Dropbear

Tag: debian

  • pidof moving to procps

    pidof is a program that finds the PID of a named program. In some ways it is like a cut-down pgrep found in the procps package.  pidof currently sits in sysvinit-tools.

    There are plans to move all utilities that use the proc filesystem under one package which will make the maintenance of them simpler, which in effect means moving pidof from sysvinit-tools to procps. The short-term bump should make it better in the long term.

    Now as I wear two hats (Debian maintainer and procps upstream) there are two very important things I/we need to know.

    • If your Debian package depends on pidof being present, then we need to discuss dependencies. procps is generally installed on most systems but there might be corner cases. Possibly just depending on a specific version of procps will do it
    • If you, your Debian package or anything else (including other distributions) need the non-LSB options of pidof (ie they use -c -n or -m) then we (upstream) need to know about it. There are provisional plans not to support these options but they’re needed, or a subset is, then that could change.

    Debian developers can chime in on the debian-devel email list, or email myself. If its an upstream issue then either email me, or even better, the procps email list

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  • Careful with apache upgrades

    You might (or not if you don’t visit) notice all my websites were down.  A rushed apt-get dist-upgrade and I found two problems:

    1. PHP5 got removed, which is bad if you run a wordpress site that uses PHP to run
    2. The apache configuration has changed.

    Yes, the NEWS entries did warn me, if I read them fully. Yes, I didn’t read them enough.

    Apache now ignores configuration files that don’t end in .conf To give a completely non-theoretical example, if you have your virtual hosts in files such as /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/enc.com.au then this will not be recognised and your sites will show the default “It works” page.

    Stuff that doesn’t fall in the usual places where website stuff should go, which for my setup is a lot of things, will also be denied as the developers have tightened up the rules around what is permitted.  Pretty simple to fix with a few <Directory blah> clauses.

    This isn’t a criticism of the Debian apache developers. They do an awesome job of keeping the package workable, flexible but secure which isn’t easy.  Now it’s all back working, I actually agree with the changes they have made. It is just that the latest changes are, well, tricky so be forewarned.

     

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  • procps-ng 3.3.7 Released

    procps-ng version 3.3.7 was released today.  It has some new and interesting features in the top program that Jim has been busy working on.  There is a new filter feature which can exclude fields that match a value for example. The remainder of the changes are small bug fixes and getting the compile warnings count down with -Wall enabled. The library revision was updated but this did not involve an API or ABI change.

    procps-ng can be downloaded off the sourceforge page which has the current and previous releases stored there. Alternatively you can visit our gitorious page if git fetch is more your thing. Debian packages will be going into experimental until the freeze is over and we get things unblocked.

  • Off to LCA2013

    While I’ve been involve in Linux and Debian for many (15 or more) years, I’ve only ever been to one “major Linux thing” in all that time and that was manning some stall for Debian about 10 years ago.

    Well, let’s call it two because next week I’m off to the Linux.conf.au 2013 conference. I can’t get too terribly excited about the location because its… Canberra, yep my (now) home town and about 4 blocks from my workplace; so no exotic locales for me!

    I’m hoping to catch up with some Debian folk while the conference is on. There is at the very least a keysigning party where there are some others from Debian on Wednesday.

    PS WordPress update broke the visual editing, I hope it looks ok.

  • procps 3.3.6 and Mudlet 2.0

    Mudlet - Graphical MUD clientYesterday was a busy Debian day for me with the release of not one but two packages.

    procps

    procps version 3.3.6 was released both as an upstream and a Debian package.  While there were many bug fixes in this release, the main new feature for it was the top inspect feature.

    The top inspect feature allows you to run top in the normal way then you can inspect a specific process you have selected within top for more information.  Examples of this include fuser or lsof type output to see what files or libraries are open but really the limit is how clever the operator is and how often you would need this information.  Even scripts can be run off this feature if you have some customised or cooked output you need to see.  Once the output is there, you can search for text.

    There will be a small hold-up with the Debian packages as the section for the  library has been moved to libs, where it should be. At least I think that’s why there is a delay.

    procps infrastructure

    procps currently has only an email list and a gitorious git repository.  While this works most of the time, there are two main problems with this setup.

    The first is that the only two ways you can report bugs is send an email to the list or create a git merge request. The email has the problem with tracking and gathering history while the git sets the bar pretty high for reporting something has gone wrong.

    Second problem is there is no tarball file repository.  gitorious does have the feature of downloading tarballs of the tag checkpoints, but this is the raw repository.  When you make a tarball with “make dist” there are some generated files included in the tarball that don’t appear in the gitorious ones, which means its not a simple for some as you expect.

    So I’ll be creating a project for these two features soon.  Not sure where they will be but I use sourceforge for both these for a few other projects so that might be where they end up.

