Re: [CentOS] Where are my VIM colors?

[Von]

On Dec 7, 2007, at 9:49 AM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
> wrote:


Maybe, it's stupid question but I've just installed CentOS5 and when  
I'm

going to edit some of my conf files I see no colors as it did in old
CentOS4x...
I'm using:

[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~]$ echo $TERM
xterm

Thanks in advance,

Regards,
Israel


Check to make sure you have vim-enhanced installed.

# rpm -qa|grep vim
vim-enhanced-7.0.109-3.el5.3
vim-common-7.0.109-3.el5.3
vim-minimal-7.0.109-3.el5.3

That worked for me. 
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Re: [CentOS] Torrent: reminder to use it folks!

[Von]

On Dec 17, 2007, at 10:05 PM, Robert Arkiletian wrote:


Also don't forget that many mirrors offer rsync. If you rename your
5.0 DVD to the 5.1 version and do an rsync it will save lots of
bandwidth.



I could be tired, but could you please elaborate how this is possible?  
A dvd iso with X number of files of all different bytes diff'd against  
another dvd iso with X number of entirely different bytes. 
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Re: [CentOS] Torrent: reminder to use it folks!

[Von]

On Dec 18, 2007, at 4:29 PM, Robert Arkiletian wrote:


On 12/17/07, Von <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:


On Dec 17, 2007, at 10:05 PM, Robert Arkiletian wrote:


Also don't forget that many mirrors offer rsync. If you rename your
5.0 DVD to the 5.1 version and do an rsync it will save lots of
bandwidth.



I could be tired, but could you please elaborate how this is  
possible?


mv CentOS-5.0-i386-bin-DVD.iso CentOS-5.1-i386-bin-DVD.iso

Check out the public mirrors list. Only mirrors that offer full DVD
downloads and rsync will work. Hover your mouse over the rsync link to
see the rsync address.

For example, if I was to use the kernel.org mirror it's
rsync://mirrors.kernel.org/centos

then navigate the http or ftp directory structure to see the full path
to the iso. Then run rsync

rsync -Pv rsync://mirrors.kernel.org/centos/5.1/isos/i386/CentOS-5.1- 
i386-bin-DVD.iso

.

You should get upto 50% savings. At least I did with the CD iso's in
the past. The capital P is --partial --progress.


Brilliant. Thanks for the tip!



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Re: [CentOS] redhat-release still 5 Final in CentOS 5.1

[Von]

On Dec 4, 2007, at 11:38 AM, Bart Schaefer wrote:


On Dec 4, 2007 2:34 AM, Francesco Camisa
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

YOU MIGHT WANT TO DOUBLE-CHECK, THE THREAD WAS BRAND NEW.


Your message had References: and In-Reply-To: headers indicating that
you started the "new" thread by doing a "Reply" operation on an
existing message in another thread.  The Subject alone does not a
thread make.

When someone says "do not hijack threads" they mean "do not hit Reply
and then modify the Subject."  Sometimes they also/instead mean "don't
change the topic without changing the subject" but usually it's the
Reply thing.

Now that we've had our netiquette and jargon lessons for the day,
let's go back on topic.


Someone buy this man a beer. ;-)
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[CentOS] LDAP / PAM -- Invalid Credentials Error

[Von Landfried]

Hello,

I am having a small issue with LDAP, and I hope someone here might be  
able to provide a few tips.


I am unable to authenticate as user 'testuser' on server 'storage'  
and the following errors appear in /var/log/messages on server 'storage'


Sep 19 16:56:17 storage sshd(pam_unix)[3124]: check pass; user unknown
	Sep 19 16:56:17 storage sshd(pam_unix)[3124]: authentication  
failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=test-kja1
	Sep 19 16:56:17 storage sshd[3124]: pam_ldap: error trying to bind  
as user "uid=testuser,ou=People,dc=example,dc=local" (Invalid  
credentials)


I am also unable to issue this command:

# passwd testuser
passwd: Unknown user name 'testuser'.

but this command works fine:

# finger testuser
Login: testuserName: Test User
Directory: /home/testuser  Shell: /bin/bash
Never logged in.
No mail.
No Plan.

The server 'storage' is the LDAP host server, and there are about 9  
other servers configured to use 'storage' to authenticate users. All  
9 of them allow 'testuser' to login and also for him to change his  
password.


Issuing this command:

# ldapsearch -x -b 'uid=testuser,ou=People,dc=example,dc=local'  
'(objectclass=*)'



# extended LDIF
#
# LDAPv3
# base  with scope sub
# filter: (objectclass=*)
# requesting: ALL
#

# testuser, People, example.local
dn: uid=testuser,ou=People,dc=example,dc=local
uid: testuser
cn: Sean Cook
objectClass: account
objectClass: posixAccount
objectClass: top
objectClass: shadowAccount
shadowMax: 9
shadowWarning: 7
loginShell: /bin/bash
uidNumber: 547
gidNumber: 500
homeDirectory: /home/testuser

# search result
search: 2
result: 0 Success

# numResponses: 2
# numEntries: 1


I think the issue might be with PAM, because comparing all files I  
can think of doesnt point me to any differences except /etc/pam.d/ 
system-auth


The LDAP server 'storage' has WINBIND turned on, as follows:

authrequired  /lib/security/$ISA/pam_env.so
authsufficient/lib/security/$ISA/pam_unix.so likeauth nullok
authsufficient/lib/security/$ISA/pam_ldap.so use_first_pass
authsufficient/lib/security/$ISA/pam_winbind.so  
use_first_pass

authrequired  /lib/security/$ISA/pam_deny.so

account required  /lib/security/$ISA/pam_unix.so broken_shadow
account sufficient/lib/security/$ISA/pam_succeed_if.so uid <  
100 quiet
account [default=bad success=ok user_unknown=ignore] /lib/ 
security/$ISA/pam_ldap.so
account [default=bad success=ok user_unknown=ignore] /lib/ 
security/$ISA/pam_winbind.so

account required  /lib/security/$ISA/pam_permit.so

passwordrequisite /lib/security/$ISA/pam_cracklib.so retry=3
passwordsufficient/lib/security/$ISA/pam_unix.so nullok  
use_authtok md5 shadow

passwordsufficient/lib/security/$ISA/pam_ldap.so use_authtok
passwordsufficient/lib/security/$ISA/pam_winbind.so use_authtok
passwordrequired  /lib/security/$ISA/pam_deny.so

session required  /lib/security/$ISA/pam_limits.so
session required  /lib/security/$ISA/pam_unix.so
session optional  /lib/security/$ISA/pam_ldap.so


And the server 'phoenix' (which allows 'testuser' to login fine) does  
not;


# User changes will be destroyed the next time authconfig is run.
authrequired  /lib/security/$ISA/pam_env.so
authsufficient/lib/security/$ISA/pam_unix.so likeauth nullok
authsufficient/lib/security/$ISA/pam_ldap.so use_first_pass
authrequired  /lib/security/$ISA/pam_deny.so

account required  /lib/security/$ISA/pam_unix.so broken_shadow
account sufficient/lib/security/$ISA/pam_succeed_if.so uid <  
100 quiet
account [default=bad success=ok user_unknown=ignore] /lib/ 
security/$ISA/pam_ldap.so

account required  /lib/security/$ISA/pam_permit.so

passwordrequisite /lib/security/$ISA/pam_cracklib.so retry=3
passwordsufficient/lib/security/$ISA/pam_unix.so nullok  
use_authtok md5 shadow

passwordsufficient/lib/security/$ISA/pam_ldap.so use_authtok
passwordrequired  /lib/security/$ISA/pam_deny.so

session required  /lib/security/$ISA/pam_limits.so
session required  /lib/security/$ISA/pam_unix.so
session optional  /lib/security/$ISA/pam_ldap.so


I tried disabling WINBIND but the issue still occurs even after  
restarting ldap and sshd.


Please help!!


--
Von Landfried | System Administrator
Eye Street Software Corporation
1-888-252-2085 x 3052
[EMAIL PROTECTED]



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Re: [CentOS] LDAP / PAM -- Invalid Credentials Error

[Von Landfried]

Thank you for you response, but I might not have been clear in my  
original email.


All of the other servers (servers[1-9]) are working properly, i.e.  
the user 'testuser' is able to log in using the password I set, and  
is able to change the password using passwd, among other things of  
course. So because of this, I assume LDAP is working properly.


My question is why can't 'testuser' log into the actual LDAP server?  
There must be some configuration difference, but I just can't find it.


I obviously would not change /etc/pam.d/system-auth manually, I would  
use 'authconfig' to make any changes. I already turned off WINBIND  
and that did nothing to fix it. Unless something has to be restarted,  
(other than ldap, sshd) then this wasn't the cause.


The /etc/ldap.conf is configured properly, on all machines, which is  
why I assume the user is able to log into the other 9 servers.


These are CentOS 4.5 servers, so they are running openldap-2.2.13-7.4E

Running 'getend passwd' (didn't know that command, thanks for that  
one) shows the user, so I assume the password is correctly setup  
(kinda already knew that since he can log into all other machines)


I will keep trying, and will read through the documentation.



On Sep 19, 2007, at 11:00 PM, Craig White wrote:


you can't bind as a user that doesn't have a password

you don't have users until you have configured /etc/ldap.conf properly

1 - use 'system-config-authentication' and don't
edit /etc/pam.d/system-auth
uncheck Windows authentication and winbindd goes away

2 - edit /etc/ldap.conf to properly match your ldap setup, when you  
get

it
set up properly, the command 'getent passwd' will first list the
contents of /etc/passwd and then list whatever you have setup for
nss_base_passwd in /etc/ldap.conf

3 - you really need better understanding of LDAP...try a book

   I'll recommend a really old one but really good for basic LDAP
knowledge...
   LDAP System Administration by Gerald Carter

   or

OpenLDAP v 2.3 (included with CentOS-5)
http://www.openldap.org/doc/admin23/

OpenLDAP v 2.2 (included with CentOS-4)
http://www.openldap.org/doc/admin22/

a hint here...you don't say whether you're using CentOS-4 or CentOS-5

man ldap.conf # refers to ldap.conf supplied by openldap - the file
located at /etc/openldap/ldap.conf and man 8 ldap.conf (CentOS-4 IIRC)
or man pam_ldap (CentOS-5) refers to /etc/ldap.conf (supplied as  
part of

padl's nss)

good luck

Craig

On Wed, 2007-09-19 at 18:19 -0400, Von Landfried wrote:

Hello,

I am having a small issue with LDAP, and I hope someone here might be
able to provide a few tips.

I am unable to authenticate as user 'testuser' on server 'storage'
and the following errors appear in /var/log/messages on server  
'storage'


	Sep 19 16:56:17 storage sshd(pam_unix)[3124]: check pass; user  
unknown

Sep 19 16:56:17 storage sshd(pam_unix)[3124]: authentication
failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=test-kja1
Sep 19 16:56:17 storage sshd[3124]: pam_ldap: error trying to bind
as user "uid=testuser,ou=People,dc=example,dc=local" (Invalid
credentials)

I am also unable to issue this command:

# passwd testuser
passwd: Unknown user name 'testuser'.

but this command works fine:

# finger testuser
Login: testuserName: Test User
Directory: /home/testuser  Shell: /bin/bash
Never logged in.
No mail.
No Plan.

The server 'storage' is the LDAP host server, and there are about 9
other servers configured to use 'storage' to authenticate users. All
9 of them allow 'testuser' to login and also for him to change his
password.

Issuing this command:

# ldapsearch -x -b 'uid=testuser,ou=People,dc=example,dc=local'
'(objectclass=*)'


# extended LDIF
#
# LDAPv3
# base  with scope sub
# filter: (objectclass=*)
# requesting: ALL
#

# testuser, People, example.local
dn: uid=testuser,ou=People,dc=example,dc=local
uid: testuser
cn: Sean Cook
objectClass: account
objectClass: posixAccount
objectClass: top
objectClass: shadowAccount
shadowMax: 9
shadowWarning: 7
loginShell: /bin/bash
uidNumber: 547
gidNumber: 500
homeDirectory: /home/testuser

# search result
search: 2
result: 0 Success

# numResponses: 2
# numEntries: 1


I think the issue might be with PAM, because comparing all files I
can think of doesnt point me to any differences except /etc/pam.d/
system-auth

The LDAP server 'storage' has WINBIND turned on, as follows:

authrequired  /lib/security/$ISA/pam_env.so
authsufficient/lib/security/$ISA/pam_unix.so likeauth  
nullok
authsufficient/lib/security/$ISA/pam_ldap.so  
use_first_pass

authsuff

Re: [CentOS] Central file server advice please

[Von Landfried]

My one piece of advice, coming from experience, is to buy a hardware  
RAID card from a reputable manufacturer, i.e. 3ware, Adaptec, LSI. I  
personally recommend 3ware, and have 10+ in various servers here in  
the office. The $200-$600 dollars you will spend will be well worth  
it if something ever should happen. You can swap out cards, and the  
raid array will be recognized, you can swap out drives on the fly,  
and they all support the newer RAID 6 for even better redundancy (I  
like RAID10, but I am paranoid). 3ware has amazing utilities for  
monitoring the array, either via the linux CLI, or via a secure web  
interface (nice when you use SSH port forwarding). It will send you  
an email when any errors occur (configurable detail levels) so this  
helps provide peace of mind. I can't stress how important a dedicated  
hardware RAID card is, regardless of the brand.


Just my .02


On Sep 21, 2007, at 11:06 AM, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:


On Thu, 20 Sep 2007 at 10:58pm, John Bowden wrote

I have a Gygabyte GA-7N400 PRO2 with a 2.6 mHz Athlon cpu. I want  
to set up a
central file storage for 2/3 users using 6/7 machines. A mixture  
of win2k, XP
and various Linux distros (my home network). It will be used to  
store files,

(docs, music and DVD ) for all of these machines, print server, (two
ink-jets), mail server and later on  a myth tv set up. Would SAMBA  
be the

best option for the file and print serving ?


Samba for file serving, CUPS for print serving -- both Win2K and XP  
can handle IPP.


