That’s why …
Posted on April 17th, 2008 by Christian in Life
… I’d break a butterfly on a wheel … I was coming out of the office, and found my car this way:
Up close
Birdie view
Software support and “key account” managers
Posted on April 14th, 2008 by Christian in Life
As Mike wrote about his experiences with hardware vendors, I’m gonna devote this here post to my favorite software company in the world. We recently bought two copies of a software called “2X Application Server Enterprise Edition“. As one would think from reading the specs of the software, it’s near a Citrix solution (which it is, at least for a small part); but in return it’s faaaar away concerning the price. Just so you get an idea, about what I’m meaning with “faaar“:
Windows Server 2003:
Standard Edition: 2 * 91,00
CAL: 50 * 6,00
Terminal Server CAL: 50 * 17,00
___________
1.332,00The above are fixed costs, you need them anyway as both Citrix as well as the 2X solution is only working *on top* of Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services.
Now, here’s the real comparison between 2X Application Server & Loadbalancer and Citrix XenApp Platinum Edition:
2X 2 * 1510,00 = 3.020,00 Citrix 50 * 393,00 = 19.650,00
While 2X is licensed per terminal server, XenApp is licensed per user. As you can see from the above prices, the 2X solution is roughly 1/6 of the Citrix XenApp solution.
April weather
Posted on April 8th, 2008 by Christian in Life
Well, it’s April. And usually when it’s April, there’s April’s weather. In the morning I was rather surprised by the weather.
And after I picked up Michel, we some when arrived at work (that is one hour later), we had our own adventure park in front of the work place:
Collapsed trees
TYPO3 hogging
Posted on April 7th, 2008 by Christian in Life
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 05:00-19:00
As a comparison, here’s the “normal” load for the last week:
LOAD 31.03.08-07.04.08
Creating multi-distribution RPM/XML repositories
Posted on April 2nd, 2008 by Christian in Life
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):
- dists/
- sle9/ (contains the repodata for SLES 9)
- sle10/ (contains the repodata for SLES 10)
- esx35/ (contains the repodata for VMware ESX 3.5)
- i586/
- noarch/
- ppc64/
- src/
- x86_64/
As you can see, this is gonna get tricky in regards to managing the RPMS in a single place, while keeping the distributions apart.
So I went ahead, rewrote the script that perviously managed our two repositories for SLES 9/10. The limitation I pointed out above (keeping the RPMS in a single place), is easily overcome by using bind-mounts (sure it looks messy).
Now the only problem I’m still facing is that createrepo isn’t even looking at the excludes when it’s called by the script. But if I pass the raw command line the script is calling on a simple shell, it works like a charm .. So I don’t have the slightest clue right now, why in gods name it ain’t working … 
open-vm-tools for Debian Etch
Posted on March 27th, 2008 by Christian in Life
Well, after a loooong time of trying to get the modules and all the other stuff (read: init-script for the guest daemon and modules) working, I think I’m about there.
I finally fixed a long-standing issue, with the postinst/prerm scripts, and the tools should be about ready. Gonna try and send it Daniel Baumann’s way (that is the Debian Maintainer), for proper inclusion into Lenny.
I (successfully) tried splitting the Xorg parts from the “normal” open-vm-tools, as I usually don’t want Xorg installed on *any* of my virtual machines. Thus leaving me with open-vm-tools, open-vm-modules and open-vm-toolbox (and open-vm-source) as a list of packages one could install.
