Kevin's musings

As I noted recently ( Fedora 17 and updates-testing ) In the run up to Fedora 17 release, the updates-testing repo has been disabled. If you are wanting to use ‘yum distro-sync’ to sync your pre-release machine up to stable updates/base repo packages only, there’s a few gotchas you might run into:

• First the fftw package decided to reorg how it’s subpackages were setup. (IMHO not a great idea right before release). The version in updates-testing is one libs package, but the base version is a bunch more subpackages.
• Next you may run into colord-gtk issues. colord grew a new colord-gtk subpackage (IMHO not a great change right before a release either).

To work around these, try:

yum shell
remove colord-gtk
remove fftw-libs-double fftw-libs-long fftw-libs-quad fftw-libs-single
downgrade colord
downgrade fftw-libs
distro-sync


I’ll try and update this post with any more of these I find… feedback welcome.

Yesterday, we finally had to make the decision to send Merlin on his way. It never gets any easier to make that decision, but once again, I think we made the right one at the right time. (At least I keep telling myself that).
Merlin was a beautiful blue brindle (one of the rarest colors of greyhounds) boy. His owners had high hopes for his racing carrier, but it never went anywhere, and he retired when he was only 18 months old, having never run an official race.

He went into his life of retirement to a great place: a family where he learned all the obedience commands (He had his Canine Good Citizen Cert), dog agility, and how to teach other greyhounds how to live in a home. He also helped raise a bunch of greyhound puppies over time, keeping them in line and showing them the ropes.

When I first moved to Colorado and thought about adopting a greyhound, I went to a meet and greet and there he was. So handsome, soft and alive. He was the first greyhound I met in colorado and the one that sent me on my way adopting and fostering.

Then, when he was around 5, he came to me. At first he was afraid. He had major seperation anxiety anytime I left the house, but soon he learned that I would ALWAYS come back to him. He became my velcro dog. If I went upstairs, so did he. If I went on a trip, he wanted to go too. Here too he showed foster dogs how to run up stairs, play with stuffed toys and enjoy life. We spent many many many days out at the greyhound booth at the ren faire. Merlin didn’t really care about being there or the people or attention out there, he just wanted to be with me (and later Wendy as he bonded with her too). While at the booth he would hang back and sleep and lay down, not caring too much about people petting him. When we would leave the booth, he would move up front, scanning the crowds until we returned… jumping for joy at our arrival (literally).

He was a champion “roacher” (laying on back with all legs in the air like a dead cockroach):

Last year he was diagnosed with a thymoma in his chest. They didn’t give too good a chance, but we looked in his eyes and saw that he was going to stay with us, so he had a 4+ hour surgery and they removed a double fist sized thymoma from his chest. Amazingly he recovered and got another year to spend with us. He still tossed stuffed toys around and would from time to time run around the yard.

Good bye Merlin. You touched more lives than you can know. I will never forget you.

Xfce 4.10 was released to the world 2012-04-28 and Fedora rawhide was updated in the days right after that. (Thanks Christoph!)

Our Fedora 18 feature has been approved: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Xfce-4.10

My side repo for existing Fedora releases has been updated also to 4.10 final, and I have also built for Fedora 16 as well now. See:
http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/kevin/xfce-4.10 for a repo file for your /etc/yum.conf.d/ directory.

Lots of nice new little bugfixes and additions in Xfce 4.10. Give it a try today.

If you have a Fedora 17 install and updated recently (since saturday), you may or may not have noticed that the updates-testing repo is now disabled.

It’s enabled for testing during most of the pre-release cycle of Fedora, but as we get close to release time (and we are), updates-testing is disabled.

So, if you are a tester/qa person/wanting to help test in the run up to release you may wish to re-enable updates-testing (a simple: ‘su -c ‘yum-config-manager –enable updates-testing” should do). You can then update and use the excellent ‘fedora-easy-karma’ tool to provide testing feedback.