The mother board has 2 X IDE channels, 2 X IDE channels with raid  
and 2 X SATA
raid channels, that's up to 10 hard drive devices. The IDE raid  
chip is a
GigaRaid IT8212F chipset. It supports raid 0 or raid 1 and raid 0  
+ 1 and
JBOD. The SATA raid is a Silicon Image Sil3512. It supports Raid 0  
or 1.
Would I get better speed performance using the chips to manage the  
raid or

using software raid?


Without digging out the specs of those cards, I'd lean heavily  
towards software RAID, mainly for ease of management and  
compatibility.


--
Joshua Baker-LePain
QB3 Shared Cluster Sysadmin
UCSF
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Re: [CentOS] fstab problem after a failed drive

[Von Landfried]

You should be able to boot off the CentOS 5 (assuming its 5) DVD or  
CD1 and go into "linux rescue" mode which will allow you to mount  
the / drive in rw mode thus allowing you to remove the entry from  
the /etc/fstab. Look into that option, I have done it before, but  
can't remember the exact steps.


A quick Google search found this:






On Sep 22, 2007, at 5:19 PM, Gregory P. Ennis wrote:


Everyone,

I installed a sata drive on a SuperMicro with SCSI drives.  No problem
with the installation.  Everything went as expected as the os  
recognized
the drive and assigned /dev/sdc to the new 300 gig Seagate drive.   
I had

planned to use this drive for backup tarballs.

The drive had been functional for about a week with no problems.
Apparently it went out today when I tried to reboot the system.   
Now the

boot process brings the system up into repair mode, but mounts the /
partition in "read only" status.  I can see that the original /dev/sdc
is present but /dev/sdc1 is not present.

I removed the drive completely and predictably /dev/sdc is no longer
present.

The problem I have now is that I have an entry in /etc/fstab that
references the disabled drive that I am unable to change because I can
only get to /etc/fstab in "read only" status.  I am sure there is  
way to

remove the entry to /dev/sdc1 but I have not been able to do so.

Any help would be appreciated

Greg Ennis

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Re: [CentOS] Formatting a large disk

[Von Landfried]

I had this same issue with 'fdisk' when I installed it on a server  
with 12TB of space RAID'd down to 6TB. Just use 'parted' and it will  
solve your problems.






On Sep 23, 2007, at 1:43 PM, Rajeev R Veedu wrote:

I need to install Centos on a machine with 3tb raid disk. (3 ware  
raid card) Could someone in the list suggest a utility for  
partition this disk. I would like to have the whole disk in 1  
partition and format it for ext3. The default partitioning utility  
doesn’t do this. The OS sits on another SATA disk and each time  
during the installation it doesn’t format the full disk which is 3TB.




Could someone suggest another disk partitioning utility (other than  
fdisk) please?




Thanks



Rajeev R. Veedu

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Re: [CentOS] vmware 1.0.4 lock up on install

[Von Landfried]

Thanks again for the links, these will be useful.



On Sep 24, 2007, at 5:24 PM, Akemi Yagi wrote:


On 9/24/07, Akemi Yagi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

On 9/24/07, Flaherty, Patrick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:


Oh and check the premade images VMWare offers. They call them
appliances, but they are just premade images.
http://www.vmware.com/appliances/ I know they have CentOS5.


Downloadable vmware-images for CentOS 4 and 5, prebuilt and updated,
are available in the CentOS testing directory.  See this bug tracker
for details:

http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=1722


CORRECTION: Not in the testing directory but from the url given in the
above bug report.

Akemi
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[CentOS] OpenSSH multiple private key question

[Von Landfried]

I am using CentOS 4.5 with OpenSSH_3.9p1 and I am curious if anyone  
has a solution for this scenario. I have several pub/priv keys that I  
use for various tasks/reasons. My issue is that I want to have 2  
private keys stored in ~/.ssh/ and I am not sure the best way to  
accomplish that. Currently I am using ssh-agent, and it works fine  
for manually performing tasks. I was curious if there is a simple way  
to have multiple private keys stored in the same ~/.ssh/ directory  
without using ssh-agent? Thanks for reading.


-Von
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Re: [CentOS] OpenSSH multiple private key question

[Von Landfried]

Perfect, I knew it was possible, and I was familiar with ~/.ssh/ 
config, just currently only use it for different port settings.


Thanks Luciano


On Sep 26, 2007, at 2:51 PM, Luciano Rocha wrote:


On Wed, Sep 26, 2007 at 02:42:51PM -0400, Von Landfried wrote:
 I am using CentOS 4.5 with OpenSSH_3.9p1 and I am curious if  
anyone has a
 solution for this scenario. I have several pub/priv keys that I  
use for
 various tasks/reasons. My issue is that I want to have 2 private  
keys stored
 in ~/.ssh/ and I am not sure the best way to accomplish that.  
Currently I am
 using ssh-agent, and it works fine for manually performing tasks.  
I was
 curious if there is a simple way to have multiple private keys  
stored in the

 same ~/.ssh/ directory without using ssh-agent? Thanks for reading.


You can name them whatever you want, then add to ~/.ssh/config,
at the end:

host *
identityfile ~/.ssh/key1
identityfile ~/.ssh/key2

You can also restrict by host instead of a global definition, of  
course.


--
lfr
0/0
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Re: [CentOS] remote tar via ssh

[Von Landfried]

I copied this from  which is a nice  
little tutorial for remote copying of files.


tar is normally an archiving program for backups. But with the use of  
ssh, it can be coerced into copying large directory trees with ease.  
It has the advantage that it copies things correctly, even ACLs on  
those Unixes which have them, as well as being perfectly comfortable  
with symlinks.

The syntax, however, is slightly baroque:

tar -cf - /some/file | ssh host.name tar -xf - -C /some/place/cool
Whilst it looks complex, at heart it's quite simple: create a tar  
archive to stdout, send it across the network to another tar on the  
remote machine for unpacking.


The arguments to the first tar are -c to create a new archive and -f  
-, which tells tar to send the newly created archive to stdout.


The arguments to the second tar command are the reverse: -x to  
extract the archive and -f - to take the archive from stdin. The  
final -C /destination tells tar to change into the /destination  
directory before extracting anything.


Why should you use this method when the other two are available? For  
initial copying of large directory trees, this method can be very  
quick, because it streams. The first tar will send it's output as  
soon as it has found the first file in the source directory tree, and  
that will be extracted almost immediately afterwards by the 2nd tar.  
Meanwhile, the first tar is still finding and transmitting files.  
This pipeline works very well.


As with the other two methods, you can ask for compression of the  
data stream if your source data is amenable to it. Here, you have to  
add a -z flag to each tar:


tar -czf - /some/file | ssh host.name tar -xzf - -C /some/place/cool
In a similiar fashion, you can enable verbose mode by passing a -v  
flag to the 2nd tar. Don't pass it to the first one as well, or  
you'll get doubled output!


Why shouldn't you use this method?

The syntax is a pain to remember.
It's not as quick to type as the scp command, for small amounts of  
files.
rsync will beat it hands down for a tree of files that already exists  
on the destination.



On Sep 26, 2007, at 3:15 PM, ann kok wrote:


Hi all

Can I use ssh to have remote tar files from machine A
to machine B?

ssh from machine A to machine B
tar all files in machine B to exact to machine A

Thank you





__ 
__

Got a little couch potato?
Check out fun summer activities for kids.
http://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=oni_on_mail&p=summer+activities 
+for+kids&cs=bz

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Re: [CentOS] PCI-X SATA RAID Controllers

[Von Landfried]

I would recommend PCI-E if you want the fastest card available, and  
using the 'linux dd' option before you install CentOS 5 allows you to  
load the 3ware kernel module prior to installation which is what I  
did to get my 9650SE-16 working. ;-)


On Oct 9, 2007, at 4:56 PM, Steve Bluck wrote:


Hello All,
What would be the lists recommendation for an 8 port controller with
native support for Centos 5.0? Currently have a 3ware 9650SE which  
does

not...
Cheers


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Re: [CentOS] remote ssh to machine how display firefox

[Alfred von Campe]

I can ssh into a remote machine.
I can start X on that machine with startx


No need to start X on the remote machine.  You need to do "ssh -X  
" so that X is forwarded (back to the machine that you  
ssh'ed from).  Make sure that "X11Forwarding yes" is set in the /etc/ 
ssh/sshd_config file (restart the sshd if it was not).  Then you can  
simply type "firefox &" and it will appear on the machine you started  
the ssh from (assuming of course that a X server is running  
locally).  This of course works for any X11 application, not just  
Firefox.


Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] yum -- what repo sites were accessed?

[Alfred von Campe]

I want to know that when I do a

yum install whatever

I can learn exactly which urls were used for each configed repo.   
e.g was my local base accessed or one in .au?


Increase the debugging level: "yum -d3 ..." should do it.

Alfred


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Re: [CentOS] unstable kernel after update to CentOS 4.5

[Alfred von Campe]

Kai:

Dec  9 04:30:35 nx10 kernel: EXT3-fs error (device hda3):  
htree_dirblock_to_tree: bad entry in directory
#1330023: rec_len % 4 != 0 - offset=10264, inode=808542775,  
rec_len=13621, name_len=100

Dec  9 04:30:35 nx10 kernel: Aborting journal on device hda3.
Dec  9 04:30:35 nx10 kernel: ext3_abort called.
Dec  9 04:30:35 nx10 kernel: EXT3-fs error (device hda3):  
ext3_journal_start_sb: Detected aborted journal

Dec  9 04:30:35 nx10 kernel: Remounting filesystem read-only


Updating to 4.5 was just a coincidence.  I believe you have a disk  
that's going bad.  I've seen this error three times and it has always  
been a bad disk.  Backup what you can and replace the disk.


Alfred


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Re: [CentOS] unstable kernel after update to CentOS 4.5

[Alfred von Campe]

Kai:


I checked the filesystem in the evening and it's clean. I really doubt
there's anything with the disk.


That's what I thought too.  I had the same error you had, and  
initially the disk seemed to be OK.  It would run for weeks before  
the error showed up again.  But after I replaced the disk, the  
problem never occurred again.  The next time I got this error (on a  
different system), the drive also seemed fine otherwise.  I've  
learned my lesson.  When I see this error I just replace the disk.


If you have a spare disk, I would give it a try.  If your errors do  
not go away, then you can suspect something in the CentOS 4.5  
update.  But that update has been out for a while and I suspect it's  
running on thousands of systems without this problem.


Alfred

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[CentOS] CentOS 5 sysreport

[Alfred von Campe]

I stumbled across this issue because I requested to install the  
sysreport package in my kickstart file.  Anaconda complains that such  
a package doesn't exist.  There is a bug report about this already  
(http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=2492), but it's certainly a  
strange situation.


  1. Anaconda doesn't think the package sysreport exists

  2. yum thinks it exists:
# yum list sysreport
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Available Packages
sysreport.noarch 1.4.3-13.el5  base

  3. But installing with yum fails:
# yum install sysreport
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up Install Process
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Parsing package install arguments
Package sos - 1.7-9.1.el5.noarch already installed and  
latest version

Nothing to do

  4. The sysreport file from the sos package fails to run:
# sysreport
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/sbin/sysreport", line 31, in ?
import sos.policyredhat
ImportError: No module named sos.policyredhat

  5. But if you extract /usr/sbin/sysreport from the sysreport  
package using

 rpm2cpio for instance, it works just fine.

So it would be nice if yum would allow installing the sysreport  
package (see step 3 above) as that would appear to solve all the  
problems.


Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] CentOS 5 sysreport

[Alfred von Campe]

On Dec 11, 2007, at 11:56, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:


Hmmm something else is 'borked' on the system. Here it is on a 5.1
updated system:


Strange, this is my CentOS 5 test system, which was just freshly  
installed via kickstart (for the 8th time or so).  I keep tweaking  
the kickstart file and my post.sh script.  I am using a local repo  
that gets rsync'ed every night, so unless something is broken in that  
repo, I don't see what could have possibly messed up this system.   
I'm about to kickstart it again (I'll comment out the "yum update"  
from the post.sh script to see if it makes a difference).



I do see a bug above...



Well, care to elaborate?

Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] CentOS 5 sysreport

[Alfred von Campe]

Well, care to elaborate?


Well, sysreport has been deprecated by sos in 5.1 :)


Oh, that problem.  Yeah, well, sosreport has the same problem on my  
system: it doesn't work.  The reason is that /usr/sbin/sysreport is a  
symlink to /usr/sbin/sosreport:


  -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 28439 Nov 11 20:02 /usr/sbin/sosreport
  lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root19 Dec 11 15:24 /usr/sbin/sysreport -> / 
usr/sbin/sosreport


I kickstarted the system again, this time without applying the 5.1  
updates, and the problem persists.  If I remove sos, download the  
sysreport RPM and install it, I can get sysreport to work (without  
the above warning).


Hold the presses.  I just figured out the problem.  I had another  
version of Python in the path ahead of /usr/bin/python.  I have  
everything working now.  Sorry for wasting your time on what turned  
out to be a local configuration issue.


Alfred

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[CentOS] Problem after crash during yum update

[Alfred von Campe]

I was doing a "yum -y update" on a CentOS 4.5 system to get to 4.6  
when my system froze.  I couldn't ping it nor switch to an alternate  
console.  It was completely frozen.  The only recourse was to cycle  
the power.  So I did that, and now when I try to do a "yum update" I  
get the following error:


[many package header downloads deleted]
tkinter-2.3.4-14.4.el4_6. 100% |=|  21 kB 
00:00

---> Package tkinter.i386 0:2.3.4-14.4.el4_6.1 set to be updated
---> Downloading header for oprofile to pack into transaction set.
oprofile-0.8.1-33.i386.rp 100% |=|  20 kB 
00:00

---> Package oprofile.i386 0:0.8.1-33 set to be updated
--> Running transaction check
--> Processing Conflict: python-devel conflicts python <  
2.3.4-14.4.el4_6.1
--> Processing Dependency: kdebase = 6:3.3.1-6.el4 for package:  
kdebase-devel
--> Processing Dependency: httpd = 2.0.52-32.3.ent.centos4 for  
package: httpd-manual
--> Processing Dependency: xorg-x11-devel = 6.8.2-1.EL.31 for  
package: xorg-x11-deprecated-libs-devel

--> Processing Dependency: rpm = 4.3.3-22_nonptl for package: rpm-build
--> Processing Dependency: xorg-x11-deprecated-libs = 6.8.2-1.EL.31  
for package: xorg-x11-deprecated-libs-devel
--> Processing Dependency: httpd = 2.0.52-32.3.ent.centos4 for  
package: httpd-suexec

--> Processing Dependency: rpm = 4.3.3-22_nonptl for package: rpm-devel
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
Error: python-devel conflicts with python < 2.3.4-14.4.el4_6.1
Error: Missing Dependency: kdebase = 6:3.3.1-6.el4 is needed by  
package kdebase-devel
Error: Missing Dependency: httpd = 2.0.52-32.3.ent.centos4 is needed  
by package httpd-manual
Error: Missing Dependency: xorg-x11-devel = 6.8.2-1.EL.31 is needed  
by package xorg-x11-deprecated-libs-devel
Error: Missing Dependency: rpm = 4.3.3-22_nonptl is needed by package  
rpm-build
Error: Missing Dependency: xorg-x11-deprecated-libs = 6.8.2-1.EL.31  
is needed by package xorg-x11-deprecated-libs-devel
Error: Missing Dependency: httpd = 2.0.52-32.3.ent.centos4 is needed  
by package httpd-suexec
Error: Missing Dependency: rpm = 4.3.3-22_nonptl is needed by package  
rpm-devel


From the attached log file, you can see that yum was able to install/ 
update 120 packages before it crashed.  Any ideas on how to recover  
from this state?


