fedora - That Fleming Gent

Old Dog Learns New Trick

Middle aged server hacker and software packager reads manual pages, gets enlightened.

Pardon the disruption..

Due to a lost / corrupted GPG keyring and passphrase I’ve had to issue a new RPM signing key for my ThatFlemingGent repository. I’m fixing the breakage now and I can’t say I’m too pleased, it’s a pain in the proverbial

caffeine

Keeping afloat in a binary ocean

Micro-rant: One of my pet peeves as a guy who likes to say his piece online is the number of really interesting and useful technologies / ideas completely ruined by lazy attempts at marketing by even lazier “salesmen” and marketers. Look at email – DKIM/SPF/DNSBLs/greylisting just

dns

Getting a PowerDNS recursor up and going, fast!

This post is another one of my “quick and dirty” service tutorials This time, I’ll cover getting a recursive DNS service up and going, using the PowerDNS recursor package. Traditionally Red Hat/Fedora users would opt for BIND (with or without the old “caching-nameserver”

courtesy

How polite!

I’m testing the Prosody XMPP server package I’d mentioned some time back (I’ve worked with jabberd/jabberd2 and ejabberd, figured a new tinker toy was on the cards) and got this when trying to check the service status – as a non-privileged serf/peon

bloodyidiots

Just Plain Bad Service

I almost lost two of my domains this week – a registrar / hosting company that will not be named decided to close them off without any notice – no email, letter or even a phone call. 15 minutes in a phone queue as the “next to be answered”

centos

New hosting arrangements

If you’re reading this (and not a “Page Cannot Be Displayed” or “Internal Server Error”) then I’ve successfully moved my site(s) to the new server. After years of hosting off my own gear, either at datacentres or literally in-house I’

fedora

Things I thought I'd never see

If I hadn’t been present for these, I’d probably call myself a bullspit artist. But I swear on a stack of $documents I was there and my experiences are 100% true. Firstly, I thought I’d never ever see a web framework’s object

backup

More of Michael's Not So Quick Tips

Migration I migrated my filesystems to ext4 (I’ve come from an all0ext3 F10 to F11 upgrade, FWIW) and just like to mention that if you’re migrating your root filesystem you might want to regenerate your initrd via mkinitrd; the stock one I had didn’t

fedora

Presto, We Have No Gallery!

Fedora / Linux stuff: For those users of my package set, you can now use yum-presto to grab deltarpms of my packages for Fedora 10 and 11. This should make your life easier – I know my upstream link isn’t always fast so the less traffic over it the

courier

I'm IPv6 ready - are you?

Firstly for those wondering about Courier-IMAP / authlib / maildrop+authlib packages for Leonidas: I’ve built them successfully – only a minor adjustment needed after all that – and it’s available in the usual place. Enjoy, and let me know if there’s any bugs / issues. (For

fedora

Some updates, and a little "open sermon"

I’m in the unusual position of being inside, yet rugged up with a jacket and scarf with what feels like a cold. I can’t say I’m happy about it. Upgraded WordPress here to 2.7.1 (Fedora 11 RPM rebuilt for F10) without too

fedora

That Fleming Gent Meets Leonidas

My long-running repository at ThatFlemingGent (or “Enlartenment” for those who haven’t caught up) is live and ready for use. As releases have progressed the list I offer has become smaller, as many have been pulled into Fedora proper (either by me or other Fedora contributors), died

ejabberd

Experiences in both success and failure

I did my bit: I really do like where things are headed and I’m sure the good work will continue 🙂 There’s been some lively debates on the mailing lists of late, but it’s worked out smoothly and courteously in this humble hacker’s

fedora

Scale and speed and spam

Obligatory Laugh-and-head-shake digression: I’ve been fighting email spam for 12 years plus, and I still see stupid spammers – pardon the tautology – indiscriminately junkmailing abuse@ role addresses. Idiots. Why not just offer crack to a cop? With that thought out of the way… Mike McGrath’

fedora

Result may be fit, social with an open messaging standard on top.

Techie Happenings: I’ve been tinkering with more XMPP (Jabber to you oldies) messaging in general, as it happens. I’ve had a look at the python Yahoo transport and found it a little lacking – it’s config is a little too different to the python

fedora

Murphy is my co-pilot.

After moving what seems to be several mountains at the workplace over the last few weeks, I’m finally on holiday. Additionally, my girlfriend is back from interstate, which makes me even happier. Alas, nature doesn’t like us and lo, as soon as she stepped off the

courier

New courier-imap packages

Sam released 4.5.0 today (and maildrop 2.1.0, which I’m trying to package up now and having an interesting time tracking a compile problem with the db/gdbm stuff) – I’ve updated my packages for CentOS/RHEL and Fedora in the usual places

fedora

This should be obvious, but..

If it’s not notifications / oddly explained failures to build from gcc itself (hello davfs2 on CentOS/RHEL5, where did that fail? Insights welcomed as the build.log is charmingly opaque. Cheers) or flex & bison (Hello vulcan on F10/x86_64, whaddaya mean you can’t parse

buddhism

De-stressing

Hey Yaakov, make that four users once I’ve set it up, I certainly do like the looks of it. A good tool that makes any job easier is a winner in my book, and that looks like a good one indeed. This weekend was a long one in

fedora

Quick head-scratcher avoidance tip

When upgrading versions of Fedora, it’s almost never a bad idea to force a SELinux relabel on reboot (or via fixfiles if it’s a little too late ;-)) I yum-upgraded my doorstop-cum-network box without doing so, then had a momentary headscratcher relating to why Dovecot failed

apache

I hate it when that happens...

I had a bit of free time – and a half-day at work yesterday to boot – so I thought I’d modernise my set of hacked-up shell scripts (calling mock/createrepo/rsync+ssh) and install the all-singing & dancing Koji suite. Now I’ve done this at

bloodyidiots

The Sir Humphrey Appleby Award goes to...

ObFedoraContent: I have now permanently retired the Fedora 7 and Fedora 8 sections of my repository. As I mentioned a few nights ago, those with older releases should really consider upgrading to a supported release or move to RHEL/CentOS. Cheers. Skip the rest if you’re only wanting

fedora

A Koan

A novice once came to a systems software roshi seeking wisdom: “I am troubled. My project has become large and I am having trouble reproducing the environment across test servers. I have all my sources and I’ve installed them from source in the ways our forefathers have,

fedora

Know Your Product.

Remi Collet ponders usage rates of the Enterprise RH versions vs Fedora. It’s a good question too, actually. Personally I think a lot of it comes down to what you offer in your repo – I know most of my downloads are for server related software (eg. Courier