SysAdmin Blog

Ok, so you should exclude stuff like /proc when trying to duplicate complete system to another machine with tar (dump/restore wasn't an option, because the filesystem layout on the target was quite different from the original, and the filesystem too - xfs instead of ext3 on Linux boxen).

Unfortunately I didn't think about it until tar freaked out because the target / fs was full...

Since I first installed TikiWiki, the image galleries didn't work - until now. Just upgraded to the latest version from the BRANCH-1-8 cvs branch, and now scaled images are actually displayed.
There's still some problems with the tiki stylesheet I'm currently using, should have started customizing it long ago. But, I'm just not interested very much in this html stuff - much more in the backoffice software that makes a CMS tick.

Yesterday, I tried to install Solaris 9 on my old Sparcstation 10. Certainly this is not the hardware this OS was developed for (the installer complained about not enough memory, 96MB being the minimum), and two SM51 CPUs are not blindingly fast either. Nevertheless, when booting from the Software CD 1, the installer starts and works without problems. Because I don't have too much disk space either, I chose only the core install with a few additions (thankfully, the Solaris installation CD now contains a lot of basic tools that had to be built from scratch in earlier days, like a quite current perl. tcsh, wget, ncftp, less).

All in all, including package selection, installing the first CD needs about 1 1/2 hours on this hardware (and with a 2x CDROM drive). Eveything looks fine until this message comes up right before the final reboot:

Unable to run Launcher without Java.
The following CDs will not be installed: Solaris 9 Software 2 of 2 (12/03 SPARC Platform Edition)
syncing file systems... done

At no time before that point the installer complained that java was a required package for the installation to complete. Ok, the system was bootable at that point, but it's a quite bare basic solaris install without all the fine goodies (and without manpages and development libraries). Great.

I went home and watched some TV.

Today, everyone and their dog is writing about Eric Raymond's CPUS story (cache). I didn't have his problems yet, as I only have used CUPS as print server for Windows Clients accessing it through Samba, and UNIX Clients via standard BSD lpr/printcap setup.
Oh yes, and I think the MacOsX print support is based on CUPS, but the interface is obviously a lot better than the one supplied with Redhat's Fedora setup.

By the way, I was quite surprised with the quality of the OS X help - after having found dozens of documents on, for example, enabling root access or booting to single user mode on the web, I took a look at the integrated help and found everything there (try looking up "root access" or "single-user mode" in Mac Help). Seems like I'm already spoiled by the "help" supplied on Microsoft OSes, which mostly fails to have any sort of technical documentation targeted at system administrators. But then I chose a Mac system, because I knew I would mostly have positive surprises (and because I used to work with NeXT machines and I'm still kind of NextStep affictionado - the overall feeling is quite comparable, and lots of old knowledge comes in quite handy on OS X)...

The 2.4.25 Linux Kernel (cache) has been out for some time now, and after the corresponding Grsecurity (cache) patch has been made available, it was upgrade time.
I had been waiting with the upgrades for a few weeks now, despite several local root holes in recent kernels, as 2.4.25 was the first kernel with the xfs filesystem included, which I use on several important servers. The risk in waiting for so long was limited, as none of the affected systems had local users besides the system administration, and on the other hand, merging the xfs and grsecurity patches always needed quite a bit of manual intervention, as they collided in some places (mainly the ACL code).
I'm still building custom kernels for the more important systems, but it seems this is getting out of style. Perhaps some leftover from a time, when saving a bunch of kBytes on the kernel memory footprint could really make a difference.
Nowadays, I hear statements like "we don't support custom built kernels, the users are usually fucking them up anyway, and GENERIC just works" even from some of the OpenBSD people, who perhaps should know better.

Fine, so the iBook has bluetooth and WLAN and all, but my access point is with my girlfriend, and I don't have any bluetooth hardware yet (mobile phone just has IRDA and serial, and bluetooth mice and keyboards are a bit expensive right now). There now is an USB serial dongle (btw., look at the ProlificUsbSerial page if you're looking for an MacOS X driver), an USB soapbox to connect PS/2 keyboard and mouse (and all sorts of other USB stuff, like the Quickcam and the digicam and the external harddisk). Probably until I have upgraded all that stuff, bluetooth is obsolete again...

The iBook arrived on thursday... Quite fun, started by reinstalling the whole system and repartitioning the harddisk into several slices. Putting the home directories to another partition doesn't work yet, though - somehow the preferences don't get saved when I change the home dir in the Netinfo Manager.

Anyway, good place to start the AlexHardwareList.

Well, some Win2k source code fragments have been leaked (cache) a few days ago, and while I haven't made any efforts to retrieve a copy until now (IOS 12.x sources, anyone?), i thought this article (cache) on Kuro5hin to be interesting.

brought SendMail to the current release, 8.12.11, and upgraded MilterSender, MilterDate, and MilterSpamc to their current versions (also released a few days ago). Wasn't shure if it's a problem to run milters linked against the previous sendmail's libmilter, but it seems as if that's no problem right now (still haven't updated SmtpVilter...).

Also upgraded Sendmail on the FreiNet MXen yesterday, and I'm eagerly awaiting the new version of milter-ahead with the additional option I proposed to the author - to accept mail unconditionally if the destination mailserver is unreachable (otherwise, backup-MX don't make much sense).

Hm, still can't find out why scaled images in the Galleries don't work. All this php madness in the TikiWiki code doesn't make it easier, but it seems as if the view galleries script expects to find pre-generated scaled images in the database which the upload script doesn't create. Can't even seem to find the code where that should be done :(
I also noticed SIGSEVs from the httpd, but it doesn't log what it was working on at the time.