2011-12-15

Wednesday/Thursday 2011-12-14

Woke up in the morning, on the wrong side of the bed. Tried to feel better but drank coffee instead.

Brainstormed with the rest of the IT crew on how to deploy community systems (as in fedoraproject.org/community and NOT fedoracommunity.org) and then started building a special box for it. However after a lot of fights with my own syntax skills I got a preliminary version proxy working. Now its up to the real programmers to do their part :).

2011-12-14

My Opinions on Voting

I usually don't blog politics, but since it comes up with my opinions on Fedora lack of voters and some other items... I figured I should just go ahead and do it. Today I received a couple of emails from relatives and such trying to explain how bad the US budget is, and why it should be explained easier as that of a family. One set went to blame the politicians, another set blamed the special interests (tax and spend liberals, cut and spend conservatives). In the end, they both neglected to point out who the real culprits are.. the absentee landlord of the United States, the voter.

Look at the following revenue amounts.
  1. Tax Revenue:    $2,170,000,000,000
  2. Fed Budget:     $3,820,000,000,000
  3. New Debt:       $1,650,000,000,000
  4. National Debt: $14,271,000,000,000 
Now some people will cut off the zeros and then compare it to a family budget... or some will go on long screeds blaming the politicians or special interest groups. That misses the important part of democracy. In the end, the politicians are a proxy. They may be influenced by "monied" interests but the special interest they are mostly interested in is the voters who every 2-6 years say whether or not they will get to serve again.

To make this fair, let us change out the regular blamees to the people who actually are supposed to be responsible whether they like it or not.
  1. Amount majority of US Voters Want to be taxed.
  2. Amount majority of US Voters Want to spend.
  3. Amount they are happy to borrow.
  4. Amount the taxpayers has to pay back plus a lot of interest we didn't calculate.
Notice, I don't put in voters in the bottom. People who don't vote and most non-citizens in this country pay taxes so they get stuck with the bill whether or not they vote.


If you are outraged about the amount spent versus the amount taxed.. you need to do the following:
  1. Register to Vote.
  2. Research the candidates who will either up the amount taxed, lower the amount spent, or a combination of the two.
  3. When the election occurs, vote for the candidate that fits your needs best. Remember always that there is no perfect candidate, you will have to make do with what you can get.
  4. Watch whoever gets elected and ask why they voted for this or that. Keep them on their toes. People who know that they are watched are psychologically more likely to be honest and dependable. They are also more likely to follow the social norms of the people watching them. Most politicians get in trouble because the only people watching them are other politicians.
  5. If you don't like how things occurred, vote for someone else the next time.
  6. Talk to your neighbours and find out why they don't vote. Get them to register and vote too. They don't have to vote for the person you voted for, but they need to watch the elected just the same as you.
  7. Keep at it. It took 20+ years to dig this whole, it will take 20+ years to dig out of it.
If you aren't registering to vote, you have lost any right to be taken seriously.

You can sit in a park, you can show up at the IRS office with bags of tea at the IRS office, or you can email me pithy statements about how horrible everyone else is, but you have given up your most important voice.. and the only one I will give credence to, the vote.

[PS Take the above as my opinion and my default answer when you email, blog, facepoke, etc about the dire straights of a nation. In my limited and very biased view, the above can be used for most nations.. the amount that people will happily borrow because they want it and don't want to save for it will always be larger than it should be. I don't have much sympathy for a bond market that doesn't take that into account in the interest rates and fees they initially charge.]

2011-12-13

Monday/Tuesday 2011-12-13


Ok the weekend was a blast playing Minecraft with my kid. My wife says we sound like a bunch of dwarves and should beware. I then play Gimli quotes on Youtube for fun.


Monday

  • Email not as bad as last couple of weeks
  • Worked on pass phrase tool.
  • Worked with Seth on known_hosts item
  • Worked with Kevin with collab change
  • Spend the evening going over password entropy and to see if we can run a password checker against our old passwords. [Mainly to get an idea of how many weak ones there were so we can be better informed in the future.]


Tuesday


  • Work inside of RH on DNS nameservices. Find out that our registrar doesn't do IPv6 yet. WHEEE
  • Weekly phone call with RHIT.
  • Remove old collab servers.
  • serverbeach03 goes whacky when trying to decommission it.
  • Wrote a HOWTO on travelling to the colo.
  • Dealt with zones we knew nothing about.. it would seem there are quite a few hanging out there that showed up after top level registrar was updated.
  • Rebuilt smtp-mm03
  • Sync'd over data to archives for F14.

2011-12-09

Friday 2011-12-10

Spent the evening with kid playing mindcraft. Was told by kid that I couldn't take a sick day for him and me and play today... "Dad I don't want to go to truancy court." Sigh.. ok well then off to work it is

Talked with some people on Google+ about running email oneself versus using a service. I used to have all my email go to my private SMTP server where I could filter spam, ham, lamb, etc however I wanted. At some point in 2000 I just got burned out by it. I think it was because it was my day job and that pretty much made any problem at home more work versus fun. Oh well.. I can take Parental Computing for a while longer.

Discovered the Piano Guys this week. They have some seriously cool music they make per day. I really love Cellos (though I find the Viola de Gamba for some reason nicer to my ear [And yes that is a joke on multi layers].)

Wondered if Santa Claus would get me a computer... looked at the one system76. Santa says I have not been good enough this year for that though.


2011-12-08

Wednesday/Thursday 2011-12-07-> 2011-12-08

Spent most of Wednesday tracking down issues with ipv6 and Linux network bridges. Somehow, somewhere we finally stomped it out... but I will admit that by the end of it I was tired and using a hammer to put in screws... One of the following fixed it:

  1. Different kernel
  2. Removing an ipv6 address from the bridge or its parent ethernet port.
  3. Some changes in guest network drivers
  4. 2 pints of Marble Red Imperial Ale. [Ok I don't drink, but I really really wanted to after the mysterious "it works, but no new ips are allowed.. now it doesn't work.. now it does." ]
  5. Magic pixie dust (it takes 8 pixies to make an ounce of dust.. and man are those things hard to catch.)
A lot of email was dealt with during the day. And then I made the fatal mistake at 10pm of putting stuff in the bin without thinking about what i had selected.

Thursday morning and afternoon was dealing with the fact that 2 weeks of email had been deleted and I needed to figure out which ones I really cared about. Wheee. Thankfully I hadn't emptied the bin but there was still a lot of emails that needed to be sorted out from all the stuff I had deleted earlier. 

And then I got a ring of the doorbell. And there was a box on the doorstep. And the box had another box in it, and that box had this


and all my cares went away. Now to see how much it would cost for us to make say 20 of these for Fedora for next release.

Worked to move a DNS server from one colocation to another. Found out that the IPs couldn't be routed as easily as first claimed. Moving to plan A. (Plan B was doing this after we were told they could reroute at the border.) Then spent the day looking at what would be needed for updating our server at internetx01 to rhel6.

2011-12-06

Tuesday 2011-12-06

Looked at desktops this morning. It would seem that there is a constant rule about computers and me. The computer I would like to have is about $5000.00. I think it has been that way since 1994 and I first tried to come up with what my home linux box should be. In the end, the computer I end up is usually 1/10th of that.

I can see that the US Thanksgiving holiday is over and people are gearing up for various end of the year holidays.. the email volume of patches and such have gone up. Thankfully most of the arguments seem to have gone down for a while.


Monday 2011-12-05

It is snowing quite alot around where I am living. Sadly, I seem to live in a heat bubble of some sort, we ended up with a 1-2 cm while most of the state seems to have gotten from 12 to 25 cm.

Most of the weekend was spent playing minecraft with my son. I put a server on a box and then we played for more hours than we should have. This originally was meant to be a study of how simple graphics can make for a playable game.. i think the 14 hours I played shows that it can be for certain audiences.

Spent most of the day catching up with email. Worked on getting a new DNS nameserver at Peer1 ready for us this week. Saw that the Fedora elections ended with not a lot of people voting. I wish voting was mandatory at times.

2011-12-02

Friday 2011-12-02

Had to get off the computers early last night due to a heavy windstorm which had 80 mph gusts. The internet went up and down for a bit but I did get to watch some "How Things Are Made" on Netflix.. don't ask me why but I find the show fascinating.

Fedora Elections are going on without a lot of fanfare this cycle. Larry Cafiero, Bob Jensen AND Christopher Wickert are running for the board. That should make for some excitement. Spent part of the day hacking on a version of the javascript password generator.. hope to ahve a test page on Monday.

2011-12-01

2011-12-01 - Thursday

This week has been a mass of emails mostly about doing anything. If anything I have learned that some set of people and I are never going to agree (or it seems to move towards seeing each others point of view.) It is probably just better to put their emails in the "Read When I am NotDepressed" folder. I guess they do that to mine :).

It looks like there will be a snow fall of some sort this weekend in New Mexico... everything from storm of the decade to minor puffs of snow. I stocked up on Hobnob cookies and canned soup so will be able to make it through the day. That and a large generator should allow me to keep the laptops going while I play minecraft.

Putting a redundant power supply into a system caused it to crash out badly. Glad we had a redundant powersupply to fix that (thanks to AdamW for giving me that one). Then putting in cleaning tapes but forgetting to eject the tape in the drive already... just makes the day go round.

The day got crappy enough that the music went from Classical to the Doors to Evanescence to Metallica.

2011-11-30

Wednesday 2011-11-30

Started off the morning with page storm caused by a xen domU jumping ahead 30 minutes and then time stopping on it. This of course caused all kinds of problems with encryption and such. System could not be rebooted and had to be destroy/created.

Went Middle School shopping with the wife. I think we have found a good one, and will look more into it over the next couple of weeks. Had tea at Satellite Coffee.

Getting excited to be in Blacksburg Virginia for FudCon. One, I am bringing my dad. My passion for computers would not have been as wide and strong if my dad had not introduced me to a Heathkit 8008 system. I was told I couldn't get a bigger computer until I programmed it.. which I spent a whole summer getting it to do a little light show. My dad's friends would have these MicroVaxes running this thing called Unix (because VMS was for accountants as I was told at the age of 10 or so). He had a great time at SELF last year and Mom wants a weekend to herself so up we go.

