Month: December 2007

Advanced bashrc (‘Turning a simple chroot into a binpkg repository’ continued)

Christian 1 Comment

As I pointed out back in October, it’s rather easy to create a setup which syncs a built binary package to a remote node (which is serving them to the world – via http,rsync,ftp – pick your poison).

Now, ever since we had slight space problems on miranda (cough my binpkgs cough), I wanted to look into methods on how to get rid of storing them on the buildnode and the webnode. I think now (hehe, it’s only 7pm), I finally managed to get a “proper” bashrc which does a lot of that foo. Take a look at this:

As you can see, it does a lot of things, which are all connected with binary package repositories (including cleaning up old packages no longer in the tree – trying not to waste too much space). Sadly, I currently have to use a custom patched qpkg version, as the one implementing the –eclean features isn’t in the tree yet. When I talked to Ned the other day, he complained about it being slow (well, yeah — it has to go through the whole tree) which I don’t really see when you look at what it’s doing.

Also, I had a weird phenomenon today happening: the buildnode built a binary package, sent it to the webnode, which ran qpkg --eclean' afterwards. But after that the binary package was gone. "Why" you ask now ? Well, apparently the webnode isn't synced the same time the buildnode syncs (the webnode is in Germany, the buildnode in the US). So I had to come up with a trick, in order to fool qpkg into not cleaning the freshly built binary packages. See the rssh’ in front of the qpkg call ? Guess what, that’s the lil’ dirty trick …

Anyway, the full bashrc is available. The next thing I’m gonna have to look at (which Markus already did), is building packages via buildbot.

Update: as you see, I updated the bashrc a bit. That’s because after writing this, I started a new (fresh) binpkg repository (empty), and out of the sudden the thing ain’t syncing correctly (as in no Packages file, no portage settings). Turns out, rsync doesn’t create directories which ain’t there. So another extra `ssh‘ execution to create the settings/ directory inside the repo.

Looking back (yet again)

Christian Leave a comment

Well, it’s yet again New Year’s Eve. Yet again a whole year passed by blazing fast, I didn’t manage to get everything done like I wanted.

That includes the following things:

  • getting a better job (and probably better paid too!)
  • getting a better life (well, it’s as it sounds like – my current life is rather unhealthy, and thanks to a friend I got the grip onto myself and started changing a few things – like doing a small workout every day, a bit more movement all over the day and so forth)

Which also means I do have some resolutions for the next year …

  • Become more active (like do a longer workout each day)
  • Get a better paid job (even if that’s going to hurt some people)
  • Fix my remaining health problems (like my foot, the back, …)

Now that sounds like I didn’t get anything done in the last 365 days, but that I sure did.

  • I finally managed to make my way through the slackers list (Fabian accused me I’d be orphaning half the tree – if at all, it was 1/12),
  • I did some major changes at work (though I still need to do some things – like fixing the MySQL replication with TYPO3).

I do have the feeling that the next year is gonna get interesting real soon. I do have a project for the implementation of a VDI based class-room scheduled early next year (budget still pending – so it’s a maybe); we still do have to review the available possibilities (which includes Dell – who apparently implemented exactly this for some university/technical university in Brandenburg), as well as some other small purchases.

Gentoo wise I can’t tell yet whether or not I still want to be part of it. The last few months have been rather tough for me, I’ve been haunted by guilt for other things, so I couldn’t care much about Gentoo. I’ve put away some of the burdens I had, in order to focus on the fun aspects of our beloved distribution (there isn’t much left sadly).

I’d like to thank those who had extra patience with me, thank those who took the time to talk to me, those who cheered me up when I needed it. It’s been a tough time, but thanks to a lot of amazing people (Norman, Michel, Christina, Alex, Diego, Ned, Chris, Robin, …) I got through it and I’m still here – alive and kicking 😛 !

Oh, and a happy new year !!

Life as God it wrote

Christian Leave a comment

Well, some of you know I’m a bit clumsy. Ok, I went buying some stuff for Saint Nicholas for the ones I love, which came to me about ten minutes before the shops are closing. Navigated my butt into the car, drove the ~6km to the nearest store (which still had open, that was around 20:00).

