Paul's Blog Entries for August 2006

Tuesday 1st August 2006

New Computer

With funding for my new company imminent, I placed an order for some of the bits for my new computer with Tekheads:

Wednesday 2nd August 2006

Hospital Visit

Drove Bingning's mum to her appointment at the Dental Hospital. Took Leon for his first visit to the City of Manchester Stadium on the way back.

New Computer

Collected some more bits for the new computer from Aria Technology:

Arrived back home to find that I'd missed City Link's attempted delivery of the other bits, so will have to wait until tomorrow to put it all together.

Whilst I was at Aria, I also bought a new PSU and some case fans to replace those in my current desktop box, which has become very noisy recently. It's certainly much quieter now.

I actually had to drill some holes in the plastic front fascia of the case to allow air in for the front case fan (there's a nice fan mount there and holes in the metal chassis, but nowhere for the air to come from!).

Thursday 3rd August 2006

Local Packages

New Computer

The parts from Tekheads arrived just after lunchtime. It soon became apparent that I had the wrong sort of memory. Silly me didn't know the difference between dual-channel DDR and DDR2. The OCZ memory I bought was the latter but the Abit motherboard required the former. I took the memory back to Aria who gave me a credit note for the full amount, which was nice given that they have prominent signs stating that Items bought in error and no longer wanted will be subject to a 25% administration charge. So that was nice. The Corsair TWINX2048-3200PT memory I bought as a replacement was actually cheaper than the OCZ memory, so I got a refund too :-)

Friday 4th August 2006

VirtenSys Limited

My new employer has just completed a $12 million venture capital funding round. So I'll get paid next week :-)

Local Packages

Made some samba packages that addressed the CIFS issues I've been having.

Saturday 5th August 2006

New Computer

Got it up and running. Installed mock and built x86_64 versions of the samba packages from yesterday. Was suitably impressed with the performance. Copied my home directory over from the old box (an 800MHz Athlon) and got my desktop back. I'm a happy bunny right now.

Sunday 6th August 2006

Local Packages

Reoganised the repository to add an architecture directory underneath the distribution directory now that I can build packages for both i386 and x86_64 architectures. I updated the mirrorlists accordingly and started populating the FC5/x86_64 repo.

Monday 7th August 2006

Local Packages

Fedora Extras

Tuesday 8th August 2006

Local Packages

Fedora Extras

Wednesday 9th August 2006

Local Packages

SELinux and mock

Thursday 10th August 2006

Local Packages

Friday 11th August 2006

Local Packages

Fedora Extras

Monday 14th August 2006

Local Packages

Tuesday 15th August 2006

Local Packages

Fedora Extras

Wednesday 16th August 2006

Local Packages

Website

Thursday 17th August 2006

Internet Outage

Local Packages

Friday 18th August 2006

Local Packages

Sunday 20th August 2006

Woken by Alarm

The temperature alarm on laurel (my old desktop) went off again, at around 4:10am. I'm not at my best at that time of day. It was running the makewhatis -w from the cron.weekly job. I killed the job, the alarm beeping stopped shortly afterwards and I went back to bed.

In the afternoon I fitted an addition fan blowing at the bridge chip on the Gigabyte GA-7IXE4 motherboard (which has a small heatsink but no fan). I also discovered that the BIOS display of the hardware monitoring page locks up after trying to display the voltage of the -5V rail and it has to be reset using the reset switch. The lm_sensors output for this rail indicates something above +3V so I suspect that there is a hardware problem there. I told lm_sensors to ignore that rail, and also the temp3 sensor, which doesn't appear to be connected. I bumped up the CPU temperature alarm to not go off until 90°C too. Running makewhatis -w manually and watching the sensors output, the CPU temperature peaked at 80.5°C so that should be OK now.

/etc/modprobe.conf:

alias char-major-89 i2c-dev

/etc/sensors.conf:

chip "w83782d-*" "w83627hf-*"
    label in0 "Vcore"
    label in1 "Vcache"
    label in2 "+3.3V"
    label in3 "+5V"
    label in4 "+12V"
    label in5 "-12V"
    label in6 "-5V"
    label in7 "V5SB"
    label in8 "VBat"
    compute in3 ((6.8/10)+1)*@ ,  @/((6.8/10)+1)
    compute in4 ((28/10)+1)*@  ,  @/((28/10)+1)
    compute in5 (5.14 * @) - 14.91  ,  (@ + 14.91) / 5.14
    compute in6 (3.14 * @) -  7.71  ,  (@ +  7.71) / 3.14
    compute in7 ((6.8/10)+1)*@ ,  @/((6.8/10)+1)
    set in0_min vid*0.95
    set in0_max vid*1.05
    set in1_max 3.81
    set in1_min 2.24
    set in2_min 3.3 * 0.95
    set in2_max 3.3 * 1.05
    set in3_min 5.0 * 0.95
    set in3_max 5.0 * 1.05
    set in4_min 12 * 0.90
    set in4_max 12 * 1.10
    set in5_max -12 * 0.90
    set in5_min -12 * 1.10
    set in6_max -5 * 0.95
    set in6_min -5 * 1.05
    set in7_min 5 * 0.95
    set in7_max 5 * 1.05
    set in8_min 3.0 * 0.80
    set in8_max 3.0 * 1.20
    ignore in6
    ignore temp3
    set temp1_over 40
    set temp1_hyst 37
    set beep_enable 1

Monday 21st August 2006

Fedora Extras

Local Packages

PPTP Client

Thursday 24th August 2006

Local Packages

Made some significant changes to my buildsystem:

Friday 25th August 2006

Local Packages

Fedora Extras

PPTP Client

Monday 28th August 2006

Fedora Extras

Local Packages

Tuesday 29th August 2006

SELinux Policy Update

The latest FC5 SELinux policy package, selinux-policy-2.3.7-2.fc5, contains my context fixes for /etc/aliases(.&) but more importantly, splits out a separate selinux-policy-devel package. This means that the procedure to BuildSeLinuxPolicyModules is now the same in FC5 as for FC6 onwards, which is nice :-)

Fedora Extras

Local Packages

Wednesday 30th August 2006

Fedora Extras

Thursday 31st August 2006

Mock/Squid Problem Resolved

As I don't want to maintain full local mirrors of the Fedora development repositories (i386 and x86_64), I've configured my buildsystem to use offsite repositories via a squid cache. Unfortunately the squid setup wasn't caching the packages. This turned out to be due to my selection of mirror:

$ HEAD "http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/development/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/alchemist-devel-1.0.36-1.2.2.i386.rpm"
200 OK
Cache-Control: no-store
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2006 10:22:26 GMT
Via: 1.1 www.mirrorservice.org
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: "616686-23a03-fe262140"
Server: Apache/2.0.54 (Debian GNU/Linux)
Content-Length: 145923
Content-Type: application/x-redhat-package-manager
Last-Modified: Fri, 25 Aug 2006 02:04:13 GMT
Client-Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2006 10:22:31 GMT
Client-Peer: 212.219.56.133:80
Client-Response-Num: 1

Switching to a more sane mirror resolved the problem.

Local Packages

Wrote a script to check for dependency closure in my repository, which identified a number of issues:

I also began to populate a Fedora Core Development version of my local repository.

Fedora Extras

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