Category: it could be called work

Well, it appears fink will need to be reinstalled if I ever want to update anything I have currently under its care.

That’s annoying, to say the least. To rebuild everything last week took 24 hours, even after I updated the stale .info file for tar.

I have today removed xfree86 with dpkg –remove –force-depends xfree86-base and then set about rebuilding it from scratch. It seemed like it was going to work, but something still not right.

I may take a look at fink’s Engine.pm, which is where the error message appears: maybe I can figure out what conditions trigger it.

There are some other contenders: perhaps the GNU-Darwin collection has matured enough to try again. Having access to the FreeBSD ports collection would be nice.

There’s also a move to port Gentoo Linux’s Portage system to Darwin/OS X. You can find out more about it here and here.

A friend writes . . . . .

. . . . the [] interview was stupid. as far as answering their technical
questions, i did fine – they’re not doing anything tricky. and i had some
good talk with a few of the people i interviewed with, but i really don’t
like it when people expect me to answer questions from a stack of trivial
pursuit cards. or defend my personal choice of beer and linux
distribution.

And I thought those days were over . . . . .

I am rebuilding all the fink-managed packages on my system to try and figure out what this error on xfree86-base is all about.

I got as far as tar, when I discovered the distfile was out of date: the .info file calls for 1.3.19 and the current version is 1.3.25. I downloaded it, hacked together a matching .info file (I had to use another machine to get an md5 checksum: surely OS X has that?), and it built just fine.

Now I start over .

Here’s the diff of the base file and the one I made.

— tar-1.13.19-1.info Sun May 26 14:58:28 2002
+++ tar-1.13.25.info Thu Aug 8 09:51:53 2002
@@ -1,10 +1,10 @@
Package: tar
-Version: 1.13.19
+Version: 1.13.25
Revision: 1
Essential: yes
Depends: gettext, gzip, bzip2, base-files
Source: ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/%n/%n-%v.tar.gz
-Source-MD5: ff10ade59f5b312869ffb2f229177e14
+Source-MD5: 6ef8c906e81eee441f8335652670ac4a
UpdateConfigGuess: true
ConfigureParams: –program-transform-name=s/tar/gtar/ –infodir=%p/share/info –libexecdir=%p/lib
InstallScript: <<

The job search continues. The interview I had two weeks ago went well, but the startup is keeping a close eye on their burn rate to eke out as much time as they can. Hats off to them . . . .

I pitched the notion of working on contract, even a few hours here and there, to help them out and help cover my expenses. We’ll see if they’re receptive. I’m flexible, to say the least.

Where fink was taking more than a minute to report on what packages it was managing, the addition of Storable.pm cuts that to 15 seconds.

fink puts the tarball for Storable on disk but doesn’t install it where perl can find it (in a directory in its @INC array). Here’s how to do that.


[/Users/paul]:: cp /sw/src/Storable-1.0.14.tar.gz src
[/Users/paul]:: cd src
[/Users/paul/src]:: tar zxf Storable-1.0.14.tar.gz
[/Users/paul/src]:: cd Storable-1.0.14
[/Users/paul/src/Storable-1.0.14]:: perl Makefile.PL
[/Users/paul/src/Storable-1.0.14]:: make
[/Users/paul/src/Storable-1.0.14]:: make test
[/Users/paul/src/Storable-1.0.14]:: sudo make install
[/Users/paul/src/Storable-1.0.14]:: fink list xfree86
Reading package info…


Fink has detected that your package cache is out of date and needs an
update, but does not have privileges to modify it. Please re-run fink as
root, for example with a “fink index” command.
Information about 1334 packages read in 113 seconds.
system-xfree86 4.2-1 Placeholder package for manually installed X…
i xfree86-base 4.2.0-6 XFree86 libraries, utilities, clients and data.
xfree86-rootles 4.2.0-3 MacOS X/Darwin XFree86 display server.
xfree86-server 4.2.0-2 XFree86 display server (stable release)
(paul@pink)-(07:59 AM / Mon Aug 05)
[/Users/paul/src/Storable-1.0.14]:: fink index
sudo /sw/bin/fink index
Reading package info…
Updating package index… done.
(paul@pink)-(08:02 AM / Mon Aug 05)
[/Users/paul/src/Storable-1.0.14]:: fink list xfree86
Information about 1334 packages read in 15 seconds.
system-xfree86 4.2-1 Placeholder package for manually installed X…
i xfree86-base 4.2.0-6 XFree86 libraries, utilities, clients and data.
xfree86-rootles 4.2.0-3 MacOS X/Darwin XFree86 display server.
xfree86-server 4.2.0-2 XFree86 display server (stable release)


Still pretty slow: I see others reporting elapsed times of a second, but this is a 350MHz G3, not a smoking fast 800 MHz G4.

