Thursday, August 30, 2007

Revisor on Enterprise Linux

Although these are just preliminary results; Revisor (in CLI mode) now also runs on Enterprise Linux 5!

I've composed a minimal Fedora 7 installation CD which (while I'm writing this), is done formatting the partitions of a QEMU guest, and installing packages.

-some time later-
It's booting as well. In the meantime, I've been trying to get live media going on EL5 too, but I haven't managed to get it working, yet.

Tagged nonetheless and built: http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=4446

Friday, August 3, 2007

Spinning Fedora X, X-1 and X+1

In the past, I've been told building Fedora X would require the host doing the building to also run Fedora X. Not Fedora X+1 or Fedora X-1. Really Fedora X. It wouldn't be possible any other way. I assure you it wasn't my grandma or girlfriend telling me this.

Taking matters into my own hands, being the stubborn m-f that I am, I've been successfully building

on F7: FC6, F7 and F8t1 or rawhide
on F8t1 (rawhide): FC6, F7 and F8t1 or rawhide.

I've just not been able to build anything on X-1, but that's it. The rest, I did. And it's my very own application failing to do anything on FC6 because I've managed to create pretty hard requirements towards Fedora 7 or later.

Some of you think: "You didn't. It's impossible. I told you it was impossible. Period."

I'll add to that, that I've not only successfully built these spins -meaning that I didn't get any errors or warnings during the builds-, but they also successfully passed Q&A (although as we know FC6 had bugs in doing certain types of installations, so it didn't really /pass/ Q&A but it did anyway, and of course I'm not sure what Q&A requirements have been set for F8(t1)).

Bingo.

NetworkManager and NetworkManagerDispatcher

Imagine you connect your laptop to your home network and you want to authenticate against nis.home.org, using automatically mounted home directories from fileserver.home.org. The following morning, you arrive at the office and connecting your laptop to the network there, you wait for ypbind to bind to nis.home.org (which just so happens to be unavailable), and you cannot log in directly as your home directory cannot be mounted (because fileserver.home.org just so happens to be unavailable too). In addition, your office uses LDAP authentication and has a group data share you want to mount.

I'm guessing you'll need to at least disable ypbind, and maybe change authentication configuration and start using LDAP. You're also probably gonna want to mount that group data share and not automount your home directory from some NFS share.

Are you performing all these changes by hand? Does your office allow you to change it all? How does the office manage to support all that? I don't know.

What I do know is that I personally have a similar use-case with my laptop that I want to be able to connect to my home network having NIS and autofs, while not having to change the system configuration when I'm 'offline' -not connected to my home network.

I've begun to use the NetworkManagerDispatcher: it allows me to execute some scripts that would be able to detect wherever I am and adjust my system configuration accordingly. I'll call it NetworkManagerDispatcherScripts (don't try and say that out loud very fast, twice). There's a proof of concept piece of code at http://git.kanarip.com/?p=nmdscripts/.git which you can get with;

git clone git://git.kanarip.com/nmdscripts/

Execute the ./nmdscript script and see if you're connected to one of the pre-configured networks (which all apply to my home networks). Until now, it's just detecting some network characteristics and not executing any system configuration changes, and I'm just curious what anyone thinks about it.