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 slmingol posted this in tips & tricks on March 21st, 2009, @ 12:40 amAs part of the aftermath of my Fedora Core 6 laptop getting dropped, I needed to do several re-installs of key apps. One of the more critical ones was VMware Server 1.08. I’m not a big fan of the 2.x version of this product so I’d rather just continue using the 1.x version.
In what has pretty much become the norm with VMware, every kernel upgrade, invariably breaks VMware. Since I had previously been using Fedora Core 6, a deprecated release, I hadn’t had a kernel update in a while, so I didn’t really have to deal with kernel churn. Now back on the bleeding edge with Fedora 10 I’m once again having to keep VMware Server working everytime a new kernel comes out.
So to start, I made sure I had the latest and greatest version of the 1.x VMware Server branch. I prefer to work with RPMs, so I grabbed the RPM version of the package. Upon installing it I ran into the following.
1st install attempt
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| ## install vmware rpm
% rpm -ivh VMware-server-1.0.8-126538.i386.rpm
Preparing... ########################################### [100%]
1:VMware-server ########################################### [100%]
# configure vmware
% vmware-config.pl
...
...
Using 2.6.x kernel build system.
make: Entering directory `/tmp/vmware-config10/vmmon-only'
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.27.19-170.2.35.fc10.i686/build/include/.. SUBDIRS=$PWD SRCROOT=$PWD/. modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/kernels/2.6.27.19-170.2.35.fc10.i686'
CC [M] /tmp/vmware-config10/vmmon-only/linux/driver.o
In file included from /tmp/vmware-config10/vmmon-only/./include/machine.h:24,
from /tmp/vmware-config10/vmmon-only/linux/driver.h:15,
from /tmp/vmware-config10/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:49:
/tmp/vmware-config10/vmmon-only/./include/x86.h:830:1: warning: "PTE_PFN_MASK" redefined
In file included from include/asm/paravirt.h:7,
from include/asm/irqflags.h:55,
from include/linux/irqflags.h:57,
from include/asm/system.h:11,
from include/asm/processor.h:17,
from include/linux/prefetch.h:14,
from include/linux/list.h:6,
from include/linux/module.h:9,
from /tmp/vmware-config10/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:12:
include/asm/page.h:22:1: warning: this is the location of the previous definition
In file included from /tmp/vmware-config10/vmmon-only/linux/vmhost.h:13,
from /tmp/vmware-config10/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:71:
/tmp/vmware-config10/vmmon-only/./include/compat_semaphore.h:5:27: error: asm/semaphore.h: No such file or directory
/tmp/vmware-config10/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:146: error: unknown field ‘nopage’ specified in initializer
/tmp/vmware-config10/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:147: warning: initialization from incompatible pointer type
/tmp/vmware-config10/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:150: error: unknown field ‘nopage’ specified in initializer
/tmp/vmware-config10/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:151: warning: initialization from incompatible pointer type
/tmp/vmware-config10/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c: In function ‘LinuxDriver_Ioctl’:
/tmp/vmware-config10/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:1670: error: too many arguments to function ‘smp_call_function’
make[2]: *** [/tmp/vmware-config10/vmmon-only/linux/driver.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [_module_/tmp/vmware-config10/vmmon-only] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/kernels/2.6.27.19-170.2.35.fc10.i686'
make: *** [vmmon.ko] Error 2
make: Leaving directory `/tmp/vmware-config10/vmmon-only'
Unable to build the vmmon module.
For more information on how to troubleshoot module-related problems, please
visit our Web site at "http://www.vmware.com/download/modules/modules.html" and
"http://www.vmware.com/support/reference/linux/prebuilt_modules_linux.html".
Execution aborted. |
Googling a bit produced this blog post and this wiki post. According to the blog post you need to apply the following patch set to VMware 1.08 to get it to work with the newer 2.6.27 kernels. Here’s a link to the original tarball of the patchset, as well as a link to a local copy I have cached on my site.
…. Continue reading → Getting VMware 1.x Server Running on Fedora 10 »»
slmingol posted this in tips & tricks on March 19th, 2009, @ 1:53 am
UGHH …
Recently one of my kids knocked my Fedora Core 6 laptop off of a counter and sent the hard drive for a loop. This rendered the drive inaccessible. So I threw spinrite at it and after ~6 hours several sectors that were damaged were repaired/pulled out and the data moved to a different location on the drive.
Please be alright … Please be alright …
When I rebooted my EXT3 partition weighed in and had all kinds of fits about the drive being dropped as well too. I was able to get onto the system and copy most everything that I wanted off of it using scp to another system. Mind you I did have to go into the dreaded /lost+found directory to recover the data but by in large it was all there.
Light at the end of the tunnel
So I wiped the drive clean and took the opportunity to upgrade to Fedora 10. Now way back when I setup Fedora Core 6 on my Thinkpad T42 I had to do a lot of hacking and customizing to get the lappy to work optimally with FC6. For example, sleep mode when I closed the lid and the special keys to actually work, among other things.
All I can say is WOW. Everything that I had to manually monkey around with just works now! The only thing missing was a package I found out about from thinkwiki to get the nifty OSD when I hit the mute & volume keys.
Problem #1, didn’t take long 
One thing that I just do even though it’s considered bad practice is to just run as root on a laptop. It’s just easier and I don’t have to fight with it too much otherwise.
So when I tried to login as root at the GDM prompt I was presented with an annoying although somewhat expected problem where it wouldn’t let me login as root to GNOME. I knew it had something to do with security and most likely PAM or some such, so I googled for “fedora 10 login as root desktop” and the first hit was a page over on cyberciti.biz that said you could disable this “feature” by commenting out a line in the /etc/pam.d/gdm file.
