Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

I use CentOS rather than Gentoo as the host operating system for Xen boxes.  After a recent upgrade to CentOS 5.2, I rebooted to find that my Xen virtual machines could no longer communicate with my LAN.

This is caused by two problems:

• libvirtd (/etc/init.d/libvirtd) sets up its own network bridge device, assigns the IP address range 192.168.122.* to this device, and kicks off its own copy of dnsmasq to provide DHCP services to your virtual machines.  Use chkconfig to switch off libvirtd and reboot CentOS to clear this problem.
• If you don’t specify a MAC address in your XenU’s config file, each XenU gets a randomly generated MAC address.  An upstream change in udev (which Gentoo uses) ensures that each ethernet interface with a different MAC address is assigned a new eth* number, which will screw up your networking start scripts.  Edit /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules file and rename the ethernet devices in there, and then make sure you specify the same fixed MAC address in your XenU’s config file too.

I hope this saves time for other people.

I’ve just done an upgrade of a web box from Apache 2.0.x to Apache 2.2.8, using Portage 2.1.4.4. Somehow, Apache got built after the modules (PHP, Subversion, etc etc) were upgraded - and not before. This left Apache completely unable to start, because the modules had been linked against Apache 2.0. Grrr.

Gentoo’s new Apache 2.2.8 default config also left behind the mod_ssl config file from Apache 2.0 (for some reason, instead of updating this file, Apache 2.2.8 comes with a mod_ssl file with a different name)

Also had problems with /usr/lib/apache2/logs not existing, and with Apache’s Listen directive being hidden away inside the default vhost, instead of in the main config file where it belongs.

All in all, took me a couple of hours to dig through everything and sort it out. It’s not like Gentoo’s Apache team to fsck things up as badly as this; I hope this isn’t a sign of things to come, or else I’ll fork these packages and maintain them myself.

Give or take a couple of weeks, it’s been 12 months since I resigned from Gentoo.  At the time, I said that I was looking to continue my work on the Seeds project “downstream” of Gentoo.  I’m now ready to do that.

Seed Linux, hosted on Google Code, is the official successor to Gentoo Seeds project that I started during my time at Gentoo.  At the moment, there’s an embryonic overlay and wiki, and a handy script to build a Seed Linux Xen VM from scratch (tested on CentOS 5) - and four basic seeds for x86:

• portage-server is a simple local rsync server seed for the Portage tree, to save your Seeds having to sync their trees from the Net all the time.
• file-server is a very simple Samba server for running on a home or office file server.
• lamp-server is a basic LAMP (Linux, Apache, PHP 5, MySQL) stack, perfect for running a blog on.  It also supports mod_python and Ruby on Rails, but I plan on releasing a separate LAMR stack in the future (an optimised LAMP stack makes for poor LAMR performance, and vice versa).
• devbox is an empty seed, useful for developing other seeds

I’m also working on a basic home-gateway seed (email/anti-spam/internal DNS/VPN gateway), but that isn’t ready to commit just yet.

The whole idea behind the Seeds is to do what Gentoo has never managed - to provide out-of-the-box working solutions to specific problems.  To do that, I need somewhere I can host pre-compiled Seeds for users to download. If anyone can provide suitable diskspace and bandwidth (or knows anyone who can), I’d love to hear from you!

When I recently bought my new MacBook Pro, I also picked up a copy of Parallels Desktop for Mac from the same store. That turned out to be a bit of a mistake.

I downloaded the latest beta of Parallels, only to find that the license key that came in the retail copy of Parallels wasn’t recognised by the beta. More than a bit puzzled (the instructions for the beta state that you can re-use your existing license key), I contacted Parallels’ support team for help.

It turns out that the retail copy of Parallels that I bought isn’t supported by Parallels at all. Not the customer service I was looking for. I have to go through the UK reseller for support.

Why do I have the feeling that this is going to turn into a saga?

Don’t make my mistake - if you want to get yourself a copy of Parallels, make sure you download it from their website. Don’t waste your money on a boxed copy from a store.

Contrary to what this week’s Gentoo Weekly News says, please don’t contact me about the removal of the nxserver packages from Portage. That section of GWN appears to be auto-generated by a script, and not checked by a human prior to publication.

Please send all queries to nx@gentoo.org instead. I believe Stefan (genstef) has taken over the NX packages.

I’d just like to say thank you to everyone who’s contacted me since I retired, offering words of support and understanding. I’ve made many great friends over the last three years, and enjoyed great working relationships with many more folks, and I hope we all keep in touch in the future.

I have no intention of talking about my retirement in public, so please stop asking me to. I’ve left Gentoo. My involvement with it is now history as far as I am concerned. I can’t stop you talking about why I left, but whatever concerns you want to raise about Gentoo, please make sure they’re your personal concerns instead of whatever you believe it was that finally made me decide to quit. Just leave me out of it, please.

A few folks have been in touch to call me a “coward” for leaving. I despise each and every one of you for that (which I’m sure is hardly news to you). You only make me wonder how you can look at yourselves in the mirror each morning.

My upstream contact at 2X - Raphael - would like to hear from anyone interested in continuing the work I started on bringing the 2X Linux Terminal Server to Gentoo.

If that sounds like you, please contact him directly via raphael at 2x dot com.

I’ve left Gentoo this evening. I have resigned both as a Trustee, and as a developer, with immediate effect. I wish everyone all the best.

There are great people already in place to pick up most of the projects and packages that I’ve been involved with over the last three and a half years. The NX packages and the Seeds project are the only two major ones where there’s currently no-one in place to hand them to. It’s no longer up to me what will happen to both of these inside Gentoo.

I have taken a full backup of the Seeds project. After a short break to recharge my batteries, I’ll move downstream (so to speak) and continue to develop the LAMP Server seed as an independent project outside of Gentoo.

I’ve stopped downloading email sent to my Gentoo email address. All email sent there will now go unread. If you want to get hold of me, I can be reached via my Gmail account - stuart dot herbert at gmail.com. This blog will disappear from Planet Gentoo soon (as is right and proper), but I’ll continue to post news about the Seeds project on my personal blog after my short break.

I’ve only done very basic testing, but so far I’m not seeing any problems at all with trying to run the Perl components (nxnode, and nxserver) from the 2X Linux Terminal Server as normal, interpreted Perl scripts.

I’m currently working on a patch for the server/nxnode component so that it will create and install nxnode and nxserver as interpreted scripts. Mostly, it’s just a case of stripping out all the steps used for compiling the scripts, and trying to install the dedicated Perl interpreter.

Once that’s done, it’ll be time to fill out the src_install() function of the ebuild … and then we’ll have something we can start testing for real.

… is don’t use SeaMonkey to try and write long blog posts