Paul's Blog Entries for April 2009

Thursday 2nd April 2009

Local Packages

ADSL2+

I've been invited by my ISP to take part in their ADSL2+ 21CN trial. Given this this is likely to improve the upload speed from my server, I'm going to accept, though I'll need to replace my ancient but trusty SpeedTouch Pro router that I've had for about 8 years now.

Friday 3rd April 2009

Fedora Project

Monday 6th April 2009

Fedora Project

Local Packages

Tuesday 7th April 2009

Fedora Project

Tuesday 14th April 2009

Fedora Project

Local Packages

New ADSL Router

I bought a SpeedTouch 546v6 router to replace my ancient SpeedTouch Pro router that won't support ADSL2+ as I'll be going on PlusNet's 21CN trial soon.

After doing the standard "easy" setup to change the LAN address to suit my home network, I needed to configure the router to do PPTP-to-PPPoA bridging so that I could do the authentication from my Linux firewall/router box and, more importantly, have the WAN IP address on a local interface on that box. Whilst this could be configured using the GUI on the SpeedTouch Pro, the CLI is required on the SpeedTouch 546v6. Setup was as follows, using telnet to log in to the router.

Firstly, clear the standard configuration out of the way: 

:ppp relay flush
:eth flush
:ppp flush
:atm flush
:saveall

Then create a suitable phonebook entry for a UK ADSL connection (VPI 0, VCI 38) and enable the PPTP service: 

:atm phonebook add name=ADSL_PlusNet addr=0.38
:service system modify name=PPTP state=enabled
:saveall

On the Linux box, I used my existing configuration based on my pptp-plusnet package, and just changed the PPTP server's IP address to that of the new router, restarted the plusnet service and it all sprang into life.

Wednesday 15th April 2009

Local Packages

Friday 17th April 2009

Local Packages

Monday 20th April 2009

Local Packages

Tuesday 21st April 2009

Fedora Project

Started updating the Gnome-1 stack (libxml, glib, gtk+, ORBit, imlib, gnome-libs, libglade) to fix up a bunch of minor niggles:

I'd updated and built all of the packages locally and didn't envisage any problems.

Firstly, I updated all packages in Rawhide, which went OK until I got to gnome-libs, where the ppc64 build failed. This turned out to be because of the old config.sub and config.guess files shipped in that release, a problem I'd come across earlier when updating libxml. After adding an almost identical patch to the one for libxml, gnome-libs built successfully, as did libglade (which didn't need patching).

Next up were the updates for Fedora 10 and 11. These couldn't be done as regular builds because updated packages don't automatically get pulled into the buildroots, and I wanted the lower level packages to be used in the rebuilds of the upper level packages for consistency, and also because some of the upper level packages require the new %{name}%{_isa} provides from the rebuilt lower level packages. So I built the leaf packages libxml and glib and raised an infrastructure ticket to get them added into the buildroots. It turned out that the ticket needed to be raised in the separate rel-eng trac instance, which I did. After quite a bit of discussion on the merits of these updates I managed to get libxml and glib tagged for override and built gtk+ and ORBit.

The imlib dependency bug I was fixing had been raised for EPEL-5, so I also started updating the packages there, by building glib, gtk+, and imlib. However, it turned out that glib and gtk+ are in RHEL 5 and should never have been branched for EPEL-5 (it wasn't me that did that - I just recently took over maintenance of the packages) so the new builds for those packages were removed and I marked those branches "dead" in CVS to prevent a repeat of that incident.

Thursday 23rd April 2009

Local Packages

Friday 24th April 2009

Fedora Project

The addition of the option to allow authenticated users to bypass the milter had been requested before (in Bug #437506 and private mail), and I'd previously held off doing it because:

  1. I thought this should go upstream first, and
  2. there is I think a better way of achieving the same result, namely run the milter on the MTA port only and have authenticating clients use the submission port (587) instead, where their mail will never even be seen by the milter (this is the approach I use myself).

However, it seems that there's no activity at all upstream and I imagine some users might have difficulty getting their users to use the submission port (even though it's certainly the "right thing to do" as it also avoids outbound smtp blocking that travelling users might come up against when using hotel etc. networks). So I finally gave in and applied the patch.

Tuesday 28th April 2009

ADSL2+

My DSL line has now been migrated to ADSL2+ on the 21CN trial. Didn't really notice much and speeds haven't changed much but at least it's working and it hasn't got slower :-)

Wednesday 29th April 2009

Local Packages

Thursday 30th April 2009

Fedora Project

I was CC-ed on Bug #497679 (SElinux prevents sendmail from reading /var/run/milter-greylist/milter-greylist.sock) by Dan, and there wasn't really a nice, clean, simple fix for it so I installed the milter on my own mail server and wrote policy for it. This turned out to be quite easy as a result of the earlier work I'd done on the SELinux milter module for spamass-milter and milter-regex. Dan has now merged my policy in Rawhide and we await other testers' results.

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Next Month: May 2009