Category Archives: debian

Tomcat boggle

mojo-jojo david% ant clean
Buildfile: build.xml

clean:
     [echo] Deleting all project files
   [delete] Deleting directory /home/david/tomcat5.5-5.5.20/servletapi
   [delete] Deleting directory /home/david/tomcat5.5-5.5.20/container
   [delete] Deleting directory /home/david/tomcat5.5-5.5.20/jasper
   [delete] Deleting directory /home/david/tomcat5.5-5.5.20/connectors
   [delete] Deleting directory /home/david/tomcat5.5-5.5.20/build

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 46 seconds
mojo-jojo david% ls
build.xml  debian/
mojo-jojo david%

*blink*

Web logs considered disturbing

I installed awstats today for the first time on my personal domain and
reading though the search terms is always amusing, but I got concerned
by people finding my site searching for “bonnie langford naked” and
“naked bonnie langford”. Turns out I was talking about Bonnie Langford
in a post about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the naked thing
was to do with body scanners on the London Underground.

But what really worried me was the search for “scott james remnant
naked”.

I had an epiphany in the shower

About a year ago I had a problem with udev crashing during startup on
my powerpc box. Somehow I managed to muddle on with this problem,
probably by not rebooting the box. 🙂 Last summer I had to reoot it
again so I did a bit more research and discovered that udev was trying
to looking up the nvram group, not finding it in /etc/group and then
trying ldap, which, of course, failed because we have no networking yet.

Adding the group fixed the bug and filed a bug
against udev saying that udev should add any groups it used. Carrying
out further debugging revealed that the crash was during nss_wins. The
general order of events were:

  1. udev looks up a user or group.
  2. Group doesn’t exist in compat.
  3. Lookup in ldap.
  4. Ldap attempts to resolve the name of the ldap server or client.
    (server is 127.0.0.1 so confused about this point.)
  5. Network and/or dns server isn’t up so dns fails fails.
  6. Attempts to look up host in wins.
  7. udevstart crashes.

I didn’t have time to debug this any further and proceeded to forget
the problem, but last night my fileserver started having the same
problem. Removing ldap from passwd, group and shadow resolved the udev
problem, but then I didn’t have any users. Late last night I booted
without ldap and then changed nsswitch.conf to add ldap, and went to
bed.

This morning I had an epiphany in the shower. Not only did I remember
what the bug was, but also a sensible workaround. The problem wasn’t
with the passwd et al lines, but the hosts line. I did have

hosts: files dns mdns wins

The solution is to return if dns isn’t available and changed the line
to:

hosts: files dns [UNAVAIL=return] mdns wins

Now all I need to do is to debug nss_wins and get to the bottom of
the crash. It might be worth filing a bug against nss_ldap for trying to
do a lookup against an ip address.

Minimising service downtime during upgrades

Having just mistakenly performed a large upgrade including powerdns, I’m
wondering if there isn’t something we can do to minimise the amount of
time we stop a service between pre-inst and post-inst. Could we have
something like a post-unpack maintainer script or a flag telling dpkg
that the package contains a daemon and to minimise the time between the
maintainer scripts where possible.

Yes I should read the list archives, but I’m about to go
out. Must remember to check when I get back.

Edit: Adeodato Simó pointed
out that in most cases daemons should just do a restart in the postinst,
unless changing files on disk is a problem. Need to investigate if this
is an issue for pdns-server and fix it.

New Irssi packages

Finally have irssi-0.8.10-rc6 packages out. Hopefully 0.8.10 will be
out soon so I can upload it to debian without using nasty version
numbers. The biggest change from the version in sid is that I’ve
changed the package name to irssi and it should replace both
irssi-text and irssi-snapshot. It also includes a devel package, so
I’d appriciate if people could test upgrading and building irssi
plugins. Email me any bugs you find. 

deb http://www.davidpashley.com/debian/irssi ./

As Hot As HEL

Yesterday was a little more productive. Finally got round to starting
merging irssi-text and irssi-snapshot into a irssi package. Need to do
silly little things like putting files into the right packages, and then
I can start merging some of the patches from 0.8.9-9.

