Controlling your OOimpress presentations over bluetooth
Posted by fabian.arrotin in CentOS, Fun on June 22nd, 2009
One other thing I learned from the Florian’s talk last week-end is anyRemote . It can be used to control your Linux laptop (or the application started on your Linux laptop/desktop) , like for example OpenOffice Impress from your mobile phone (over IR/bluetooth/WiFi) . Of course that’s not the only stuff that you can use for that : Dag recently posted his WiiPresent package he wrote during the last Fosdem (co-authored with Didi) but in my case it’s difficult to justify to my kids that ‘Daddy has to steal one of your wiimote’s because he wants to use it during an OSS presentation’ . Advantage of anyRemote is that it’s compatible with my Nokia mobile phone so I was interested in testing/using it. It was not available on RPMforge .. until now ! : i’ve made a commit to the rpmforge svn yesterday (so expect the packages to appear in some days, when Dag’s buildsystem will process them)
People in the meantime who don’t want to wait can ‘ping’ me for the locally built RPMs for CentOS 5 
Interested in Heartbeat/Pacemaker newer rpms ?
Posted by fabian.arrotin in CentOS, Cluster, Uncategorized on June 20th, 2009
While I am/was attending a Zarafa summercamp for professional reasons, I discussed with Florian Haas (from Linbit/DRBD) about newer Heartbeat/Pacemaker packages landing or not in the CentOS Extras repositories (we didn’t talk about DRBD itself which is already provided in the Extras repository while newer DRBD packages are actually in the [testing] one). That’s true that I’ve myself not used/deployed heartbeat based cluster the last months (RHCS instead …) so I didn’t follow what happened on the Linux-HA/Pacemaker level. (I was just aware of the fact that Pacemaker was a replacement for the included Cluster Resource Manager within heartbeat 2.x). The actual heartbeat packages in the CentOS Extras repository were being packaged/built by Johnny but I’ll probably have a look with Ralph about what we can do. Florian told me that he was using the RPMs built by the Novell/OpenSUSE buildservice. While I was following some interesting talks, I had a quick look to see if their SRPMS could be used ‘as-is’ and submitted to Mock. Unfortunately no. I (we ?) ‘ll have to do some cleanups/adjustements within the SPEC file to fit the Mock buildsystem. (OpenSUSE uses someting different of course)
But even if the packages built succesfully , some testing will of course need to be done to see if upgrading from the actual heartbeat 2.1.3 package to 2.99 can be done in a ’smoothly’ way .. More informations to come in (i hope) a near future now that Florian gave me extra-pressure on my shoulders
VMware : a “time machine” ?
Posted by fabian.arrotin in CentOS on June 18th, 2009
I had (for professional reasons) to look at the Compatibility List on the VMware website for the (recently released) vSphere 4 product. And the the surprise : they already list CentOS 5.4 , even if not even in ‘alpha’ stage .. interesting
Is VMware a kind of ‘time machine’ ? 
“cpio: MD5 sum mismatch” error when submitting a F11 SRPM to Mock
Posted by fabian.arrotin in CentOS on June 8th, 2009
Today I had to migrate a customer CVS repository to Subversion. I looked after cvs2svn but I only found it (at least a ‘working’ version) in Rawhide. “No problem ! , I’ll use my mock wrapper script on my build system” … Except that instead of building a nice ready-to-go rpm, I ended with that error message :
warning: /builddir/build/originals/cvs2svn-2.2.0-2.fc11.src.rpm: Header V3 RSA/SHA256 signature: NOKEY, key ID d22e77f2
cvs2svn ##################################################
error: unpacking of archive failed on file /builddir/build/SOURCES/cvs2svn-2.2.0.tar.gz;4a2d65a4: cpio: MD5 sum mismatch
Error installing srpm: cvs2svn-2.2.0-2.fc11.src.rpm
Hmm, that famous problem Russ reported some time ago . But instead of setting up a F11/Rawhide domU somewhere just to extract the sources/spec from the rawhide srpm , I just decided to modify my wrapper script around mock on my CentOS 5 builder. Instead of just downloading the SRPM and directly submit it to mock, I first install it with the –nomd5 rpm parameter (using rpm2cpio is also an alternative), and then recreate directly a SRPM with `rpmbuild -bs –nodeps` (with of course the correct –define ‘ ‘ values for my build system) and then submit the resulting srpm to mock. I’ll check later if it’s possible to find a rpmmacro that can be used directly in the mock config file to bypass the srpm explode/recreate step. More informations about that issue in the Red Hat bugzilla and also on the Fedora wiki …