Second, Blacksburg Virginia is home to Blacksburg Tactical Research Center which had some of my most favourite gaming supplements. Well it was 20 years ago. Now to see how their Open Gaming Supplement system works.

2011-11-29

Tuesday 2011-11-29

Last week was mainly taken up with little tasks to make sure Fedora IT would survive American Thanksgiving break, which it seems it did. Yesterday was decommissioning some servers that were not properly configured originally. Tomorrow will be fixing their replacements I guess.

Spent today working out how to end of life mediawiki 114 and 115. I will be end of lifing mediawiki116 as soon as the reviews for 117 and 118 are submitted and fulfilled.

Not much else on the list of things.. my head feels like someone took a 2x4 to the left of it for some reason.

2011-11-21

Monday 2011-11-21

Most of the weekend turned into a blur of things I can't remember exactly what I was doing. I thought I was going to read some comic collections of Schlock Mercenary and Sheldon the Kid. Instead they were quickly taken by my son to his room where giggles and saying of gag-lines kept echoing out of. I thought he was done with them yesterday as they had reappeared on the coffee table, but they quickly went back as "I wanted to read them again." Since I have not seen our Calvin and Hobbes in years.. I expect I will have to order another set. [On the other hand, for all the other comic collections we have that don't get boggarted like that.. it is a fine complement.]

Oh look this was in my drafts for some reason.. getting published.

2011-11-17

Thursday 2011-11-17

Well no one seemed to notice the Ubuntu Chuck say YEAH to the Beefy Miracle in my last post... I dodged something I guess.

Tasks

  1. Email deluge
  2. Learned NOT to read users@fedoraproject.org if you want to feel happy about what one does.
  3. Found out that I broke mirroring for people getting spins from alt.fedoraproject.org due to my missing that the rsync target was called alt before and fedora-alt later.
  4. Struggled with setting up APC power strips for remote logins. Got 2 to work. Had to get help from RHIT on the other two.
  5. Tried to get to building those systems he started on Monday and got sucked into the morass of configs.

2011-11-16

Wednesday 2011-11-16

Tasks for today

  1. Phone call with various people around the world on PPC systems
  2. Thanksgiving lunch with son.
  3. Finish off rsync's off Fedora 13 and Fedora 14 to archives. Will redo 14 after EOL. Will also work with dgilmore on a clean hardlink of the entire archive tree.
  4. Worked a bit on the Fedora Hosted FAD.
  5. Finished off a budget.
  6. Took a meme too far (with apologies to my friends in Ubuntu.. who are currently looking for eyebleach. Also apologies to anyone who uses the gimp professionally.. I butchered this badly.)
  7. Read about SOPA. Having seen how badly the current DMCA and similar rules are abused regularly.. I figure this will it even worse.
  8. Work out which systems I would abuse tomorrow.

2011-11-15

Tuesday 2011-11-15

Today was another mass of email, but finally let up around lunch time... just in time for phone meetings. Didn't get a chance to try Bovril.. will put that on the list later.

Tasks
  1. Fix certificates on alt and download servers.
  2. Try to get alt and secondary to do weird stuff with URLs. [well not weird but getting puppet it to do it for me is the weird part.]
  3. Wipe disks on serverbeach05
  4. Sync Fedora 13 from production to archives
  5. Sync Fedora 14 from production to archives
  6. Try to figure out how to do spreadsheets
Music
WCPE because I need to relax or I will strangle myself on a spreadsheet.


2011-11-14

Monday 2011-11-14

Spent most of the weekend not sleeping well to this lingering cough. My mood was quite foul and rude by the end of yesterday. Broke down and got some cough medicine which helped my sleep last night quite a bit.

After extensive semi-blind testing (making identical sandwiches and then randomly eating them later in the day), I have come to the conclusion that Dennis Gilmore is correct: Vegemite tastes much better than Marmite. I think it has to do with the Malt extract in Vegemite versus "Vegetable" extract used in Marmite.  Then lo and behold this evening a third contender appeared on my doorstep all the way from Shropshire England: Bovril.

Tasks today


  1. Email catchup. Two days of email is quite a lot.
  2. Try to figure out serverbeach routing with Kevin
  3. More email.
  4. Clean up old disks off of serverbeach05
  5. More email.
  6. Lots of tiny IRQ's all different.
[Edited 2011-11-15. I got Bovril not Marmite.]

2011-11-10

Thursday 2011-11-10

Got an extremely good nights sleep last night. Thank you Theraflu :).

Spent the morning catching up with emails from the last couple of days. I had put a pile of them on my "will read when my head isnt' spinnie" and since it wasn't, they needed to be read.

Spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how many systems we use, where and why. Not a lot of fascinating work but one of those "hmmmm".

And today I got several emails of people who say they have read my blogs and wanted to know if I could advertise for them :). The answer is no. This blog is meant for making sure I write something weekly and to let my boss know I didn't die :). I don't feel right using it to market stuff.

On other news.. we have everything ordered for Thanksgiving Dinner. I just need to finish the gaming module off.

2011-11-09

Been sick (2011-11-02 => 2011-11-08)

Tuesday night last week (2011-11-02) I got a horrible headache and went to lay down.. ended up getting some sort of "creeping crud" that was going around the neighbourhood. Spent most of Wednesday and Thursday laying in bed watching Economics lectures I had gotten earlier in the year as a present. I went to a technical school which at the time didn't have much in the way of softer sciences like Economics so it has been an area that is interesting but foreign. When Economists use the words like people are "rational actors" it means something completely different from what a psychologist would mean. I can see why it causes so much confusion with people. I also finished watching the lecture series on Chinese history, which was quite good but now I want to find out more details on various periods.

On Friday I got back to work and spent the day reading emails and getting quotes for new systems... and then spent the weekend sleeping for the most part. Went to a Magic show one day which was fun, but I was wiped out too much to try and figure out how the tricks were done. Monday was getting ready for the upcoming release. Do we have enough disk space (yes), Are permissions set correctly (yes), Did we correctly calculate the speed of a laden swallow (no). Tuesday was watching servers, going to some phone meetings, and ordering equipment I got quotes on last week. Ordered some Xmas presents for family and started to figure out what cards to send this year.

Today has been dealing with a lingering cough from the "creeping crud". It  goes from just a burble to something that sounds like Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Work wise was a deluge of emails and deal with next years ordering cycle.

Finally for people looking at interesting ideas in computer games, I found this article fascinating. Glitch sounds like a game I would enjoy playing in or writing. Cooperative games have been more my pull. That said, I am actually trying to figure out the old Empire game.

2011-11-01

Tuesday 2011-11-01

Wow another November.. that means Thanksgiving is coming soon. I got to hand out some candy last night. Our street is reaching historic "dead" levels which means I may just go to some other street next year (or put up some sign "Diabetic Rush Here. Get your 5lb sugar bags!"

Tasks

  • Email. Not as much as normal.. Snow storm in northeast I think has hit a lot of core emailers.
  • Download RC3. Changes in XFCE not a lot. Not sure if we are ready for a final release though.
  • See that RC4 does need a bunch of retesting.. wait for it to appear so I can grab it.
  • Put out for various quotes.. will see if they come in the morning
Ended up with a headache in the afternoon and went to laydown. When I got up no more headache, but now I have a sore throat and thick cough. Well one of the benefits of working from home is I can't get my co-workers any sicker than they would be :). 

2011-10-31

2011-10-31 - Halloween

Well today was mainly catching up with email then getting the house ready for trick and treaters tonight (I might be giving away king size candy and needed to get another crate... next year I am just going to give away bags of powdered sugar.. its easier).

Worked on getting PPC systems ready for the transfer then got sidelined by a bunch of emails about other systems. I think I have them all cleared up.. going to need to make a todo list for tomorrow:


  1. Order tapes
  2. Get quote for new system
  3. Build ppc06->ppc09?
  4. Get quote for powersupply
  5. Get quote for sourceware systems
  6. Get RHN for sourceware systems
  7. Work with gnome admins on backups
  8. Play more with FC16.. 
F16 RC2 is running on the spare laptop. It is running "cooler" in that the system temperature isn't pegged at 97C like it was on the beta. However I haven't had enough time to see if in my normal workflow (thunderbird, firefox, openoffice, eclipse, xchat, lots of terminals). After that it will be "can I deal with the UI" layout. [I am ok if the UI isn't for me.. lots of things aren't for me. It doesn't mean I have to swear and complain about them.]

Well the doorbell is ringing saying trick or treat.. time to publish.

2011-10-27

Thursday 2011-10-27

Today was pretty quiet which is always nice on a Freeze.

Tasks
  • Read email
  • Read LWN
  • Try to understand the intricacies of CSS
  • Download Fedora-16-Final-TC3 and see if it works OK.
  • Tried out the new Blogger interface. I am not liking it.. but I think it has to do with how spartan it feels to me.
Music
  • WCPE for most of the day.

Tuesday 2011-10-25 / Wednesday 2011-10-26

Yesterday was a large number of interruptions so I didn't get this post done on the usual time.

The Fedora 16 Freeze started on Tuesday. If all goes well Fedora 16 will be out soon. Updated one laptop to whats in F16 and will have to rebuild it because somewhere in between something went fishy in my updates. Oh well. Worked on a couple of stuck servers in the morning. Looks like when I missed a dependency in mediawiki for svg (which pulls in half of GNOME (sigh)) and so I need to make some updates to packages.

Read through the whole move /usr -> / tree of emails and wondered where I had read this before.. oh yeah I joked about this a couple of years ago, but someone wants to do it seriously. Look if you are going to reinvent the filesystem layout REALLY do it, not some half donkey attempt.

