Unless you’ve spent your whole Linux life using Ubuntu, Debian, or Gentoo, you know about RPMs. Until YUM came out, I was starting to get interested in Debian and Gentoo’s methodology. Debian has some nice features, except their command line interface — dpkg — which I find extremely counterintuitive; but that could be overlooked because of apt. Also, the Debian approach in general seems to be “if it breaks, it’s not big deal — just hack the source” — a worthy philosophy for non-production systems. Gentoo, however, is a big minus for a cluster or site administrator, because the benefits of binary packaging is completely lost on the portage team, and I often want to rebuild my own packages for a site and then distribute them to each computer. I do not want, nor can I afford to build packages on production systems that need those CPU cycles and IO channels for other things.
This leaves me with RPM. This software was designed by one of the founders of Red Hat, Erik Troan. Erik had a lot of enthusiasm and vision, but his software approach was, er, very limited, to say the least. RPM reflects his clumsy approach to software. However, that was 1991 or whatever, and now it’s 2009, and RPM is now in version 5 and has a completely new development team and has left Erik’s clumsy designs far behind.
Or have they?
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Despite all the wonderful text-oriented and processing tools in UNIX, one tool is surprisingly absent: an ability to generate some kind of text-based graph from an input stream. This would be useful for all sorts of things, but most notably for “eye-balling” the relative frequencies of similar data-sets. Such data-sets could be: logs of every sort, file-types in a directory, version control statistics, etc. The graph could be a simple thing, such as dashes that take up to the width of the current TTY. But as far as I could tell, no such tool exists.
Until now.
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My apologies (to the 3 people subscribed to this blog), but over the past month I’ve been involved in several time-consuming, mind-numbing projects. One project is to prepare an RPM-based Linux distribution, so I shall have many blogs to say about RPMs, but not until I’ve figure out all the glitches therein.
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In early 2007, I interviewed for a system adminsitration position with a firm in Vienna. I was asked if I had experience with Postfix, the mail transport agent (MTA) system written by Wietse Venema. When I told the interviewers, which included technical staff, that I was not, but quite experienced with sendmail, the looks in their eyes told me my chances of landing a job was now less than the square root of a negative number. Their gasps hinted at a sentiment like, “What unix administrator in his right mind uses sendmail??” Well, I’m here to set the record straight and provide a meaningful how-to. Given that most UNIX hosts only need only a Mail Sending Program (MSP) to send via SMTP, having a trimmed sendmail MSP-only configuration is a lot more useful than a bloated postfix one. More…
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This isn’t a technical post in itself, nor specific to UNIX, but I want to draw my readers to this excellent article at the Wall Street Journal. If any of you have seen National Treasure, starring Nicholas Cage, or have read the most intriguing Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, this is a particular intriguing read.
Essentially, Thomas Jefferson, one of America’s “founding framers” and also its third President, was good friends with a guy named Robert Patterson, an early cryptographer. Patterson created a cryptographic scheme that was pretty tough to crack, and in fact, wasn’t cracked until very recently (of course, who tried, I do not know). While it isn’t as secure as public-private key encryption, it was fairly strong given that it could be used with pen and paper. A room full of forty scribes working in three, eight-hour shifts would need about a month to crack a page-sized message.
The encrypted plain-text? A very timely excerpt of Jefferson’s own work:
In Congress, July Fourth, one thousand seven hundred and seventy six. A declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled. When in the course of human events…
Again, enjoy the read.
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Many of you are no doubt monitoring the news of AirFrance 447; the search for the black box is being intensified, but only a few days remain until the box’s transponder’s battery runs out. The black box is deemed most important in helping authorities determine what exactly caused the crash, which might ultimately lead to improvements in air safety.
What about the black box in UNIX? Well, we have two — core dumps and sar — but they’re only partially useful for good “post-mortem” analysis. Third-party solutions are good, but they, too, lack one useful tool that I provide below: a full process ticker. More…
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A recent article, by blogger Stuart Rackham, shows how to clone a vm in VirtualBox. Basically this amounts to cloning the VDI associated with the vm. But this still requires one to do the tedious steps of creating, registering, and modifying the vm to be like the previous vm. I have written a script that no doubt some will find useful. More…
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