Alfred




update.log.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data
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Re: [CentOS] Problem after crash during yum update

[Alfred von Campe]

I was in meetings most of the afternoon yesterday, so I didn't get a  
chance to try Garrick's solution until this morning.  I made the list  
of duplicate RPMs, and it contained over 100 RPMs.  It then occurred  
to me that I only needed to remove the RPMs that are causing the  
conflict to get yum to finish the update.  But then along came  
Karanbir's email, and using "package-cleanup --problems" narrowed  
down the list even further.  I did an "rpm -q" for each package  
identified by "package-cleanup --problems" followed by an "rpm -e" of  
the higher versioned RPM.  Then "yum update" worked just fine.


However, I still have a lot of duplicate RPMs installed.  I don't  
think I can do an "rpm -e" on the lower versioned RPM, since many (if  
not all) of the files are in the newer RPM as well.  Maybe I'll have  
to do an "rpm -e --justdb" for each lower versioned RPM to fix this...


In any event, thanks for your help.  This list is great.

Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] yum updates

[Alfred von Campe]

Is there a way to still do the yum updates but not update the
openoffice.

Right now, I do it one at a time.


Yes, just do a "yum update -exclude=openoffice".

Alfred


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Re: [CentOS] Problem after crash during yum update

[Alfred von Campe]

Akemi:


Follow this forum thread:

http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php? 
topic_id=10139&forum=27&post_id=32373#forumpost32373


The command in there (note #6) may work for you as well.


Excellent, thanks for the pointer.  However, in my case I want to  
clean out the older packages since already I successfully completed  
the "yum update" to 4.6, right?  So it's just a matter of changing  
the "head" to "tail" on that command so it looks like this:


for file in `rpm -qa --queryformat="%{NAME} %{ARCH}\n" | sort |  
uniq -c | grep -v " 1 " | \
  cut -c 9- | cut -d" " -f1`; do rpm -q --last $file | tail -1 |  
cut -d" " -f1; done | \
  grep -v kernel | grep -v gpg-pubkey | xargs rpm -e --justdb -- 
nodeps


Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] LIMITING NUMBER OF KERNEL VERSIONS RETAINED

[Alfred von Campe]

Some time ago there was a discussion on the above subject. I have  
scanned the past few month's mailing list archives and cannot find  
the relevant mail(s).


Could somebody please repost the solution or point me at the  
correct resource.


What you want is:

  # yum instal yum-utils

followed by:

  # package-cleanup --oldkernels [--count=x]

where x defaults to "2" (i.e., keep two older kernels).

Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Re: kickstart question

[Alfred von Campe]

Ok I found a %post section in kickstart but is it valid to
put a "yum -y update" there?


I usually call a post processing script that among other things does  
a "yum -y update" from the %post section (mounted via NFS), so  
calling yum directly from the %post should work.


Alfred

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[CentOS] Strange performance issues under CentOS 5.1

[Alfred von Campe]

I am still running CentOS 4.6 on our production systems, but I am  
starting to plan the upgrade to CentOS 5.1.  I have one test system  
running 5.1 that is the exact same hardware configuration as my 4.6  
test system.  One of our builds runs about 6 times slower on the 5.1  
system, even though is uses less overall CPU time.  I first suspected  
something wrong with the disk, but the results from bonnie++ show  
that the 5.1 system is slightly faster:


  Version  1.03   --Sequential Output-- --Sequential  
Input- --Random-
  -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- -- 
Block-- --Seeks--
  MachineSize K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec % 
CP  /sec %CP
  centos4.6   16G   35933  10 21301   5
46507   6  41.8   0



  Version  1.03   --Sequential Output-- --Sequential  
Input- --Random-
  -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- -- 
Block-- --Seeks--
  MachineSize K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec % 
CP  /sec %CP
  centos5.1   16G   42015  14 21179   5
49863   4  91.6   0


Then I ran the build with "/usr/bin/time --verbose", and here are the  
results (first 4.6 then 5.1):


Command being timed: "make"
User time (seconds): 32.15
System time (seconds): 3.52
Percent of CPU this job got: 99%
Elapsed (wall clock) time (h:mm:ss or m:ss): 0:35.88

Command being timed: "make"
User time (seconds): 22.05
System time (seconds): 3.11
Percent of CPU this job got: 11%
Elapsed (wall clock) time (h:mm:ss or m:ss): 3:31.35

As you can see from the above, there is a lot of idle time on the 5.1  
system.  Finally, I ran the build with "strace -c", and here are the  
top ten lines of that output (again, 4.6 first and then 5.1):


% time seconds  usecs/call callserrors syscall
-- --- --- - - 
 53.81   16.804147   54916   30658 waitpid
 34.75   10.853461   82851   131   wait4
  5.291.650844   9177706154581 open
  1.610.503701  15 34408   read
  0.910.283706  15 18607   write
  0.600.185894  12 14919 10364 stat64
  0.520.163340  10 16495  9079 access
  0.470.146933   7 20581   mmap2

% time seconds  usecs/call callserrors syscall
-- --- --- - - 
 60.07   15.173924   52687   28858 waitpid
 38.509.724412   83831   116   wait4
  0.540.135194   7 19199 10705 access
  0.360.090850  54  1681  1334 execve
  0.270.067686   5 14423 10570 stat64
  0.110.027676   1 24832   read
  0.090.022339   0155810135765 open
  0.030.007617 15948   unlink

Any suggestions as to what could possible be causing this?  I am  
fresh out of other ideas to try.


Alfred


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Re: [CentOS] Strange performance issues under CentOS 5.1

[Alfred von Campe]

On Feb 12, 2008, at 21:57, William L. Maltby wrote:


Check BIOS settings? For memory, CAS etc. the same? Disk hardware the
same and specified identically?


Pretty much all the same.  They are standard Lenovo desktops, with a  
3.4 GHz Core 2 Duo and 3 GB of memory (the BIOS doesn't let the OS  
address more than 3 GB).



Presumming that nothing is found there, install system accounting
packages and run some SAR reports. You may see a clue in them.


I will try that next.

Any "tweaks" on the old system you forgot to apply on the new?  
Elevator,

buffer flush interval changes, etc?


Nope, it's a vanilla kickstart install.  I am using the same scripts  
(with only slight variations) to build both the 4.x and 5.x systems.   
I didn't do anything to "tune" the 4.x systems.  That's one of the  
things I like about CentOS (and RHEL for that matter): they just work  
out of the box.  A build (make/gcc) is typically CPU bound.  I don't  
understand how it can get only 11% of the CPU.  That's unheard of.



Any other noticeable things on there that may cause it? Presume the
slowdown is caused by a process that you are not looking at. "Hangs"
while some other process is waiting or tying up the CPU. Try running
top.


There is nothing else running on the systems at the time.  I have  
lots of terminal windows open on the 4.x system, but I am ssh'ed into  
the 5.x system and nobody else is logged in.  If anything, the 4.x  
system should be slower since there are many more things running on it.


I notice an execve shows on the new one that is not in the old. One  
says

"hmmm".


The execve is in the other as well, just a few lines further down  
(i.e., it didn't make the cut when I did the "head strace.log").



What does swapon -s show?


CentOS 4.6:
FilenameTypeSize 
UsedPriority
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 partition   4095992  
210592  -1


CentOS 5.1:
FilenameTypeSize 
UsedPriority
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 partition   3047416  
120 -1



Is the system "seeing" the same amount of memory "available" or have
BIOS settings in one reduced available?


CentOS 4.6:
MemTotal:  3113612 kB
MemFree: 24868 kB
Buffers: 23164 kB
Cached:2428508 kB
SwapCached: 136108 kB
Active:1685808 kB
Inactive:  1257004 kB
HighTotal: 2226560 kB
HighFree: 1088 kB
LowTotal:   887052 kB

CentOS 5.1:
MemTotal:  3114452 kB
MemFree:   2722528 kB
Buffers: 84592 kB
Cached: 174804 kB
SwapCached:  0 kB
Active: 187084 kB
Inactive:   137220 kB
HighTotal: 2226560 kB
HighFree:  1972860 kB
LowTotal:   887892 kB


If all new equipment on the new one, open her up and reseat all
connections, PCI cards and mem sticks. Make sure all power connectors
are well seated to MB and drives.


I will double check that.  I may also try to install 4.6 on the HW  
that is currently running 5.1 and see if there is a problem.  With my  
kickstart scripts I can have the system up and running in less than  
30 minutes.  That is probably the best next step to rule out any HW  
issues.  I'll do that as soon as I get into the office.



Front side bus and memory speeds set the same in BIOS?


Should be.


That's all I can think of that may be even remotely related ATM


Thanks for all the excellent suggestions, Bill.

Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Re: Strange performance issues under CentOS 5.1

[Alfred von Campe]

On Feb 13, 2008, at 11:37, Scott Silva wrote:

I didn't see it but did you do a 'uname-a" on both systems to see  
if one is running a PAE kernel?


No, that was not it.  But I did finally track it down.  There was one  
additional difference in the software configuration that I had  
forgotten about.  The CentOS 5.1 system is in a different NIS domain  
and it has Kerberos enabled.  We are going to move to an integrated  
NIS/AD environment to have a single sign-on for Windows and UNIX/ 
Linux, and I was planning to roll that out at the same time as CentOS  
5.1.  The performance issue went away when I used a local account to  
do the build, and also on another CentOS 5.1 system (on identical HW)  
that was bound to the old NIS domain.


Needless to say, we can not roll out CentOS 5.1 in the new NIS  
domain.  I will be talking to the corporate IT folks tomorrow to  
track down what is causing this issue.


Thanks for all the help,
Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Yum not updating kernel

[Alfred von Campe]

Bob:


I agree totally! The problem is with rpm. It refuses to install a non
i386 rpm.


What are the contents of the ~/.rpmmacros file (for root)?

Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] bash - safely pass untrusted strings?

[Alfred von Campe]

Are you trying to pass all parameters from one script to another or  
just the first one ($1).  If it's the former, have you tried using  
"$@"?  For the latter, "$1" might work.


Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] parsing /proc/cmdline

[Alfred von Campe]

Hi - I am not an expert at shell script writing.


Me neither, Perl is my thing, and with regular expressions this would  
be trivial.



If /proc/cmdline looks like

option1 option2 ... ks=http://192.168.1.8/ks/ks.cfg option3 option  
4 ...


How can I get the 192.168.1.8 out of this cmdline.


This is probably not the best approach, but it should work:

  awk -F "ks=" /proc/cmdline '{print $2}' | awk -F / '{print $3}'

On the other hand, if I can call awk, I could also call Perl...

Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Re: kickstart post section

[Alfred von Campe]

I tried the above suggestion and it did not have the desired effect.
Everything gets logged to log file. I was hoping for a way to log  
to the file and also still see it on the screen also.


Have you tried something like this:

%post
(
do your stuff here
) 2>&1 | tee post-install.log



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Re: [CentOS] rsync question

[Alfred von Campe]

On Apr 7, 2008, at 13:07, Ray Leventhal wrote:

I want to backup the /home tree to that box nightly via rsync  
(cronjob), so I tried this:


rsync -avrogz /home/ /mnt/backup/


First, drop "rog" from the options, as they are implied with -a.   
Also, since you are not going over a (potentially slow) network, drop  
the "z" as well, leaving you with just "rsync -av".


Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Re: Gnome Terminal and xterm problems

[Alfred von Campe]

I should add that the hang occurs after an unknown amount of time.


Are we talking days, hours, or minutes here?  I use ssh all the time  
to log into the systems I manage, but they are all on the LAN.  I  
often log into my home CentOS system, and keep the connection up for  
an entire work day (8+ hours).


I currently have some ssh sessions that have been running for at  
least a few weeks.  When the connection hangs, are you still able to  
disconnect it using "~." (make sure you hit return before you try  
that escape sequence).


Alfred

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[CentOS] HELP, I accidentally initialized my /boot partition

[Alfred von Campe]

So I installed a second drive in my system today, and instead of  
typing "mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1" I did a "mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda1".   
Fortunately, that was just my /boot partition.  I thought I could  
just copy the contents from the /boot partition from another system,  
but that didn't work as expected.  The again, I don't have another  
system that's identical to the mine.


What is the best way to re-create the /boot partition for my system?

Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] HELP, I accidentally initialized my /boot partition

[Alfred von Campe]

A few more details about the failure mode might get you better help -
"didn't work as expected" is not very descriptive. Did you try to
reboot?  What happened?  What else have you tried?  Can you boot from
rescue media?  What is currently in /boot/...?


The answer to the last question is "nothing".  It was the /boot  
partition I accidentally did a mkfs on!  And "didn't work as  
expected" simply means that the system didn't boot.  Fortunately, my  
root partition an all the other partitions where not affected.   
Thanks to the earlier replies from Ross Walker, I was able to recover  
my system using roughly the following steps:


  1. Boot from CentOS 4.5 CD #1 in rescue mode
  2. chroot /mnt/sysimage
  3. mount /dev/hda1 /boot
  4. rpm -e grub kernel
  5. yum install grub kernel
  6. e2label /dev/hda1 /boot
  7. reboot

Whew!  I was really sweating bullets for a couple of hours.  I would  
have hated to rebuild this system from the ground up (the OS is the  
easy part as I have a kickstart script, but I've installed Oracle and  
a bunch of other things that would have taken days to reinstall).