  • Change etc to configs
  • Change bin to programs
  • Change share to data
  • Change home to user-stuff
  • Change usr to distro-stuff
  • Change local to local-stuff
And I want the bikeshed to be yellow too. Wednesday opened with some rain which if I lived 400 miles north would be 8+ inches of snow. Tasks
  • Email (lots and lots of email)
  • Got a hair cut (several actually)
  • Go over tickets for final release
  • Rebuild value01.stg
Music
  • WCPE on Tuesday
  • Creedence Clearwater Revival - Chronicles, Volume 2
  • Depeche Mode - Black Celebration
  • Genesis - Invisible Touch
  • Peter Gabriel - So

2011-10-24

Monday 2011-10-24

Friday I went to Socorro, New Mexico to attend the annual alumni event, 49'ers, at New Mexico Institute of Technology and Mining. I went to this school a while ago and learned quite a lot about computers while trying to get my Physics degree. The school has changed greatly on the outside and somewhat on the inside, but it was a fun event. The students still complained about the same things and us alumni got to chide them on how hard we had it compared to them.

Saturday was another trip to Socorro, this time with the family. The dog enjoyed the horses, and I enjoyed the old cars. They had a lot of 1929 Model A's and I had the entire engine explained to me by a fan. The best thing was the showing of how pedal UI design has changed since 1929.


Having a gas pedal in the middle seems intuitive to some, but man it is hard to go from one car to another and drive them.

Monday's tasks were pretty simple.

Tasks
  • Get blood taken for tests
  • 3 days of email backlog
  • Wash dog which rolled in something
  • Get app servers have same RPMS on them
  • Go to library about books
  • Find a coffee cup I want for Xmas

Music
  • Blue Oyster Cult - Club Ninja
  • WCPE

(Edited to add: I misspelled pedal as peddle)

2011-10-19

Tuesday 2011-10-19 / Wednesday 2011-10-20

Tyr's day

So Tuesday was mainly dealing with Big Blue Room IRQ's. Termite inspection that showed house was ok. Having to deal with preteen school drama. In the end, I got another app server moved to our KVM systems and will have only 3 more to do this week. 2 are going to be harder than I wish because when bapp goes down we are SOL for a while.

Wodin's day

So today started off walking the dog and realizing that with my coat and not shaving.. I didn't look much different from the transients living in the arroyo. No wonder no one wanted to come near me. A shower and shave later.. I still need to do something about my coat (its an old cloth jacket which is super comfortable.)

Booked travel to January FUDcon. Put in the receipts and everything! Worked through a ton of email... and hit the big D quite a bit to avoid drama of various sorts. I got app02 moved over to another box.

Music
  • Loreena McKennitt - Elemental
  • Phil Collins - No Jacket Required
  • Rush - Power Windows
  • Sting - The Dream of the Blue Turtles

2011-10-17

Monday 2011-10-17

Today was mainly dealing with email. It is amazing how much piles up in 48 hours. Beyond that it was pretty quiet. I spent the afternoon getting bastion02 built as RHEL-6 on kvm. This was a lot easier than dealing with the bastion01 move.. I guess I had learned all the easy mistakes I could make.

Beyond that, I learned that changing passwords on Friday is a bad thing.. especially for passwords you only use once in a while. Sigh..

And for future reference
  • Apples - member of the Rose family (Rosaceae)
  • Oranges - member of the Ruta family (Rutaceae)

both of which are grouped one or two steps higher in the trees. So when trying to compare different things try for something like Mushrooms vs Oranges.

2011-10-14

Thursday 2011-10-13/Friday 2011-10-14

Thursday was a bunch more of not responding to emails about password changes and such. In the end. my Grandfather's words of wisdom came to me: If you haven't got anything nice to say, keep your frelling mouth shut.

Got plans in place for Januaries FudCon. I think I will fly in and drive up with my Dad. He had a lot of fun at SELF and all the ex-Navy people who were there. I think some of them will be at FUDcon also.

Saw that there was an announcement for 10,000 paid for round trip tickets to Japan. Sadly it is just an idea, and people need to be serious bloggers to get them if they do come out. I don't think that my love for Sergeant Frog and Totoro will put me in any spot of placement there.

Well hope everyone has a good weekend. I am going to spend it reading about Isometric games and CSS

2011-10-12

Thank you Dennis Ritchie

Today marks the passing of the pioneer of C and Unix, Dennis Ritchie is the R in K&R, the true C that many of us middle aged programmers grew up on. He helped author two of my need to find new copy books: The C Programming Language and UNIX Programming Manual. What I love about "The C Programming Language" was its conciseness. In this age of 400-1000 page tomes on languages, it covers pretty much everything you need to know in less than 200. If I ever write a programming language guide, I hope mine does not get longer than that.

Anyway thank you Dennis Ritchie, you have shaped my life in many ways. [Thankyou LWN for the heads up]

Wednesday 2011-10-12

Spent most of the day hitting discard on posts about password lengths and things like that. Nothing I could say would help, because people are not in the mood of listening. Did spend some time going through the glibc code for md5 and sha512 password hashes. Also read the Ulrich Drepper code and first misread that there was an 80 character limit. However a rereading said that I was wrong. It looks like there are no practical limits on how long a password could be, but the worries about a DOS are overblown to any of the other input methods.

Got some disks replaced inside of one of our virtual servers. Waiting for NFS to be finished setup and then I can move the app servers around. Made Linux Weekly News quote section again.. I see someone reads these blog entries :), thanks.

Working my way through the CSS Cookbook by Christopher Schmin at the moment.. I will hopefully update my main site to beyond HTML3 soon :).

How to Create A New SSH Key

Here is how you can change your OpenSSH .ssh key if you need to. On a non-shared Linux computer do the following:

$ ssh-keygen -b 4096
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/ssmoogen/.ssh/id_rsa): id_fedora_rsa
id_fedora_rsa already exists.
Overwrite (y/n)? y
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): 
Enter same passphrase again: 
Your identification has been saved in id_fedora_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in id_fedora_rsa.pub.
....

In your .ssh directory you can configure a file called config to use this key when logging into fedorapeople or similar stations:

Host *fedorahosted.org *fedorapeople.org pkgs.fedoraproject.org
    User ||put your fas account name here||
    ProxyCommand none
    ForwardAgent no
    ForwardX11 no
    Port 22
    KeepAlive yes
    HashKnownHosts no
    GSSAPIAuthentication no
    VerifyHostKeyDNS yes 
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_fedora

2011-10-11

Tuesday 2011-10-11

OK so Beefy Miracle will be F17. Could we have this be the last release name, please? I am not sure that release names really fire anyone up for our release cycles as our audience is much more oriented on engineering bling than marketing buzz :). [And really how many double entendre jokes will we have to deal with this?]

Ok onto the workload for today ...

Tasks
  • Email
  • spend some time on the serverbeach05 issue
  • arrange for IBM to come to cage tomorrow

Music
More WCPE.

Monday 2011-10-10

I spent Friday on travel to Los Alamos New Mexico. The fires in the Spring had removed more of the trees from the hills, but due to the heavy cloud cover it looked rather pretty at times (or scary in a horror movie way). Los Alamos has always reminded me a bit of Twin Peaks. I had a damn fine cup of coffee though no cherry pie.

Tasks
  • A lot of email to dig out of.
  • Work with Kevin on serverbeach05 oddity
  • Get info on virthost vlans
  • Work with IBM on how to get disk replacements

Music
Today was more WCPE. If you like classical music and like to listen on an ogg stream, you might want to listen and if you like give a pledge to them

2011-10-06

Thursday 2011-10-06

Today was split up into 3 parts:

  1. Standard thursday items: emails, reading weekly lwn.net news, and Infrastructure meeting.
  2. Moving proxy08 to proxy01 so that we could have RHEL-6 on our main proxy. Most of the hard stuff had been done before with the testing and setting up of proxy8. Most of my tasks were just making it think it was proxy01 and rebooting.
  3. Moving app03 from xen04 to virthost08. In my first attempt at doing this I learned the hard hard lessson that Unix does not ask you "Do you really want to do that." If you mistype the partition you want to dd over.. you will wipe out your physical system pretty quickly.

Well with virthost08 dead, (although enough existed for dracut's rdshell to work on bootup.) I needed to rebuild it. That was just a series of setting up a proxy to the IBM's IMM card and then using the remote console to run anaconda to repartition the disks and set stuff up. All in all about an 2 hours later.. we are back in business for copying 32 GB of data across a LAN... this time making sure that the dd target is correct. Then there is a lot of fiddling of removing xen bits and making kvm ones work. In the end, I got it working at the end.

2011-10-05

Thank you Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs passed away today and I want to thank him for one important things he did. While I enjoyed the NeXT cube in my office in the 1990's and playing with the Lisa in the 1980's.. the most important thing doesn't deal Apple or Next. He kept Pixar going when most other CEO's and investors would have canned the company. That foresight brought my family many movies that have made us laugh, cry and think over the years.


Anyway thanks.

Wednesday 2011-10-05

Today was spent tracking down why XFCE and Fedora beta 16 didn't work too well. In the end it turned out that Adam Williamson found the solution in 10 minutes after I found a log file which said why my systems would never log in. The solution was due to a gdm-sessions file checking for 3d effects and then trying to launch mutter whether or not it was installed. Ray Strode had fixed the issue upstream already and soon it will filter downstream.

Beyond that I now have 2 test systems installed and running. One is an "old" eMachines with a 3 GHZ Pentium 4 processor and 1 GB of ram. The other is the loaner laptop, Lenovo T61. I have a 3rd box which I know won't run anything past RHEL-2.1 so I don't put it in the pool. Test box 1 is slowly working out pi to its last digit, and the laptop is doing the same for e. [No not really.. gdm shuts down the boxes after 20 minutes whether I am remotely logged in or not :)]

On Fedora IT front, I mainly read email and stayed out of Seth's way as he updated systems. Tomorrow I will be working on Drupal7 items to learn how that will work with insight, and Friday I will be taking off for another 3 day weekend.

Remember to vote in the F17 naming. Never looks like a great name for 17... though I do have a soft-spot for Gernsback.

2011-10-04

Tuesday 2011-10-04

Today was mostly fighting one of two things: F16-beta installing on a spare E-machine and trying to get a system that had been a xen box to be a kvm one. Took a bit but I realized my problem was that console=hvc0 doesn't work well with bootup.

