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Entries tagged squeeze

Upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze

16 February 2011 21:50

Rather than waiting for a few months, as I typically do, I decided to be brave and upgrade my main virtual machine from Lenny to Squeeze. That host runs QPSMTPD, Apache, thttpd, and my blogspam server; nothing too complex or atypical.

The upgrade was mostly painless; I was interrupted several times by debconf asking me if I wished to replace configuration files I'd modified, but otherwise there were only two significant messages in the process:

crm114

crm114 warned me that its spam database and/or configuration files had changed and would most likely result in brokenness, post-upgrade, and I should do something to stop avoiding lost mail.

Happily this was expected.

sysv-rc

It transpired I had a couple of local init scripts which didn't have dependency information succesfully encoded into them; so I couldn't migrate to dependency-based bootup.

Given that this server gets a reboot maybe once every six months that wasn't really worth telling me about; but nevermind. No harm done.

That aside there were no major surprises; all services seemed to start normally and my use of locally-compiled backports meant that custom services largely upgraded in a clean fashion. The only exception was my patched copy of mutt which was replaced unexpectedly. That meant my lovely mutt-sidebar was horribly full of mailboxes, rather than showing only new messages. I created a hasty backported mutt package for Squeeze and made it available. (This patch a) enables the side-bar, and b) allows you to toggle between the display of all mailboxes and those with only new mail in them. It is buggy if you're using IMAP; but works for me. I would not choose to live without it.)

Now that I've had a quick scan over the machine the only other significant change was an upgrade of the mercurial revision control system, the updated templates broke my custom look & feel and also required some Apache mod_rewrite updates to allow simple clones via HTTP. (e.g. "hg clone http://asql.repository.steve.org.uk/").

So in conclusion:

  • The upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze (i386) worked well.
  • Before you begin running "iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT" will avoid some potential surprises
    • There are probably other services worth neutering, but I tend to only do this for SMTP.
  • Keeping notes of updated template files will be useful if you make such system-wide changes. (e.g. hgwebdir templates)

ObQuote - "Hmm, upgrades " - The Matrix Reloaded (shudder).

| 2 comments

 

Today I migrated from 32-bit to 64-bit, in-place

7 March 2012 21:50

This evening I sat down and migrated my personal virtual machine from a 32-bit installation of Debian GNU/Linux to a 64-bit installation.

I've been meaning to make this change for a good few months, but it took me until this evening until I decided it was as good a time as any.

Mostly the process is painless:

  • Ensure you have a 64-bit kernel, with support for 32-bit binaries too.
  • Install the 32-bit compatibility libraries, such that your old binaries work.
  • Overwrite your binaries and libraries in-place so you have a 64-bit base system.
  • Patch it up afterwards.

I overwrote a lot of the libraries and binaries on the system such that I had a working 64-bit apt-get, dpkg, sash, etc, and associated libraries. Then once I had that I could use those tools to pull the resto of the system up to date.

One thing I hadn't counted on is that I needed to have a 64-bit version of bzip such that "apt-get update" didn't complain about errors. I suspect I could have fixed that by re-configuring my system to disable compression. Still it was easily solved.

Along the way I also shot myself in the foot by having a local caching DNS resolver, listening on 127.0.0.1, which broke. With no DNS I couldn't use apt-get - but once the problem was identified it was trivial to fix.

Anyway all seems OK now. My websites are up, email is flowing and I guess anything else can wait until the morning.

ObQuote: "Somebody's coming up. Somebody serious." - Leon

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Happy birthday to me

10 March 2012 21:50

Recently I accidentally flooded Planet Debian with my blog feed. This was an accident caused by some of my older blog entries not having valid "Date:" headers. (I use chronicle which parses simple text files to build a blog, and if there is no Date: header present in entries it uses the CTIME of the file(s).)

So why did my CTIMEs get lost? Short version I had a drive failure and a PSU failure which lead to me rebuilding a few things and cloning a fresh copy of my blog to ~/hg/blog/.

My host is now once again OK, but during the pain the on-board sound started to die. Horribly crackly and sounding bad. I figure the PSU might have caused some collateral damage, but so far thats the only sign I see.

