Sles9 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.

TSM client: Backing up files with umlauts on SLES

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 13:21:10 +0000

In the past, I always had problems with SLES and our Tivoli Storage Manager client’s when backing up files with german umlauts. Well, today I looked a bit harder, and quite quickly found a solution.

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sles9 root [0] > env | grep ^LC
LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8

As you can see from the above, SLES9/10 ain’t setting LANG or LC_ALL (which I searched for first), but is setting LC_CTYPE.

So, simply changing the LC_CTYPE in the init-script and/or prepending the dsmc command line with a new LC_CTYPE fixes my umlauts problems!

TYPO3 hogging

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 21:28:44 +0000

Well, we do appear to be having some strange load problems with our main TYPO3 box hosting several home pages of the local universities, as you can see below.

LOAD on t3node1 between 05:00-19:00 on 2008/04/07

We repeatedly tried to figure out which of them was the one responsible, but neither I nor the other Unix sysadmin knew a better way to figure out the load each TYPO3 installation was causing (since there ain’t no phptop or something similar). But since today the new semester started, we figured it might be good to finally figure which one it was. And a few minutes (as in one or two) wouldn’t be much of a problem compared to the advantage we’re getting out of it.

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):

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:

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.

Bitching

Fri, 10 Mar 2006 19:57:11 +0000

Once again, I’m compelled to play (other call it administering 😛) with our TYPO3 cluster (which is sadly running SLES).

One thing I just learned about SLES (for the ones curious, its Novell’s SuSE Linux Enterprise Server and yes, it suffers the same pain as SuSE/openSuSE). They split one single config file (at least the apache2 one) into 9 (or more) different files.

Another thing is, for what the hell does a simple LAMP need a full blown Xorg w/ KDE installed ?