Posts

Ok, as I said earlier I’m currently reinstalling my system from scratch (to finally and completly get rid of stupid eselect-compiler). The first attempt was a bit, ehrm, error-prone (as in unpacking stage3-i686-2006.0.tar.bz2, chroot ing to that and running emerge -ek system). Result was a b0rked chroot after the first two packages (heh, it was pulling in =sys-libs/glibc-2.4-r3 as the second package, thus everything that hasn’t been merged from my binpkg-repo and still originating from the snapshot being broken). ...

OK, as some of you may now (hah, you’re really a dear Mr. Gulleen); I’m currently practicing an extended time-out (sort of) from Gentoo. I noticed devrel and all the other groups I have a responsibility for, that I’ll be more or less away till 30th November 2006. This is due some crazy stuff currently happening at work (like my desk being full of paperwork). I also lately thought about retiring myself from Gentoo, but haven’t come to a conclusion yet. I really enjoy the work currently, but I can’t find as much motivation/time as I used to find earlier this year. True, work is currently eating myself up completely, with all that provisioning (which hopefully ends around 30th November this year - note to head: accounting at German universities sucks !). ...

Heh, I managed to catch the S1 to Hellenberg and got of in Stuttgart Rohr. The S-Bahn doors nearly squashed me. I’m now at my aunt’s place, sitting on the sofa and relaxing a bit. My aunt was really happy when she saw me (as she always is if I or my brother comes by). I’ll go to bed in a few minutes, Saturday is getting really stressing. I need to get to my cousin and his wife (and my little grand cousins). I even need to buy a new LCD display for my aunt, since she somewhere red that those need 70% less power.

So Uncle Seemant just conceded his defeat (at least for yesterday’s battle) which gives me something I barely have. But for today’s battle I guess I have to concede, as he has some valid points. #0: Why am I still awake ? It’s a bit after 12pm around here (that’s in Germany) and I’m usually in bed at that time, but not today. Basically I waited all the time for my dear Uncle Seemant to gimme his response, so I might be enlightened by his never ending wisdom. And I have to admit it was worth it 😛 so kids, listen to your Uncle Seemant! The other part of it is, I just don’t want to go to bed, as I’m trying to avoid some nightmares with blood and killing people and stuff like that. ...

Since one of the requirements for my current project is having NIC redundancy, I didn’t get around looking at the available " adapter teaming" (or adapter bonding) solutions available for Linux/SLES. First I tried to dig into the Broadcom solution (since the Blade I first implemented the stuff uses a Broadcom NetXtreme II card) , but found out pretty soon that the basp configuration tool, which is only available on the Broadcom driver CD’s shipped with the Blade itself, pretty much doesn’t work. ...

In preparation to get our website (and all those other websites - like www.fh-neubrandenburg.de or www.hmt-rostock.de) clustered, someone bought the cluster version of the PacketPro 450. These things are nice, especially considering you don’t need to fiddle around with LVS yourself (which is a real pain in the ass). The only problem I have currently with them is that they scan the database and web nodes every 30 seconds, and since we have an active node and a hot-standby both do this and producing this: ...

Since I got annoyed by umlauts being printed as ░, I figured I’d install a UTF-8 capable font on this box here and all my problems would be gone. But not so fast. screen is a real fucked up thing. If you’re starting screen via screen -U everything is nice and cosy, and you get your UTF-8 goodness. But, don’t think you’ll get away with just enabling UTF-8 as default and enabling UTF-8 for each new window by doing this: ...

Well, since our current solution for mapping printers is an ugly batch file, which needs to be put into Startup, I today poked at doing it in VBscript (I know, but it’s less ugly than the batch script, trust me). As some of you know, printers are only applicable to users (as in you can’t put a startup script onto an OU, which is going to map the printers). So as we store users and the computes in different OU’s in our Active Directory (we do have about 15.000 students), I can’t apply the printer.vbs to the users OU directly either, unless I implement some intelligence into the script itself. ...

OK, since Alex asked me last Sunday what exactly needs to be done to turn a simple chroot (or even a bloody box) into a binpkg producing environment, here’s a little howto … First, lets start from a freshly unpacked stage3. 1 2 3 4 5 catalyst/x86 stage3-amd64-hardened # chroot . /bin/bash --login # Now, make sure you turn on FEATURES=buildpkg # (and setup anything else you need, like CFLAGS, # LDFLAGS, whatever) linux # echo 'FEATURES="buildpkg"' >> /etc/make.conf With that single change you’re basically nearly finished with setting up the whole thing, the remaining things are just ...

For what it’s worth, I’ve been trying to get some stages together the last few days. Thanks to solar and Brent, the ppc-stages are now coming along quite fast. I haven’t really tested them yet, but for what it’s worth, you’ll find stages based on Saturday’s snapshot (that is 200780105 for those not smart enough to take a look at the calendar) here for the following profiles: uclibc/ppc (normal/-softfloat) uclibc/ppc/hardened uclibc/x86 uclibc/x86/hardened hardened/amd64 hardened/amd64/nomultilib hardened/x86/2.6 (x86/i686) Now remember, this isn’t official release material. This is just MY effort ( for now) to provide current stages. ...