Anyway, thanks all for the replies, I am now up and running again.

Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Hot swap SATA?

[Alfred von Campe]

As to device naming, use LABEL= to fix that.  SCSI device naming on  
Linux

stinks.


Quick question regarding the naming issue (and sorry for hijacking  
this thread).  My CentOS 4.5 desktop system has two SATA drives: the  
boot drive is /dev/hda1 and the second drive is /dev/sda1.  Is this  
the expected naming convention?  It really got me confused and this  
was partly the reason why I accidentally initialized my boot  
partition recently while trying to add the second drive.


Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Hot swap SATA?

[Alfred von Campe]

/dev/hda is being controlled by a controller that mimics an IDE  
drive and is being accessed through the kernel's ide layer.  /dev/ 
sda is being controlled by a libata-supported controller and is  
being accessed through the kernel's scsi stack with libata.


As far as I know, all drives (2 hard disks and 2 optical drives) are  
on the same controller.  Well, all 4 are plugged in to the  
motherboard of a Lenovo ThinkCentre M55 PC.  There is no separate  
controller, unless there is more than one on the motherboard itself.   
In the BIOS, these drives all appeared together numbered 1-5 (with  
one of these missing because there are only 4 devices total).


Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Hot swap SATA?

[Alfred von Campe]

On Aug 23, 2007, at 9:08, Lamar Owen wrote:

Many motherboards that have more than two SATA connectors put two  
on the

SouthBridge's IDE-type controller, and the others on 'something else'.
Usually, the 'something else' shows as a SCSI controller in Linux.   
How many

SATA connectors are there?


The User guide says they are 5 connectors, but I can only see 4.   
Three of them are very close to each other, and the fourth one is a  
little further away.  Wouldn't you know it, my boot drive is  
connected to the one that is by itself.  Maybe if it had been  
connected to one of the other three, it would have been /dev/sda (or / 
dev/sdb).


Like I mentioned in my previous post, I have two hard disks and two  
optical drives.  Here are the device names:


# ls -l /dev/[cdhs][vd]*
lrwxrwxrwx  1 rootroot 3 Aug 20 12:24 /dev/cdrom -> hdc
lrwxrwxrwx  1 rootroot 4 Aug 20 12:24 /dev/cdrom1 -> scd0
lrwxrwxrwx  1 rootroot 4 Aug 20 12:24 /dev/cdwriter -> scd0
lrwxrwxrwx  1 rootroot 3 Aug 20 12:24 /dev/dvd -> hdc
lrwxrwxrwx  1 rootroot 4 Aug 20 12:24 /dev/dvd1 -> scd0
lrwxrwxrwx  1 rootroot 4 Aug 20 12:24 /dev/dvdwriter -> scd0
brw-rw  1 rootdisk  3, 0 Aug 20 12:23 /dev/hda
brw-rw  1 rootdisk  3, 1 Aug 20 12:23 /dev/hda1
brw-rw  1 rootdisk  3, 2 Aug 20 12:23 /dev/hda2
brw---  1 rootdisk 22, 0 Aug 20 12:23 /dev/hdc
brw-rw  1 rootdisk  8, 0 Aug 20 12:23 /dev/sda
brw-rw  1 rootdisk  8, 1 Aug 20 12:23 /dev/sda1

It is strange indeed.

Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Hot swap SATA?

[Alfred von Campe]

Ok, run a 'lspci' and see if it lists two controllers.


Yup, it does:

# lspci | fgrep IDE
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) 4 port  
SATA IDE Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.5 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) 2 port  
SATA IDE Controller (rev 02)


That definitely settles it.  We now return you to your regularly  
scheduled topic...


Thanks,
Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] What is eating my memory?

[Alfred von Campe]

I install centos 5 on a HD while it is in a Compaq with 256Mb  
memory.  After install, i am in graphics mode (Gnome) and top  
reports not quite all 256Mb used.


Then I move the HD to a decTOP with 512Mb memory.  I am running non- 
graphics (init 3).  I ssh into the unit and top reports not quite  
all of that used.


So what ate up more than 256Mb memory (X is not running)?

Perhaps there is something I did not clean up properly wrt the move.


Have you done any I/O on the system?  The memory could be in use by  
buffers.  Please post the contents of /proc/meminfo.  Your real free  
memory should be the sum of MemFree + Buffers + Cached.


Alfred

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[CentOS] Very slow disk performance on CentOS 4.5

[Alfred von Campe]

I recently moved my CentOS 4.5 disk from a Lenovo ThinkCentre M52  
(3.2 GHz Pentium 4) to a Lenovo ThinkCentre M55 (3.4 GHz Core 2  
Duo).  I had to install the SMP kernel, but other than that  
everything just worked.  I did have an issue with accidentally  
initializing my /boot partition, but that was my own fault.


But the system was not feeling right.  Some things just seemed to be  
slower, but I couldn't put my finger on it.  Today, I noticed that  
disk I/O was very slow to one of the disks (the boot drive, /dev/ 
hda).  It took over 18 minutes to unzip a set of files that used to  
take just under 2 minutes on the old system.  Sure enough, if I  
copied the files to the second drive (/dev/sda), I was able to unzip  
them in under 2 minutes again.


When I accidentally clobbered the /boot partition, I learned that  
there were two IDE controllers on this motherboard, which explained  
why one SATA drive was named /dev/hda and the other SATA drive /dev/ 
sda.   But I find it hard to believe that there would be such a  
performance difference between the two controllers/drivers/disks.   
And I know the slow disk worked just fine before I moved it to the  
new system.


Any ideas what could cause a drive to be so slow?  Could it be that  
DMA is disabled on the drive (see the output of hdparm below)?  Also,  
why does hdparm work for one disk but not the other?


Thanks for any pointers,
Alfred


# lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82Q963/Q965 Memory Controller  
Hub (rev 02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82Q963/Q965 PCI Express Root  
Port (rev 02)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB  
UHCI Contoller #4 (rev 02)
00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB  
UHCI Controller #5 (rev 02)
00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2  
EHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio  
Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI  
Express Port 1 (rev 02)
00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI  
Express Port 5 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB  
UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB  
UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB  
UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2  
EHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)

00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev f2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801HB/HR (ICH8/R) LPC  
Interface Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) 4 port  
SATA IDE Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) SMBus  
Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.5 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) 2 port  
SATA IDE Controller (rev 02)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G70 [GeForce  
7300 GT] (rev a1)
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5755  
Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)
0a:0a.0 Serial controller: NetMos Technology PCI 9835 Multi-I/O  
Controller (rev 01)



00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) 4 port  
SATA IDE Controller (rev 02) (prog-if 8a [Master SecP PriP])

Subsystem: Lenovo: Unknown device 1011
Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 177
I/O ports at 
I/O ports at 
I/O ports at 
I/O ports at 
I/O ports at 30d0 [size=16]
I/O ports at 30c0 [size=16]
Capabilities: [70] Power Management version 3

00:1f.5 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) 2 port  
SATA IDE Controller (rev 02) (prog-if 85 [Master SecO PriO])

Subsystem: Lenovo: Unknown device 1011
Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 185
I/O ports at 3428 [size=8]
I/O ports at 341c [size=4]
I/O ports at 3420 [size=8]
I/O ports at 3418 [size=4]
I/O ports at 30f0 [size=16]
I/O ports at 30e0 [size=16]
Capabilities: [70] Power Management version 3

# hdparm /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
multcount= 16 (on)
IO_support   =  0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq=  0 (off)
using_dma=  0 (off)
keepsettings =  0 (off)
readonly =  0 (off)
readahead= 256 (on)
geometry = 24792/255/63, sectors = 203928109056, start = 0

# hdparm /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
HDIO_GET_MULTCOUNT failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
IO_support   =  0 (default 16-bit)
readonly =  0 (off)
readahead= 256 (on)
geometry = 9730/255/63, sectors = 80032038912, start = 0


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Re: [CentOS] Very slow disk performance on CentOS 4.5

[Alfred von Campe]

On Aug 31, 2007, at 12:20, Ross S. W. Walker wrote:


See if the drive supports DMA and 32-bit IO and if it does set it
with hdparm (put in the hdparm.conf to do so across reboots).


I guess that is what I am asking.  How do I do set the appropriate  
parameters with hdparm?



And look into getting a SATA replacement, the PATA on these boards
are really meant for DVD/CD-ROMs, etc.


The are all SATA drives (2 HDDs and 2 optical drives).  But because  
there are two controllers, one of the HDDs shows up as /dev/hda and  
the other as /dev/sda.


Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Very slow disk performance on CentOS 4.5 [solved]

[Alfred von Campe]

Yes, I was going to say this too, make sure the SATA settings in the
BIOS are all set to SATA operation and not "legacy", then you should
see /dev/sda and /dev/sdb and all DMA, IO size, NCQ and multiple  
sector

settings will be properly negotiated at start-up.


I bit the bullet and rebooted my system.  I couldn't find anything in  
the BIOS regarding this.  However, while the system was down, I  
simply swapped the SATA connections of one of the optical drives with  
the slow hard disk.  Upon reboot, the slow disk formerly at /dev/hda  
disk was now /dev/sda (and the former /dev/sda was now /dev/sdb) and  
the two optical drives are /dev/hda and /dev/hdb.  Moreover, the disk  
drive now performs as before.


So why does a simple swap like this cause such a performance  
difference (almost an order of magnitude!)?



To set these via hdarpm:

hdparm -c 1 /dev/hda (for 32-bit)
hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda (for DMA)
hdparm -m 16 /dev/hda (multiple sector IO = 16 sectors)

These can be combined to: hdparm -c 1 -d 1 -m 16 /dev/hda


Now that the drive is /dev/sda, hdparm doesn't work.  Is there a  
similar utility to change these settings on SATA drives that show up  
as /dev/sdx?  Is this even needed?  In my case, I'm happy to get back  
the previous performance, but if there is a way to increase it even  
further, I'd like to know.


Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Very slow disk performance on CentOS 4.5 [solved]

[Alfred von Campe]

Well most desktop motherboards these days provide for 2 SATA devices
and 2 emulated PATA devices. Though the emulated PATA devices will
probably end up using PIO instead of DMA for transfers which is
slow and processor intensive, so these are usually reserved for
optical drives, which are slow.


Thanks, Ross, that certainly explains it.  I wonder why the  
motherboard isn't labeled more clearly that not all SATA connectors  
are treated the same.



I would still have the 2 optical drives hda/hdb set for DMA transfer
too as watching DVDs will be choppy and burning CDs/DVDs may be
fraught with failures.


I'll keep that in mind.


Most cases this isn't needed, but if you want to view and access
information on SATA/SAS/SCSI disks you can google for 'sdparm', but
it isn't as user-friendly as hdparm and not all options are
implemented for SATA drives as they support a limited SCSI command
spec.


I'll check out sdparm.

Thanks again,
Alfred


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Re: [CentOS] Re: rootpw and graphical mode?

[Alfred von Campe]

I use rootpw --iscrypted with my kickstart installs in graphical mode  
all the time.  Here is the first section of my kickstart file:


# Start of snip
install
url --url http://centosmirror/
lang en_US.UTF-8
langsupport --default=en_US.UTF-8 en_US.UTF-8
keyboard us
xconfig --resolution 1600x1200 --depth 24 --startxonboot  -- 
defaultdesktop gnome

network --device=eth0 --bootproto=dhcp  --hostname myhost
rootpw --iscrypted **
firewall --enabled --trust=eth0 --port=22:tcp --port=80:tcp
selinux --disabled
authconfig --enableshadow --enablemd5 --enablenis -- 
nisdomain=mydomain --nisserver=nisname

timezone America/New_York
bootloader --location=mbr --append="rhgb quiet"
clearpart --all --drives=sda --initlabel
part /boot --fstype ext3 --size=100 --ondisk=sda
part pv.2 --size=0 --grow --ondisk=sda
volgroup VolGroup00 --pesize=32768 pv.2
logvol swap --fstype swap --name=LogVol00 --vgname=VolGroup00 -- 
size=1000 --grow --maxsize=3000
logvol /--fstype ext3 --name=LogVol01 --vgname=VolGroup00 -- 
size=1024 --grow --maxsize=4
logvol /scratch --fstype ext3 --name=LogVol02 --vgname=VolGroup00 -- 
size=1024 --grow

shutdown
# End of snip

Hope this helps,
Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Reconfiguring gnome desktop

[Alfred von Campe]

Please - how do I reconfigure my gnome desktop (CentOS 4.4) to get  
back
my application icons and workspaces? Something's changed in the  
settings

so that there are no workspaces shown in the panel and applications
"disappear" off the screen when applications (eg Evolution, Mozilla  
etc)

are minimized!


Just right click on the lower panel (the grey area at the bottom of  
the screen) and select "Add to Panel...".  The items you are looking  
for are named "Window List" and "Workspace Switcher".  If you don't  
even have the lower panel, right click on the top panel and select  
"New Panel".


Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] command to show virtual X screens

[Alfred von Campe]

Is there a command line command that controls which virtual X screen
a person is viewing?

Sure I can click on one of the 4 virtual X screens but can I  
control that

from the command line.


Are you talking about the workspaces provided by the default Gnome  
desktop manager?  If so, CTRL-ALT- should do what you want.


Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] command to show virtual X screens

[Alfred von Campe]

Ok - I didnt realize it was called workspace, but yes that is it.

But - what I want is a command line program that I can execute to  
show workspace 3.

The sometime later execute a command line program to show workspace 1.


Sorry, I don't know about a command line option for this (and the  
documentation doesn't seem to mention one either).  You could, as  
someone else suggested in an earlier response, send the simulated  
keyboard events to the right place, but that is rather kludgy.  You  
may have better luck asking at http://gnomesupport.org/forums.  May I  
ask why you are trying to do this?  There may be a good reason not to  
provide command line support for something that switches the  
workspace the user is looking at.