     

    Mudlet

    Mudlet, the multi-user dungeon or MUD client, has finally made it to version 2.0!  It looks a lot more stable and polished at least from the scripting side than the previous RC versions but has all the features that we’ve come to expect with it.  The most important thing is that the developers have finally put a line in the sand and said “this is version 2.0”.  The Debian package was uploaded yesterday and should be on its way to your local mirror soon.

     

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  • debhelper versions – Guilty!

    After reading Jakub’s pet peeve about debhelper build-dependencies I decided to check my own and sponsored packages to see how they fare.

    find debian/ -type f -name control | xargs grep -h -o 'debhelper (>= 9[^)]*)' | sort | uniq -c
      2 debhelper (>= 9)
      2 debhelper (>= 9.0)
      3 debhelper (>= 9.0.0)
      1 debhelper (>= 9.20120115)

    Oops! Something to fix in all subsequent releases.

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  • pam bugs hurt

    I did some upgrades of what seemed like a million packages today on my Debian sid computer.  I was doing this remotely and when I tried to ssh back in I got kicked out after entering my password, hmmm.

    OK, so I waited until I could get in front of it and tried to login to the console and was greeted with the message “Cannot make/remove an entry” and kicked out, even as root; double hmmm.

    So it was boot into single user time which, thankfully worked. bash loaded ok so it wasn’t a shell problem.  However su failed which means we are into pam problem territory.  I found a bug report that sounded like my problem, but with no clear solution except upgrade in Ubuntu.

     

    The solution was pretty simple for me.  It’s something funky with /etc/pam.d/common-sesssion and a simple ‘/usr/sbin/pam-auth-update’ fixed it for me.

     

     

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  • procps-ng 3.3.3 released

    top
    Top in colour mode

    This weekend procps-ng version 3.3.3 was tagged and released for distribution.  There have been many patches and fixes involved in this release as we move from an unchanging static sort of code into something that is easier to maintain and build on various architectures.  The good thing is I’m down to 1 or 2 patches in the Debian archive which is a big change from the 30 or 40-odd I used to carry.  For the sole metric of getting that number down, the project fork has been a success.

     

    There were some post-release bugs I found and these were more to do with the various options turned on or off rather than what you’d see if you did the basic ./configure && make.  One of them was how the version numbers are defined in git, but would only appear if certain files were older than others (such as aclocal.m4 versus config.h.in)  Others were when certain features were turned on.  The make check doesn’t see all of this because it uses the default configure flags.

    One annoying thing of the autotools is conditionally installing man pages. This is where you don’t or cannot compile a binary so you don’t install the corresponding man page.  The automake documentation is of course obscure about this but I cannot see a way of distributing only a man page, so we have this fiddle where a file goes into dist_man_MANS or EXTRA_DIST depending.

    Interestingly, there has been some bike-shedding around Fedora-land (see the link below) regarding the name procps-ng versus procps.  Debian is lucky that we do have different upstream and package names (though not ideal) so apt-get install procps still gives you procps.  There also has been discussion about merging procps-ng into util-linux whichin the short-term won’t be happening.

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  • psmisc 22.16 Released

    psmisc version 22.16 was released today.  It is a bugfix release that bascially fixes a problem around strings in C.  Process name lengths are only supposed to be 16 characters long, so a 17 bye buffer is ok; until you have processes with brackets which means the string is 18 characters.

    The next wrinkle is that at times the brackets are stripped out so matches fail because the lengths don’t quite line up. You’ll see this with the Debian 22.15-2 version of psmisc where killall won’t find long-named processes.

    So, 22.16 fixes all that.

    Test Processes

    It really shows that psmisc needs a set of tests like procps has already. The difficulty with both is that its not simple in the DejaGNU framework to make test processes. These are not the programs within the package but other processes that the programs can work on.  There really needs to be an equivalent to touch for processes just for this sort of thing.  Creating processes is rather simple, but ensuring they go away is the tricky part, or they die with certain signals.

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  • VMware Player on Debian

    For various reasons, having vmware running on my desktop would be kind of useful.  VMware provide a Free (as in beer) version of their software called VMware Player. I downloaded the file VMware-Player-4.0.2-591240.x86_64.bundle off their website and tried to build it.

    It failed to build. Given my previous lack of success with VMware server, I wasn’t too surprised.  What was surprising was it wasn’t too hard to fix it.  The problem was that the vmnet module would not compile and that was due to three things:

    • net device ops no longer has set_multicast_list (in netif.c)
    • the linux module header needs to be included to define THIS_MODULE
    • skb_frag_t has been redefined and needs an adjustment

    The patch is only a few lines and means I can compile vmware on my Debian sid computer running kernel 3.2.0-1

    vmnet.patch

    To use it, you will need to find where the modules are built, for me it is /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source

    1. mv vmnet.tar vmnet2.tar
    2. tar xf vmnet2.tar
    3. patch -p0 < vmnet.patch
    4. tar cf vmnet.tar vmnet-only

    With that you can run the player which will try to build the modules and you’re done!

     

     

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