metadata.xml (the third)
Posted on March 14th, 2008 by Christian in Gentoo
So Petteri came up with a nifty python script (nopaste|local), which in return spit out this. Which generated a rather complete list (nopaste|local), that looks like this:
700: perl
569: maintainer-needed
128: media-video
126: xemacs
47: sound
32: ha-cluster
32: crypto
19: desktop-misc
16: netmon
15: forensics
13: web-apps
10: pam-bugs
8: vserver-devs
8: mips
8: embedded
8: app-backup
8: apache-bugs
8: alsa-bugs
7: net-im
7: kde
6: tcltk
6: media-tv
6: dev-embedded
5: voip
5: theology
5: samba
5: net-p2p
5: freedesktop-bugs
4: sparc
4: java
4: graphics
2: net-mail
2: ldap-bugs
2: kernel
2: fonts
2: cpp
1: x11
1: wxwidgets
1: www-servers
1: tex
1: shell-tools
1: sgml
1: sci
1: qmail-bugs
1: python
1: proaudio
1: media-optical
1: kerberos
1: hp-cluster
1: amd64
metadata.xml (the second)
Posted on March 14th, 2008 by Christian in Gentoo
As I was kinda bored after work today, I had a closer look at what I saw during my fuckup in the morning. Well, Steve said, that when he looked at metadata.xml it’d be “really common” .. still that isn’t making it right ..
There is a reason we do have a herds.xml (exactly for the reason to associate people with packages, and that’s what the <herd> tag is for in metadata.xml) file. So after a preliminary look through the repository, here are the winners:
700 : perl
126 : xemacs
63 : haskell
47 : sound
32 : ha-cluster
31 : crypto
19 : desktop-misc
16 : netmon
15 : forensics
13 : web-apps
8 : mips
8 : app-backup
7 : kde
6 : tcltk
6 : net-im
6 : media-tv
6 : dev-embedded
5 : voip
5 : theology
5 : samba
5 : net-p2p
4 : sparc
4 : java
4 : graphics
2 : net-mail
2 : kernel
2 : fonts
2 : embedded
2 : cpp
1 : x11
1 : wxwidgets
1 : www-servers
1 : tex
1 : shell-tools
1 : sh
1 : sgml
1 : sci
1 : python
1 : proaudio
1 : php
1 : media-optical
1 : kerberos
1 : hp-cluster
1 : gentopia
1 : amd64
Don’t know how accurate that list is, but you can check it for yourself. The commands I’ve used are these:
for i in $( < ../herds.list ); do grep --exclude=eclass --exclude=CVS \ --exclude=profiles --exclude=skel.* -R \ "<email>$i@gentoo.org</email>" /cvs/gentoo-x86/* ; done > redundant-metadata-xml.list
for i in $( < herds.list ); do echo -e " $( grep "<email>$i@gentoo.org</email>" \ ~/public_html/redundant-metadata-xml.list | \ wc -l )\t: $i"; done | \ grep -v "^ 0" | \ sort -nr > public_html/redundant-metadata-xml.overview
While herds.list holds a list (separated by \n) with all the herds there are. The raw files are here and here and here. Knock yourself out!
metadata.xml
Posted on March 14th, 2008 by Christian in Gentoo
So I ended up cleaning out some retired (~20) people from metadata.xml, where I found this interesting piece of metadata.xml:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE pkgmetadata SYSTEM "http://www.gentoo.org/dtd/metadata.dtd"> <pkgmetadata> <herd>kernel-misc</herd> <maintainer> <email>crypto@gentoo.org</email> <name>Crypto herd</name> </maintainer> <maintainer> <email>masterdriverz@gentoo.org</email> <name>Charlie Shephered</name> </maintainer> </pkgmetadata>
And here the hint for all you people again: A DAMN HERD AIN’T NO MAINTAINER. SO IF YOUR HERD IS MAINTAINING A PACKAGE, PUT IT INTO <herd> and not into the <maintainer>. kthnxbye.
To be or not to be …
Posted on March 9th, 2008 by Christian in Gentoo, Life
… that’s the question. I’ve been thinking lots and lots about my involvement with our “beloved” distribution.
I talked to some of the users (that is Gordon), some fellow developers (hello Christina, Łukasz, solar, Jorge, Anders) about whether or not I’m actually still wanted and/or needed. Turns out, the collective opinion is, that I am fun to have around (*shrug* don’t ask me why, I don’t find myself particularly funny/amusing) and that’d I’d be the person to have around.
That being said, I still do have some things on my agenda (they haven’t changed .. like getting healthier - as in heading to the gym; getting a better paid job; getting my own life; getting some friends), which are going to jockey with those Gentoo interests.