Author: Christian

Depression coming up

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As you may now (or not), I haven’t been pretty active in the last couple of days (OK, I admit it has been the last two weeks).

Work is currently being a bitch (I have a 6,36h day normally, but lately that evolved into a 8+h day which I’m not even payed for), personal life is also a bit frustrating (yeah you know those people-people relations called friendship and stuff).

I thankfully saw Diego return from his vacation (well sort-of, line-cuttage ain’t exactly vacation), Benedikt just announced that linux-vserver-2.0.2 is now finally available (after _rc31) and I’m still waiting on some replies from a dear friend.

Also I’m still trying to keep up on Planet Gentoo and mailinglists; gentoo-dev and lkml most of the time (you can’t imagine how many time this takes 😛 ).

Let’s see how that all turns out.

LiveCD, bootstraping and binary packages

Christian 1 Comment

Ok, as I said earlier I’m currently reinstalling my system from scratch (to finally and completly get rid of stupid eselect-compiler).

The first attempt was a bit, ehrm, error-prone (as in unpacking stage3-i686-2006.0.tar.bz2, chrooting to that and running emerge -ek system). Result was a b0rked chroot after the first two packages (heh, it was pulling in =sys-libs/glibc-2.4-r3 as the second package, thus everything that hasn’t been merged from my binpkg-repo and still originating from the snapshot being broken).

After removing the whole stuff again, again unpacking the stage3 tarball I simply untar’ed all system related (or those that I thought were vital) tarballs into the /mnt/gentoo directory.

*arg* after I finished writing those lines, I tried sudo gcc-config 6 to see if that would work. And what happens ?

Same old, same old …

portage / eselect-compiler

Christian 1 Comment

On Monday I helped Ned fixing ebuilds using the following DEPEND/RDEPEND:

Problems only popped up because app-admin/eselect-compiler got masked due to numerous, unresolved bugs (and Jeremy/eradicator being MIA again).

But that also revealed a bug within portage on handling the || ( a b ), where a is being masked.

So solar and I had being working on updating those ebuilds that use the above syntax (or something similar, some are using other versions, thanks Sven for the hint/reminder).

But now I’m sitting here with a broken system (ask tsunam about yesterday evening, ~ 20:00 UTC), unable to switch gcc-versions (due to gcc-config-1.3 misbehaving in some way and always only setting the cross-compiler when it should set the native-compiler).

I decided to reinstall the system from my kept binary packages (heh FEATURES=buildpkg ++), just backed up /etc (and left /home and /root). Will see how that turns out.

IBM

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We just received the long awaited shipment of sixteen 300GB FC-HDD’s (2Gbps with 10000rpm) for our SAN (a pretty old DS4500/FaStT 900).

But there’s still the software option missing we ordered within the same breath. So I called our trustworthy IBM distributor (hah!) and asked the guy responsible for sales, what the ETA on this software option is (if someone is interested its VolumeCopy/FlashCopy).

He told me, that we’ll receive a letter with the license key about 4 weeks after commission !!!!!!

I nearly fell from my chair when he told me that.

I still can’t believe it, that sending a license key printed upon a simple page is taking 4 weeks 😮

Luca had a nice comment about that:

SLES-9.2 (continued)

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OK, so after yesterdays battle with SLES and rpm, I decided to simply upgrade rpm (again rpmbuild -bb rpm.spec as in from source).

I had to tune (hah, remove stuff that isn’t working on this ancient gcc-3.3.3 ie. -fstack-protector) a bit to get it working, wasted 20 minutes worth of CPU time and ~30 of my time. I finally gave up. I couldn’t persuade neither rpm, nor git to compile on the damn SLES/Dell.

While the above was running, I did some compile-testing on Tim’s behalf (he back ported the e1000-driver updates from 2.6.18 to our 2.6.17 branch), seems to work so far.

On a more personal note, I’d like to stab all people neglecting their promises!

SLES-9.2

Christian 1 Comment

Hrm, today I tried to install some extra programs I need for devel-stuff (quilt, git, subversion) on an ancient (not sooo ancient) SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.2.

Did I already mention I hate rpm-based distros ? Ah and I missed to tell you, that I really love USE-flags …

Ok, so it took me half the afternoon, to rebuild half of all installed packages (heh, kde* depends upon expat*; but who need X or even KDE on a server-machine?) and figured that everything was for nothing.

I found no RPM/SRPM providing te_ams, so I couldn’t install xmlto, which in fact resulted that I couldn’t install git. Also took a look at the git.spec file, where something like –without=docs is mentioned.

Either its this ancient rpm-version, or that generally doesn’t work. So I’m fscked, not git on that machine and short-handed just ssh -e rsync’ed my local linux-git to that machine. It’s a bit inconvenient, but works.

I’ll look into that tomorrow, maybe I even manage to get the damn git working on that machine (or even dump SLES9 in favour of SLES10 / Gentoo!).

15 million pieces

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So Joshua asked my why the heck I was doing that puzzle (OK, I said it actually is a puzzle) and here’s now the story for that ..

Diagnose: Bursted plaster
Diagnose: Bursted plaster

As you see on the image above, the plaster is completely bursted. The dome also started to get some crannies, so my parents decided to cover the whole plaster with pebbles. Only catchy thing about that is: you need to glue every single pebble (diameter ~1cm) by hand onto the cement. And that pretty much sucks.

Half finished oven
Half finished oven

Ok, so it took us about two whole weekends to cover the dome with the pebbles (don’t ask about my back, it was hurting like someone put a hot iron back there), next thing will be the substructure that also needs to be reworked.

OT: to compete a bit with ChrisWhite, I managed to catch another expression on my face:

Me, being agitated
Me, being agitated

Now guess, what pissed me off at that time ? *g*

Plaything

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Ok, today I received another WRT54GL (yah, too much money 😛 ) and updated it to dd-wrt v23-SP1 instantly and is now (once again) powering my wireless network.

Yay! and thanks to Cisco/Linksys for that fine piece of hardware and to NewMedia-NET GmbH for providing such a great image for this hardware 🙂

Ah, nearly forgot that: remember, never put the same IP twice in the static DHCP lease table, or dnsmasq is refusing to start (thus no DHCP/DNS)!