Entries tagged wheezy

I look after a bunch of servers, working for Bytemark that is not a surprise, but I only touch a very small number of desktop systems.

precious - My desktop

This is the machine upon which I develop, check my personal mail, play my music & etc.

steve - My work machine

To keep the working from home separation going I have a machine I only use for work purposes.

travel/travel2 - EEPC box

I have two EEPC machines, a personal 701 and a work-provided 901.

Honestly these rarely get used. One is for when I'm on holiday or traveling, the second for when I'm on-call.

Yesterday I got round to upgrading both the toy EEPC machines to wheezy. The good news? Both of them upgraded/reinstalled easily. Hardware was all detected, sleeping, hibernation, wifi, etc all "just worked".

Unfortunately I am now running GNOME 3.x and the experience is unpleasant. This is a shame, because I've enjoyed GNOME 2.x & bluetile for the past few years.

The only other concern is that pwsafe appears to be scheduled for removal from Debian GNU/Linux - the list of open bugs shows some cause, but there are bugs there that are trivial to fix.

For the moment I've rebuilt the package and if I cannot find a suitable alternative - available for squeeze and wheezy - then I will host the package on my package repository.

In conclusion: Debian, you did good. GNOME, I've loved and appreciated you for years, but you might not be the desktop I want these days. It's not you, it's me.

Tags: gnome, pwsafe, wheezy | 24 comments

So I have a new desktop computer. I installed Wheezy on it via a USB stick, and everything worked. All the hardware. Yay. I guess we take it for granted when things like sound, disks, and network cards just work these days. I remmeber fighting with distros in the past, where such things were not necessarily straightforward.

The only minor complication is the graphics card. I bought a cheap/random GeForce card for the new machine (£30):

$ lspci -nn | grep VGA
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation GF119 [GeForce GT 610] [10de:104a] (rev a1)

Booting up I get a working X.org and GNOME 3.x, but the open graphics driver is "too bad" so I get fallback GNOME; with "Applications" & "Places" menus.

Installing the proprietry driver gave me a full GNOME 3.x experience. But I didn't like it so for the moment I'm running:

• GNOME fallback mode.
• Bluetile.
• Open (nvidia) drivers only.

The plan was to install awesome, or similar, but I'm just a creature of habit and I'm still cloning git/mercurial repos and selectively restoring backups.

My old desktop has been given to my partner to replace the EeeeeePC she's been using for the past year.

I'll fettle over the weekend until I'm back up and running properly; but for the moment I'm good. All my videos/music are ported across. I can print, and I have access to the repos I'm currently working on. (Mostly lumail which will have a new release over the weekend.)

Tags: debian, shelob, wheezy | 4 comments

Running a pristine operating system is fun. I keep going to run programs and finding they're not installed!

For example I'd planned to re-deploy the Debian Administration code-base this evening, but couldn't because fabric is not contained in Wheezy (#714421).

Thankfully backporting the package was trivial, but it was a minor stumbling block. I've hit a few of those recently.

Still in happier new my lumail mail client can now handle both adding attachments to outgoing mails and extracting them from incoming mails.

There are missing features which some people might expect and rely upon, such as:

• Threading support.
• GPG support.

But that said the scripting primitives allow interesting things to be done and I'm enjoying the experience of writing something so "major".

True I've got ~20 "stars" on github which isn't a great sign of popularity, but I have had some fun feedback and the client works for me.

I'm going to have to spend a few days working on TAB-completion code that plays-nice with curses, because that's a major irritation (and you can't mix/match curses & readline, annoyingly). But otherwise I think we're getting close to being complete enough I'll slow down.

Tags: fabric, lumail, wheezy | 5 comments

Having migrated my websites away from my ssh/mail box I'm going to upgrade that this weekend.

I've got my new mail client, lumail, working well enough to use exclusively, so the upgrade should be nice and simple.