An opensource backend to sync my mobile phone
Posted by fabian.arrotin in CentOS, Fun on June 5th, 2009
While I used for several months the service offered by ScheduleWorld , I didn’t like the idea that my calendar was stored elsewhere than on one of my machines. The fact that ScheduleWorld decided recently to switch to V2 (and now don’t provide the service for free anymore), it pushed me to find a solution to sync my calendar between my Nokia E51 and my Linux laptop/computers. I really appreciate my Nokia mobile phone, but unfortunately it doesn’t support iCal (and I’ve not found a symbian app that could do that ..) . The only protocols that the Nokia can ‘talk’ is SyncML or ‘ActiveSync’ (through their ‘Mail for Exchange‘ free plugin) . That directly limits the scope for the backend. While I considered Funambol at a time (to use SyncML) , I finally ended with Zarafa (and Z-push) . It’s all open-source (in the community edition though) and emulates an ical (and caldav support is now available in the 6.30 release) and Z-push emulates an ‘ActiveSync-over-the-air’ server so I’m now able to directly sync my calendar/contacts/tasks/mails from my Nokia mobile phone to the server (using a MySQL backend) and either use the Zarafa webaccess (that I don’t use that much though) or Thunderbird with the Lightning extension . (every “iCal aware” program works of course)
Note : Z-push isn’t yet available in the RPM format on the Zarafa website due to a clause in the GPL license (more informations on the RPMfusion bugzilla related page) . Thanks to Robert Scheck a spec file was written but isn’t yet available. Robert is interested in seeing his package landing in EPEL and RPMfusion while I consider myself providing it in RPMforge. In the meantime, if you’re interested in the RPM version, feel free to ‘poke’ me or consult the spec file in the RPMfusion bugzilla .
RPM the easy way ?
Posted by fabian.arrotin in CentOS, Uncategorized on May 30th, 2009
While Karanbir posted an interesting rpm the other day , that reminded me another commercial app I had to look once. The application was provided as an RPM, but it seems that none of the installed files was declared in the rpmdb .. and here is why :
[arrfab@waldorf vmware]$ echo -e “Files present in the RPM package: \n” ; rpm -qlp VMware-Player-2.5.1-126130.x86_64.rpm ; echo -e “\nand now the RPM script : \n” ; rpm -qp –scripts VMware-Player-2.5.1-126130.x86_64.rpm
Files present in the RPM package:
/var/cache/vmware/VMware-Player-2.5.1-126130.x86_64.bundle
and now the RPM script :
preinstall program: /bin/sh
postinstall scriptlet (using /bin/sh):
# Execute bundle installer on install or upgrade after laying down bundle
# and then delete the bundle afterwards.
# Have to redirect the console to stdin because it’s closed by default.
# Setting VMWARE_SKIP_RPM_UNINSTALL is necessary because we don’t want the
# bundle to run rpm commands, since rpm will deadlock if that happens.
TERM=dumb VMWARE_SKIP_RPM_UNINSTALL=1 /var/cache/vmware/VMware-Player-2.5.1-126130.x86_64.bundle \
–required –console < /dev/tty
rm -f /var/cache/vmware/VMware-Player-2.5.1-126130.x86_64.bundle
preuninstall scriptlet (using /bin/sh):
# On uninstall only, remove existing bundle installation.
if [ $1 -eq 0 ]; then
if [ -e /usr/bin/vmware-uninstall ]; then
TERM=dumb /usr/bin/vmware-uninstall --console > /dev/null 2>&1
fi
fi
postuninstall program: /bin/sh
Do we really have to comment on that one ?
Small thoughts about the upcoming RHEV
Posted by fabian.arrotin in CentOS on April 22nd, 2009
While I attended the Red Hat partner summit, we had a demo of the upcoming RHEV (for servers and desktops). It was strange that while Vmware announced a beta version of VirtualCenter running on Linux, on the their side, Red Hat decided to keep the version written in .Net (from people from Qumranet, acquired by Red Hat last year). So you need a Microsoft Windows 2003 machine to manage your Red Hat Virtualization infrastructure .. are times changing ?