Alfred

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[CentOS] CentOS 4.5 system doesn't boot after installing latest updates

[Alfred von Campe]

Today I decided to install all the latest updates (including the -06  
kernel).  The "yum update" seems to have run just fine (no errors),  
but when I rebooted the system it just sits there with the word  
"GRUB" in the upper left hand corner.  I booted from the CentOS 4.5  
install CD into rescue mode, did a "chroot /mnt/sysimage" and  
reinstalled grub and the latest kernel, but it still gets stuck in  
the same place.  It's not that I can't boot the new kernel; I can't  
even get to the grub screen!


Any ideas?  I am totally stuck at the moment...

Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] CentOS 4.5 system doesn't boot after installing latest updates

[Alfred von Campe]

Today I decided to install all the latest updates (including the  
-06 kernel).  The "yum update" seems to have run just fine (no  
errors), but when I rebooted the system it just sits there with the  
word "GRUB" in the upper left hand corner.  I booted from the  
CentOS 4.5 install CD into rescue mode, did a "chroot /mnt/ 
sysimage" and reinstalled grub and the latest kernel, but it still  
gets stuck in the same place.  It's not that I can't boot the new  
kernel; I can't even get to the grub screen!


I'll answer my own question.  In addition to re-installing grub, a  
"grub-install /dev/sda" was required to get the system to boot.  I  
thought that reinstalling grub via yum/rpm would take care of it, but  
apparently it didn't.  Lesson learned, panic averted.


Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Re: CentOS 4.5 system doesn't boot after installing latest updates

[Alfred von Campe]

Out of interest, is this something that is always required when  
upgrading Grub?


i.e. should one always manually run "grub-install" /dev/XXX" after  
doing so?


No, it shouldn't.  But in my case, I didn't "upgrade grub".  I simply  
did a "yum update" which installed, among other things, a new kernel,  
so a reboot was needed.  And when I rebooted, grub wouldn't start.   
So I booted into rescue mode from the CentOS CD #1, and did a "rpm -e  
grub kernel" followed by "yum install grub kernel".  This did not fix  
the problem.  I had to boot into rescue mode again and do a "grub- 
install /dev/sda".  The big question remains, what happened on my  
system that corrupted the MBR.  I could have been anything at all  
since the last time I rebooted (about a month ago) and not  
necessarily the "yum update".


Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Re: CentOS 4.5 system doesn't boot after installing latest updates

[Alfred von Campe]

Anyways, my suggestion is to check all the drives in your system  
for said files as mentioned.  If they are there, but not where grub  
is looking for you may have to make changes.


My system started its life with one drive and CentOS 4.3, and has  
been "yum updated" and is now at CentOS 4.5.  I also added one  
additional drive to it over the last 18 months.  The only time it has  
failed to boot was when I accidentally initialized the /boot  
partition.  I believe this was an anomaly (something corrupted the  
MBR).  I will soon find out when I do the "yum update" to the other  
27 CentOS systems I manage if the update is indeed the culprit (I  
doubt it).


Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] excluding directories in rsync

[Alfred von Campe]

I am trying to exclude a directory (and all file and sub-directories
under that directory) when using rsync.

I have spent two days on google, but everything that I can find there
involves excluding individual files, not an entire directory.


Have you tried a simple "rsync --exclude remove_dir ..."?

Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] How to export X displays

[Alfred von Campe]

On Oct 10, 2007, at 10:09, Dag Wieers wrote:

There is xrdp and I have packaged it for RPMforge, but I am not  
sure if it

is completely usable. (ie. I haven't figured out how to use it and
therefor I didn't make the proper sysv script etc...)


On a somewhat related note, what is the best/easiest way to set up a  
CentOS system to be able to access an existing X desktop remotely  
(like Remote Desktop on Windows)?  I have used VNC in the past, but I  
had to create a new VNC session.  I want to be able to access my  
existing desktop remotely and not a separate VNC desktop.  Can nx do  
this (I've heard about nx on this mailing list, but have not yet read  
any documentation)?


Thanks,
Alfred


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Re: [CentOS] How to export X displays

[Alfred von Campe]

On Oct 10, 2007, at 14:18, Brian Mathis wrote:


CentOS has "Desktop Sharing" built in.  Look for it in one of the
settings/preferences menus.  "Enable desktop sharing", and then you
can use VNC as a remote client.


Wow, that was easy!  I thought I was going to have to jump through a  
bunch of hoops to get this working.


Thanks, and we now return you to your regularly scheduled thread  
topic...


Alfred


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Re: [CentOS] script help

[Alfred von Campe]

On Oct 26, 2007, at 6:28, Tom Brown wrote:


I am sure the answer here is really easy but i am stuck!


Getting the quoting right for remote commands in the shell is never  
an easy thing :-).



# mount | grep data | awk '{print$1,$2,$3}'

gives me the info i require locally, however i need to execute this  
over about 1000 hosts so i run things remotely using ssh something  
like


# MOUNTER=`ssh $i 'mount | grep data | awk '{print$1,$2,$3}''`

however this fails as at the end of the line there are 2 ticks eg '  
together -


Can anyone offer me some syntax help please?


I can usually get this to work with some trial an error by doubling  
up quotes and using backslahes but it's a frustrating experience.
Instead, I use a different technique: I put a script in a network  
accessible place (i.e., a common NFS mount) and then use ssh to  
execute that script.


Alfred

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[CentOS] Problem running a setuid Perl script on CentOS 4.5

[Alfred von Campe]

I'm trying to create a setuid Perl script (yes, I am aware about the  
security implications), but am getting this error:


  % cat testsetuid.pl
  #!/usr/bin/perl -UT
  print "My real user id is $< but my effective user id is $>\n";
  exit(0);
  % ./testsetuid.pl
  Can't do setuid (cannot exec sperl)

I am using the stock Perl that came with CentOS 4.5.  The problem I  
am trying to solve is to run a software build as a particular user.   
We want any user to be able to submit a build job that runs on the  
build machine as the designated build user.  If there is a better way  
to do this, I'm open to suggestions.


Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Problem running a setuid Perl script on CentOS 4.5

[Alfred von Campe]

On Nov 16, 2007, at 9:55, Marc Wiatrowski wrote:


Being aware of the security implications, do you have
perl-suidperl-X.rpm installed?


I meant I was aware of the implications of running setuid scripts.  I  
was not aware that CentOS' upstream provider had packaged suidperl  
separately.  Installing this package solved my problem.  However, I  
am pursuing an sudo solution at the moment that may work even better  
for me.


Thanks,
Alfred

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[CentOS] Kickstart stopped working

[Alfred von Campe]

I've been using kickstart for a while now, but today I tried to  
kickstart a system and it's just not working at all.  I can't figure  
out why it's hanging.


I booted from the CentOS 4.5 CD #1 and typed "linux ks=http:// 
centosmirror/ks/sys20.cfg".  If I check my web server's log, I can  
see that sys20.cfg was accessed.  This file begins with the following  
lines:


  install
  url --url http://centosmirror/

Looking at the text in alternate console 3 (or was it 4), I can see  
that it got an IP address via DHCP, got the config file mentioned  
above, set the hostname as specified in the config file, and then  
ends with the following messages:


  trying to mount CD device hdc
  mntloop loop0 on /mnt/runtime as /mnt/source/CentOS/base/ 
stage2.img fd is 21

  transferring http://centosmirror//./CentOS/base/product.img to a fd
  transferring http://centosmirror//./disc1/CentOS/base/product.img  
to a fd


A long time (5 minutes?) passed between the last two lines, and then  
the entire things repeats (with some additional output lines that I  
didn't bother to write down).


First, I don't have a product.img file in my base directory.  In a  
recent thread on this list about doing an ftp install, I remember  
reading that copying stage2.img to product.img helped, so I created a  
hard link between the two.  Second, looking at the webserver logs,  
there is no mention of product.img or stage2.img.  Finally, there is  
no alternate console #2, so I can't get a shell prompt to poke around  
a little more.


I've done dozens of kickstarts in the past using this server, but I  
don't remember if I've successfully done a kickstart install since  
4.5 came out.  Are there some known issues with kickstart in 4.5?  I  
rsync my local repo every night from one of the public mirrors.


Alfred

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[CentOS] Has anyone gotten KDiff3 to work on CentOS 4.X?

[Alfred von Campe]

The Subject: line says it all.  I haven't been able to find a KDiff3  
RPM (http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net) that will install on CentOS 4,  
and I am also having problems building it from source (the  
application that is, not the RPM).  I have some users who really want  
to use KDiff3, so any help/hints are appreciated.


Thanks,
Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Need to do some careful moving...

[Alfred von Campe]

On Jun 26, 2007, at 21:03, Robert Moskowitz wrote:

When I built this new Centos 5 drive, I copied over much of my old  
data using cp, and did not use the -preserve option.  Ouch.  I need  
those file create dates so that documents and such sort properly,  
historically.


I recovered much of my stuff from a tar built back in mid-May (but  
I missed that the tar backup ended abnormally, as I was tar-ing to  
a USB attached drive formatted FAT32, and at 4Gb, it stopped).


Now I want to copy all of my newer files into this recovered  
directory.  The -u option of cp and mv will do the wrong thing, of  
course.  I want to only copy files that are NOT present in the  
recovered directory.  I will of course still be stuck with a lot of  
files with a Jun 18 date that were created between the backup date  
and Jun 18, but at least I will be better off


Sounds like the perfect job for rsync.  You probably want to use the - 
a option.  Check out the man page and test on a different directory  
until you get the directory hierarchy just right.


Alfred


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Re: [CentOS] Gnu Screen - terminal issues

[Alfred von Campe]

On Mar 3, 2011, at 17:50, Les Mikesell wrote:

> I almost never log in 
> directly at a linux console anymore and if I need to do something from 
> home or remotely, I just pick the session that was my last desktop at work.

I didn't know you could do this with NX.  I've been using VNC to connect
to my session at work from home, but it's kinda slow.  So how do you use
NX technology to connect to an *existing* GUI session (in my case Gnome
if that matters)?  Sorry, I know this is off topic, but then again this
entire thread seems to be headed off on a tangent...

Alfred

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[CentOS] Another system with no sound

[Alfred von Campe]

I am also having an issue with no sound on some CentOS desktop systems.  I 
manage about 3 dozen desktops.  These are all Lenovo ThinkCentre systems of 
varying vintages, but there are only 2 distinct sound controllers among all of 
them:

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio 
Controller (rev 02)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family High Definition Audio 
Controller (rev 01)

On some systems, the sounds is working fine, and on others it's not.  It's not 
a sound controller issue, as I've got sound working on multiple systems with 
each controller.   I've checked the settings in alsamixer and the master is not 
muted.  As far as I can tell, all systems are configured similarly (they were 
build via kickstart and maintained up-to-date with "yum update" periodically).

Here is some info from a system on which sound is working:

# lspci | egrep -i 'audio|sound|snd|alsa'
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio 
Controller (rev 02)
# lsmod | egrep -i 'audio|sound|snd|alsa'
snd_hda_intel 523949  0 
snd_seq_dummy   7877  0 
snd_seq_oss32577  0 
snd_seq_midi_event 11073  1 snd_seq_oss
snd_seq49585  5 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_midi_event
snd_seq_device 11725  3 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq
snd_pcm_oss42817  0 
snd_mixer_oss  19009  1 snd_pcm_oss
snd_pcm72133  2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm_oss
snd_timer  24516  2 snd_seq,snd_pcm
snd_page_alloc 14281  2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm
snd_hwdep  12869  1 snd_hda_intel
snd55877  9 
snd_hda_intel,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq,snd_seq_device,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_timer,snd_hwdep
soundcore  11553  1 snd

And here is the same info from a system where sound is not working:

# lspci | egrep -i 'audio|sound|snd|alsa'
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio 
Controller (rev 02)
# lsmod | egrep -i 'audio|sound|snd|alsa'
snd_hda_intel 523949  1 
snd_seq_dummy   7877  0 
snd_seq_oss32577  0 
snd_seq_midi_event 11073  1 snd_seq_oss
snd_seq49585  5 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_midi_event
snd_seq_device 11725  3 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq
snd_pcm_oss42817  0 
snd_mixer_oss  19009  1 snd_pcm_oss
snd_pcm72133  2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm_oss
snd_timer  24516  2 snd_seq,snd_pcm
snd_page_alloc 14281  2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm
snd_hwdep  12869  1 snd_hda_intel
snd55877  11 
snd_hda_intel,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq,snd_seq_device,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_timer,snd_hwdep
soundcore  11553  1 snd

Similar, but not quite identical.  The settings in alsamixer, however, are 
identical.  Any ideas as to what I can try next?

Thanks,
Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Slightly OT: Vim command (or macro) to replace space under cursor by " " (without deleting the following word)

[Alfred von Campe]

On Oct 5, 2009, at 5:34, Niki Kovacs wrote:

> Here's what the according macro would look like. Pressing F2 would
> replace the space under the cursor by " " :
>
> :map  cw 
>
> ... except this also deletes the word after the cursor, which is  
> annoying.
>
> Any suggestions ?

Have you tried  the "s" command (substitute) instead of "cw"?

Alfred

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[CentOS] Locales and filenames

[Alfred von Campe]

I have a file which contains non-ASCII characters (umlauts, accented  
characters, etc.) both in its filename as well as its content.  The  
only way I have been able to see these characters is inside vim,  
where they are displayed correctly no matter what I have LANG set  
to.  My default LANG is en_US.utf8, but I have tried de_DE.utf8,  
de_DE.iso88591, and various others.  In the output of a simple ls,  
the characters are shown as either a simple "?" or a "?" in a box  
depending on what I have LANG set to, and the same is true if I use  
cat to display the contents.  I have tried this both in an xterm as  
well as a gnome-terminal window on a CentOS 5.3 system.

I am taking stabs in the dark here as I've never had to deal with  
LANG and locales before.  Am I missing something obvious or is there  
more to it than simply setting LANG.  Since I can see the characters  
correctly in vim, I'm sure it's not a font issue.  I just want to be  
able to display these characters correctly with simple Linux commands  
like ls and cat.

