LiveCD, bootstraping and binary packages

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

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.

Chris (the White variety)

Hrm, I think I tortured christel a bit too much, earlier ..

Singing
Singing

Actually Chris, I think that was your and Diego’s comment(s) in combination with esammer (thanks for the decent laughing flash I had btw 😮 )

LinuxTag – part 3

I’m now at Frankfurt Airport and I nearly got on the earlier train to Stuttgart which I wasn’t able to catch, according to the service guy. I was facing the same problem than the morning before. The damn doors closed right in front of my face. Meh, Friday seems to be my bad luck day.

I’m still waiting for the ICE supposed to leave at 20:54 but it’s currently having eighteen minutes delay. My cousin messaged me earlier that she’ll collect me at Stuttgart Central Station. The day is nearly finished now and I’m awake since yesterday morning 07:40 minus that three hour break. I’m still pretty excited that I really got to Wiesbaden and I really enjoyed that little trip (even if it was a bit expensive).

LinuxTag – part 2

I’m sitting in the S8 to Frankfurt Airport where I’ll switch to the ICE to Stuttgart to visit my cousins and my aunt. Linux Tag was quite amazing, I finally met some of the people behind OpenVZ (Kir and Kirill), saw a bit of Andrew Morton’s Kernel FAQ (Kir told us that) and met some people including Bertl, doener, derjohn, zeng, foo, … of the linux-vserver community. Both workshops were quite interesting and I learned a lot of things about openvz and it’s userland tools and linux-vserver (finally I understood the CPU Tokenbucket system).

Even if I didn’t arrive in time to watch Kir and Kirill’s presentation of openvz and its features completely, I managed to watch Kir demonstrating the live migration between two different nodes. Even if Kirill needed to reboot his system due to a readonly filesystem (it was / that was the whole bugger) I have to admit it really impressed me (since that’s a feature we had to pay 3000€ for VMware ESX and no I don’t want do hear a single word about it). Sadly the OpenVZ stuff isn’t ported yet to SPARC so I’ll keep vServer running on the U1 (Ultra1). I also met Hollow in person, which really was the highlight of all days. He was my mentor when I joined Gentoo and is the person that I’m doing most of my work on Gentoo / Linux vServer / OpenVZ related things. Bertl’s talk nearly took four hours but those four hours were quite informative and interesting. He held a general introduction into virtualization theory (which took him two hours). After a small fifth teen minute break he demonstrated most of the things possible with linux-vserver (including resource limits to kill kill certain memory/cpu hogs).

Demonstration ended at 18:10 and we got back up to the Linux vServer booth were I finally managed to ask Bertl about his patch name versioning scheme. And I finally understood it!

We also stopped by at the SWsoft booth to say goodbye to Kir and Kirill and to talk about the SRPMS but they already had left. We did some group photos of all present at the Linux vServer booth. Afterwards Hollow and I grabbed our backpacks and took of to the station. On the way we had a little discussion about problems and stuff that we recently noticed. First was the /dev/console virtualization effort, since we switched from init-style Gentoo (which we removed from the utils) to plain. The virtualization would show some effect if you’re wanna be able to see what’s happening on the startup phase of a vServer. Second thing was the reintroduction of the fastboot bug (that’s what I call it). The util-vserver package leaves a plain and empty file in the guests root filesystem, which really annoys me. The third thing is the vserver-init.$( mktemp )´ file that is placed in /tmp but isn’t deleted after startup is complete. Another thing we talked about was the vserver stop´ which only waits for the vkill timeout to kick in but isn’t going to stop the vServer by itself.

LinuxTag – part 1

Boy, that day started great (irony). I was supposed to get my lazy ass up at 04:20 am to be at the station at 05:27 am, taking the train to Wiesbaden (together with Hollow).

But someone in this odd world doesn’t like me. I somehow managed to turn off the damn cell (that was supposed to wake me up) and slept till 05:10 am, till Paula came in and woke me up. She told me she was awake since half an hour and she waited on me to step into her bedroom.