If you are not interested in testing things out, and want to just have your install more or less as it will be when it’s released on the 22nd, you may want to run a ‘yum distro-sync’. This should downgrade your packages to the base versions from any you have installed from updates-testing. If you don’t do this you may run into odd problems about packages not available or mismatches when trying to install 32bit packages on a 64bit install or the like.

Yesterday I had to say goodbye to a long time friend. ;(

Farewell Bitters. I’ll miss your mrows from the kitchen, your so very loud purring (missing these last few weeks), and your curled up calico self.

1993(ish) – 2012

Xfce 4.10 pre1 was released on 2012-04-01 (no joke!

In the last week I have built and landed it in Fedora rawhide, including rebuilding all the plugins against the new libraries. The only application left I know of that has issues is xfburn. I’ll be working on that in the next few days, in the mean time you will probibly want to remove it so you can update the rest of the stack.

I’ve also setup a Fedora 17 side repo with all these packages built. You can find it at:

http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/kevin/xfce-4.10/

I’m running it here and it seems to be pretty stable so far. Of course it’s only a pre1, so there could well be problems. Save your work often. Please report bugs on these packages to the fedora-xfce list or directly to me, to avoid confusion with the normal 4.8 packages in Fedora 17.

Comments and corrections and welcome for our Fedora 18 Feature page: Xfce-4.10

I got a little email note from the Red Hat HR folks today congratulating me on my 1 year anniversary with Red Hat. It really has gone by so quickly, so much to do, so much to learn, so much to work on. Hopefully I’ve made a difference and kept things running smoothly in Fedora Infrastructure for everyone. I hope it will continue to be a fun and satisfying trip in the years to come.

A number of folks have asked about this in #fedora over the last few months, so I thought I would do a quick blog post about rc.local in the systemd world.

/etc/rc.d/rc.local is no longer shipped, but it still works fine once you set it up correctly:

Create /etc/rc.d/rc.local as root.
Add a “#!/bin/sh” to the top of it.
chmod 755 /etc/rc.d/rc.local

Once you do those things, systemd will see the file exists, is executable, is a shell script and will run it. No further action needed.
I do hope systemd maintainers keep this functionality around as it’s sometimes handy to run things in a simple script rather than create a new unit file for it.

A week or two back we got a bug report from someone that they were downloading Fedora from download.fedora.redhat.com via https and the ssl cert didn’t match up. Of course it wouldn’t, as download.fedora.redhat.com has pointed to our dl.fedoraproject.org servers for at least 2.5 years now.

Since no one should be using this old dns entry now, I asked for it to be removed. I probibly should have made more noise at the time, but didn’t think too many people would still be using it. I did make a pass at fixing anything I could see still using it in the wiki.

In any case, it’s gone now. Please take a few minutes to go and look and see if you have any docs or wiki pages or notes or anything else that refers to this old entry, and update it. Please point them to ‘dl.fedoraproject.org’ (if you want to point directly to our master mirrors) or ‘download.fedoraproject.org’ (If you want it to point to a mirrormanager mirror that contains the content you seek).

Sorry if this causes any issues for anyone, but after 2.5 years, we should really be able to move on.

After seeing Christoph’s post fudcon 2012 todo list I thought that making a post fudcon TODO list was a great idea. Here’s mine (help welcomed!):

• Need to drop our staging git branch in puppet and merge any staging machine changes into the master branch
• Need to work on making out applications more ‘container’ like. ie, reduce the things they depend on and make it easier to spin up an env they run in
• Check out cloud tech and filesystems to see if any will meet our needs
• See if we can automate spinning up a application env with all needed integration testing machines
• Get two factor auth working for sudo for sysadmin-main and deploy. Continue adding types of auth and services once it’s solid
• Talk to the Board about our torrent seeder.
• Make sure the folks who want to work on reviving smolt have all the info and help they need
• Figure out how best to deploy the new community/tagger applications to production
• Find the time to add the nightly live compose to the rawhide/branched scripts so it happens in a totally automated way
• Finish migrating everything to RHEL6

If there’s something I told you I would help you with/do at Fudcon and you don’t see it above, please let me know and I will add it to the list.