I just discovered that my network and host monitoring graphs have been logging no new data for the past week. When mrtg fails to pull new data, it logs the current datapoint with the prior value, so you get a flatline. For some reason, I wasn’t getting that (I would have noticed it). The root cause seems to have been all the perl libraries that mrtg installs and depends on were gone. Dunno why. I reinstalled mrtg and all seems well.

MRTG Index Page
Continue reading “broken mrtg output”

I decided to migrate to Apache 2. No compelling reason. I noticed that a portupgrade run had done something nasty to my existing Apache 1.3 installation and decided I’d rather switch than fight.

I think it’s more responsive but it could just be that new car smell . . . I’m sure I’ll never put it to the test.

I like rpm even less than netinfo, but FreeBSD supports it, in a way, through its Linux emulation layer.

I was trying to install KRSS and after running into the usual issues with KDE apps not being able to find the QT libraries (the most popular query in the KDE support forums), I decided to try the rpm approach.

Well, it almost worked right out of the box. I needed a symlink:

ln -s /usr/compat/linux/var/lib/rpm /var/lib


Then I discovered the insurmountable opportunity.

error: failed dependencies:
libDCOP.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libfreetype.so.6 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libGL.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libGLU.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libjpeg.so.62 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkdecore.so.3 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkdeprint.so.0 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkdesu.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkdeui.so.3 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkfile.so.3 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkhtml.so.3 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkio.so.3 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkjava.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkparts.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libkssl.so.2 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libksycoca.so.3 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
liblcms.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libmng.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libpng.so.2 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libqt.so.2 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libXft.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libXrender.so.1 is needed by krss-2.6-2.6
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.1.3) is needed by krss-2.6-2.6


Obviously, I have all this stuff installed, but in my FreeBSD database (actually just a bunch of ASCII files). Some way of making rpm and the pkgdb aware of what each other is keeping track of would be a Good Thing.

I had to figure out to make samba work on OS X today, and rather than spend any time looking for existing documents, I worked out my own solution.

I installed the fink package and got version 2.2.5 installed. As usual there was some fumbling around with smbpasswd (doesn’t exist on OS X and the fink package doesn’t create it for you). So I had to pull a make_smbpasswd script from another working samba installation to get that working.

See the MORE link below for details on all the changes.

Then I had to add some stuff to inetd.conf and services, the latter being a stanza in the netinfo database. My love for netinfo being well-documented, I made the changes my own way.

Finally, I had to add 3 lines to inetd.conf (I wonder when Apple will switch to xinetd? and if I switched, what would it wreck?).

I have more fun working with OS X than the other OSes I have worked with, even on the command line. Gotta get that iBook . . . .
Continue reading “samba tips for OS X”

A confluence of events has me thinking about data storage. A friend dropped me a note containing a proposal I can’t talk much about other than to say it was about storage; I have also been following a thread on the Open Darwin discussion list about mounting ftp-based stores as filesystems; and last of all I somehow wiped out this laptop’s disk layout and partitioning scheme, meaning I may never be able to reboot: backing up what I have became important.

Anyway, in the course of this, as I found myself making backups of my home directory and realizing that I have appletalk/IP, samba/cifs, and nfs all running here, I was reminded that they all require different incantations to make them work. In some case they’re unidirectional: UNIX, including OS X, can share appletalk but only OS X can mount appletalk volumes, while all of them can share and mount NFS filesystems. I haven’t tested samba, though I have mounted and written to samba shares from UNIX and Windows here.

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/ad0s2a 128990 42774 75898 36% /
/dev/ad0s2f 257998 532 236828 0% /tmp
/dev/ad0s2g 7179502 3322530 3282612 50% /usr
/dev/ad0s2e 257998 228222 9138 96% /var
procfs 4 4 0 100% /proc
pink:/Network/iso 11642580 7373720 4268860 63% /mnt/tmp < - NFS mount from OS X //PAUL@BLUE/PAUL 5853056 2595712 3257344 44% /mnt/smb <- samba mount from FreeBSD //PAUL@RED/PAUL 7302272 5239424 2062848 72% /mnt/red <- samba mount from FreeBSD
Wouldn't it be easier if there was a super-command (like attach?) that could automagically determine what protocols were available between host A and B and just handle the mounting of the filesystem? You could prioritize it, of course: hosts connecting from some networks might connect with appletalk or samba, while others might be offered ftp only.

OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) offers this as a feature: "Mount ftp servers directly in Finder", and here is a mention of mount_ftp and ftp.fs possibly being present in Jaguar. Get your advance orders in now . . .

KDE offers something like this but I've never used it. I may try it now to see how close I am to what they have.