After that I worked on the E-machine and found that its BIOS was so old it didn't know how to deal with GPT partitioned disks. Thankfully dlehman had a update.img that fixed this issue.. yeah! Since the system has only 1GB of ram, I installed the 32 bit at first.. and am now trying the 64 bit. The box is probably at the bottom end of what Fedora can support out of the box these days or a bit faster than that.

Oh and I voted for the next release name: Go Never.

2011-10-03

Monday 2011-10-03

Missed several days of blogging due to allergies. Most of my time was spent trying to get stuff sort of working while keeping my brains from rattling too much from sneezing.

Today was a lot of catchup email and reading articles people had sent me during that time. I would like to recommend the Atlantic's article on parental computing I think it hits the nail on the head of issues with todays push towards centralized (ahem cloud) computing.

Tasks
  • Work through 4 days of email
  • Do Fedora IT tickets for release tomorrow
  • Try to move a xen image into a kvm image.. now where was that howto

2011-09-27

Tuesday 2011-09-27

Most of today was not taken up with PPC (only about 2 minutes while I rebooted the working hardware and it actually did that without crashing). Instead most of the day was working on Fedora 16 betaRC3 issues.

Last night while installing the system got stuck in anaconda going at 100% CPU but nothing happening. I figured letting it sit all night might get it to get to the next step. Instead this morning the laptop was very very very warm and the desk had a slight discolouration from where the T61 had sat on it. I then said "oh dear", and turned off the laptop for a while to let it cool down. I then added a metal laptop riser underneath it to allow for better airflow, and rebooted for another go at a reinstall. The install this time worked perfectly, but the kernel OOPS after reboot in firmware insertion. Ok... maybe letting it run 12 hours at 100% CPU wasn't a good idea.

Let the system cool down, and reboot. No OOPs and the system got first boot going. No problems so I create an account and log in to KDE. KDE starts up and gets a crash when I try to add another desktop... known bug but trying to do trace opened up a new weird behaviour, somewhere in the KDE stack I would only get updates to apps every 30 seconds or so. It wasn't like they were stuck, just that it takes either some sort of buffer to fill up with events or a trigger like moving the mouse to get the applications to draw new data. Running a gnome app was even weirder in that it would completely grey out during these times (however xfce apps would not have this happen).

Ok do a yum update and reboot the system. Oh look a new issue. The RHGB would draw the fedora icon and then stop. No disk activity, not accepting keystrokes to F1->F4, and not able to ping. Ok reboot again with rhgb out of the grub2. .. boot fails in fsck check with no shell fallback. Ok reboot the DVD into rescue mode and find that /home's superblock needs to be "fixed" (the journal on / was able to recover but for some reason systemd.e2fsck didn't seem to be able to do so.)

Alright system boots up after a system wide relabeling and we can log back into various shells. KDE still shows problem, GNOME does not but keeps giving me sadmac faces when trying to launch apps. XFCE works without issues. At this point I am not sure if the problem is with the hardware or not so I am going to run the IBM system check tools overnight to see if it comes up with anything.

In my offtime I got a haircut and read more of the CSS cookbook to catch up with 21st century HTML.

2011-09-26

Monday 2011-09-26

Today was mostly a catchup day. I went with the wife to early vote in our municipal elections, and then went to the book-store to look for some old sci-fi books. One of the things I learned was that living with a writer means book-stores are work and not fun.. which made my slow perusal maddening for her as she wanted to take a break.

After I got back, I learned how to do customer service by Keurig. My Keurig coffee maker had stopped working on Saturday and after trying descaling and some other things figured it was a broken pump. So this morning I expected a long phone call where I would have tobeg for a replacement. Instead I was helped by a cheerful lady "named" Dana who helped me figure out that due to the high altitudes of New Mexico, my coffeemaker was pumping grains up the "pin" causing it to block up. The fix was to use a small paper clip to clean out the tube and then run some cups through. After doing that a lot of grounds came out and I got coffee.. that made me happy. Dear Keurig, please hire more people like "Dana", she made my day. [I am not sure if she was really Dana or had a cover name.. but I enjoyed talking with her while waiting for the coffee-maker to go through the canister of water.

Tasks
  • Email.. lots.
  • Play around with zif
  • Download and install RC2

2011-09-23

Friday 2011-09-23

Ok so I volunteered to be a rawhide wrangler. Will see what that looks to require and will start on it Monday. What I envision it to be is that for things that are broken in rawhide but are built/working in beta channels.. I would be there to build stuff that has gotten out of sink. So if 16beta has gnome-shell-3.2.0-6 and rawhide has -2 I build the -6 version and push to rawhide. The goal will be "make rawhide consumable as much as possible."

Tasks
  • Try to get a vlan change for ppc11
  • Brick an APC power bar. Turns on you can turn on SSL before you upload any certificates.. which means it can't be logged in anymore.
  • Play around with zif. Don't brick the laptop this time :).

Thursday 2011-09-22

For some reason I woke up at 5am convinced it was Saturday. Convinced so much that I went to bed and when the wife and child asked me to get up at 7am I put on quite a whine. Well it turns out it is really Thursday, so I am off to figure out what needs to be done for the day.

Spent my free time while waiting for techs or puppet to run .. to install Fedora Beta-RC1. Found a long list of issues:

Issues with Brc1
  • KDE Desktop was non installable due to digikam issues (known)
  • Caused a crash by selecting and unselecting repos
  • Restarted the install and chose a minimal install
  • Did a "yum groupinstall kde --exclude=digicam --exclude=kipi*" and got items installed.
  • Got x running and decided to switch systemd to graphical desktop. [Made sure kdm was installed
  • Had the system switch to run level 5 (graphical desktop) and found I had 'bricked' the box. No X started up and the system had no gettys
  • Trying to get grub2 not to boot into this level didn't work and I decided it was late and time to just reinstall
  • Did a default click through install and system seems functional. Yeah something I learned from windows works... if things stop working, just reinstall

Tasks
  • Got retrace02.fedoraproject.org on the net. Test day next week should be go
  • IBM called with new parts.. start the dance
  • Someone is doing a bumpkus load of reviews because my bugzilla mail is full
  • Fedora weekly meeting
  • IBM arrived and we played does this part fix the problem
  • Got a working PPC board and spend evening building it.
  • Sooooo close, and still stuck with needing to update blade bios

2011-09-21

Wednesday 2011-09-21

Last night was a string of nightmares with everything from giving a PhD thesis defense but not knowing which subject to living in a trailer after a nuclear war. Fun stuff.

Tasks
  • Work with IBM on PPC issue some more.
  • Do research on PPC server options. My google grok foo rolled a 1.
  • NIST papers long. Brain hurt.
Music More WCPE

2011-09-20

Tuesday 2011-09-20

Tasks

  • PPC issues
  • Spend a lot of time tracking down system ownership
  • Build bastion01 and work on moving it to production
  • Debug various bastion issues

Music

WCPE is a wonderful OGG station so I get to listen to pretty much commercial free classical music when I want.. I just need to make sure I do a bi-yearly donation. I miss the Norwegian OGG radio stations. I was enjoying listening to the childrens radio and learning some amount of Norwegian. Its like Old English but not.

2011-09-19

Monday 2011-09-19

Today is International "Talk like a Pirate day" but my grasp of just normal English is sub-par currently. The local allergens are in full blossom and I have gotten a bad case of the ear tubes getting blocked up... so today was mainly drinking warm liquids hoping my left ear would pop open.

A quote from an article today:

The computer is a thing, but what people want is not a thing, but to do things.

Something we computer people forget all to often :).

Tasks
  • Get IBM technician into location for PPC replacement part N+1
  • Lots of Email to catchup on
  • And another day another dead PPC.

Music
  • WCPE -classical music

2011-09-16

Friday 2011-09-16

Spent most of the day working with various IBM Power PC support technicians. I will say that the IBM guys worked their hardest on trying to get one of our blades working. In the end, they had a fix-now board sent out and a technician there by 1pm. The board of course didn't work. Not sure why we are having so much trouble with JS12 blades but it really really is getting old.

Tasks
  • Spent talking with IBM on PPC support.
  • +1 Nirik's changes to VPN
  • Rebuild ppc12 so it can go back in production

Music
  • WCPE - Classical Music

2011-09-15

Thursday 2011-09-15

The Microsoft Ergonomic keyboard died last night (half the keys quit working while trying to type the last blog) so I went out and got a

Tasks
  • Buy a keyboard
  • Try to catchup with email
  • PPC hardware fails in new and horrible ways
  • Fedora Weekly Infrastructure meeting

Music
  • Clannad - Magical Ring
  • Def Leppard - Pyromania
  • Depeche Mode - Construction Time Again
  • WCPE Classical Radio

2011-09-14

Wednesday 2011-09-14

Lots of rain last night.. I slept so solidly that I didn't hear the pager go off at all. Thanks to Seth Vidal for fixing the issues we ended up with.


Learned also that getting used to vi keys (j,k) to move around in email is a bad thing in other readers.. spent the morning removing a lot of non-junk emails

Tasks
  • Junk my work email accidently. Spend time fixing
  • Wondered HOW THE HENRY IBM stays in business with a crappy self-service center like it has
  • Pain and agony.. it must be PPC

Music
  • Depeche Mode - A Broken Frame
  • Duran Duran - Rio
  • Fleetwood Mac - Mirage
  • Heart - Private Audition
  • Phil Collins - Hello, I must be going
  • Rush - Signals
  • Blue Oyster Cult - Tales of the Psychic Wars

Thoughts on Rawhide

Currently Fedora supports in some form or fashion 4 releases at one time:

Rawhide
Meant for the cutting edge of packages. Packages here can be broken regularly so that fixes can be done as fast as possible versus waiting til more expensive times during an adoption curve.
Release+1 (16)
A release that will be released soon. Branched from Rawhide and then made into release quality over a 6 month period. Problems and fixes are progressively worked on so that the software is the newest "stable" version.
Release (15)
The current "release" which is meant for most users to install and run. Fixes to this release are meant to be neutral. If a newer "stable" version is released it does not mean that it is put into the Current Release but only if no fixes can be made to the version that was released.
Release-1 (14)
The release which is nearing its end of life and fixes should only be done for security and critical problems

Ok using the "standard" technology adoption lifecycle, and realizing that Fedora is meant for Innovators and "Early Adopters" versus say people in the Majority curve(**).