Got all I wanted, went back to my car (you know, this one) and put the stuff into the trunk. When closing the trunk, I felt some opposition, so I closed it a bit harder. “Closed” I thought and went back into my car. When turning on the ignition the bord computer suddenly complained “trunk open“, so I went back out, trying to open the trunk. *WTF* .. I couldn’t get it open. So I tried again, still nothing.

Okay I thought, since it was kinda closed and I couldn’t get it open with some brute force, I decided to go back home. On the way back home I remembered the parking lot of one of the DIY superstore’s had rather good lighting. So I went by.

On the parking lot, after parking my car, I went over the back seats below the trunk deck into the trunk, removed the trunk deck and saw that I somehow stuffed one of those plastic cooling bags into the lock of the trunk. I went *WTF* and tried brute force again opening the trunk. Still a no-no.

Ripped out the cooling bag (eventually everything of it), went back onto the back seats and tried to open the left rear door, but that didn’t work. Again *WTF*. Toggled the central locking system with the appropriate switch on the front panel. Still *WTF* it didn’t open. So I crawled onto the front seats, where I saw a tiny red light glowing, which is where I figured that the child safety lock for the rear doors was still on .. that at least explained why I couldn’t open the rear door from the inside.

Finally back outside, I went around the car to the trunk, tried to open it. Nothing, again with some force, *TADA* and I got it open. Removed the remaining parts (what was left of the cooling bag), and finally could close the trunk like it’s supposed to close. *pfew*

Device CAL’s ain’t no Device CAL’s ?

Christian Leave a comment

I stumbled upon a *real* weird problem. Apparently the terminal server licenses called “per Device” ain’t a real per device. From reading on it Microsoft states it like this:

Device-based versus User-based Terminal Server CALs

Two types of Terminal Server Client Access Licenses are available: TS Device CAL or TS User CAL.

  1. A TS Device CAL permits one device (used by any user) to conduct Windows Sessions on any of your servers.
  2. A TS User CAL permits one user (using any device) to conduct Windows Sessions on any of your servers.

You may choose to use a combination of TS Device CALs and TS User CALs simultaneously with the server software.

If I take the above and take a closer look at my terminal server license server I’ll see something like this:

Terminal services license manager
Terminal services license manager

As you can see, I *do* have devices with more than a single license (in fact, several of them do have more then four), which from my understanding ain’t what Microsoft had in mind.

After noticing this, I initially thought my terminal servers had the wrong license mode, but as you can see below, they are using “per Device“.

Terminal service license settings
Terminal service license settings

Which means, I am completely clueless at this point, as they *really* should be using just a single license, and not multiple ones.

Update:

Ok, after experimenting a bit with it, it seems that a license seems to be tied to the SSID. Which would explain, why I see different CAL’s for a single device. We reflashed the thin clients in between (and within that process, the SSID is freshly generated), so that’d be the only explanation I’ve got for what I’m seeing.

Frantic work, private life, friends

Christian Leave a comment

Well, it’s been a full month since I last wrote something. Back then I had some problems with 2X, Windows Terminal Server and printing (I still have problems, but not those anymore – I resolved them).

Work has been unusual frantic the last month, as well as I don’t pay much interest to all the things in Gentoo anymore (that was an advice from my shrink), as it just keeps putting on my anger/urge to do something nobody wants me to do even more. So I invested my time into doing other things (like baking or reading one of the many books that I buyed of Amazon and didn’t ever get a chance to read) I enjoy more.

I haven’t been completely dormant when it comes to Gentoo work, I finally went through the slacker list of last month (resulting in some retirement bugs, some already resolved – others not). Also I’ve been working hard with Robin on getting the auto-synced userinfo.xml working, in order to get away from two different sources of data. So be advised, you should rather edit LDAP (you can edit most of your own record by now – besides gentooAccess of course).

Now, my remaining task is, to get the missing data from people I mailed (most of them answered, others didn’t which is a real shame). Once that is done, we can simply lock the userinfo.xml in the gentoo/ repo, and then simply turn on a script to grab the userinfo.xml from LDAP and push it to the webnodes.

As for my personal life, it has improved at least a bit. I’ve been seeing a shrink to help me through some stuff (you know how life is – challenging), but also some of my friends helped me (heya there 😛 Diego, Alex, Christina, Norman, ……)