Paul's Blog Entries for November 2006

Thursday 2nd November 2006

Local Packages

bittorrent 5.0.0 is out at last. As is often the case, there's little evidence that anyone has done any testing on the command-line clients, since many of them produce tracebacks as soon as they're started, as in other recent versions:

The seed client, launchmany-ccnsole:

Traceback (most recent call last): 
  File "/usr/bin/btseed", line 82, in ?
    config['torrent_dir'] = \
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'decode_from_filesystem'

The curses client, bittorrent-curses:

>>> unable to setrlimit  not allowed to raise maximum limit 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/bittorrent-curses", line 45, in ?
    from BitTorrent.RawServer_twisted import RawServer, task
ImportError: cannot import name task

Contrary to the install documentation, python 2.3 is no longer supported since the code uses collections.deque, which was introduced in python 2.4. There appears to be an effort to work around this problem in one of the places that it's used, but the same technique isn't universally used and hence it doesn't work.

Normally I'd just declare this all as a bad job and forget about it but today I had a bit of a look into it in more detail and managed to fix the tracebacks despite knowing hardly any python at all. I've stripped out all support for distributions with python older than 2.4 in my bittorrent-5.0.0 package though.

Friday 3rd November 2006

Local Packages

• Updated python-twisted-core to incorporate some changes from the latest submission for Fedora Extras, primarily the splitting off of separate -doc and -zsh subpackages

Monday 6th November 2006

Fedora Extras

• Updated bluefish to 1.0.7 in response to a request in Bug #214133; I hadn't noticed the releases of 1.0.6 and 1.0.7 because the upstream download site had moved and the old site still had everything up to 1.0.5 but nothing later

Local Packages

• Updated perl-Sub-Uplevel to 0.14

Tuesday 7th November 2006

Local Packages

• Updated my FC6 yum hotfix to include a fix for Bug #213622 (yum-updatesd fail to get update info), which affects people using exclude in their yum configuration

Fedora Extras

• Formally reviewed python-twisted-core and didn't come up with anything more than last week's quick look; should be ready to approve soon

Wednesday 8th November 2006

Fedora Extras

• Approved Thomas' python-twisted-core package

Thursday 9th November 2006

Fedora Extras

• Bumped the FC-5 and FC-6 branches of mod_fcgid to version 2.0, as per the development branch, which has had no issues so far

Tuesday 14th November 2006

Local Packages

• Updated gtkwave to 3.0.16

Fedora Extras

• Updated gtkwave to 3.0.16

Thursday 16th November 2006

Local Packages

• Updated bittorrent to 5.0.1; the most obvious ImportError: cannot import name task bug has been fixed upstream but my other traceback-fixing patches still apply OK, which suggests that command-line users using the upstream packages are still in for a tough time (my packages can be found here by the way)

• Updated libidn to incorporate an info fix from the rawhide package (Bug #209491)

• Updated proftpd to incorporate a couple of patches mentioned in Bug #214820, one of which may fix a remote code execution vulnerability

Fedora

• Raised Bug #215970 regarding multilib dependency problems in FC6+updates kdeedu, and added a comment to Bug #214208 about a similar issue with FC6+updates bind-devel; I spotted these easily enough whilst running dependency closure checks for my own repo, so I think it would be wise to widen the scope of the Fedora Extras dependency checks that are run after each push

Friday 17th November 2006

Local Packages

• Bumped and rebuilt the proftpd and libidn packages from yesterday, this time remembering to sign them

• Updated my FC6 yum bugfix package to 3.0.1, which includes the fixes in the recently-pushed official update, plus my patch for Bug #212850, though Bug #213260 is still an issue

• Tweaked the proftpd security patch and rebuilt it yet again as the original patch seems to cause a segfault immediately upon connection (see Bug #214820

Tuesday 21st November 2006

Fedora Extras

With the Fedora CVS server now fixed, I was finally able to import and build libpng10 1.0.21, which addresses a DoS issue (Bug #216263, CVE-2006-5793) that I was notified about on Saturday,