  • Rawhide should be where people can experiment and break and fix stuff quickly without affecting the main population of users.On the standard technology curve this should be the furthest out innovators and developers.
  • Release+1 should be where things are solidifying and innovators are getting things ready for others to use.
  • Release should be where innovations have solidified and early adopters can try to make the various parts work for their projects.
  • Release-1 is where users who are not ready to move to either Release+1 or Release and may want to jump off to something more "Main Stream" like an Enterprise Linux.

The reality though is that Fedora does not seem to be able to handle this many streams at once. There have been a lot of threads about packages not getting approved for fixes in "Release" and "Release-1" that should have been, and large and long complete breaks in "Rawhide" that have not been fixed. Looking at the threads and in particular Jonathan Corbet's reply to me.

To me the original idea of "No Frozen" rawhide sounded good. I am not sure that the implementation due to the fact that developers can only focus on 1 or 2 releases at any one time. So I think we have problems that need to be addressed after this release.

  1. Should Rawhide be usable by anyone? If people are using it should they expect any kind of timeframe for problems to be fixed?
  2. Should we just have a way to move people from rawhide to Release+! when the alpha split occurs and stop updating rawhide til Release+1 becomes Release?
  3. Should we just give up on the concept of this many releases being available and go for "Release+1, Release, Dooom"?
  4. With all the other stresses should we just end Fedora on a high note, and move along to "GnomeOS-X" and "NotADesktopOS-X"?


** People who are in the majority parts of the curves prefer items where the cost to adopt is much lower and different than people who are early adopters or innovators. This is why there is such a disconnect between the "Wow this is the greatest thing since sliced bread" and "This is the most horrible change I have ever seen." groups in adoption cycles.

2011-09-13

Tuesday 2011-09-13

Stuff
I learned the following today how to retire a branch.. I think

fedpkg clone mediawiki114
fedpkg switch-branch -l
fedpkg switch-branch origin/el4
fedpkg retire
fedpkg push

Then go into fedorapackages and retire the packages there. (Or just follow the directions at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_remove_a_package_at_end_of_life

I set up a new set of packages for x86_64 EL-6 testing. Public key is in the directory.

Tasks
  • Learn how to get fedpkg to retire stuff
  • Build a bunch of fedorapkgs for testing
  • Had a late afternoon page fest that was weird.

Music
  • WCPE
  • Adele - 19
  • Adele - 21

2011-09-12

Monday 2011-09-12

Spent the weekend trying to get my old website moved to new cloud systems. The old box was a CentOS-3 system so.. its a bit of upgrade. Yes I am so far behind the curve I had a very EOL system on the internet.

Release time must be coming up because a lot of emails on lists are the "I would rather rant on someone else's broken stuff versus working on my own broken stuff" emails. I am getting better, my discard draft folder was emptied of 30 emails reminding people that "If you haven't anything gorram nice to say, then shut the frak up."

On the nice news.. IT IS FALL. The air has that nice aroma, the leaves are turning brown (we aren't New England so its Green->Brown with some Yellow for an Aspen) and I am feeling lively as a chipmunk.

Tasks
  • A lot of email.
  • Play around building audacious for EPEL-6
  • Update F16 box.. the box only reboots cleanly if I turn off rhgb
  • Got a continual crash in rhythmbox playing WCPE so time for a new player
  • Compile audacious for EL-6 is fun. Got it working.. yeah
  • Kill/maim/exterminate db01.stg
  • Started a thread on devel which I hope was constructive

Music
  • WCPE ogg (which killed rhythmbox)

2011-09-09

Friday 2011-09-09

Started the day off with finding out the change I made to DNS earlier broke the box earlier. sigh. On the other hand, the weather has become nice and cool. Today's high was 75 which is well inside my "I operate well" parameters. I woke up pretty focused and clear.

Tasks
  • Fix resolv.conf mess
  • Spent the morning learning git
  • Started reading through NIST and CC documents


Music
  • Robert Plant & Allison Krauss - Raising Sand
  • The Police - Zenyattà Mondatta
  • Phil Collins - Face Value
  • Blue Oyster Cult - Fire of Unknown Origen
  • Def Leppard - High and Dry
  • Rush - Moving Pictures
  • The Police - Ghost In the Machine

2011-09-08

Thursday 2011-09-08

Well today got off to a late start.. too many allergens and not enough benadryl. Or too much benedryl.. and not enough wakeup juice. Not sure which. When I got up I found I broke staging...

I upgraded my systems salt to 0.9.1 and ran into a long list of issues... mainly because I didn't have Cython installed and it wants it. Then some other ones that just seemed mid-devel issues.

Tasks
  • Get db02.stg into rotation
  • Break staging in new and interesting ways
  • Fedora Infrastructure meeting
  • More playing with salt.
  • Work on retrace server

Music
  • Miles Davis - Complete Birth of the Cool
  • Dead Can Dance - Into The Labyrinth
  • Bruce Hornsby and the Range - The Way It Is
  • Allison Krauss and Union Station - Paper Airplane
  • Robyn Miller - Myst
  • Robert Plant & Allison Krauss - Raising Sand

Books
I am currently blazing my way through "Inside the Tornado" by Geoffrey Moore.It is an interesting read and is hopefully making it better at learning how to market stuff better. The funniest part is reading it as a book written 15+ years ago. Most of the companies written are either gone or changed greatly due to market changes. It is memory lane remembering the whole "Pen Tablet" craze of the early 1990's that died. I am reading the original version and should look at the revised version afterwords. The first startup I went to work for, Spyglass, bought copies for everyone to see how we would grow in the first Internet boom of 1995-1996. We ended up trying to be a Gorilla and ended up being kicked to Monkey status by our primary customer Microsoft :).

2011-09-07

Wednesday 2011-09-07

Forgot today was Wednesday.. but my wife didn't. She snuck the human-sized cat carrier outside of the bathroom and got me locked into it before I could think what was up. Off to the doctor for me. No wonder I wasn't allowed to get anything to eat after 5pm last night. Visit wasn't too bad, usual prodding and I got a treat for not biting the doctor.

Tasks
  • Lots of email from lists
  • Spend some time setting up Salt
  • I'm not a real DBA, but I get to play one on Fedora Noc.

Commands I want to remember
pg_dumpall > /var/tmp/spew1
mysqldump -u username -ppassword --databases db1 db2 db3 > /var/tmp/spew2
mysql < /tmp/spew2
psql -f spew1 postgres
And xz takes forever... Music
  • Kate Bush - Lionheart
  • Pink Floyd - The Wall
  • The Police - Regatta de Blanc
  • Rush - Permanent Waves
  • Heart - Bebe Le Strange
  • Blue Oyster Cult - Cultosaurus Erectus

Setting Up Salt

Salt is a remote execution manager which allows a system administrator to run multiple commands across many systems in their enterprise at once. Similar to Func, I am looking at it as a configuration tool written in python that I can grok better than I am at puppet.

To start with we worked from the central home server by installing the following rpms:

  1. https://github.com/downloads/thatch45/salt/salt-0.8.9-1.el5.noarch.rpm
  2. https://github.com/downloads/thatch45/salt/python-zmq-2.1.7-1.el6.x86_64.rpm
  3. https://github.com/downloads/thatch45/salt/zeromq-2.1.7-1.el6.x86_64.rpm

$ sudo yum localinstall salt*rpm python-zmq*rpm zeromq*rpm

Now some prep work is needed here. We need to setup the hostname for the salt server in DNS and or /etc/hosts so that our clients can find it. After that we can start the master and minion on our first box.

$ sudo /sbin/chkconfig --add salt-master
$ sudo /sbin/chkconfig --add salt-minion
$ sudo /sbin/service salt-master start
$ sudo /sbin/service salt-minion start

The next clients will only have the minion added. The master will be off as we aren't ready to deal with multi-master setups. So what can we do with salt? Well we can run cmds and such

$ sudo salt '*' cmd.run "ls -l /etc/hosts"        
xanadu.int.smoogespace.com: -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 209 Sep  7 14:59 /etc/hosts
xanadu.int.smoogespace.com: 

$ sudo salt '*' user.info smooge
{'xanadu.int.smoogespace.com': {'gid': 500,
                                'groups': ['desktop_admin_r',
                                           'mock',
                                           'wheel'],
                                'home': '/home/smooge',
                                'name': 'smooge',
                                'passwd': 'x',
                                'shell': '/bin/bash',
                                'uid': 500}}
$ sudo salt '*' status.diskusage /
{'xanadu.int.smoogespace.com': {'/': {'available': 13899972608,
                                      'fstype': 'ext4',
                                      'total': 16910295040}}}


However I then ran into some limitations. I am trying to figure out what might have caused them, but they are rather interesting:

salt '*' pkg.list_pkgs
{'xanadu.int.smoogespace.com': {}}

salt '*' file.get_sum /etc/passwd    
{'xanadu.int.smoogespace.com': 'Hash md5 not supported'}

There should be quite a bit more packages there than that, and I think md5sum is supported. I am guessing there are some packages I need to install or check in the files. Will get to that in my next blog on this.

2011-09-06

Tuesday 2011-09-06

Yesterday was Labour Day Holiday in the United States so while I expected to labour through the day, I ended up playing a card game called Dominion with an old college friend. So I guess I spent the day on holiday after all.

Today is now my Monday with a 3 days of unlooked at email.

Tasks
  • Email, a lot of email
  • RHIT phone meeting
  • Rebuild fas01.stg
  • Go through security guides to try and write one for CentOS-6

Music
  • Rush - Farewell to Kings
  • Pink Floyd - Animals
  • Meat Loaf - A Bat Out of Hell
  • Fleetwood Mac - Rumours
  • Heart - Little Queen
  • Rush - Hemispheres
  • Blue Oyster Cult - Some Enchanted Evening
  • Heart - Dog & Butterfly

2011-09-02

Friday 2011-09-02

Stuff

Late start today.. the grass pollens are making it very hard to sleep at night. A sudafed with coffee seems to have gotten the day going today though.