I disabled the on-board sound and ordered a cheap USB sound device which now provides me with perfect sound under the Squeeze release of Debian GNU/Linux.

In the past I've ranted about GNU/Linux sound. So I think it is only fair to say this time things worked perfectly - I plugged in the device, it was visible in the output of dmesg, and /proc/asound/cards and suddenly everything just worked. Playing music (mpd + sonata) worked immediately, and when I decided to try playing a movie with xine just for fun sound was mixed appropriately - such that I could hear both "song" + "movie" at the same time. Woo.

(I'm not sure if I should try using pulse-audio, or similar black magic. Right now I've just got ALSA running.)

Anyway as part of the re-deployment of my desktop I generated and pass-phrased a new SSH key, and then deployed that with my slaughter tool. My various websites all run under their own UID on my remote host, and a reverse-proxy redirects connections. So far example I have a Unix "s-stolen" user for the site stolen-souls.com, a s-tasteful user for the site tasteful.xxx, etc. (Right now I cannot remember why I gave each "webserver user" an "s-" prefix, but it made sense at the time!)

Anyway once I'd fixed up SSH keys I went on a spree of tidying up and built a bunch of meta-packages to make it a little more straightforward to re-deploy hosts in the future. I'm quite pleased with the way those turned out to be useful.

Finally I decided to do something radical. I installed the bluetile window manager, which allows you to toggle between "tiling" and "normal" modes. This is my first foray into tiling window managers, but it seems to be going well. I've got the hang of resizing via the keyboard and tweaked a couple of virtual desktops so I can work well both at home and on my work machine. (I suspect I will eventually migrate to awesome, or similar, this is very much a deliberate "ease myself into it" step.)

ObQuote: "Being Swedish, the walk from the bathroom to her room didn't need to be a modest one. " - Cashback.

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Failing to debug a crash with epiphany-browser and webkit

20 August 2012 21:50

Today I'm in bed, because I have le sniffles, and a painful headache. I'm using epiphany to write this post, via VNC to my main desktop, but I'm hating it as I've somehow evolved into a state where the following crashes my browser:

  • Open browser.
  • Navigate to gmail.com
  • Login.
  • Wait for page to complete loading, showing my empty inbox.
  • Click "signout".

Running under GDB shows nothing terribly helpful:

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x0000000000000000 in ?? ()
(gdb) bt
#0  0x0000000000000000 in ?? ()
#1  0x00007ffff51a0a46 in ?? () from /usr/lib/libwebkit-1.0.so.2
#2  0x00007ffff3d8f79d in ?? () from /usr/lib/libsoup-2.4.so.1
#3  0x00007ffff2a4947e in g_closure_invoke () from /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0
#4  0x00007ffff2a5f7f4 in ?? () from /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0
...

To get more detail I ran "apt-get install epiphany-browser-dbg" - this narrows down the crash, but not in a useful way:

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x0000000000000000 in ?? ()
(gdb) bt
#0  0x0000000000000000 in ?? ()
#1  0x00007ffff51a0a46 in finishedCallback (session=<value optimized out>, msg=0x7fffd801d9c0, data=) at ../WebCore/platform/network/soup/ResourceHandleSoup.cpp:329
#2  0x00007ffff3d8f79d in ?? () from /usr/lib/libsoup-2.4.so.1
#3  0x00007ffff2a4947e in g_closure_invoke () from /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0
#4  0x00007ffff2a5f7f4 in ?? () from /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0
..

So this crash happens in ResourceHandleSoup.cpp. Slowly I realized that this came from the webkit package.