Wednesday 22nd November 2006

Fedora Extras

• Reviewed python-twisted-web

Local Packages

• Updated python-twisted-web to update the plugin cache on install and uninstall, as per Thomas' submission to Extras

• Updated curl to dlopen() the right LDAP libraries for ldap:// queries without having to have openldap-devel installed at runtime (Bug #215928)

Monday 27th November 2006

Local Packages

• Updated perl-Test-File to 0.17; this requires such a bleeding-edge version of Test::Builder that even the Rawhide package needs the test patches supporting older distributions

• Updated proftpd to 1.3.0a, which actually addresses CVE-2006-5815, unlike the updates from last week, which address a different issue (see upstream bug #2858)

Tuesday 28th November 2006

Fedora Extras

• Updated gtkwave to 3.0.17

Local Packages

• Updated gtkwave to 3.0.17

Wednesday 29th November 2006

Fedora Core

• Raised Bug #217661 regarding ppp not being built with libpcap support in FC6 and Rawhide

Local Packages

• Updated ppp to include a patch for Bug #217076 (ChapMS2 is broken in pppd-2.4.4)

• Updated sendmail to fix LDAP routing (Bug #206288)

• Built tcptraceroute for Rawhide

Backup Server

More preparatory work done towards getting my bacula system up and running again. With the server consolidation effort of moving the file and print server on to my desktop box, and getting lots of new disk space, I'm also going to consolidate the storage dæmon on to this box instead of lumbering the Internet-facing box with that task.

Anyway, today's steps included making a new RAID1 device (/dev/md4), creating an LVM physical volume on it, creating a new volume group (VgBackup) using that, and three new logical volumes (/var/bacula - 3GiB, /var/lib/mysql - 5GiB, /var/spool/bacula - 50GiB).

First step was to create the new 80GiB Linux RAID autodetect partitions /dev/sdc2 and /dev/sdd2 using fdisk, and then reboot so that the kernel would use the new partition table.

Then:

# mdadm --create --level=1 --raid-devices=2 --auto=md /dev/md4 /dev/sd[cd]2
# mdadm --examine --scan --config=mdadm.conf
# vi /etc/mdadm.conf
(mdadm output pasted into /etc/mdadm.conf)
# pvcreate /dev/md4
# vgcreate VgBackup /dev/md4
# lvcreate --size=50G --name=BaculaSpool VgBackup
# mke2fs -j -L BaculaSpool /dev/VgBackup/BaculaSpool 
# lvcreate --size=3G --name=BaculaVar VgBackup
# mke2fs -j -L BaculaVar /dev/VgBackup/BaculaVar 
# lvcreate --size=5G --name=BaculaMySQL VgBackup
# mke2fs -j -L BaculaMySQL /dev/VgBackup/BaculaMySQL
# vi /etc/fstab
(add new mountpoints /var/bacula /var/lib/mysql /var/spool/bacula)

# cd /var/spool
# mkdir bacula
# chcon -t mnt_t bacula

# cd /var
# service bacula-fd stop
# service bacula-dir stop
# mv bacula bacula.orig
# mkdir bacula
# chcon -t mnt_t bacula

# cd /var/lib
# service mysqld stop
# mv  mysql  mysql.orig
# mkdir mysql
# chcon -t mnt_t mysql

# service netfs start
(mount new filesystems)
# chown mysql:mysql mysql
# mv mysql.orig/* mysql
# restorecon -rv mysql
# chcon -t lost_found_t /var/lib/mysql/lost+found
# rmdir mysql.orig
# service mysqld start
# cd /var
# chgrp bacula bacula
# chmod 770 bacula
# mv bacula.orig/* bacula
# mv bacula.orig/.bash_history bacula
# rmdir bacula.orig
# restorecon -rv bacula
# chcon -t lost_found_t /var/bacula/lost+found
# cd /var/spool
# restorecon -rv bacula
# chcon -t lost_found_t /var/spool/bacula/lost+found
# chown bacula:disk /var/spool/bacula
# service bacula-fd start