Posted by Ceri Davies
Fri, 15 Dec 2006 19:46:00 GMT
Patching Solaris is difficult
Patching Solaris is historically hard work involving cross referencing the installed patches (showrev -p) with the installed release (cat /etc/release) and the latest Recommended patch cluster and patch report at SunSolve.
Sun tools actually make it harder
Since this is such a nightmare, Sun have offered a huge number of methods for patching Solaris systems. Some are no longer properly maintained or don’t support recent releases, some are heavy X based monsters, some have a huge dependency list (33 packages for smpatch in Solaris 10 6/06, and that’s not only the ‘light’ version, but is also incomplete). The one thing they have in common is that they suck.
smpatch is the worst of the lot
After a recent experience where smpatch not only rendered a production machine unbootable, but required three reboots to do so and then had failed to even offer all of the available patches, I’ve had enough.
From now on we’ll be using Patch Check Advanced (PCA) from http://www.par.univie.ac.at/solaris/pca/.
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Posted in Software, Solaris, Sun
Posted by Ceri Davies
Fri, 22 Sep 2006 20:13:00 GMT
I had most of a day spare today, so I though that I’d try out the FreeBSD 6.2-BETA1 image. Having recently read about the Win4BSD beta from the Win4Lin people , I figured that this would be a good application to try out on the new FreeBSD install.
FreeBSD 6.2 is looking to be great, of course :) I wouldn’t mind seeing the release notes start to get pulled together though, as I can’t remember what’s happened to RELENG_6 in the last six months.
I didn’t have high hopes for Win4BSD in honesty, as the User’s Guide mentioned kqemu and I thought it was just going to be like QEMU, which I’ve used before, but had problems with. However, I liked the way that with Win4BSD the “Documents and Settings” were stored in the FreeBSD filesystem and shared back into the Windows guest, thus allowing them to backed up normally and shared between multiple guests. The same is done with printers.
From a dirt clean installation of FreeBSD 6.2-BETA1, here’s all I did. Note that that clean installation should include the source distributions.
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Posted in FreeBSD, Software | 2 comments
Posted by Ceri Davies
Wed, 02 Aug 2006 19:49:00 GMT
Now that’s funny.
Posted in Apple, FreeBSD, Software
Posted by Ceri Davies
Mon, 31 Jul 2006 19:29:00 GMT
Some guy asked on comp.unix.solaris for a tool for Solaris that could drop a TCP connection without killing the associated process.
I pointed out that we had tcpdrop(8) from OpenBSD which did this, whereupon Casper Dik informed me of the existence of the TCP_IOC_ABORT_CONN ioctl which does the same job on Solaris.
So I did a dirty port of tcpdrop(8) which you can download if you want.
It’s been tested on Solaris 9, but might not even compile on other versions. You get to keep both pieces if it breaks.
Posted in FreeBSD, Software, Solaris | no comments
Posted by Ceri Davies
Wed, 14 Jun 2006 19:52:00 GMT
I recently had cause to arrange for Oracle’s RDBMS 10g to be started at boot time. This led me to despair somewhat at the state of shell scripting in general, and I will rant a little on that subject. This isn’t really intended as an attack on this particular script, but these are the issues that arose from it.
The Oracle installation provides a couple of scripts named dbshut and dbstart that look like they’ll do that job. Indeed, the top of dbstart states:
# This script is used to start ORACLE from /etc/rc(.local).
The corresponding RCS log from the import tells a different tale:
$ svn log -r99 dbstart
Password for 'ceri':
-------------------------------------------------------------------
r99 | ceri | 2006-06-09 15:27:33 +0100 (Fri, 09 Jun 2006) | 5 lines
Add a bunch of scripts used for looking after our databases.
Mainly culled from our live systems, with the notable exception
of the Oracle provided utilities dbshut and dbstart, which are
as out of the box here (and therefore do not work).
-------------------------------------------------------------------
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Posted in Oracle, Software, Solaris | 4 comments
Posted by Ceri Davies
Fri, 17 Feb 2006 20:54:00 GMT
There has been a lot of complaining done about problems with Apple’s Mail.app.
The major annoyances with it for me have been its utter refusal to mark messages as read or to retrieve addresses from our LDAP servers reliably. Since we have a site-wide license for Office, I decided to try Entourage.
Yes, it’s from Microsoft. The secret is this though: on Mac OS X, Office isn’t really, really shit and annoying.
Entourage basically does everything that I want; it has sensible defaults with respect to top-posting (and not doing it) and text formats (plain by default), and can actually mark a message as read once I have read it. LDAP stuff works too.
It did manage to mangle my signature, but that was imported from Mail.app so I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt there.
Posted in Apple, Mail, Software | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ceri Davies
Thu, 12 Jan 2006 17:45:00 GMT
Note: This extract from IRC gives all the background for this story that you might need:
<ceri> damn, i managed to get "learn linux" on my objectives for the next six months :(
<flz> hahahaha
<linimon> ceri: just tell yourself it's exactly like FreeBSD but with everything stupid.
I was looking at the requirements for RHCE certification and got to:
- use lftp to access FTP URLs
I hadn’t heard of lftp before, so I skipped to the manual page and saw this in the list of lftp commands and their documentation:
echo [-n] string
guess what it does.
This is in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Just the kind of comprehensive documentation that enterprises like to bet the farm on. I understand why BSD documentation is praised so highly now.
Posted in Software | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by Ceri Davies
Tue, 29 Nov 2005 23:18:00 GMT
EuroBSDcon 2005 was a resounding success for me. I had lost a large amount of enthusiasm for the project, which has probably shown in the contributions from myself and my dealings with others.
After the weekend in Basel, I can categorically state that BSD fucking rocks, and you’d do well to use and learn it now before everyone else realises and you’re just another guy who has no idea about the “great new OS that actually makes your life easier”. Straight up.
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Posted in FreeBSD, Software | 2 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ceri Davies
Tue, 22 Nov 2005 00:01:00 GMT
Although I am unsure of both the wisdom and utility of dragging my laptop to EuroBSDcon, I’m also sure that I don’t want to get laughed at for using mutt again. Kmail seems a little more stable than a year ago, and my IMAP setup is seeing the benefit of experience too.
Not reading your mail from the same command line all the time brings another problem though: how to send outbound mail?
The obvious solution is SMTP AUTH, but I’ve always shied away from actually looking at how to do it. Turns out that Exim makes it an utter piece of cake.
Simply add an authenticator for the AUTH mechanism of your choice:
lookup_cram:
driver = cram_md5
public_name = CRAM-MD5
server_secret = ${lookup{$1}lsearch{/usr/local/etc/exim/authpwd}{$value}fail}
server_set_id = $1
(Note that I previously added an authenticators section to my exim configuration; if you don’t already have one, you’ll need to add it.)
You’ll also need to edit your acl_smtp_rcpt ACL and add:
accept authenticated = *
at an appropriate point.
Then create /usr/local/etc/exim/authpwd which contains a username:password pair on each line, separated by a comma. Make sure that this file has appropriate permissions, of course. Easy.
Posted in Mail, Software | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ceri Davies
Fri, 18 Nov 2005 12:03:00 GMT
It seems that on Planet RedHat, “minimal install” means “not only X, but KDE too. Oh, and 30MB of wallpapers while you’re at it, please”.
We are not going to get along.
Posted in Software | no comments | no trackbacks