We see that the last call by name is to the function in line ResourceHandleSoup.cpp:329, that puts us at the last line of this function:

// Called at the end of the message, with all the necessary about the last informations.
// Doesn't get called for redirects.
static void finishedCallback(SoupSession *session, SoupMessage* msg, gpointer data)
{
    RefPtr<ResourceHandle> handle = adoptRef(static_cast<ResourceHandle*>(data));

    // TODO: maybe we should run this code even if there's no client?
    if (!handle)
        return;

    ResourceHandleInternal* d = handle->getInternal();

    ResourceHandleClient* client = handle->client();
    if (!client)
       return;

..
..
    client->didFinishLoading(handle.get());
}

So we see there is some validation that happens, then a call to "didFinishLoading" and somewhere shortly after that it dies. didFinishLoading looks trivial:

void WebCoreSynchronousLoader::didFinishLoading(ResourceHandle*)
{
      g_main_loop_quit(m_mainLoop);
      m_finished = true;
}

So my mental-debugging is stymied. I blame my headache. It looks like there is no obvious NULL-pointer deference, if we pretend client cannot be NULL. So the next step is to get the source, the build-dependencies and then build a debug version of webkit. I ran "apt-get source webkit", then editted the file ./debian/rules to add --enable-debug and rebuilt it:

skx@precious:~/Debian/epiphany/webkit-1.2.7$ DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS="nostrip noopt" debuild -sa

*time passes*

The build fails:

  CXX    WebCore/svg/libwebkit_1_0_la-SVGUseElement.lo
../WebCore/svg/SVGUseElement.cpp: In member function ‘virtual void WebCore::SVGUseElement::insertedIntoDocument()’:
../WebCore/svg/SVGUseElement.cpp:125: error: ‘class WebCore::Document’ has no member named ‘isXHTMLDocument’
../WebCore/svg/SVGUseElement.cpp:125: error: ‘class WebCore::Document’ has no member named ‘parser’
make[2]: *** [WebCore/svg/libwebkit_1_0_la-SVGUseElement.lo] Error 1

Ugh. So I guess we disable that "--enable-debug", and hope that "nostrip noopt" helps instead.

*Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold*

Finally the debugging build has finished and I've woken up again. Let us do this thing. I'd looked over the webkit tracker and the crashing bugs list in the meantime, but nothing jumped out at me as being similar to my issue.

Anyway without the --enable-debug flag present in the call to ../configure the Debian webkit packages were built, eventually, and installed:

skx@precious:~/Debian/epiphany$ mv libwebkit-dev_1.2.7-0+squeeze2_amd64.deb x.deb
skx@precious:~/Debian/epiphany$ sudo dpkg --install libweb*deb
[sudo] password for skx:
(Reading database ... 173767 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace libwebkit-1.0-2 1.2.7-0+squeeze2 (using libwebkit-1.0-2_1.2.7-0+squeeze2_amd64.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement libwebkit-1.0-2 ...
Preparing to replace libwebkit-1.0-2-dbg 1.2.7-0+squeeze2 (using libwebkit-1.0-2-dbg_1.2.7-0+squeeze2_amd64.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement libwebkit-1.0-2-dbg ...
Preparing to replace libwebkit-1.0-common 1.2.7-0+squeeze2 (using libwebkit-1.0-common_1.2.7-0+squeeze2_all.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement libwebkit-1.0-common ...
Setting up libwebkit-1.0-common (1.2.7-0+squeeze2) ...
Setting up libwebkit-1.0-2 (1.2.7-0+squeeze2) ...
Setting up libwebkit-1.0-2-dbg (1.2.7-0+squeeze2) ...
skx@precious:~/Debian/epiphany$

Good news everybody: The crash still happens!

Firing up GDB should hopefully reveal more details - but sadly it didn't.

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x0000000000000000 in ?? ()
(gdb) bt
#0  0x0000000000000000 in ?? ()
#1  0x00007ffff51a0a46 in finishedCallback (session=, msg=0xb03420, data=) at ../WebCore/platform/network/soup/ResourceHandleSoup.cpp:329
..
(gdb) up
#1  0x00007ffff51a0a46 in finishedCallback (session=, msg=0xb03420, data=) at ../WebCore/platform/network/soup/ResourceHandleSoup.cpp:329
329     client->didFinishLoading(handle.get());
(gdb) p client
$1 = <value optimized out>

At this point my head hurts too much, and I'm stuck. No quote today, I cannot be bothered.

| 9 comments