Debugging “rug”

Posted on Friday, 15th August, 2008 in Life

Well, it’s 7pm. I’m sitting at home and thinking about why in gods name rug isn’t adding my update repository. I can add the service using yast inst_source, but when yast then syncs with ZenWorks, it tells me something like:

Failed to get repomd/repodata.xml; Reason: 530 - Access denied

So my fellow co-worker turned on the debug-logging and we quickly found out why: rug isn’t using the command line credentials I was passing.

Now I only need to find out, why rug isn’t using them, and how I’m able to pass username and password to rug .. Or not, after looking through the Novell community, I found bug 204741 in Novell’s bugzilla. Guess, what .. It’s marked WONTFIX (or whatever, I can’t view the duplicate bug).


SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 on VMware ESX (continued)

Posted on Sunday, 27th July, 2008 in Life

Well, after some searching today (we applied the VMware Update 2 today, thus the VMware Tools update too), I finally found out what is causing that problem.

Though the problem seems to be not limited to virtual systems alone, I just browsed through this Novell Forum thread which pretty much describes my problem. I found the same error in the VM’s I tried to mount a CD image.

kernel: ide-cd: weird block size 524288
kernel: ide-cd: default to 2kb block size

Only difference between my behaviour and the one described, is that the virtual maschine is switched off immediately after you try to mount a CD image.

Now, this guy is saying Novell is working on it … But you’re gonna have to ask the question, why in gods name did such an update get through QA ? Or ain’t there no QA for updates ? *shrug*


SLES-9 (once again)

Posted on Thursday, 8th March, 2007 in Life

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 :P ) 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:

$ emerge '<apache2-2.0.49-r63' '<apache2-mod_php4-2.0.49-r63' '<apache2-mpm_prefork-2.0.49-r63'

Looks like SuSE (or Novell who bought SuSE sometime 3 or 4 years ago) doesn’t consider reverting to an older patch level. Which means I would have to remove apache2, apache2-prefork, apache2-mod_php4; fetch the basic RPMS from our FTP server (which sadly forbids directory listing, so I can’t exactly look for the original RPMS) and I tried to blindly to fetch them.

Foooked. Didn’t work .. now I cron’ed the POS to restart every half an hour, so at least we have *some* solution. Will see about reverting the the last patch tomorrow again, hopefully I’ll find the original RPMS.