever seen a page rendered like this?

Opera with weird webfont

Those of you running Slackware 14 or current probably have noticed the move to the Apache httpd v2.4 already.
On my webservers I haven’t yet dared to upgrade from the stable 2.2 version, but I figured it might be a good time to test out an upgrade procedure.

Notable problems / changes

This new version of the Apache httpd brings a few things that you should really pay attention to before attempting to upgrade. Well, you could ignore it, but it would surprise me if you wouldn’t end up with a broken webserver 😉
So you might want to look into these things:

1. Configuration syntax changes
2. Handling the Pleuris-Hoeren-Paaltjes aka PHP disaster
3. Switching to the MPM-event module

Of course you’ve already done your homework and read upgrading to 2.4 from 2.2, right? 😉 (continue reading…)

Some days shit is just weird. Like this morning.
Somehow my mutt managed to get disconnected from our mailserver, so I restarted it. Mutt goes “Hej, good morning, how about I connect to your mailserver, one moment please”.
“Sure sure”, I think, not really paying attention. After a while it still said “Loggin in…” though. Huh, why is this taking forever?
After checking strace and seeing it wait on a read(3, …) call I figured maybe the connection was somehow weird. However, after killing and restarting mutt a few times (since that always works, right? :-p) it still got stuck on “Logging in…”.

Obviously the first thing I should have done was think “What changed since it last worked properly?”, but I didn’t and went ahead to check out all the logs and other junk on my mailserver. It had one positive (I think) effect: I upgrade my Dovecot from 2.1.6 to 2.1.15 😉
Other than that everything worked great on my mailserver. (Which a working webmail and no complaints from clients confirmed)
Long story short: It’s not the mailserver, dummy.

What changed since yesterday when everything was still great?
OpenSSL.
Slackware had an upgrade for libopenssl to version 1.0.1d, to fix some security issues. Apparently it introduced a new bug. Bugger.
Meanwhile they fixed that library again, so now we’re at version 1.0.1e. Guess what.
After upgrading to 1.0.1e Mutt magically works again 😉

Moral of the story:
Don’t touch OpenSSL if you don’t have to. This thing causes more headaches than brain cancer.

Another round of updates came along on Slackware64-current and since I was playing around with ffmpeg I figured I might as well update that. Since ffmpeg is one of those products that has a bunch of really active developers it gets updated about every 5 seconds.
This means that whenever they release a new version it’s instantly obsolete. However, that also means that when you’re trying to run the latest version from git, you’ll often run into software that uses the older functions/symbols/garbage and therefore won’t compile. (continue reading…)

So I still run Slackware Linux on pretty much all of my machines, which I often smile upon when I see another Ubuntu/Debian/Pokemon update break stuff (that I then get to fix, details). However, running bleeding edge Slackware-current also draws some blood every now and then. (continue reading…)

Seems like they released a new patch for World of Warcraft, increasing the version to 4.3.3 build 15354.
Obviously this broke on my wine64 installation of the game:
* Start wine64 Wow-64.exe
* Login
* “Patch required” -> OK
* “Downloading Update” -> OK

Patch 4.3.3 under wine64

Actually, it’s slackware64-current, but it’s pretty much the same for today’s issue.

Don’t ask me why, but for some reason my girlfriend wanted to start KDM/KDE.
(probably because enlightenment now completely abandoned their piece of garbage login manager ‘entranced’).
So she ran a ton of updates – “slackpkg update ; slackpkg upgrade-all” and rebooted.
KDM came up fine. Then she tried to login and was greeted by:

Cannot open ConsoleKit session: Unable to open session: Launch helper exited with unknown return code 127

After clicking this away KDE started to load but stopped shortly after that and KDM was greeting her again. (continue reading…)

Since I was in another update mood I decided to take a quick look at my notes.
The admin page mentioned something about the new 3.0 version.
Obviously I immediately became very excited and ran to the bathroom.
After screaming for half an hour I made a backup of the wordpress dir and sql and wondered if the auto-upgrade button would work.
Always a surprise…. but it worked! It actually worked! (continue reading…)

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