Rpm on BAFM

SLES-9-2

Sat, 16 Aug 2014 10:23:06 +0000

Hrm, today I tried to install some extra programs I need for devel-stuff (quilt, git, subversion) on an ancient (not sooo ancient) SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.2.

Did I already mention I hate rpm-based distros ? Ah and I missed to tell you, that I really love USE-flags …

Ok, so it took me half the afternoon, to rebuild half of all installed packages (heh, kde* depends upon expat*; but who need X or even KDE on a server-machine?) and figured that everything was for nothing.

Building RPMs on SLES10SP2-ppc64

Sat, 16 Aug 2014 09:50:36 +0000

Well, it turns out that building stuff on ppc64 is a real pain in the ass, at least on anything SUSE related. I do have to tweak every damn spec to include this:

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%ifarch ppc64
export LDFLAGS="$LDFLAGS -m64"
%endif

Otherwise, ld is gonna fail when linking, as it’s gonna try linking the generated 64bit code ( -m64 is passed on via RPM_OPT_FLAGS to CFLAGS) as 32bit code, which ain’t gonna work at all …

Building opsview for SUSE Linux Enterprise 10

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 09:10:06 +0000

Disclaimer: I don’t take any responsibility for faults within the software, I just provide the RPM’s! Feel free to ask me about stuff concerning these RPM’s, but I ain’t accountable if your stuff goes kaboom …

Well, I just looked at opsview again (haha, thanks Alex 😛). Only trouble is, the people over at opsview don’t distribute RPM’s for that … After registering for their site, to download the SRPM’s (or to download anything), I got the RPM’s and started looking at them.

Novell KMP: KMP'ing IBM's RDAC driver

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 09:03:51 +0000

Well, after yesterday’s lesson about getting the IBM RDAC to install for a not-yet-running kernel, I decided to take it a step further. Novell does have some documentation about KMP’s, which is actually rather good, especially the guide written by Andreas Grünbacher.

After a short tinkering, I got it actually working. I was kinda surprised, at how easily it actually is. One problem I still have to deal with, is modifying the %post, to generate the mpp-initrd image. For now, the KMP only contains the default %post, which updates the modules.* stuff.

Novell KMP: Useable version of ibm-rdac-ds4000

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 09:03:03 +0000

After some more tinkering, a lot more looking at the macros in /usr/lib/rpm/rpm-suse-kernel-module-subpackage and /usr/lib/rpm/suse_macros, I think I finally have a usable RPM’ified version of IBM’s Multipathing driver ready for use.

There is still one major annoyance left: each time you install a new ibm-rdac-ds4000-kmp RPM, you also need to reinstall the corresponding ibm-rdac-ds4000-initrd package, as the macros in /usr/lib/rpm don’t allow for custom %post or %postun.

As mentioned before, I’m gonna send them to LSI/IBM for review, and maybe, MAYBE they are actually gonna make use of that.

RPM: Query a specific rpm-file for information

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:12:44 +0000

Since I end up googling it each time I need this, it’s about time I write it down … If you want to query a specific RPM for information (Requires/Information/…) you’ll need to use the –package/-p option.

-p <file> — Query a Specific RPM Package File

Up to now, every means of specifying a package to an RPM query focused on packages that had already been installed. While it’s certainly very useful to be able to dredge up information about packages that are already on your system, what about packages that haven’t yet been installed? The -p option can do that for you.

KMP: Define a new subpkg template

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 16:43:36 +0000

There might be reasons, you’d wish you could make the kernel module package do other things. Two already pop into my head: 1) The mpp-Image upgrades for the ibm-rdac kernel module packages and 2) the " adjustments" which need to be done post install for the VMware kernel module package in /etc/vmware-tools/locations.

What you basically do is this:

Add the new subpkg template to your sources list
Call the %suse_kernel_module_package macro with the option -s and then add your source number

For me this looks like this:

New vmware-tools-kmp

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 11:31:04 +0000

Since we recently upgraded our VMware Infrastructure to VMware vSphere, I finally had a chance to refresh the RPM’s for the KMP for 2.6.16.60-0.39.3-0.1 and 2.6.27.21-0.1. You can find the source RPM here.

Novell KMP: vmware-tools-kmp and ibm-lin_tape-kmp

Sun, 10 May 2009 11:27:22 +0000

After working with the novell-kmp solution, I think it’s actually rather easy to create a " Kernel Module Package". In the end, I created two additional KMP’s, one for the tools component of the VMware-Tools shipped with VMware ESX, and another for the lin_tape SCSI driver, used by our IBM TS3400 as well as the IBM TS7530.