Thanks,
Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Locales and filenames

[Alfred von Campe]

On Oct 27, 2009, at 9:45, Niki Kovacs wrote:

> The 'file' command displays encoding information. If you have to  
> change
> the encoding, use 'recode'. Example :

Thanks for the quick response, Niki, but I don't need to change the  
encoding (at least I don't think I do).  I just want ls to show me  
the non-ASCII characters in its output and cat to display the  
characters properly in my xterm or gnome-terminal.  Currently, both  
of these commands display them as "?".  My current test case has a  
file which contains a "ç" (0xE7, c with cedilla) in its filename, and  
an "í" (0xED, i acute) inside the file.

Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Locales and filenames

[Alfred von Campe]

On Oct 27, 2009, at 10:51, Niki Kovacs wrote:

> [kikino...@babasse:~] $ touch "Fichier encodé en français"
> [kikino...@babasse:~] $ touch "Wie heißt diese Datei denn bloß äh"
> [kikino...@babasse:~] $ ls F* W*
> Fichier encodé en français  Wie heißt diese Datei denn bloß äh

To be honest, I don't even know how to create those characters on the  
command line on Linux (I am writing this on a Mac where I know how to  
generate characters using the option key).  However, I have an  
existing file on Linux that has the problem I described.  If you must  
know, I wrote a small shell script that creates this file by cutting  
and pasting non-ASCII characters from the iso_8859-1 man page.

> What's your current system-wide locale ?

en_US.UTF-8

In case you are wondering why I am asking about this when I don't  
even know how to type these characters, is that I have a user who  
wants to be able to use non-ASCII characters in file names.

Thanks,
Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Locales and filenames

[Alfred von Campe]

On Oct 27, 2009, at 13:40, Niki Kovacs wrote:


I vaguely remember Mac uses UTF-16 as default encoding. This could be
the source of your problem.


Forget I said anything about the Mac; I'm only using it to write  
these emails.  The file in question was completely created on Linux.   
The filename contains the character 0xE7 (c with cedilla) and the  
file itself contains the character 0xED (i acute).  Neither character  
is displayed correctly using ls (filename) or cat (content), but I  
can look at the file with vim.  Here is some output cut&pasted from  
my xterm window to illustrate the issue:


bash-3.2$ ls -l XXX*
-rw-r--r-- 1 av16209 GRP-HEPDSW 22 oct 27 14:11 XXX?
bash-3.2$ cat test.sh
#!/bin/sh
echo "This is an i acute: � > XXX�
  bash-3.2$

I have also attached a gzip'ed test.sh.

Alfred




test.sh.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data
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Re: [CentOS] Locales and filenames

[Alfred von Campe]

On Oct 27, 2009, at 19:28, ken wrote:

> E.g., create a file with vi with just one German/Greek/French word,  
> say,
> Έντελέχεια (Entylecheia, an ancient Greek word).  If the  
> name of the
> file is "nonenglish", then, after you do your save in vim, run the  
> shell
> commands
>
> touch temp; mv temp $(cat nonenglish)

I guess my issue is how these characters get generated in the first  
place.  By cutting and pasting the word "Έντελέχεια" from  
your email into a file on Linux (via the Synergy mouse & keyboard  
sharing utility no less), I was able to create a file containing that  
word and also named that word and display it correctly with cat and  
ls.  So UTF-8 encoding appears to work just fine.  It's 8-byte  
characters in ISO 8859-1 encoding that are causing my problem.   
Fortunately, I think I don't have to deal with ISO 8859-1 encodings,  
and my problem was self-created by cutting and pasting characters  
from the iso_8859-1 man page.

Now I have a follow up question: so far I've only been able to enter  
non-ASCII characters on my Linux system by cutting & pasting; how do  
I actually generate any of these characters on a system with a US  
keyboard?

Thanks for all that have helped me solve this problem.

Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Locales and filenames

[Alfred von Campe]

On Oct 28, 2009, at 2:59, Mogens Kjaer wrote:

> If your locale is UTF8, íéèæøå would be multibyte characters.
>
> If your characters are one byte only, they are not UTF-8.

That was the key: the file was not UTF-8.

> vim knows how to handle this correctly:

Yes, it apparently does.  It almost appears to be magic how it  
figures this out...

> If you open the file with vi (you would see the text
> [converted] on the bottom line), and do:
>
> :set fileencoding=utf-8
>
> and write out the file again it should be converted so
> that cat displays it correctly.

Yes, it certainly does.  Thanks for the tip.  I guess I have a lot to  
learn about encodings...

> You can use the convmv script to convert filenames into
> utf-8 (yum install convmv).

I will check this out!

Thanks,
Alfred


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[CentOS] Centosplus kernel does not have framebuffer support?

[Alfred von Campe]

I'm still using CentOS 4.6, but have been planning an upgrade to  
CentOS 5 for quite a while.  One of the things that was holding me  
back is that the CentOS 5.0 kernel did not have the framebuffer  
support enabled by default.  So I waited for CentOS 5.1.  However, on  
one of my test systems I ran into the bad NFS performance issue (see  
CentOS bug 2635), so I plan to use the centosplus kernel.  However,  
it appears that this kernel does not have the framebuffer support  
enabled -- arrgghhh!


So, is this just an oversight or is there a reason for not enabling  
the framebuffer support on the centosplus kernel?


Alfred (who really wants to upgrade to CentOS 5 but cannot live with  
the NFS performance issue and does not want to build his own kernel  
RPMs)



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Re: [CentOS] Centosplus kernel does not have framebuffer support?

[Alfred von Campe]

On Apr 16, 2008, at 19:21, Akemi Yagi wrote:


You have another choice here if you would rather not wait for the next
update of the centosplus kernel.  The standard kernel with the same
NFS bug fix is available from:

http://people.centos.org/hughesjr/kernel/5/

I have just checked the kernels in there; they do have the framebuffer
support enabled.


But what is the best way to include all the appropriate kernel RPMs  
from that location in an automated kickstart build?  I mirror my own  
repo, so I guess I could do what I want, but this is how I currently  
get the centosplus kernel from a script called in the kickstart %post  
section:


yum --enablerepo centosplus -y update

Voila, I get all the latest updates as well as the centosplus kernel.

Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Centosplus kernel does not have framebuffer support?

[Alfred von Campe]

On Apr 17, 2008, at 10:34, Akemi Yagi wrote:


If you have your own mirror, the easiest way would be to get those
bz32 kernels in your repo.  Johnny Hughes or other CentOS devs
need to chime in here about the plan for those kernels, but my (wild)
guess is that those kernels stay there until they are no longer
needed, namely until 5.2 comes out in which the NFS bug is
(supposedly) fixed.


Well, the way I set up my mirror is by rsync'ing the entire directory  
structure from one of the public mirrors.  What are the steps I would  
have to run to update my local mirror to include Johnny's RPMs?  I  
would also have to redo this update after every rsync.  And how will  
these kernels then be automatically installed if they are in the  
repo?  This does not seem to be that easy.



Or else, depending on how soon the next kernel update comes out, you
may want to wait for the centosplus kernel with the vesa framebuffer
support turned on (provided the change is made in the next release).
I will do my best in reminding Johnny of the corrections. :-)


Any chance this will happen before next Wednesday?  That's when I'm  
planning to start my upgrades...


Alfred


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Re: [CentOS] Centosplus kernel does not have framebuffer support?

[Alfred von Campe]

On Apr 17, 2008, at 14:02, Akemi Yagi wrote:


Any chance this will happen before next Wednesday?  That's when I'm
planning to start my upgrades...


I doubt it, but you never know because this is up to our upstream  
vendor.


I was thinking about a new centosplus kernel before next week -- is  
that dependent on upstream?  In other words, are centosplus kernels  
released only when there is an upstream kernl release or can they be  
released at any time a CentOS maintainer deems necessary?


Alfred

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[CentOS] Kickstart syntax for CentOS upgrade

[Alfred von Campe]

I'd like to automate the upgrade from CentOS 4.6 to 5.1 as much as  
possible.  Since upgrades per se are not really recommended, I'm  
planning to do a kickstart installation.  However, I want to leave  
one of the existing partitions (/scratch) untouched during the  
installation.  Here is my current layout (LogVol00 is swap so not  
shown in the df output below):


  # df -hl
  FilesystemSize  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
  /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol01
 36G   11G   24G  30% /
  /dev/sda1  99M   17M   78M  18% /boot
  /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol02
 36G  9.7G   24G  29% /scratch
  # vgscan
Reading all physical volumes.  This may take a while...
Found volume group "VolGroup00" using metadata type lvm2
  # pvscan
PV /dev/sda2   VG VolGroup00   lvm2 [74.41 GB / 32.00 MB free]
Total: 1 [74.41 GB] / in use: 1 [74.41 GB] / in no VG: 0 [0   ]
  # lvscan
ACTIVE'/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01' [35.75 GB] inherit
ACTIVE'/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol02' [35.72 GB] inherit
ACTIVE'/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00' [2.91 GB] inherit

I've tried various alternatives of specifying the disk layout in the  
kickstart file, and here is my latest attempt:


  part /boot --fstype ext3 --onpart sda1
  part pv.2 --noformat --onpart sda2
  volgroup VolGroup00 --noformat --useexisting --pesize=32768
  logvol swap --useexisting --fstype swap --name=LogVol00 -- 
vgname=VolGroup00
  logvol /--useexisting --fstype ext3 --name=LogVol01 -- 
vgname=VolGroup00


But when I try to install CentOS 5.1 via kickstart, anaconda  
complains that "You have not defined a root partition (/), which is  
required for installation of CentOS to continue".  Has anyone  
successfully installed CentOS 5.X via kickstart and preserved at  
least one partition on a logical volume, and if so, could you please  
share your kickstart file?


Thanks,
Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Kickstart syntax for CentOS upgrade

[Alfred von Campe]

On Apr 28, 2008, at 18:37, Tom Lanyon wrote:
This worked fine for me on a 4.6 kickstart I did recently. I can't  
remember whether I tried it on 5.x or not, sorry.


bootloader --location=mbr --driveorder=sda
part /boot --onpart=sda1 --fstype=ext3
part swap --onpart=sda2 --fstype=swap
volgroup vg --useexisting
logvol / --useexisting --name=root --vgname=vg --fstype=ext3

Because the volgroup already exists you don't need to define a PV  
for it.


That last sentence was the key.  I removed the line "part pv.2 -- 
noformat --onpart sda2" and did not make any other changes and now  
the "upgrade" is working fine.  For future reference, here is what  
the relevant section of my kickstart file looked like:


  bootloader --location=mbr --append="rhgb quiet"
  part /boot --fstype ext3 --onpart sda1
  volgroup VolGroup00 --useexisting
  logvol swap --useexisting --fstype swap --name=LogVol00 -- 
vgname=VolGroup00
  logvol /--useexisting --fstype ext3 --name=LogVol01 -- 
vgname=VolGroup00


Thanks for the help,
Alfred

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[CentOS] Is it possible to lvrename the current root partition?

[Alfred von Campe]

I'd like to rename my existing volume groups and logical volumes (I  
picked names a long time ago I no longer like :-).  I recently  
stumbled across the lvrename and vgrename commands, but when I tried  
the former to rename the logical volume that my root partition  
resides on, the system became unbootable.


In addition to renaming the LV (and VG if I decide to to that as  
well), what else needs to be changed?  So far my list includes:


  o /etc/fstabb
  o /boot/grub/grub.conf
  o /dev//
  o /dev/mapper/

I was hoping the lvrename and/or vgrename would take care of these  
details.  Are there any scripts out there that take care of all the  
details?  If not, I may write one (once I have the recipe to get this  
working, of course).


Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Is it possible to lvrename the current root partition?

[Alfred von Campe]

Josh, Bill, and Ross, than you for all the suggestions.  I'm running  
out of time to try them today, but I will do so on Monday when I'm  
back in the office and I"ll post an update.


TGIF!
Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Is it possible to lvrename the current root partition?

[Alfred von Campe]

On May 2, 2008, at 17:24, Ross S. W. Walker wrote:

Sure you can do all this from rescue mode off the first CD.

Boot the cd type in 'linux rescue' and continue to the command prompt.


First, thanks for the detailed list, Ross.  It was very helpful.  I  
was able to rename both the VG and the LVs, but it was slightly more  
complicated than the items on the list.



1) make sure swap isn't using the swap lv
- swapoff -a


What I did was say "Skip" when the rescue image asks you if you want  
it to find existing Linux installations and mount them under /mnt/ 
sysimage.  The reason I did this was that if you let it mount your  
partitions, you need to go through a lot of additional steps to get  
everything under /mnt/sysimage unmounted, and nothing in there is  
needed to do the rename (unless you want to rename the VG -- see below).



2) unmount all lvs mounted
- umount /mnt/sysimage/boot
- umount /mnt/sysimage


Not needed because of what I did in step 1, but there are additional  
mount points to unmount if you do let the rescue image do the mounts  
(do a "mount | grep  sysimage" to find all the mount points).



3) mark all lvs as unavailable
- lvchange -a n 


This step is indeed required unless you chose to skip the mounting  
of /mnt/sysimage altogether.  Do a "lvm lvscan" to find out which LVs  
are active (and use "lvm lvchange" as described below).



4) rename the volume group
- vgrename  


Well, vgrename is not part of the rescue disk.  So if you want to do  
this, you will have to mark the root LV as available, mount it, and  
then copy /mnt//usr/sbin/vgrename to /tmp.  Then you have  
to unmount the root partition and mark the LV as unavailable.



5) rename the logical volumes
- lvrename \ 

6) repeat #5 as necessary


The lvrename binary (symbolic link) does not exit in rescue mode, so  
you will have to type "lvm lvrename" (and "lvm lvchange", etc.).   
Also, you have to use a forward slash here.




7) re-activate all the lvs
- lvchange -a y 


Remember to use the new names.


8) re-mount the root and boot lvs,
- mount /dev// /mnt/sysimage
- mount /dev// /mnt/sysimage/boot


I think this part worked as is.


9) chroot to the mounts with, 'chroot /mnt/sysimage /bin/bash'


Before I could do this, I had to use mknod to create the device  
entries in /mnt/sysimage/dev/mapper/- and the  
symbolic links in /mnt/sysimage/dev//.  Make sure the  
symbolic links point to /dev/mapper/... and not /mnt/sysimage/dev/ 
mapper/...  I don't remember if this was required to mount it while  
in rescue mode or to make the system bootable again.  But I remember  
that I had to do it.