Finland appears to be playing havoc with my hayfever. Typically I
forgot to being anything and the chemist was shut. A very nice lady
answered my plea for an anti-hystamine, but I don’t think it completely
prevented me feeling like crap. Also woke up to find that I’m being
eaten alive by mosquitos. Bastards. Weather should be 25C today, so a
few degrees lower than the last two days, but higher humidity. I was
expecting hot weather, but this is silly

In some kind of HEL

I’m in Helsinki. This is good.

I’m awake. This is not so good

Left Laura’s flat yesterday at 1pm and proceeded to visit pretty
much every bomb site via the northern line, to drop her off at Euston so
she could return to her parents and then on to Paddington by bus to meet
Robot101. Rather surprisingly we managed to meet up without too much
hanging around and then catch the slightly slower, but much cheaper
Heathrow Connect. The train is on the departures board as being to
“Hayes & Harlington. Also stops at Heathrow.” despite
heathrow being beyond Hayes. It might as well have added “but don’t tell
any one”. I suspect Heathrow
Express might have words if they advertised
going to Heathrow too much. I really don’t think it is worth paying
14.00GBP over 9.50GBP for the ten minutes less it takes for the non-stop
service.

Met up with various other people at Heathrow consisting of Scott James
Remnant, Steve McIntyre, Rob Taylor, Phil Hands and Simon Kelley. Flight
delayed by 25 minutes, although it was about 18:40 befre we actually
took off. Arrived in Helsinki around midnight, only to find it doing
some impression of dusk. Surprised to be met by Jesus and other locals
so we didn’t need to work out the busses, even though various people had
been organised enough to print out the lovely photographic guide to
HUT.

It’s now 8am localtime so time for breakfast. It has no right being
this bright, this early in the morning.

irssi-text-0.8.9-3

Finally managed to get my ipv6 transport working and gain access to a IA64 box running Debian (well
Ubuntu, but close enough) to debug the FTBFS on itanium (Thanks Thom). Turns out that
the Ubuntu package didn’t build either and after several aborted
attempts to play around with the static specifier, I noticed
that debian/rules special-cased not using -O2 on
ia64. Removed that and it now compiles on both at least i386 and
ia64. Hopefully my sponsor will build on powerpc and alpha for me
too. 

irssi-text (0.8.9-3) unstable; urgency=medium

  * Fix linker errors on IA64 by building with -O2 on that platform too.
  * Upload with medium urgency to get the previous fixes into sarge

 -- David Pashley <david@davidpashley.com>  Sat, 19 Mar 2005 17:43:07 +0000

I also spent an hour or two this morning tracking down a bug when using a turkish locale. It
turned out that the perl plugin was taking the name of the different chat
networks (e.g. IRC, SILC) and lowercasing all but the first character using
g_strdown() to give the name of the perl module
(Irssi::Silc). The problem was that g_strdown() uses the
current locale to do the lowercasing and in turkish, the lower case of I is not
i. A quick change to use the newer g_ascii_strdown() and irssi now
starts in a turkish locale. 

--- irssi-text-0.8.9.orig/src/perl/perl-common.c
+++ irssi-text-0.8.9/src/perl/perl-common.c
@@ -565,8 +565,8 @@
        chat_type = chat_protocol_lookup(rec->name);
        g_return_if_fail(chat_type >= 0);

-       name = g_strdup(rec->name);
-       g_strdown(name+1);
+       name = g_ascii_strdown(rec->name,-1);
+       *name = *(rec->name);

        /* window items: channel, query */
        type = module_get_uniq_id_str("WINDOW ITEM TYPE", "CHANNEL");

I have asked the submitter to check this bug and will upload once 0.8.9-3 is
in sarge. I also need to send this patch upstream. In the meantime if you use a
turkish locale, can you test out the package available at http://www.davidpashley.com/debian/irssi-text/ 

irssi-text (0.8.9-4) unstable; urgency=low

  * Correctly lower case chat protocols using g_ascii_strdown() rather than
    using the deprecated g_strdown() (Closes: #232628)

 -- David Pashley <david@davidpashley.com>  Wed, 23 Mar 2005 08:29:32 +0000