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| #%PAM-1.0
auth [success=done ignore=ignore default=bad] pam_selinux_permit.so
#auth required pam_succeed_if.so user != root quiet
auth required pam_env.so
auth substack system-auth
auth optional pam_gnome_keyring.so
account required pam_nologin.so
account include system-auth
password include system-auth
session required pam_selinux.so close
session required pam_loginuid.so
session optional pam_console.so
session required pam_selinux.so open
session optional pam_keyinit.so force revoke
session required pam_namespace.so
session optional pam_gnome_keyring.so auto_start
session include system-auth |
Doing this did the trick!
slmingol posted this in tutorials on March 14th, 2009, @ 11:08 pm
Recently I was trying to get one of my OpenVZ instances to host a CUPS service for my entire domain. In order to do this the VE instance needs to know about the device files under /dev that relate to the printers I wanted to share. The device files I needed to share were for 2 USB printers. So I put the script below together to figure out what the current files are for the 2 USB printers on the HN and then create the necessary files within the VE and update the VE instance through the vzctl –details switch to reflect the devices for the printers.
NOTE: Some of the info on the OpenVZ wiki here offered some helpful guidance.
lsusb output
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| Bus 004 Device 008: ID 04f9:000d Brother Industries, Ltd HL-1440 Laser Printer
Bus 004 Device 004: ID 04a9:1069 Canon, Inc. S820 |
I was interested in adding these 2 devices so I used their ID …. strings to uniquely identify them from reboot to reboot. They’re identified in the $filterDevices variable in the add_usb_devices_to_ve.sh script below.
…. Continue reading → Getting CUPS and OpenVZ to Play Nice on CentOS 5 »»
slmingol posted this in misc on March 11th, 2009, @ 7:57 pm
I won’t normally do this on this blog but from time to time I’ve been known to watch the foodchannel, of which I especially enjoy watching Alton Brown. Recently he had a show where he mentioned some of the foundations of cooking recipes. I always forget these some I’m documenting them here so I won’t have to go looking for them again!
Definition of terms
mirepoix (meer-ah-pwah)
Equal parts of onion, carrot, & celery. Basis for most French cuisine.
sofrito – (so-frito)
Equal parts of tomato, garlic, & pepper. Spanish heritage.
the trinity (aka. the holy trinity)
1 onion, 2 green peppers, 3 stalks of celery. A combination of the two.
This forum thread on cheftalk.com proved helpful in explaining some of the history etc. about these.
slmingol posted this in tips & tricks on March 11th, 2009, @ 2:08 am
I finally got around to setting up Git [1] & [2] and Subversion for my personal development environment. I also installed the GitPlugin for Trac so I’d have a choice of either SCM tool from within Trac so that I can use either SCM. I wanted to make sure that all my urls were consistent so I spent a good deal of time mapping this all out and making sure that these urls would be handled correctly by apache using mod_rewrite and proxying, since my git and subversion servers are behind my firewall.
Repo viewers
I was interested in having the top urls, svn.lamolabs.org and git.lamolabs.org taking you directly to a repository viewer. For Git I chose gitweb, while for Subversion I chose webSVN. So here are the links to the 2 web repo viewers.
 screenshot of gitweb in action  screenshot of webSVN in action
…. Continue reading → Git and subversion setup on CentOS 5 »»
slmingol posted this in tutorials on March 4th, 2009, @ 5:00 am
I started installing trac a few days ago on one of my OpenVZ VE instances running CentOS 5. I got to the point where I needed to install the gitPlugin when I realized, oh crap, I need Python 2.5. Installing major upgrades to python can be a bit of a pain. Especially on RedHat flavored distros. So I setup a separate OpenVZ VE instance just to try out doing an install of Python 2.5 along side my existing Python 2.4 install. Refer to my previous post about installing Python 2.5 on CentOS 5.
So this is the moment of truth. Installing Trac and all it’s plugins so that they are using the 2.5 install.
Point python to python25
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| % alias python=/usr/bin/python25 |
That was easy enough.
Trac
So now lets install Trac. I’m going to use easy_install to do this. This gives me the latest version that’s available, 0.11.3. Doing it this way will automatically install Genshi for me as well.
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| % easy_install trac
Searching for trac
Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/trac/
Reading http://projects.edgewall.com/trac
Reading http://projects.edgewall.com/trac/wiki/TracDownload
Reading http://trac.edgewall.com/
Best match: Trac 0.11.3
Downloading ftp://ftp.edgewall.com/pub/trac/Trac-0.11.3.zip
Processing Trac-0.11.3.zip
Running Trac-0.11.3/setup.py -q bdist_egg --dist-dir /tmp/easy_install-_WZSG4/Trac-0.11.3/egg-dist-tmp-TCkvCy
Adding Trac 0.11.3 to easy-install.pth file
Installing trac-admin script to /usr/bin
Installing tracd script to /usr/bin
Installed /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/Trac-0.11.3-py2.5.egg
Processing dependencies for trac
Searching for Genshi>=0.5
Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/Genshi/
Reading http://genshi.edgewall.org/
Reading http://genshi.edgewall.org/wiki/Download
Best match: Genshi 0.5.1
Downloading http://ftp.edgewall.com/pub/genshi/Genshi-0.5.1-py2.5-linux-i686.egg
Processing Genshi-0.5.1-py2.5-linux-i686.egg
Moving Genshi-0.5.1-py2.5-linux-i686.egg to /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages
Adding Genshi 0.5.1 to easy-install.pth file
Installed /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/Genshi-0.5.1-py2.5-linux-i686.egg
Finished processing dependencies for trac |
…. Continue reading → Installing Trac on CentOS 5 »»
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March 21st, 2009, @ 12:40 am |
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