I spent a few hours last night removing packages from my ssh/mail box to trim it down. Removing a bunch of Perl modules I used in my CGI coding, removing services such as nfs-common, portmapper, etc.

Today I'll have a stab at the upgrade. The only thing I have to be careful of is my backported/tweaked qpsmptd packages. I'll try the native wheezy version now it has caught up.

(I don't use any of the standard qpsmtpd plugins at all. Instead I have a separate tree of my own custom anti-spam and virtual-hosting aware plugins. They all work in a unified fashion. Using these plugins against a new version of qpsmtpd should be just fine. But obviously I need to test that.)

Work on Lumail is probably going to slow down now it is genuinely in use, but I'll keep an eye out for feature requests and missing primitives. Annoyingly I wasted 30 minutes just now implementing a plugin I'd already written: lumail issue #51.

I also need to step-back this weekend and reassess my hosting. When I was tweaking my slaughter setup I recently realized I have more hosts than I thought:

• Cluster running for Debian-Administration.org:
  • 4 x web nodes
  • 2 x database nodes
  • 2 x "planet" nodes
  • 1 x "misc" node.
• Personal stuff
  • 1 x ssh/mail host. (ssh.steve.org.uk/mail.steve.org.uk)
  • 1 x web host. (www.steve.org.uk, www.lumail.org, etc, etc.)
  • 1 x blogspam.net server (www.blogspam.net)
  • 1 x builder node - Runs buildd for producing my packages.

Total: 13 virtual machines. (+ one kvm-host)

Tags: lumail, wheezy | 2 comments

If anybody has access to a complete mirror of the Debian Wheezy release, and was willing to share a list of all setuid/setgid binaries that would be greatly appreciated.

It doesn't seem to be something you can find online, so you need to manually unpack each .deb file and look at the permissions.

I don't have access to a (complete) local mirror, and so I cannot easily build such a thing, unless I go to ebay and buy a random DVD-archive.

This list would be useful for folk wanting to direct their audits ..

Tags: setgid, setuid, wheezy | 13 comments

After spending a while fighting with upstart, at work, I decided that systemd couldn't be any worse and yesterday morning upgraded one of my servers to run it.

I have two classes of servers:

• Those that run standard daemons, with nothing special.
• Those that run different services under runit
  • For example docker guests, node.js applications, and similar.

I thought it would be a fair test to upgrade one of each systems, to see how it worked.

The Debian wiki has instructions for installing Systemd, and both systems came up just fine.

Although I realize I should replace my current runit jobs with systemd units I didn't want to do that. So I wrote a systemd .service file to launch runit against /etc/service, as expected, and that was fine.

Docker was a special case. I wrote a docker.service + docker.socket file to launch the deamon, but when I wrote a graphite.service file to start a docker instance it kept on restarting, or failing to stop.

In short I couldn't use systemd to manage running a docker guest, but that was probably user-error. For the moment the docker-host has a shell script in root's home directory to launch the guest:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Run Graphite in a detached state.
#
/usr/bin/docker run -d -t -i -p 8080:80 -p 2003:2003 skxskx/graphite

Without getting into politics (ha), systemd installation seemed simple, resulted in a faster boot, and didn't cause me horrific problems. Yet.

ObRandom: Not sure how systemd is controlling prosody, for example. If I run the status command I can see it is using the legacy system:

root@chat ~ # systemctl status prosody.service 
prosody.service - LSB: Prosody XMPP Server
      Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/prosody)
      Active: active (running) since Wed, 03 Sep 2014 07:59:44 +0100; 18h ago
      CGroup: name=systemd:/system/prosody.service
          └ 942 lua5.1 /usr/bin/prosody

I've installed systemd and systemd-sysv, so I thought /etc/init.d was obsolete. I guess it is making pretend-services for things it doesn't know about (because obviously not all packages contain /lib/systemd/system entries), but I'm unsure how that works.

Tags: docker, systemd, wheezy | 5 comments