Of course we know that Red Hat is an opensource company and that each time they acquired a company they opensourced properly the product (Directory Server, GFS, etc …) so we’re sure that the goal is to provide a Linux version in the future .. But due to the fact that all Virtualization companies are now in a race, Red Hat didn’t want (again) to wait several months (even if RHEV ETA is september). Of course we can trust Red Hat on that one .. but on the other hand , Red Hat addicted people were astonished when we saw a Windows machine with Internet Explorer. Something nobody swore it would happen some years ago …
Citrix XenServer (still) using CentOS 5.x
Posted by fabian.arrotin in CentOS on March 13th, 2009
While we were busy talking about the Virtualization market in #centos the other day , someone didn’t know that Citrix was now offering their XenServer enterprise for free (as in beer, not speech). I guess that it’s a kind of answer to the fact that Vmware offers ESXi also for free (since late july 2008). The console app is almost an exact copy of the screen you get with ESXi (but i don’t know who copied the other though). I don’t want to compare both products or features but because I was already busy with CentOS 5.3 QA tests I thought that it was a good time to download/test it .. Unfortunately their Xencenter management application is still a MS-only application that depends on .Net 2.0 (like VI client for Vmware, even if VMware announced recently a that a VI client for linux would probably be released and that they have now a demo of VirtualCenter Linux version running on CentOS ..)
And guess what Citrix is (still) using for the dom0 ? CentOS ! okay not a ‘real’ CentOS anymore because some packages (including the kernel of course but still based on 2.6.18-92.1.10.el5) were replaced but most of the packages still come from CentOS (they were not even rebuilt and CentOS yum repositories are still in /etc/yum.repos.d/) .. That reminds me that someone else confirmed me that Oracle VM itself was based on Unbreakable (and so on CentOS/RHEL).
Watching dd progress from one host to the other with pv
Posted by fabian.arrotin in CentOS on February 26th, 2009
Recently i had to migrate a LVM based domU from machine 1 to machine 2 with only ssh port being available between the two hosts. Of course dd comes to the rescue for that but i admit that having some informations about transfer rate would be interesting. And then i remembered a Sébastien’s blog post talking about about a nice tool called PV. Of course PV has nothing to do with PV as in Physical Volume for LVM but it’s a ‘pipe viewer’ . A pv rpm is available in the RPMForge repo. Example (assuming that you’ve already created a domU2migrate lv on the target system) :
[root@machine2 ~]# ssh machine1 “dd if=/dev/VolGroup00/domU2migrate”|pv -s 8G -petr|dd of=/dev/xen02vg/domU2migrate
0:00:30 [11.2MB/s] [====> ] 4% ETA :10:13
I hope you’ll find that useful if you never heard of such tool ..
CentOS 5.3 QA tests at full steam
Posted by fabian.arrotin in CentOS on February 20th, 2009
Thanks to the fact that Karanbir is now back in action, the QA team is now working on the 5.3 QA tree at full speed. There are some nice things in 5.3 (you can already look at the Upstream release notes). We’ve already discovered some missing deps and other new good things. Of course everything will be reported on the Wiki/in the CentOS 5.3 specific release notes.
One of the thing that astonished me is the fact that (even if not written in Upstream RN) some drivers seem to have been updated. For example the sky2 module didn’t support the Marvel gigabit 88E8056 nic since 5.1 .. but .. :
[arrfab@waldorf ~]$ modinfo /lib/modules/2.6.18-92.1.22.el5/kernel/drivers/net/sky2.ko |grep alias|wc -l
29
[arrfab@waldorf ~]$ modinfo /lib/modules/2.6.18-128.el5/kernel/drivers/net/sky2.ko |grep alias|wc -l
30
Interesting , isn’t it ? (especially for people having that kind of low-level entry nic in their workstation ..)
Other interesting stuff is the newer scsi-target-utils (aka tgtadm/iScsi target) that now includes a config file and two helpers to setup a new iscsi lun easily (tgt-setup-lun and tgt-admin) .. of course there are other new good things so stay tuned for more informations and of course, don’t forget to read the Release Notes when they’ll be published !