Tasks
  • Email.. someone got busy with libvirt patches last night
  • Spend afternoon trying to build db02.stg
Music
  • Pink Floyd - The Division Bell
  • Pink Floyd - Meddle
  • Fleetwood Mac - Fleetwood Mac
  • Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
  • Rush - Caress of Steel
  • Rush - 2112
  • Blue Oyster Cult - Agents of Fortune
  • Heart - Dreamboat Annie

2011-09-01

Thursday 2011-09-01

Well today is turning into one of those "why did I get out of bed" days. I could whinge on about it for a while but what does that fix? Trying to figure out the new blogger interface which just seems odd at the moment.

I have to find a new virtual system provider. My colocated system died a horrible death last night and is down to 1/2 of a RAID and 1/2 of a DIMM. The fact that it has survived 6 years in a closet in my old bosses house in Los Alamos is a wonder.  

Tasks
  1. Lots of going back and forth between home and school today.
  2. Not as much email since I whacked a bunch accidently
  3. Saw how much disk space is in fedora-archive and how long it can take to do a sha256 on it
  4. Begin list of Compass goals for the year... now what did I get done again...

Music
Not a lot listened to as I either had to answer silly phone calls from people trying to sell me stuff OR I was going back and forth to the elementary school.
  1. Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon
  2. Pink Floyd - The Division Bell
Books
  1. Geoffrey Moore - Crossing the Chasm

2011-08-31

Wednesday 2011-08-31

Stuff

A bit of a benadryl haze today.. pollen is up and I have the fuzziness that goes with it.

I am trying to track down a study I remember but can't find (so it may not exist). What I remember is a study that showed sarcasm/satire had the reverse effect on "undecided" voters than expected. Basically taking a group of voters and show them something like Laff-In or today the "The Daily Show" and you would see the following effects. People who backed the people being made fun of would be offended, people who were against agreed, and people in the middle would initially agree, but would later be more likely to vote for the ones who had been made fun of. [EG an undecided voter would be more likely to vote FOR Nixon after watching the Laff-In/Smuckers Brothers versus against.]

The theory was that people have brain circuits attracted to "power" and satire/sarcasm looks to be a weapon of the weak against the powerful, and so undecided people would be influenced that X was more power than Y. The reason I remember this for some reason was it was pointed out to me multiple times why my sarcasm never got me anywhere. [Of course it could be that I am horrible at sarcasm.. I have an almost Sheldon level of not getting it from other people, but that is a different blog post.]


Tasks
  • Email Grind
  • Start arpwatch puppeting
  • Stop arpwatch puppeting
  • Try to get an idea of what to watch for from kernel.org stuff.

Music
  • Clannad - Clannad in Concert
  • Clannad - Crann Úll
  • Clannad - Fuaim
  • Clannad - Magical Ring
  • Clannad - Legend
  • Clannad - Macalla
  • Clannad - Sirius
  • Loreena McKennitt - Nights from the Alhambra

Reading

Tuesday 2011-08-23

Why is it wrong to say that the Year of the Linux Desktop (YoLD) has already happened.. its called Android? Yes it isn't "FreeLibreOpen" to the extent people expected the YoLD to be, and it is not what someone from the 1990's would call a desktop. However technology changes, and it is the primary interface that users people are getting to their data. Technology constantly changes how it presents itself as larger portions of a population use it.

Oh dear god, I think I have ranted on this before.. I must be getting old.

Learned that my phone company Qwest is being merged into CenturyLink and it has been going on for a year. I really am not connected with things.

Tasks
  • Email Grind
  • Systemd Grind
  • More APC updates


Music
  • Stevie Ray Vaughn - Greatest Hits
  • Miles Davis Quintet - Cookin' With...
  • Miles Davis Quintet - Relaxin' With...
  • Miles Davis Quintet - Workin' With...
  • George Gershwin - Rhapsody in Blue
  • Miles Davis - Kind of Blue

2011-08-30

Tuesday 2011-08-30

Stuff

Today was pretty easy. The telemarketers didn't call as much and the 2 that did got the message. A sink in the bathroom finally decided to show its age and the faucet had to be replaced by a plumber as my attempt was not good.

Wished there was an opengl-less window manager for GNOME3 that could run the clutter CSS/javascript plugins. Looked at what it would take and remembered that window managers have driven more than one person mad.

Tasks
  • Keep those emails going, rawhide!
  • Fix virthost02-mgmt
  • Fix download02-mgmt
  • Fix bvirthost01-mgmt
  • Try to get new retrace server built
  • Todays bugs I found in F16 alpha all noted already

Music
  • Dead Can Dance - Dead Can Dance
  • Concrete Blonde - Bloodletting
  • Enigma - MCMXC A.D.
  • Clannad - Clannad 2
  • Clannad - Dulamin (sorry for murdering the words)

Monday 2011-08-29

Daily Talk
Had a pretty uneventful weekend due to being sick. Didn't go to the local Science Fiction convention again.. but didn't pass the plague around either :). Sunday night we had a super set of Thunderstorms that went onto about 4 am this morning. I really wish the rain barrels had gotten here.. I think I would have overfilled them quite a bit.

The email over the weekend wasn't too bad. I have decided to take a break from GNOME3 for a bit and just focus on GRUB2 and systemd.

Tasks
  • Email catchup
  • Reset xen04 imm
  • Unable to reset ibiblio RSA2. Card reset only brings back bad


Music
  • Dead Can Dance - Into the Labyrinth
  • Bruce Hornsby and the Range - The Way It Is
  • Mister Mister - the best of...

2011-08-26

Friday 2011-08-26

Daily Talk

I wanted to start off that I realize a lot of issues I have with Gnome3 are my own hangups, and I don't need or want to spew those everyday. Spent the day telling telemarketers to go away, please.

Tasks
  • Daily Email Grind
  • Worked out how to do larger KVM screens.
  • Spent a good part of the day trying to get a PPC working the pain, the pain
Music
  • Apocalyptica - Seventh Symphony
  • Loreena McKennitt - Elemental
  • Loreena McKennitt - Parallel Dreams
  • Loreena McKennitt - The Visit
  • Loreena McKennitt - The Mask and The Mirror
  • Loreena McKennitt - Winter Garden
  • Loreena McKennitt - The Book of Secrets
  • Loreena McKennitt - An Ancient Muse

2011-08-25

Thursday 2011-08-25

I posted something like this on LWN.net earlier.. but I figured once there might as well put it here.

I am the black sheep of the family. For the 3 previous generations, everyone in my family worked on cars or motorcycles either as mechanics, chauffeurs, or even designers. My mom raced cars as a teenager, and my sister helped my dad take apart several engines. I on the other hand can't remove an oil filter without somehow cracking an engine block. However, I kind of know the culture, and what I am seeing in "modern" OS design parallels what I have seen of cars over the last 60 years (just maybe at a faster rate...)

Early cars were great to mod with. You could take apart an engine, play around with it, maybe see what happens if you mill out the piston heads a tiny bit, or change where the spark plugs were. It was a lot of fun for the people who liked to do that, and they learned quite a bit doing it by breaking things quite a bit. At some point though car design changed. It was no longer easy to take apart and change how a car worked because it had either gotten too complicated or a lot of barriers were put in the way on purpose to stop modding.

A good example of this is comparing a 1961 VW bug and a 2011 VW bug. On the outside they look similar enough. The interiors are similar in many ways also. I have even seen a 1964 bug modded out to look exactly like a 2004 bug on the inside.. However dig deeper and the differences are huge in philosophies.

A 1960's VW bug was the epitomy of the vehicle you could take apart and put together in many ways. Most of those ways would be horrible to look at but it was fun to do so. You learned a LOT from being able to break a car and make it do stuff that wasn't what it was originally designed to do, and you could always mill pieces to rebuild it (which is why there are still so many 1960's VW's on the road, because many of the parts are easily replaceable by someone with a lathe. And that was a second core point. Most any kid in high school could get the tools to rebuild a VW to what he wanted.. he just needed gumption.

A 2011 VW bug is the opposite end. (and I am not talking about the engine moving from the front to the back. I rode in a 72 beetle with an engine in the front because someone wanted to do that.) It is a very pretty car, and I will say it is fun to drive where it was designed to drive with. However it is not designed to be changed, in fact seems to have been designed in ways to make sure it wasn't changed. Trying to change it, see how it breaks, see how it can be fixed.. is much harder and more expensive. Especially since getting the tools and parts require a lot of custom items that you have to either be specifically trained in to remove bits off the car.

In the end, it just isn't as fun to play with anymore.

I think some of the frustration people are running into GNOME-3 is that lack of modification fun. It was fun to be able to throw sawmill, fvwm2, icewm, or E as the window manager while having other parts working in Gnome-1. It was still possible in part with Gnome-2 but sometimes not worth the effort. It is definitely not worth the effort in Gnome-3. Trying to get a right click working the way I want it is not really in the design goals of what the Gnome developers want. Realizing that and moving on is about all I can do in the long run.

Anyway off to my tasks and music

Tasks
  • Lets hunt the hidden box
  • Get caught up on researching IMM reset code.. miss meeting
  • Spot a certificate item. Turns out nothing.
  • Thought about buying a Chromebook. Quite taking shots of tequila and changed mind.
  • More javascript reading


Music
  • Altan - Another Sky
  • Altan - Horse with a Heart
  • Altan - The Blue Idol
  • Sarah Brightman - La Luna
  • Bonnie Rideout - Celtic Circles

2011-08-24

Wednesday 2011-08-24

Todays email train on -devel and -test were pretty crappy. I did not respond because a) both sides are impossible people, and b) there is no win beyond going the f away.

Spent most of the day with Gnome3/F16 in either a virtual system or the spare laptop. The laptop was pretty speedy bu the virtual system is just painful. I spend a lot of time trying to right click or look around for something that should be obvious but isn't. I am sure there are keyboard shortcuts but I need either them to be painted on my keyboard or some printout to remind me. After 2 days of this my brain hurts and my frustration levels have not lowered. I will see if things get better by Friday and then see what to punt to.