10) edit /etc/fstab

11) edit /boot/grub/grub.conf

12) remake the initrd
- mkinitrd -f /boot/initrd-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)


You will have to type the release version of the kernel instead of  
relying on the output of uname -r.


It turns out that I can skip steps 7-12 since I plan to upgrade the  
systems from CentOS 4.6 to CentOS 5.1 immediately after doing the  
rename, and the installer (anaconda) will take care of all these  
details.   I just had to adjust my kickstart scripts to use the new  
names.


Anyway, thanks again for all the help.  I'm starting to upgrade my  
two dozen or so desktops to CentOS 5.1 using the new VG and LV names.


Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Centosplus kernel does not have framebuffer support?

[Alfred von Campe]

On May 11, 2008, at 9:06, Akemi Yagi wrote


The centosplus kernel update that just came out
(2.6.18-53.1.19.el5.centos.plus) does have vesafb support enabled.
Thank you, Johnny, for the work. :-)


It finally trickled down to my mirror, and a quick install this  
morning shows that is indeed fixed.  This is great!  I do have a  
couple of issues with CentOS 5.1, but I'll start a separate thread  
for those.


Thanks again,
Alfred

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[CentOS] A couple of CentOS 5.1 issues

[Alfred von Campe]

I've finally made the switch to CentOS 5.1 (I had been running 4.6).   
So far, so good, but I do have a few issues.


First, I can not find kermit (or ckermit) in any of the repos (base,  
extras, centosplus, rpmforge).  On my 4.6 systems, /usr/bin/kermit  
was provided by the package ckermit in the base repo.  That package  
appears to be no longer available.  Any ideas where I could find a  
suitable replacement?


Second (and this is probably OT), I use the binary nVidia driver and  
the keyboard and mouse sharing utility Synergy (http:// 
synergy2.sourceforge.net, a fantastic utility without which I would  
be so much less productive).  Since upgrading to CentOS 5, if the  
nVidia card goes into powersave mode, it can not be woken up by  
moving the cursor from the Synergy server to the Synergy client  
display (in this case, the CentOS 5.1 systems); you have to hit a key  
on the keyboard that's physically attached to the CentOS 5 system to  
wake it up.  Is there a way to have the display wake up when the  
cursor is moved into the client display?  Or at least disable this  
"deep sleep" mode on the nVidia cards?  I have not changed the  
hardware or the version of the nVidia driver when upgrading from  
CentOS 4.6 to CentOS 5.1, and I did not have this issue before the  
upgrade.


Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] A couple of CentOS 5.1 issues

[Alfred von Campe]

On May 14, 2008, at 9:50, Steve Huff wrote:

This may well be an upstream issue; I have recently begun to  
encounter the same problem on a RHEL 5.1 workstation, using Synergy  
and nVidia binary packages from rpmforge (synergy-1.3.1-2.el5.rf,  
nvidia-x11-drv-1.0.9755-1.nodist.rf).


I first started seeing this issue last week, after a reboot;  
unfortunately I'm not sure off the top of my head which packages I  
had recently updated.  Before last week the desired behavior (the  
display waking from sleep upon mouse movement) was present.


It's encouraging to hear that this used to work in 5.X.  I am just  
upgrading to 5.1 and this has always been "broken" for me, so I can't  
tell if it was a recent update.  Can you post (or email me offline)  
the relevant output of "rpm -qa --last"?  We may be able to figure  
out what update caused this issue.


In the mean time, anyone have any info on Kermit for CentOS 5?  We  
have some Kermit scripts sent to us by one of our vendors, so we  
can't just easily migrate to another serial communications tool.


Thanks,
Alfred


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Re: [CentOS] A couple of CentOS 5.1 issues

[Alfred von Campe]

On May 14, 2008, at 10:58, Alfred von Campe wrote:

In the mean time, anyone have any info on Kermit for CentOS 5?  We  
have some Kermit scripts sent to us by one of our vendors, so we  
can't just easily migrate to another serial communications tool.


I was able to compile the latest Kermit from sources and put the  
resulting binary in a network accessible location.  This should be  
good enough for now.  But I wonder why Kermit is no longer available.


The next missing package is DDD?  I was able to download the RPM from  
the EPEL repo (I do not want to enable that repo on my systems) and  
install it on my systems.  But again, I wonder why that package is no  
longer available?  Both DDD and Kermit were part of the base repo in  
CentOS 4.X.


Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Re: A couple of CentOS 5.1 issues

[Alfred von Campe]

On May 14, 2008, at 18:05, Scott Silva wrote:

CentOS usually creates whatever upstream gives out. You would have  
to see why RedHat stopped putting it in, or see if you can convince  
CentOS developers to add it to centosplus.


I understand the relationship with the upstream provider.  I was  
hoping for some insight as to why Kermit and DDD were dropped from  
the distro...


Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] A couple of CentOS 5.1 issues

[Alfred von Campe]

On May 14, 2008, at 20:12, Filipe Brandenburger wrote:


I don't know why you need kermit, but for serial-based
terminal/console access, minicom may do what you want. I use it to
access Unix/Linux hosts through the serial console and for network
switches and routers as well. It works OK for that.


We do use minicom for most all serial communications.  However, we  
have some Kermit scripts provided by a vendor that can only be run in  
Kermit.


Alfred

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[CentOS] Strange NTP problem

[Alfred von Campe]

I have 30 identical Lenovo desktop systems running CentOS 5.1.  On  
one of those systems the clock is running slow (5+ minutes from  
yesterday to this morning and another minute since this morning)  
despite the fact that NTP is running on all of them and they all have  
the exact same /etc/ntp.conf file (I compared the MD5 sums of that  
file on all the systems).  Here is the output of "grep ntp /var/log  
messages" on the system with the problem since I restarted the NTP  
daemon earlier today:


May 20 11:35:38 hepdsw03 ntpd[31791]: ntpd [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sat Nov  
10 12:33:50 UTC 2007 (1)

May 20 11:35:38 hepdsw03 ntpd[31792]: precision = 1.000 usec
May 20 11:35:38 hepdsw03 ntpd[31792]: Listening on interface  
wildcard, 0.0.0.0#123 Disabled
May 20 11:35:38 hepdsw03 ntpd[31792]: Listening on interface  
wildcard, ::#123 Disabled
May 20 11:35:38 hepdsw03 ntpd[31792]: Listening on interface lo, :: 
1#123 Enabled
May 20 11:35:38 hepdsw03 ntpd[31792]: Listening on interface eth0,  
fe80::210:c6ff:feab:dd92#123 Enabled
May 20 11:35:38 hepdsw03 ntpd[31792]: Listening on interface lo,  
127.0.0.1#123 Enabled
May 20 11:35:38 hepdsw03 ntpd[31792]: Listening on interface eth0,  
10.66.42.109#123 Enabled

May 20 11:35:38 hepdsw03 ntpd[31792]: kernel time sync status 0040
May 20 11:35:38 hepdsw03 ntpd[31792]: frequency initialized 0.000 PPM  
from /var/lib/ntp/drift
May 20 11:38:55 hepdsw03 ntpd[31792]: synchronized to LOCAL(0),  
stratum 10

May 20 11:38:55 hepdsw03 ntpd[31792]: kernel time sync disabled 0001
May 20 11:39:59 hepdsw03 ntpd[31792]: synchronized to 10.101.32.104,  
stratum 3
May 20 11:40:58 hepdsw03 ntpd[31792]: synchronized to LOCAL(0),  
stratum 10
May 20 11:42:09 hepdsw03 ntpd[31792]: synchronized to 10.101.32.104,  
stratum 3
May 20 11:47:26 hepdsw03 ntpd[31792]: synchronized to LOCAL(0),  
stratum 10
May 20 11:49:31 hepdsw03 ntpd[31792]: synchronized to 10.101.32.104,  
stratum 3
May 20 11:52:48 hepdsw03 ntpd[31792]: synchronized to LOCAL(0),  
stratum 10
May 20 11:54:54 hepdsw03 ntpd[31792]: synchronized to 10.101.32.104,  
stratum 3
May 20 12:01:26 hepdsw03 ntpd[31792]: synchronized to LOCAL(0),  
stratum 10


Any idea what could be causing this?  For now I have disabled the NTP  
daemon and am running ntpdate once an hour.  What complicates the  
matter is that we are using Kerberos for authentication, and after a  
day or so the user can not log into his system anymore because of the  
time skew.


Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Strange NTP problem

[Alfred von Campe]

On May 20, 2008, at 16:56, Paul Heinlein wrote:


A slew of 5 min/24 hrs should be in the range of fixable.


If the NTP daemon was doing its job :-).

This is very suspect. Are there any SELinux or other log messages  
suggesting that ntpd isn't able to write to its drift file? Your  
local clock is definitely drifting, so a 0.000 value is bogus. It  
may indicate that there's a disconnect between ntpd and the  
filesystem.


I grep'ed for ntp in the /var/log/messages file and there were no  
other instances of ntp.  SELinux is disabled, and all my systems are  
built with Kickstart from the same template file.  I'm fairly  
confident that the other 29 systems are configured identically to  
each other.


I'd be interested in the output of "ntpdc -c kerninfo"; on most  
systems the 'pll frequency' value is a close match to the figure in  
the drift file.


# ntpdc -c kerninfo
pll offset:   0 s
pll frequency:0.000 ppm
maximum error:0.02724 s
estimated error:  0 s
status:   0001  pll
pll time constant:6
precision:1e-06 s
frequency tolerance:  512 ppm

On a system where it's working, it looks like this:

# ntpdc -c kerninfo
pll offset:   0.011131 s
pll frequency:81.440 ppm
maximum error:0.241978 s
estimated error:  0.005287 s
status:   0001  pll
pll time constant:4
precision:1e-06 s
frequency tolerance:  512 ppm

I re-started the NTP daemon around 5:30 this afternoon, and the clock  
is already off by 45 seconds.  Here are the latest entries from /var/ 
log/messages:


May 20 17:25:25 hepdsw03 ntpd[4225]: ntpd [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sat Nov 10  
12:33:50 UTC 2007 (1)

May 20 17:25:25 hepdsw03 ntpd[4226]: precision = 1.000 usec
May 20 17:25:25 hepdsw03 ntpd[4226]: Listening on interface wildcard,  
0.0.0.0#123 Disabled
May 20 17:25:25 hepdsw03 ntpd[4226]: Listening on interface  
wildcard, ::#123 Disabled
May 20 17:25:25 hepdsw03 ntpd[4226]: Listening on interface lo, :: 
1#123 Enabled
May 20 17:25:25 hepdsw03 ntpd[4226]: Listening on interface eth0,  
fe80::210:c6ff:feab:dd92#123 Enabled
May 20 17:25:25 hepdsw03 ntpd[4226]: Listening on interface lo,  
127.0.0.1#123 Enabled
May 20 17:25:25 hepdsw03 ntpd[4226]: Listening on interface eth0,  
10.66.42.109#123 Enabled

May 20 17:25:25 hepdsw03 ntpd[4226]: kernel time sync status 0040
May 20 17:25:25 hepdsw03 ntpd[4226]: frequency initialized 0.000 PPM  
from /var/lib/ntp/drift
May 20 17:28:37 hepdsw03 ntpd[4226]: synchronized to LOCAL(0),  
stratum 10

May 20 17:28:37 hepdsw03 ntpd[4226]: kernel time sync disabled 0001
May 20 17:30:47 hepdsw03 ntpd[4226]: synchronized to 10.101.32.104,  
stratum 3
May 20 17:35:04 hepdsw03 ntpd[4226]: synchronized to LOCAL(0),  
stratum 10
May 20 17:37:13 hepdsw03 ntpd[4226]: synchronized to 10.101.32.104,  
stratum 3
May 20 17:38:18 hepdsw03 ntpd[4226]: synchronized to LOCAL(0),  
stratum 10


In comparison, here are the entries from a system where NTP is  
working as expected:


May 20 14:36:51 balboa01 ntpd[3374]: ntpd [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sat Nov 10  
12:33:50 UTC 2007 (1)

May 20 14:36:51 balboa01 ntpd[3375]: precision = 1.000 usec
May 20 14:36:51 balboa01 ntpd[3375]: Listening on interface wildcard,  
0.0.0.0#123 Disabled
May 20 14:36:51 balboa01 ntpd[3375]: Listening on interface  
wildcard, ::#123 Disabled
May 20 14:36:51 balboa01 ntpd[3375]: Listening on interface lo, :: 
1#123 Enabled
May 20 14:36:51 balboa01 ntpd[3375]: Listening on interface eth0,  
fe80::21a:6bff:fe46:33d1#123 Enabled
May 20 14:36:51 balboa01 ntpd[3375]: Listening on interface lo,  
127.0.0.1#123 Enabled
May 20 14:36:51 balboa01 ntpd[3375]: Listening on interface eth0,  
10.66.43.100#123 Enabled

May 20 14:36:51 balboa01 ntpd[3375]: kernel time sync status 0040
May 20 14:40:06 balboa01 ntpd[3375]: synchronized to LOCAL(0),  
stratum 10
May 20 14:41:10 balboa01 ntpd[3375]: synchronized to 10.101.32.104,  
stratum 3

May 20 15:00:26 balboa01 ntpd[3375]: time reset -1.533233 s
May 20 15:00:26 balboa01 ntpd[3375]: kernel time sync enabled 0001
May 20 15:03:45 balboa01 ntpd[3375]: synchronized to LOCAL(0),  
stratum 10
May 20 15:05:20 balboa01 ntpd[3375]: synchronized to 10.101.32.104,  
stratum 3


You said the machines are identical. Could there be any variation  
in the BIOS revision level or its settings? Sometimes ACPI stuff  
can mess up ntp.


Yes, there may be some BIOS revision differences, but I'm pretty sure  
that at least one of the other 29 systems has an identical BIOS  
revision.


Also -- the log messages you provide have no "step time server"  
reference. Do you have a valid /etc/ntp/step-tickers file?


The files exists but is empty on all my systems.

Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Strange NTP problem

[Alfred von Campe]

On May 20, 2008, at 20:25, Filipe Brandenburger wrote:


What is the output of "ntpq -np" ? You should have a line with a star
(*), otherwise it is not synchronizing. Start running NTP again, wait
for half an hour and issue that command to see what your output is. It
could be a problem related to filtering UDP traffic, either with
iptables on the machine itself, or some other router in the network
your machine is in.