RPM spec: Installing a custom init-script

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:14:51 +0000

Well, I’m sitting again here grinding my head on how to fix up a certain package. Now, I had to look it up again, so this time I’m writing it down!

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Source1: ${name}.initd
...
install -o root -g root -m 755 %{S:1} $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/etc/init.d/ndo2db

Nagios and check_ram yet again

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:08:30 +0000

As some people know, I previously " created" (mostly modified the check_swap plug-in to print RAM usage) check_ram in C. Now one of my problems for the past few months was putting the C plug-in as well as " supported" environment under the same hat. Today I had another look at the amount of available plug-ins in NagiosExchange. There are quite a few plug-ins available, but as I do have some experience with Python, I used the one written in Python.

It was rather easy hacking in support for performance data into it, as the below shows. Someone else already posted a non-unified diff for performance data support, but that ain’t quite right according to the Nagios plug-in development guidelines.

The clue to build ppc64 RPM's

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:52:22 +0000

Remember, I talked about building RPM’s on SLES10SP2 on ppc64 ? Well, turns out I was rather stupid .. and it was rather simple (don’t ask me why I didn’t think of that). I tried asking solar, I used Google (apparently with the wrong search parameters), nothing though. Not a clue.

Today it bugged me again, so I used Google again. This time with " ppc64 suse rpmbuild", and guess what I saw within the preview of the second hit ..

Creating multi-distribution RPM/XML repositories

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 14:36:05 +0000

Well, as we do have quite a few custom built RPM’s, I was searching for a new solution to manage the repo(s). Currently I do have a single repository per distribution.

One thing one needs to know about createrepo (from createrepo), it doesn’t support this type of thing in the first place. So I had to come up with another way of doing it. First, I created a proper layout (much like the Debian Official Repository layout):

AIX 5-3 Linux Toolkit

Fri, 20 Apr 2007 13:07:04 +0000

OK, so I skipped rebuilding a newer RPM version (for now) and I’m currently rebuilding anything that fit’s into app-dev according to IBM …

The list reads like this:

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$ ls -al ~/app-dev
autoconf-2.59-1.aix5.1.noarch.rpm
automake-1.8.5-1.aix5.1.noarch.rpm
binutils-2.14-3.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
bison-1.875-3.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
coreutils-5.2.1-2.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
cpio-2.5-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
diffutils-2.8.1-1.aix4.3.ppc.rpm
flex-2.5.4a-6.aix4.3.ppc.rpm
gawk-3.1.3-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
gcc-4.0.0-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
gcc-cplusplus-4.0.0-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
gdb-6.0-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
libgcc-4.0.0-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
libstdcplusplus-4.0.0-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
libstdcplusplus-devel-4.0.0-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
libtool-1.5.8-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
m4-1.4.1-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
make-3.80-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm

OK, I’m not exactly rebuilding these old versions, I’m actually using their old specs to compile newer versions of these. I’m currently at coreutils-6.7, which really takes ages. But will see about the rest.

SLES-9 (once again)

Thu, 08 Mar 2007 22:55:36 +0000

OK, so today was the highlight of the week … We updated apache2 on Tuesday (yeah, that’s still 2.0.49, so if you have some exploits - try them 😛 ) and now out of the sudden we have major performance issues. We looked nearly the whole forenoon for a reason, why the frackin’ apache was using 236% of the CPU’s.

In the afternoon, when my co-worker decided to go home (that was ~1500), I decided to revert back to the old patch level. But that isn’t as easy as you think (at least on SLES). The only thing I wanted to do, was something like this:

AIX-5-3 undamp; rpm-4-4-7

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 14:24:50 +0000

OK, so I tried to install the AIX Toolkit today, to build some newer rpm’s (yaaaaah, I hate RPMS myself, still it’s way better than distributing plain tar.gz archives) but looks like either AIX or rpm-4.4.7 doesn’t like me.

Now I’ve to figure out how to get libm (that’s /lib/libm.so) installed on AIX. Will see about that later and/or tomorrow.

SLES-9 SP2 (continued)

Wed, 09 Aug 2006 12:27:50 +0000

OK, so after yesterdays battle with SLES and rpm, I decided to simply upgrade rpm (again rpmbuild -bb rpm.spec as in from source).

I had to tune (hah, remove stuff that isn’t working on this ancient gcc-3.3.3 ie. -fstack-protector) a bit to get it working, wasted 20 minutes worth of CPU time and ~30 of my time. I finally gave up. I couldn’t persuade neither rpm, nor git to compile on the damn SLES/Dell.