She also told me that we have to go now otherwise I’m not going to catch that train (for which I had a reservation!). We got into the cat and drove over to the station (damn, you can’t imagine how I hate red traffic lights!). She parked in the non-parking area and we ran through half the station, till we noticed the train is supposed to be on platform 15. We were already at platform 22!! So we got back running through the station with my heavy backpack (carrying my notebook and some stuff I had to put into it earlier in my morning rush) and my heavy trolli.

As we arrived at platform 15, the ICE was already beeping, indicating the doors are getting closed / locked. I asked the conductor if there was a way left to get on that damn train. She told me, there is one only way three wagons ahead, and it was the only possible way to get on that train (each wagon is approx. 30m long), so I started shouting at the conductor standing in the door to let me in. But it seems he hasn’t heard me. Damn you, fscking conductor.

I was standing in front of that damn train and saw it leaving the station. You probably can’t imagine how I felt in that moment. I was pretty much wasted, completely out of breath, standing there.

After the train left the station Paula asked me, why I stopped running, there were only three or four wagons left. I told there, that I’m completely wasted and that damn conductor I shouted at, hasn’t heard me.

Standing there on the empty platform, I was completely clueless. She told me I should look for the next available train that would take me to Wiesbaden. I thought for a second, to skip the trip but decided to search for an alternative. I looked around and saw an ICE Sprinter (which needs an extra reservation) to Frankfurt a. Main. So I called the information (was Paula’s idea) and asked for the number of DB-Ticket Service. The lady messaged me, since she couldn’t put me through, the number and I took another call to a service hotline. It was a 0900 number (at 1,49€ per minute).

Another lady answered my call and I asked her for a reservation for the ICE Sprinter (leaving at 06:25). That damn reservation cost another 10,00€. I booked that, as I really intended to show up in Wiesbaden. He service-lady asked me a couple of questions (personal, for their system to get the 10€) and it was finished. I only had to catch my reservation at the next service terminal.

After searching such a terminal for a minute or so, I collected my reservation and felt much better. Now I’m sitting in the train (Hollow tried to call me a couple of times) being around Mannheim and writing my blog post on paper (still need to hammer it into the keyboard).

My mood lifted pretty much and I’m looking forward to meet Hollow, kir, team leader of the openvz team, Bertl, the guy behind the linux-vserver kernel.

I’m still tired, tried already to sleep but the moving train makes that nearly impossible. My stomach is hurting, my head is a bit dizzy but it should be ok later (I hope so). The damn pressure on the ears drives me nearly mad (I’m not used to switch heights in that speed, Northern Germany is nearly flat and there isn’t that altitude difference that I’m experiencing right now).

I’m still impressed of Munich (who knows, maybe I’m getting a job there in the near future), my head is full of information of those various locations I visited in the past 1½ days. Also full of great memories that I’ll not forget so fast (I’m hoping at least).

I’m already thinking about my summer holidays. Maybe I’ll spend them also in Munich and not in Stuttgart where all my relatives are. But those holidays should be a bit longer than two days, it really hurts to leave again so fast.

So far from my little adventure, more as it happens.

Birthday

Today being my Birthday pretty much started my day. Somehow I managed to accept a call at 00:12 (while I was asleep) but I don’t even remember taking it. Somehow my real live is getting better and better (as in finding some friends as I pretty much was a hermit for the last couple of years).

Also I found someone to share my toughts with, someone who understands it, how to really get to me (read it as a very good friend :P)

Gentoo stuff is living on. vserver-sources/linux-vserver is approaching it’s next stable release (hopefully in this week), openvz-sources finally on something newer than 2.6.8.1 (ok, they’re there quite a while) and baselayout-vserver finally working on both openvz and linux-vserver.

And my little experiment also continues (the WRAP experiment). I’m currently trying to get a minimal Gentoo running on that (well sort of). I’m currently trying to get some replacement for/a way to strip down GCC (I really don’t need a compiler on the WRAP, and since the whole GCC takes 79M it’s pretty much a candidate for removal).

solar yesterday mentioned something like this:

Well that would be a pretty nifty feature (and I already tried my luck and wisdom *cough*), but hopefully we’ll se something like that pretty soon 🙂

It’s almost a year since I joined Gentoo and I have to admit that it was a pretty good time so far (well except some random things, like me screwing some releases).