Bad system:

# ntpq -np
 remote   refid  st t when poll reach   delay
offset  jitter
 
==
 10.101.32.104   67.128.71.65 3 u  689 1024  3770.659   
54095.7 4263.68
*127.127.1.0 .LOCL.  10 l   28   64  3770.000 
0.000   0.001


Good system:

# ntpq -np
 remote   refid  st t when poll reach   delay
offset  jitter
 
==
*10.101.32.104   67.128.71.65 3 u  232  256  3770.280
15.503   1.204
 127.127.1.0 .LOCL.  10 l   64   64  3770.000 
0.000   0.001


The bad system is synch'ing with itself (which was apparent from the  
messages in /var/log/messages).  The question is why?


Alfred



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Re: [CentOS] Strange NTP problem

[Alfred von Campe]

On May 21, 2008, at 0:55, Paul Heinlein wrote:


Yeah, with an offset of 54 seconds, it's a bad system. :-)

Try this (assuming 10.101.32.104 is your preferred local NTP server):

  service ntpd stop
  echo "10.101.32.104" > /etc/ntp/step-tickers
  service ntpd start

Adding a server to the step-tickers file will tell the ntpd init  
script to do an ntpdate sync against that host before starting ntpd.


In effect, that's what I did manually.  When I found out that about  
this problem, I did the following:


  # service ntpd stop
  # ntpdate ntp
  # service ntpd start

(ntp is a CNAME record for our local NTP server).  But after 24  
hours, the system was off my more than 5 minutes.  Why would it not  
bind to the NTP server.  Here is some output from tshark while ntpd  
was running:


# tshark udp port 123
Running as user "root" and group "root". This could be dangerous.
Capturing on eth0
  0.00 10.66.42.109 -> 10.101.32.104 NTP NTP client
  0.000683 10.101.32.104 -> 10.66.42.109 NTP NTP server
1025.000547 10.66.42.109 -> 10.101.32.104 NTP NTP client
1025.002017 10.101.32.104 -> 10.66.42.109 NTP NTP server
2050.000145 10.66.42.109 -> 10.101.32.104 NTP NTP client
2050.000812 10.101.32.104 -> 10.66.42.109 NTP NTP server
3076.000485 10.66.42.109 -> 10.101.32.104 NTP NTP client
3076.001917 10.101.32.104 -> 10.66.42.109 NTP NTP server
4101.001065 10.66.42.109 -> 10.101.32.104 NTP NTP client
4101.002016 10.101.32.104 -> 10.66.42.109 NTP NTP server
5126.000671 10.66.42.109 -> 10.101.32.104 NTP NTP client
5126.001551 10.101.32.104 -> 10.66.42.109 NTP NTP server
6151.001270 10.66.42.109 -> 10.101.32.104 NTP NTP client
6151.001868 10.101.32.104 -> 10.66.42.109 NTP NTP server
7175.999866 10.66.42.109 -> 10.101.32.104 NTP NTP client
7176.000482 10.101.32.104 -> 10.66.42.109 NTP NTP server
8201.999206 10.66.42.109 -> 10.101.32.104 NTP NTP client
8202.000563 10.101.32.104 -> 10.66.42.109 NTP NTP server
9227.000796 10.66.42.109 -> 10.101.32.104 NTP NTP client
9227.001462 10.101.32.104 -> 10.66.42.109 NTP NTP server

Does this make any sense?

Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Strange NTP problem

[Alfred von Campe]

I'm still having this issue.  Here is another update.  I noticed that  
the drift file for the system with the problem contained "0.000".  On  
most other systems this contains a positive number (and on two a  
negative number).  I deleted the drift file, resynch'ed the time with  
"ntpdate ", restarted the NTP daemon, and waited for the  
drift file to be recreated.  It again contained "0.000" and the  
output of "ntpq -np looked like this:


   remote   refid  st t when poll reach   delay
offset  jitter
   
 
==
   10.101.32.104   67.128.71.65 3 u   49   64  3770.611   
1871.40 987.132
  *127.127.1.0 .LOCL.  10 l   48   64  3770.000 
0.000   0.001


I replaced the drift file with the contents of the file before the  
upgrade to CentOS, resynch'ed the time, and restarted the NTP  
daemon.  But after a little while, the system is "bound" to itself  
again.


BTW, the output of the cron job running ntpdate once an hour showed  
that the system has a very steady drift of 14.9 seconds every hour.   
Does that seem excessive?  NTP should be able to handle this, right?


Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] kernel-2.6.18-53.1.21.el5 centosplus?

[Alfred von Campe]

On May 28, 2008, at 14:08, Johnny Hughes wrote:

We are currently using the builders to build centos-5.2 ... I can  
try to  get the that kernel in, but we should very soon thereafter  
have the 5.2 one, so it might be better for you just to wait.


Does the 5.2 kernel include the NFS patch (RH bug 32 I think)?   
The only reason I am using the centosplus kernel is because of the  
NFS performance issue.  Oh, and I also like to have framebuffer  
support in the kernel which was missing from the previous centosplus  
kernel.  So if the 5.2 kernel includes the NFS patch, and has FB  
support, that would make my day!


Alfred :-)

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[CentOS] Frequent Gnome Terminal crashes in CentOS 5.1

[Alfred von Campe]

Ever since I upgraded all my systems to CentOS 5.1 I have been  
getting reports from users about "all their windows disappearing".  A  
little digging revealed that they meant all gnome-terminal windows.   
Since there is only one gnome-terminal process by default for all  
your open terminal windows and tabs, a crash of that process means  
losing all your terminal windows.  These crashes often (but not  
always) occur over night when the system is otherwise idle.


A quick Google search found a problem on Ubuntu related to VTE (the  
terminal emulator widget used by gnome-terminal) but not much else of  
interest.  Has anyone on this list experienced this?  I find it hard  
to believe I'm the only one.  I never saw this issue while running  
CentOS 4.X on these systems...


Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Frequent Gnome Terminal crashes in CentOS 5.1

[Alfred von Campe]

On May 29, 2008, at 14:48, Johnny Hughes wrote:


How did you upgrade?


Fresh install via kickstart.  I reformatted the root and /boot  
partitions, but left one user partition untouched.


Is it possible that you have older (possibly orphaned) binaries  
still installed from the upgrade process?


I don't think this is possible since I reformatted the root partition  
(I only have /, /boot, and /scratch partitions in addition to a swap  
partition).



If this is from a NEW install, then we need more info to help.


The process ends without leaving a trace unfortunately (at least that  
I can find).  I did have an strace running on one system attached to  
the gnone-terminal process and it finally died after 5 days or so.   
Here are the last 20 lines from the log:


  open("/usr/share/X11/XErrorDB", O_RDONLY) = 27
  fstat64(27, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=37949, ...}) = 0
  read(27, "! $Xorg: XErrorDB,v 1.3 2000/08/"..., 37949) = 37949
  close(27)   = 0
  write(2, "The program \'gnome-terminal\' rec"..., 592) = 592
  close(18)   = 0
  kill(15700, SIGTERM)= 0
  writev(14, [{"GIOP\1\2\1\5\0\0\0\0", 12}], 1) = 12
  close(14)   = 0
  writev(15, [{"GIOP\1\2\1\5\0\0\0\0", 12}], 1) = 12
  close(15)   = 0
  writev(13, [{"GIOP\1\2\1\5\0\0\0\0", 12}], 1) = 12
  close(13)   = 0
  writev(11, [{"GIOP\1\2\1\5\0\0\0\0", 12}], 1) = 12
  close(11)   = 0
  close(9)= 0
  close(8)= 0
  unlink("/tmp/orbit-kb12698/linc-3d51-0-2491c193d89b6") = 0
  close(12)   = 0
  exit_group(1)   = ?

Is there a better way than strace to get some information on this crash?

Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Frequent Gnome Terminal crashes in CentOS 5.1

[Alfred von Campe]

On May 29, 2008, at 20:58, Filipe Brandenburger wrote:

strace seems fine, just use some options to enhance the output you  
get:
-s 1024: take 1024 bytes for every string. This wouldn't have cut  
that one short

-tt: if you want timestamps
-f: to follow forked processes


Great suggestion.  I didn't know about the -s switch.  I'll change  
the strace to use all those options and wait for it to fail again.


Alfred

P.S.  There was nothing interesting in any of the log files.
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[CentOS] General CentOS 5.1 (or Gnome) instability?

[Alfred von Campe]

I've been a big fan of CentOS for a while, and didn't have many  
issues with CentOS 4.X over the past few years.  However, since  
moving to CentOS 5.1 a few weeks ago, I have received more problem  
reports from my users than in the last year and a half on CentOS  
4.X.  I've previously reported the problem with gnome-terminal  
crashing (and since there is a single gnome-terminal process by  
default all your terminal windows disappear which makes this really  
painful), and now I'm getting multiple reports of Gnome applets  
suddenly quitting.  Sometimes this includes the entire screen  
"flashing" (probably a side effect of the "Show Desktop" applet  
exiting).  I've also had reports of some third party tools like  
SlickEdit misbehaving and/or crashing on CentOS 5.1.


Don't get me wrong; I'm not really complaining about CentOS.  I  
really appreciate what the CentOS team does.  I am just wondering if  
anyone else has seen these issues.  If it was just one or two users,  
I would suspect the hardware or some configuration issues.  But these  
issues started cropping up after I upgraded our existing systems to  
CentOS 5.1.  The "upgrade" was a complete reinstall via a kickstart  
script (I reformatted all partitions/LVs except for one), and all  
systems are configured identically.  BTW, I'm using CentOS for our  
desktops as well as our servers, and all these problems are really  
confined to the desktop systems.  Almost everyone uses the default  
Gnome desktop.


So, does anyone else have the perception that CentOS 5.X  
(particularly Gnome) is a little less stable than CentOS 4.X or is it  
just me?


Alfred

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Re: [CentOS] Frequent Gnome Terminal crashes in CentOS 5.1

[Alfred von Campe]

On May 29, 2008, at 20:58, Filipe Brandenburger wrote:

strace seems fine, just use some options to enhance the output you  
get:
-s 1024: take 1024 bytes for every string. This wouldn't have cut  
that one short

-tt: if you want timestamps
-f: to follow forked processes


I started strace with those parameters, but the strace output did not  
change:


18:55:21 read(3, "\1\365\342\34\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\20\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0 
\0\20\0\0\0\234?\37\10", 32) = 32

18:55:21 write(3, "\0\0\2\0\1\0\1\0", 8) = 8
18:55:21 read(3, "\0\1\343\34\371\377?\3\0\0\0\0\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\10\0 
\0\0\317U\t\10\0\0\0\0", 32) = 32

18:55:21 open("/usr/share/X11/XErrorDB", O_RDONLY) = 25
18:55:21 fstat64(25, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=37949, ...}) = 0
18:55:21 read(25, "! $Xorg: XErrorDB,v 1.3 2000/08/"..., 37949) = 37949
18:55:21 close(25)  = 0
18:55:21 write(2, "The program \'gnome-terminal\' rec"..., 592) = 592
18:55:21 close(18)  = 0
18:55:21 kill(26097, SIGTERM)   = 0
18:55:21 writev(14, [{"GIOP\1\2\1\5\0\0\0\0", 12}], 1) = 12
18:55:21 close(14)  = 0
18:55:21 writev(15, [{"GIOP\1\2\1\5\0\0\0\0", 12}], 1) = 12
18:55:21 close(15)  = 0
18:55:21 writev(13, [{"GIOP\1\2\1\5\0\0\0\0", 12}], 1) = 12
18:55:21 close(13)  = 0
18:55:21 writev(11, [{"GIOP\1\2\1\5\0\0\0\0", 12}], 1) = 12
18:55:21 close(11)  = 0
18:55:21 close(9)   = 0
18:55:21 close(8)   = 0
18:55:21 unlink("/tmp/orbit-kb12698/linc-65ef-0-4ceb1113e5b63") = 0
18:55:21 close(12)  = 0
18:55:21 exit_group(1)  = ?

However, this time we started the gnome-terminal process from an  
xterm, and here is what appeared on the screen after the crash:


** (gnome-terminal:26095): WARNING **: No handler for control  
sequence `device-control-string' defined.  [there were a bunch of  
these lines, I think it happened before the crash]

The program 'gnome-terminal' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'BadRequest (invalid request code or no such operation)'.
  (Details: serial 19864803 error_code 1 request_code 0 minor_code 0)
  (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;
   that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
   To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
   option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
   backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error()  
function.)


I will try to follow the instructions in the output to capture a  
better error next time.  I should probably also recompile gnome- 
terminal with symbol information...


Alfred



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Re: [CentOS] General CentOS 5.1 (or Gnome) instability?

[Alfred von Campe]

On Jun 4, 2008, at 16:59, William L. Maltby wrote:


As to your specific problem, since hardware is not common among the
users reporting problems, I suspect that the only commonality is the
configuration *beginning* with the automated install. My thought is
there is some flaw in it that becomes common to (almost?) all the
installations.


Actually, the hardware is mostly the same for all users (Lenovo  
ThinkCentre desktop towers).  And it was working fine with CentOS  
4.6.  The kickstart scripts are mostly the same from 4.6 with  
adjustments for the changes in 5.X.  The one new thing that I forgot  
to mention is that at the same time of the upgrade we switched NIS  
domains.  The old NIS server was an old Solaris system, and the new  
one is integrated with Windows (I think it's using Windows Services  
for Unix).  But I don't think a different NIS infrastructure can  
cause the instability I'm seeing.



It might be instructive to do one real manual install (that matches as
closely as possible the automated results) on a representative system
and an automated one. Then map the differences.


I really trust kickstart, so I don't think that is the issue.


Just as general notes from astutely watching this list, I guess mixed
32/64 bit libs could be an issue. Components from mixed repositories?
All yum updated (been several things fixed since original 5.1 - I  
don't

know if they are related).


No mixed environment here.  Everything is 32-bit.  I am running the  
centosplus kernel because of the NFS performance issue.



Have you examined the logs for any machines that seem consistently
problematic?


Yes, I have and found nothing interesting.  I did have another gnome- 
terminal crash tonight, and I'll update the other thread shortly.


Alfred

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