August 3, 2010
A little bit frustrated with Fedora’s new git repositories this morning (for packages). Ding-Yi Chen has a really nice write-up on how to get started with it. Got me a few of the essentials that I had missed earlier. I like the new certificate that can be used with Koji. That’s pretty slick. Ding-Yi Chen also points to a few of the official git-related pages you may need to visit; I’ll recap them here but he’s got a point-by-point getting-things-running on his blog that was really helpful (thanks!)
Unfortunately, there still seems to be some issues:
Cloning into bare repository /cvs-scratch/fedora/opensc/fedpkg.git...
open log failed: Permission denied
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
Could not clone: Command '['git', 'clone', '--bare', 'ssh://me@pkgs.fedoraproject.org/opensc', '/cvs-scratch/fedora/opensc/fedpkg.git']' returned non-zero exit status 128
I’m not sure what this means. But the old CVS repository doesn’t seem to be usable either, which kinda stinks. I’m sure it’s just a minor buglet or two and will get worked out eventually. Very very happy that we’re no longer using CVS for this… I’d prefer SVN myself, but git is ok too.
June 2, 2010
This week’s TechMail is How to pre-upgrade Fedora 13 which shows how to use PreUpgrade (great tool). I used it to upgrade an F12 box and it worked flawlessly, despite the small /boot size. More information on how to use it is also on the Fedora wiki.
May 25, 2010
My main Fedora workstation is an HP desktop. It’s got a Core i7 quad CPU (Q9300), 8GB RAM, and dual boots Windows 7 and Fedora 13.
Dear lazyweb, how can I make this system as quite on Fedora as it is on Windows? It’s absolutely silent when Win7 is running, but when Fedora is running the fans are quite noisy. Most of the time the system has a load average of 0.00 so it isn’t CPU spiking causing the fans to go full-bore. For temperatures I have Core0 at about 51C and Core1 at 44C and the other two cores at 48C, but the fans are running at 1583 and 1160 rpm. I can’t get the sensors to pick up temps or fan speeds on Win7 for some reason so don’t have a basis for comparison (tried a few of those “gadgets” and none show me temperatures).
There has to be a way to lower the fan speed on Fedora but I can’t find it. I tried fancontrol from lm_sensors but it complains about not being able to manually set the fans and there’s nothing I can see in the BIOS that’s even remotely relevant.
Am I doomed to a noisy Fedora box? Or is there a way I can make this thing quieter short of buying new fans? (The latter is an option I suppose, but if Win7 can run perfectly silent, then I’m of the frame of mind that Fedora should too). Running an up to date F13 (wheeee!!). Thanks for any suggestions.
May 15, 2010
This week’s techmail was Firewall configuration with system-config-firewall which discusses the niceties of using Fedora’s system-config-firewall to configure iptables. I’m not much of a GUI guy, but the interface for the firewall configuration is really slick. Will it replace my use of editing iptables rules in /etc/sysconfig/iptables? Probably not. But if you were afraid of editing a text file to setup your firewall rules, then using system-config-firewall will be welcome for you.
April 7, 2010
I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but I maintain a repository of packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (arguably these could/should be in EPEL but I’ve not had time to get into the Fedora side of things as of yet… someone will beat me with a wet noodle, no doubt). It’s a very small set of packages so I don’t feel too awful about it.
Anyways, one of my favourite features in Annvix was being able to run the entire system out of runit (Annvix used runit in place of SysVinit). This gave us nicely supervised services using runit (much like DJB’s daemontools). Feeling crappy with the first day of a head cold, I spent some time today over lunch to get runit working with RHEL5. I had to re-tool the package since I don’t want it to replace SysVinit, but run under init and just supervise services (like sshd, exim, etc. — call me weird, but runit/daemontools makes a fantastic watchdog and with sshd running from tcpsvd, I get some nice ACLs to use as well).
At any rate, runit now installs and works properly. Sorry to anyone who wanted to use it (I’ve been meaning to do this for the last year, ever since I switched all of my servers over to CentOS). The runit package also comes with a bunch of run scripts; I’ve not tested them all yet so if you do end up using it and have issues, let me know. I did have to fix a few minor things in a few of them.
At any rate, I’ve chkconfig’d off a few services and have them running supervised now:
# srv --list|grep -v '-'
service status pid started
crond up 2737 04/07/2010 02:16:32 PM
crond/log up 2735 04/07/2010 02:16:32 PM
exim up 2747 04/07/2010 02:16:32 PM
exim/log up 2746 04/07/2010 02:16:32 PM
mdadm up 2738 04/07/2010 02:16:32 PM
mdadm/log up 2736 04/07/2010 02:16:32 PM
ntpd up 2733 04/07/2010 02:16:32 PM
ntpd/log up 2731 04/07/2010 02:16:32 PM
smartd up 2739 04/07/2010 02:16:32 PM
smartd/log up 2734 04/07/2010 02:16:32 PM
sshd up 2732 04/07/2010 02:16:32 PM
sshd/log up 2730 04/07/2010 02:16:32 PM
One thing knocked off my TODO list. Replaced it with going to bed early tonight.
March 4, 2010
Linux Magazine is having a vote where the results will be published in an upcoming magazine: the poll.
Currently Fedora is third at 8% with Ubuntu leading at 35%, and Debian in second at 10%.
Show these people some Fedora pride!
