3DES’ Journal

How much is your blog worth?

Well reading Raver’s blog , I noticed I’ve got homework! so here’s the result…

Not too bad isn’t it? So…who’s going to get homework??? Laia, Esteve and Pancake. Have fun!

   Tech, blogging    Add a comment

Finally at home

After some days enjoying the goods from England and Netherlands I got home yesterday. Luckily I’m still on vacation! so I can relax and work with my babies .

I have uploaded some pictures to my album, those of you with a full access user look under the folder private to get something else .

Well now it’s time to save some money for the next one… CCC at Berlin.

   personal, traveling    1 Comment

Posting from VondelPark

Well I keep moving around spending my holidays, I’m at the VondelPark right now, I just found some Wi-Fi networks around and I’m taking the chance to check my email and post some lines .

From now on two days I will depart to Rotterdam but in the meantime I’m enjoying the nice people living in Amsterdam and their good offerings .

   misc, traveling    3 Comments

OpenSlug

OpenSlug is replacement firmware for my NSLU2. I was previously running Unslung which is really cool but I wanted to restart its installation because I have bought a new 200GiB disk and I wanted to clean up the firmware installation. While searching for the latest version I’ve found OpenSlug people are finally producing binary copies of their software.

I decided to install OpenSlug because it is more cutting edge, it comes with a 2.6 kernel with lots of interesting modules like raid[0,1,5,6,10], device-mapper driver and lots of usb devices. It doesn’t provides the usual web interface so you have to start configuring it through SSH sessions, it feels more like any other Linux distribution not just a fancy firmware for your little network device.

To put my Unslung installation away I started with Redboot method to be able to upload the new firmware (remember to unplug the disks!!). Then I opened my first session log in as root with password opeNSLUg I followed this initialising guide which provides an easy way to configure the basic system, installing the root file system on the disk you decide to do so, asking you for parameters like hostname and network information. I decided to do a 5GiB partition where the installation is held, a little one for swap and like 194GiB for sharing with Samba and NFS.

Once the system is configured, it’s time to install packages…I just started with Samba and NFS, they’re configured right now my brother can now listen my music collection and use his home directory…everything through Samba, I use NFS to access all the stored content.

The packages system works pretty easy, basic commands are:

$ ipkg update < --- synchronizes packages list
$ ipkg upgrade <--- upgrades needed packages
$ ipkg install pkgname <--- installs package pkgname
$ ipkg remove pkgname <--- removes package pkgname
...


I'll keep looking for OpenSlug's features, it looks promising!

   Linux, Operating Systems    Add a comment

Managing pkgsrc upgrades with pkgmanager

Some days ago pkgsrc-2005Q3 was announced so for all those who use pkgsrc’s stable branches (like myself!) a big update is on the way. There are some different ways of doing this, my usual was the one I think is the safest but it’s also the hardest, take a look:

First back up the current installation…

$ pkg_tarup_all -K /path/to/pkgdb -d /path/to/pkgrepo "*"


Once finished, I back up the database, this is not really needed but I’d like to have it just in case…

$ tar zcvfp /path/to/pkgrepo/pkgdb.tar.gz /path/to/pkgdb


Then I used pkgtools/pkg_chk to know what packages are either outdated or missing…

$ pkg_chk -i
courier-imap-4.0.4: version mismatch - courier-imap-4.0.2
courier-maildir-0.51.0: version mismatch - courier-maildir-0.49.0
[...]
$


I use to have two opened windows on screen, one to keep pkg_chk results and the other to work on the update. First packages I usually update are those like devel/libtool-base pkgtools/digest…packages without dependencies or without any to be updated. Once those were ready the process restart, new packages without dependencies to be updated should show in pkg_chk to check what is required by a named package I use pkg_info…

$ pkg_info -n courier-imap
Information for courier-imap-4.0.2:

$


Then if none of the required packages needed to be updated I used the replace command on the package’s root directory…

$ cd ${PKGSRCDIR}/mail/courier-imap && make replace clean


Note that if clean command is not specified a binary copy of the package if kept in the work directory.

So package after package the update was done, this is quite safe but also usually requires too much time to spend on it. There are more automatic ways of doing this like using “make update” which will remove the packages and build them all based on the dependency tree, but if just one fails you’ve got troubles. Also there’s “pkg_chk -u” which just uses same “make update” so same problems.

Lastly I have discovered wip/pkgmanager, it tries to provide an easier way to manage updates on pkgsrc, besides it is not recommended to use on production environments it seems to do its work quite well (for now…). I guess being careful no big problem will show up so I started using it when just a few packages were left to be up to pkgsrc-2005Q3.

Before doing the sync with pkgmanager a little configuration is needed in order to pkgmanager being able to determine what are the packages you want on the system, what are those needed because dependencies and those orphan like when installing a package it fails and dependencies are left around.


$ pkgmanager want category/pkgname ....
$ pkgmanager sync
...
[Here will show what steps will be done and lets answer yes or not before proceeding...]
...


It seems to take care about the order for compiling packages based on dependency tree and tries to find those that will be broken by an updated requirement. I will keep trying it so I will write about any new feature or problem I find.

Before ending I’d like to say I assumed here all configurations are already backed up! Happy updating!

   BSD, Operating Systems    1 Comment