Systemd is uhm interesting. Yes it has a ton of options but wow its spews out more information than I need to know most of the time. Its like typing 'ls' and getting 'ls -lctZ' and not knowing why stuff is coloured and blinking when all you wanted was to see what files were in the directory. I can see us having to write a SMIT to deal with this complexity.

This grumpiness was sponsored by the letter R, Z, and the number 9.


Tasks
  • Morning Email Grind
  • Morning Fedora F16 update grind
  • Try to figure out if I missed some hardware somewhere


Music
  • Anonymous 4 - 11,000 Virgins Chants for the Feast of St Ursula
  • Anonymous 4 - La Belle Marie
  • Altan - Another Sky

2011-08-23

Tuesday 2011-08-23

First day of Fedora Alpha. Head mirrors run fine and things look good. My installed systems have over 360 updates to make. Yep smells like Fedora :).

Learned that my phone company Qwest is being merged into CenturyLink and it has been going on for a year. I really am not connected with things.

Also learned that my favourite New Mexico Apple,
the Champagne Apple
, may go away. The farm has had a lot of changes which have made it unsustainable. I am not sure if the Apples can be grown elsewhere and as Melinda Snodgrass says in the article, they are ambrosia to eat.

Old Man Rant
Why is it wrong to say that the Year of the Linux Desktop (YoLD) has already happened.. its called Android? Yes it isn't "FreeLibreOpen" to the extent people expected the YoLD to be, and it is not what someone from the 1990's would call a desktop. However technology changes, and it is the primary interface that users people are getting to their data. Technology constantly changes how it presents itself as larger portions of a population use it.

Oh dear god, I think I have ranted on this before.. I must be getting old.

Tasks
  • Email Grind
  • Systemd Grind
  • More APC updates
  • Work with Nirik on getting IMM located


Music
  • Stevie Ray Vaughn - Greatest Hits
  • Miles Davis Quintet - Cookin' With...
  • Miles Davis Quintet - Relaxin' With...
  • Miles Davis Quintet - Workin' With...
  • George Gershwin - Rhapsody in Blue
  • Miles Davis - Kind of Blue

2011-08-22

Monday 2011-08-22

Good morning, Universe. I had a wonderful weekend working in the yard and visiting old friends. Didn't get much computer time which was probably a good thing.

Tasks for day
  • Email Doom. *1*
  • Get to labelling ports on our APC*3*
  • Deal with various APC issues
  • Spend the evening trying to get a system working, and decide that I am having a monday.
    • my xfce settings decided not to put a window around java applet so I could move it.
    • the system sees its disks in the uefi setting but does not show the LSI controller for me to edit
    • for some reason the RHEL-6.x kvm keeps capturing the mouse when I am sure it didn't... and then it can't find the up/down keys when it does that.
  • Decided I had hit my whine quota and needed to go do something else for a while.


Music for day *2*
  • Sara Bareilles - Little Voice
  • U2 - War
  • U2 - The Unforgettable Fire
  • U2 - The Joshua Tree
  • U2 - Rattle and Hum
  • U2 - All that You Can't Leave Behind
  • U2 - How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
Notes for day
  1. Did I miss the memo that this was whinge fest weekend?
  2. It helps to plug in your earphones when you listen to music. I had to restart the queue after 2 hours of unexplained silence
  3. Power plugs these days are made so loose for safety reasons that I constantly have to get systems replugged in

2011-08-19

Friday 2011-08-19

Another warm muggy night so not a lot of sleep. Plus the dog decided it was wakeup time on the hour starting at 4am. Did the guard duty walk around with her and she was happy... and I got 55 more minutes sleep. Got to the computer and found the network was knocked off for a couple of hours last night.


Tasks
  • Read the email flux.
  • Spend most of the day figuring out IPMI.
    • It is turned on by default sometimes
    • It is turned off by default sometimes
    • Sometimes its accepts SNMP traps with NULL community
    • Sometimes it doesn't
    Anyway a lot of tracking for not much accomplishment.
  • Deal with an outage of proxy servers.

Background Music
  • Los Straightjackets - Viva Los Straightjackets
  • Los Straightjackets - The Velvet Touch of...
  • Scottish National Pipe & Drummers - Sounds of Scotland
  • This Mortal Coil - It Will All End In Tears
  • Tish Hinojosa - From Texas for a Christmas Night
  • Pink Floyd - The Division Bell
  • Pink Floyd - The Final Cut
  • Queensryche - The Warning
  • Bonnie Raitt - Luck of the Draw
  • Reta Ceol - Celtic Hymns
  • Bonnie Rideout - Celtic Circles

By the way, dear ACM. I have asked you 4 or 5 times not to send me membership reminders. I have had SPAM organizations who have had better memories than you. Please QUIT. kthnxbye.

2011-08-18

Thursday 2011-08-18

Lots of rain last night from late monsoon moisture which cooled things down quite a bit. We also had a good thunderstorm which caused the electronic toys to burp from all the EMPs going off.

Today is infrastructure meeting day and I am going to see about getting some IBM x3650 servers reinstalled.. I spent yesterday learning about the joys of IPMI systems on a network and what they can do without you knowing it. Wheee.

Tasks
  • Morning crunch of emails.
  • Read lwn.net weekly summary
  • Investigate issues with IPMI
  • Investigate PXE configs
  • Infrastructure meeting
  • Play around with DHCP files to break them
  • Check permissions for Alpha16 release
  • Find the mirror scripts and update to 16

Background Music
  • Pink Floyd - Echoes (Best of ...)
  • Queen - Greatest Hits
  • Queensryche - Empire
  • Queensryche - Queensryche
  • Queensryche - Rage for Order
  • Queensryche - Operation Mindcrime
  • Bonnie Raitt - Longing in their Hearts
  • Dar Williams - The Honesty Room
  • Ventures - Greatest Hits
  • Los Straightjackets - Viva Los Straightjackets

Hmmm can anyone tell when I went to college?

2011-08-17

Wednesday 2011-08-17

Wow today is humid here in the desert. While 50% sounds little to the 110% I remember showing up in South Carolina as a kid.. it feels heavy and dead everywhere you walk. [I am not sure if it was really 110%.. the air was foggy and supersaturated so that if you opened up a refrigerator or freezer it would "rain" where the two airs would meet.]

Laptop running F16 alpha didn't shutdown from overheating.. so we are better with GNOME3 than we were in F15. it still runs very hot though.


Tasks for the day
  • Start the day with the overnight email queue..
  • Do my morning Astronomical Photo of the Day
  • Read through more javascript code
  • Search through DHCP logs. Your packets move, but I can't hear what they are saying.
  • I tip my hat to the new desktop revolution..
  • Fight a long fight with the qxl,vmvga, and cirrus video drivers.
  • Find lost IMM management cards
  • Spend some learning about the undocumented evils of IPMI
  • Looked over allura for project sources

Background Music Albums
  • Pink Floyd - Ummagumma (or what acid soundchecks are like)
  • The Who - Who's Next
  • Pink Floyd - Obscured By Clouds
  • Clannad - Clannad
  • Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon
  • Pink Floyd - Echoes (Best of...)
  • The Police - Synchronicity
  • Queen - Classic Queen
  • Rachael Yamagata - Happenstance

2011-08-16

Tuesday 2011-08-16

Tasks worked on:
  • Get kid to school at ungodly hour of 0800
  • Really this much email? More filters needed
  • Google meetup with Seth and Kevin on cloud strategies
  • RHIT meetup on boring old conference phone
  • Put up ips for PDU's.
  • Give a fellow employee a nickel and tell him to get a real computer.
  • Corporate Training.
  • Remember that burning cd's to dvd disks works but do not play in player.
  • Do evening QA while watching 2nd season Big Bang.
    • Install works for default disk layout and custom packages.
    • Gnome 3 does not crash immediately.
    • Spock should beat lizard.
    • Gnome temperature runs as hot as it did with F15. (64 Celsius vs 42 in XFCE). Non critical (except to my lap :)).

Background Music
  • Pearl Jam - Yield
  • Tom Petty - Greatest Hits
  • Pink Floyd - A Momentary Lapse of Reason
  • Pink Floyd - A Saucer Full of Secrets

2011-08-15

Monday 2011-08-15

  • A ton of backlog email
  • Try to build a past couple of weeks progress and decide to start fresh using blog like spot/rbergeron have been
  • Remedy my old friend, we meet again...
  • Learned via irc the joy of facl's
  • Set up meetings for next couple of days
  • Download F16RC4
  • Trying GNOME3 again... hopefully it will go better.

Background albums today
  • Simon and Garfunkel - [just one song]
  • Grateful Dead - American Beauty
  • Grateful Dead - Workingman's Dead
  • Alanis Morrisette - Jagged Little Pill
  • Alanis Morrisette - Under Rug Swept
  • Pearl Jam - 10
  • Pearl Jam - Vs

2011-08-08

Living in the Past

Read through Bradley Kuhn's article on Living in the Past. I think it pretty much says many of the things I have said before, though maybe more eloquently. While I have pretty much converted to XFCE in the last 3 months, I can appreciate that GNOME is working towards a different audience set. I also agree with Bradley that ranting about it doesn't make anything better.. it just makes people more entrenched which clearly makes things work less. So I am happy to use XFCE and will work in whatever way I can to "make it a stepup from GNOME-2.32" for Linus and the like.

2011-07-31

Moving from rawhide to F16alpha

Well the test laptop was stable until today when updates seem to have caused all kinds of issues.. and then I realized the issue was that rawhide moved from F16->F17. I think I am going to reinstall the laptop to being F16 alpha later this week and see how it progresses over the span of the week. Once we get to the betas I will jump back to rawhide to see if I can cause the laptop to burn out again :).

Currently the 3.0 kernels and systemd are fighting over system locks. As can be seen by this bugzilla, I am not sure who is winning.

