Kostas’ random thoughts

I wasn’t expecting to see IcedTea available so soon in Fedora but it looks like it’s going to be on Fedora 8 if everything goes well with the package review. Not sure how usable it is yet but I am building an rpm right now so I’ll find out soon I guess.

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The fan at my shuttle at home died last week so the temperature inside the case reached around 65C and the disk drive couldn’t cope with it. So I moved the disk on my desktop and now the machine is running as a domU in xen. Surprisingly no problems so far beyond mplayer stuttering every [...]

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I can not really believe that the LHC grid people want to use glexec in every batch system. The thought of thousands of machines running this really scares me.
The suexec sources+documentation say it clearly but I am going to repeat it one more time “Do not make any changes in the source code unless you [...]

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I was looking todat at a puppet ticket and I found this little gem in ruby’s svn. No wonder poor puppet got upset. I guess I’ll have to build new ruby rpms with a fix for this for my fedora machines at home until there is a new fedora rpm :(

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Here is how to compile and install an selinux module since I’ll forget if I don’t save it somwehere (based on audit2allow -M mysaslauthd -i /var/log/audit/audit.log output).
# cat mysaslauthd.te
module mysaslauthd 1.0.8;
require {
class dir { search write add_name remove_name };
[...]

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Upgraded to 2.1.2 today since 2.1.1 was tainted. There is nothing in the logs to suggest an exploit attempt and with SELinux in enforcing mode it is unlikely that it an attempt would have been succesful but I really need to audit the machine to make sure that everything is OK.

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This is driving me crazy, I found out why it wasn’t working with sasl_keytab: … (#200892) and rebuilding the cyrus-sasl rpm with the patch fixed this problem. Now after a reboot it stopped working!! I suspect that SELinux is somehow affecting the kerberos server but I can’t see anything related in the audit logs. Really [...]

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No srpm for sun’s java 6 on jpackage.org yet, I guess I would have to look at the available patches in the maling list and and test them. Probably a good opportunity to merge the plugin related changes from the ibm spec file. The existing setup fails once firefox/mozilla/seamonkey gets updated and the users start [...]

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I’ve been thinking for a while now on which one to use and I still haven’t decided. It seems that RedHat after RHEL5 will be pushing FDS but it’s not clear if it will be a $$$ addon or not. In my testing both fullfil my requirements so it’s not clear which one is better [...]

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I am trying to decide on which language/framework to use for the frontend of a “hosts” database here at work. It seems that if I want good integration with kerberos/ldap only java (maybe Zope?) is the only choise. Rails/TurboGears/Django fail short in this area from what I can see.

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