Somewhere out there!

Some interesting stats about the relative usages rates on distributions in the Linux server space. SUSE, Fedora or Debian for sys admins: A closer look:

Interestingly, Debian accounted for 44.6% of the Linux systems deployed while SUSE had 11.4% of the systems deployed. Fedora and Red Hat legacy distributions accounted for 9.2%. The later surprised me.

As those experienced with Debian would expect:

Overwhelmingly, system administrators preferred apt-get for adding, removing and updating their servers. We also discovered that system admins added ports of apt-get to Fedora and SUSE. So much for yast -i. The preferred Debian administration utility drove people who used the non-commercial distributions to Debian.

Also with a link to an interesting php ldap admin tool: GOsa.

Technorati Tags: debian, linux, server

If you’ve recently update to the latest debian security release of sudo (1.6.8p7-1.3) which amongst other bugs fixes CVE-2005-4158: Insecure handling of PERLLIB PERL5LIB PERL5OPT environment vars then you’ve probably started getting errors like the following:

• E138: Can’t write viminfo file $HOME/.viminfo!
• dircolors: no SHELL environment variable, and no shell type option given

Sometimes I wish the changelogs would be clearer and maybe every so often a debconf message would save the hassle of an hours googling vim error codes. “Reverse the environment semantic by forcing users to maintain a whitelist [env.c, Bug#342948, CVE-2005-4158]” isn’t really that informative.

Anyway, the quick fix option is adding Defaults env_reset in /etc/sudoers.

Technorati Tags: debian, bugfix, sudo

Some useful hints for running Debian/domU from the Xen Wiki:

I encountered the following problems when setting up Debian 3.1 as a DomU on Xen3.0 Unstable for the XenDemoLaptop:

1. When booting, I get “Couldnt get a file decriptor referring to the console” about 100 times.
• Fix: Remove /etc/rcS.d/S05initrd-tools.sh
2. When booting, I get lots of “FATAL: Module blah not found”
• Fix: Remove offending modules from file /etc/modules
3. When booting, after it says “Starting hotplug subsystem:” some of the say “[failed]”
• Fix: Move offending modules out of /etc/hotplug/

Sun’s released ZFS for OpenSolarias and it looks very cool. Couple of flash demos show how easy it is to manage and its selfhealing abilities.

It would be very interesting to see the possibilities of this combined with OpenSolarias acting as a dom0.

My new v20z was taking an annoying amount of time to boot. Checking the console and a quick google I discover this hint.

The following works well:

title Xen 3.0 / XenLinux 2.6.12.5 / Unstable
kernel /xen-3.0-devel.gz dom0_mem=262144
module /vmlinuz-2.6.12-xen0 root=/dev/sda3 ro console=ttyS0,9600 console=tty0 hda=none hdb=none

The same thread had a link to this interesting site that produces boot charts.

Point and Print in Samba is a nice short article about how to install print driver into samba, Windows clients pick this driver up correctly. I had to do some additional fiddling with force user and changing the readonly setting, so I could actually get the drivers installed, but it worked eventually.

Something I should have figured out many years ago.

A good place to look if you want to figure out how to convert a command line mount to a fstab mount is /etc/mtab.

For example:

I seem to be doing this a lot at the moment. So I’ve collected a few notes together as reminder of the process.

Short review of Beagle. Of primary interest is the Firefox history indexing. Very interesting. When I get a moment, I’ll upgrade to breezy and get this installed.

Beagle can index a wide assortment of files including OO.org documents, MS Word documents, AbiWord documents, Music Files (meta data), Images (meta data), man pages, virtually any text file (including source files, Docbook, rtf and HTML), PDF, Gaim logs, Evolution mail and address books, the Tomboy note system, and several RSS aggregatiors. … A plug in for Firefox indexes web pages as they are viewed, creating a massive web history index (can prove very handy).

Back in June I decided I’d try out NX and my MiniMac as a possible active working desktop solution. The genesis for this was mainly based on my decision back in March that iBooks were the best portable solution. Reasonable battery live, hardware/software combination that just works, together.