2011-07-25

Boot Times are Important.. sort of

Adam W was at CLS and has been going over ideas he ran into. One of them was a talk by Dan Allen of Mojave Linux on speeding up boot times of Jboss.

While I agree that starting times do matter for laptops and such.. for servers they are really a joke. Mainly because all of Linux could start up in 10 seconds, but the real wait is all the BIOS/EFI startups which Linux has no power over. Two weeks ago, I spent the week with Kevin Fenzi inventorying old hardware and installing new hardware at the Red Hat/Fedora Phoenix bunker. Most of our time was spent waiting.. (average of 4 minutes per server.. the newer the server, the longer the time) for a tiny period of time when we could enter a keystroke to enter some BIOS menu. Go too soon and they keyboard buffer is overrun, wait to long and you have 1-3 more minutes waiting until you can press it. For one server, we spent close to an hour trying to get all the menus gone through so we could actually get to the point of running Linux on it. And even after going into the menus and turning on "fast" boot options, the servers still take 2-4 minutes to get to a grub prompt.

And yes during those times we were going on yak shaving expeditions or trying to figure out how many prime numbers were below a googol.. but for the most part an even long RHEL-5 boot time with all the trimmings is stunningly fast compared to getting the server to booting. Until that problem is really solved, I think most boot time arguments are going to just go over server administrator heads.

This slowness is a primary reason why Infrastructure uses virtual machines everywhere. We can reboot a virtual machine in far less time than it takes for the real hardware version to think about rebooting. In the virtual server case, slow services are more detectable. I can no longer reboot a box, get in the car, go the coffee house, come back wait for the coffee to cool and then be at a Grub prompt. I might get to the door when the prompt is waiting for me.

2011-06-27

Updating to rawhide (part trois)

The title turns out to be an unintentional pun. I spent the weekend at my first comic convention ever, the Albuquerque Comic Expo, and met Marina Sirtis who played Deana Troi on Star Trek: The Next Generation. But I digress.

After spending a lot of Friday and some of Monday trying to figure out how to capture the boot problem with kernel-3.0, I finally got lucky and saw that the watchdog occurred right as systemd mentioned that smartd was starting. Aha Data (who wasn't at the comic expo). Turning off smartd with a systemctl --disable smartd.service was able to allow for a boot to occur. Now I need to figure out how to capture the oops correctly and we should be go for opening a bugzilla report.

The other issues dealing with gdm etc are still being worked on by Adam Williamson's blog so I will wait to move out of runlevel 3 to runlevel 5. [Then again I am wondering.. why did I really ever stop using startx?]

[On a side note, the comic expo was fun. I got to meet my favourite Ghostbuster, Ernie Hudson, and geeked out speechless at meeting Jill Thompson (of various Endless comics and Scary Godmother). I also got to buy a comic I had been looking for 36 years... Thanks to all the people who were there. ]

2011-06-21

Updating to rawhide (part deux)

Continuing from yesterday's travails of having a desktop running rawhide.

  1. Let the system cool down for a couple of hours and try to boot again.
  2. Download and run the Lenovo diagnostics for the system. Everything passes except for the battery and printer port (turned off in BIOS). Both were known issues. Fans and memory say they are ok.
  3. Boot into rescue mode. The rpm database seems rather hosed that even doing the standard chicken foot fixes of rm /var/lib/rpm/__*; rpm --rebuilddb does not fix. Decide that trying to recover the database at that point was not worth it.
  4. Nuke from orbit (its the only way to be sure.) Make tar file backups of /home (but forget to backup /etc/ssh and other files.) and then reinstall
  5. Decide that installing Fedora 15 i686 makes more sense than x86_64. The box only has 2 gigabytes of ram so not gaining much for 64 bit.
  6. Do a custom install of the system and then afterwords install various fonts, eclipse, javascript, and emacs packages I want. Do not install everygame this time, just the few I know will get played.
  7. Put the system into runlevel 3. This will get past any yum update issues to rawhide that kill X etc (ok more chickenfoot voodoo, but been burned too many times. Plus being in run level 3 seems to make the system a lot cooler which I figure might have been problem also.
  8. Do a yum --disablerepo="*" --enablerepo="rawhide" --skip-broken update. After 3 minutes of dep-checking, there are 1651 packages out of 3536 installed packages to update.
  9. After about 2 hours of downloads and updating, box finishes updates. Commands work and its time to see what breaks.
  10. Found first breakage: yum. The first time I ran it I got a traceback.. by doing a yum clean all this removed that issue Doing a yum update again though just gave me a long list of packages that supposedly needed to be updated but conflicted with the packages that I just had updated. 
  11. Time to reboot and see if I have something workable. systemd and plymouthd seemed to spend a long time trying to shut the box down. (I could see this via a shell I had on the box via ssh.. but after 4 minutes it finally killed the sshd daemon.)
  12. Go for a walk, come back and reboot the system the old fashioned way. System reboots into plymouth and stops halfway through the building the icon. Oook gets out hammer.. and boots system into rescue mode again. 
  13. Remove quiet rhgb from grub.conf. Turn off hiddenmenu so I can type in options if needed. Make the timeout longer than 0 seconds.
  14. Boot my first 3.0.0 kernel.. and watch the bootup output like God intended us to. See a long pause due to the fact that I ran rescue mode on the system and a restorecon is needed. See a string of errors from the bind mounted directories. Watch a looooong relabel happen. Go for another walk.
  15. Found what the freeze was. A watchdog reset on the kernel which crashes it at "Starting Configure read-only root support". What part of the oops I can get onto the screen has to do with modprobe.
  16. Ok lets see if a single gets past this. If it does then we can work around with an update afterwords... nope. This is before single comes into play. 
  17. Now its time to try the pre 3.0-rc3 kernel. The box does boot up but gdm dies for some reason leaving just the login background of the doves and the mechanical bird. Logging into a console gives me the ability to set the system into init 3. Oh boy we can go old school with startx.
  18. Next bug.. startx doesn't. Ooooh gnome doesn't like things. Looking at the log file, I see a lot of javascript exceptions "FIXME: Only supporting fixed size ARRAYs".
  19. yum update still doesn't work but in new weird ways:
    Error: Package: ghc-tar-0.3.1.0-11.fc16.i686 (rawhide)
               Requires: libHSold-locale-1.0.0.2-ghc7.0.2.so
               Removing: ghc-old-locale-1.0.0.2-16.3.fc15.i686 (@updates/15)
                   libHSold-locale-1.0.0.2-ghc7.0.2.so
               Updated By: ghc-old-locale-1.0.0.2-26.fc16.i686 (rawhide)
                   Not found
    
    but it is there.. so I am confused. A --skip-broken doesn't fix the issue either.
  20. Ok lets go ask Seth Vidal. And yes.. somehow asking the expert makes it work when he asks me to repeat the steps I have done before. We have a system with console and if I pull back into the hinterland of knowledge before gdm and such.. there was .xinitrc. Set that to
    exec startxfce4
    
    and I have a working X session after a startx.
  21. Change the run level so when it reboots to runlevel3.target and time for bed. Wait a reboot sits around trying to stop syslogd.
    Unit systemd-kmsg-syslogd.service entered failed state.
    systemd-kmsg-syslogd.service: main process exited, code=exited, status=218
    
    Over and over again... looks like the reboot is killing syslogd, and systemd thinks it should still be up so it starts it up only to kill it again.. or something like that.. it is the reason for a reboot needing a power-off versus working.

Well after a lot of steps.. I have a system that boots. I relearned a lot of tech support skills and various things like rhgb is bad for testing systems when they dont work :). Now to work with Lennart on why syslogd is whacked and with others on why kernel-3.0rc3 kills my box.

2011-06-20

Updating to rawhide is harder than I thought.

So with my work done with the Fedora Board, I have decided to spend more time on things I can fix (technical things) versus those I can not (human interactions). One of those things, was to use more of the Rawhide release because if I can earn LWN.net weekly quotes of the week, I should endure the pain that Jonathan Corbet goes through every day. Hopefully it will also get F16 to be better.

Ok steps to do this:
  1. Install a laptop with Fedora 15.
    This was pretty easy as I am just using the laptop I built for SELF that just has a bunch of development things and a lot of games for the kid (ok me) to play when bored.
  2. Update to rawhide.
    Not as easy as I thought. I figured, hey lets just do a

    yum --enablerepo=rawhide update

    Which gave me after 2 minutes a long list of broken dependencies and such. Hey no problem.. I ran into this with the Fedora 15 betas.. use --skip-broken.

    yum --enablerepo=rawhide --skip-broken update

    This went along a lot further, but died due to packages with the same name installed multiple times. Ok let us get around that.

    package-cleanup --cleandupes

    Tada.. we can now get to our next error: "Protected multilib versions". For some reason various packages are protected from being updated even when the update is showing x86_64 to x86_64. Ok.. maybe this is an error fixed in yum.

    yum --enablerepo=rawhide --skip-broken update y*

    Oh lookie.. I have updated yum.. that was easy. Too easy.. I forgot to update python also. Running yum now gave me a huge traceback:


    --> Processing Dependency: libstartup-notification-1.so.0()(64 bit) for gnome-desktop3-...
    Traceback (most recent call last):
    ...
    pkgtup = (nevra_dict['name'], nevra_dict['arch'],
    TypeError: tuple indices must be integers, not str


    Ok maybe an updated python will fix this. Turns out that yum update python worked.. but it didn't fix the issue.. ok time to see if I can work around it in parts. Caveman Oook says to do a

    yum --enablerepo=rawhide --skip-broken update [xyz]*

    and back away down the alphabet over time. Why? Because it is a magic chicken foot that used to work in the days before yum when rpm -Uvh *rpm was used.
  3. Watch laptop catch on fire.
    Well not exactly but the /proc/acpi/ibm/thermal showed the temps over 100C which is quite hot. The system no longer was responsive and trying to log in as root would not work with messages about audit backlog limit exceeded. Turning off the system was about the only hope and turning it back on resulted in a blinking cursor in the left hand corner.
An interesting experiment.. a bit worse than my "Doing and Everything Install" but interesting. Will see if the box will come back after an hour cooling period.