shivan.org

MSE Might Be On To Something

MSE Everquest2.exe Prompt

You know… It could be right.  Everquest 2 requires administrative privileges if you are using the old-style client, opens multiple network connections, slams the CPU for hours and tries to sell me stuff constantly.

Best antivirus software evah.  *Clicks Send*

Quicktime Fail And You

I keep telling myself one of these days Apple will get the whole “Windows” thing right…

While trying to figure out why (yet again) the Quicktime plugin silently fails within Firefox I decide to do an uninstall and reinstall.  During the uninstall this lovely thing pops up…

So... ok?

Quicktime continues its decade long streak of being mental violence in software form.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Security

NFS v4 is broken on ALL systems running Red Hat Enterprise 5.4.  The Bugzilla entry is Bug 524520.

If you are lucky you’ll be using some Java app that will throw a fit immediately about not having permission to create files.  If you are not lucky you won’t notice until you see that file permissions are all randomized on the backing host file system.  Who wants random SUID files?  I do!  I do! Red Hat knows this is a security issue.  The bug report says it is “Important”.  All it takes is a single “yum update” and if you are using NFS v4, congrats, you win!

Red Hat won’t release a fix for this until November.

Guys?  Hello?  NFS v4 shouldn’t be broken for three months!  It isn’t a “preview” it is a production feature.  The fact you are setting file permissions to uninitialized values at all SHOULD BE FIXED YESTERDAY.

Grrrr…..  How many bugs like this are being hidden inside Bugzilla?

Angst over RHEL’s Slowing Pace

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is getting very old. As an example let’s look at RHEL 5’s kernel. RHEL 5’s kernel is based on upsteam vanilla 2.6.18.4. The original 2.6.18 release happened in September of 2006. Every RHEL 5 kernel is a modified version of this upstream release.

The source RPM file for building RHEL 5’s 2.6.18-128.1.14.el5 kernel contains 2680 patch files to be applied against vanilla 2.6.18.4 source. The diffstat from a full patched tree vs 2.6.18 vanilla:

 3780 files changed, 235061 insertions(+), 170479 deletions(-)

Since RHEL 5’s release they have backported large chunks of drivers, bugfixes, and new functionality from mainline to their custom 2.6.18 kernel. As a RHEL and CentOS user these efforts are appreciated. I religiously read the release notes from major updates hoping that Red Hat has blessed us with gifts backported from the mainline tree. But more often then not one ends up disappointed that some key functionality available from the mainline Linux kernel is nowhere to be found.

The userspace receives a bit less attention. Bugfixes and security issues that bite Red Hat’s biggest customers get backported and there is an occasional version bump but for the most part the userspace doesn’t get much churn. As time rolls on my coworkers and I find ourselves reaching for compilers more and more often as the included open-source tools become so outdated as to become obsolete.

In the RHEL 3 and 4 days these backports served the purpose of introducing some needed new functionality and bugfixes while providing a long supported stable environment. It was just enough so that one could get along until the next major RHEL release. The time between new major releases was about two years give or take a couple months.

Unfortunately we’re about three months beyond the two year mark since the release of RHEL 5 and the next version (RHEL 6) is nowhere to be seen. Even more concerning is that Red Hat has announced that in the next major update (RHEL 5.4) they will be introducing a new virtualization platform and spinning off new products based on it. There is no concrete information on RHEL 6 anywhere that I can find.

What do I take away from this? RHEL 6 is at least six months off if not over a year off. The userspace of RHEL 5 is getting to be so old it’s starting to stink and frankly I’m getting tired of not having access to newer userspace and kernel features. I like Red Hat as a company but I’m getting annoyed at their flagship product.

I work in a .EDU and we use Red Hat’s very generous discounts so we are definitely not one of their high margin customers. I personally maintain a mix of commercial and open source software installs and in the past I’ve chosen to standardize on RHEL and it’s clone CentOS.

Unfortunately with the RHEL release schedules becoming so long between releases it looks like it would save me time and effort to start dumping RHEL for anything except Oracle and proprietary application servers. It certainly would reduce the amount of SRPM fiddling I end up doing and give me many more options as to update frequency.

Switching between Ubuntu LTS and the most recent non-LTS is trivial compared to switching between Fedora and Red Hat. And as much as people in the Fedora camp protest this view to the outside world Fedora’s lack of polish and 13 month support cycle means it is little more than an installable checkpoint on the Rawhide road. There is no granularity between them whereas in the Ubuntu world there is.

Is this really the trend that Red Hat wants to continue? Is there nothing in between excruciatingly slow updates with long support and Rawhide? Can there be a RHEL release lifecycle that doesn’t involve end customers eventually having to drag out the compiler and replace a part of the product?

Trip to the Bronx Zoo

Last Sunday I took a trip to the Bronx Zoo. I took a few hundred photos over a 5 hour period. I used the trip as an excuse to learn how to use my new camera and managed to get a few decent shots. Below are the best photos from the trip.

First Test Photos

Here were the best of the test photos I took with my new camera. This gives me an excuse to play with Wordpress’s built-in gallery system.

I’ll put up some photos from my trip to the Zoo when I have more energy.

“The Maw”

Just finished a great little game available from Steam called “The Maw“. The game is a modern Platformer
with disgustingly cute aliens. The two aliens escape from a prison together and form a friendship centering on the one alien helping the other alien eat everything on the planet. While the characters, the animation style and the style of mayhem might seem a bit childish I can assure you its highly entertaining and very unpredictable.

Not a single word is spoken throughout the game yet there is plenty of story. Emotions are conveyed through the style of animation quite well and I couldn’t help but like the characters. The graphics are cartoony but really well done and the music is fantastic and helps keep the mood. Overall very well worth the $8.99 I spent for it and I’ll probably pick up the $4 – 6 worth of optional content available in the coming weeks.

Twisted Pixel Games, the indie publisher who made the game, has posted a decent trailer on Youtube:

Update on Red Hat Network Failure

A kind soul over at Red Hat sent me an email to let me know they were aware of the issue covered in my recent RHN rant. The issue is being worked on and the individual also pointed me to the following note sent to the RHEL 5 mailing list:

After digging into this a bit more it looks like the “”Error: failed to retrieve repodata/primary.xml.gz from rhel-x86_64-server-5″ error is part of an issue on RHN. This will also be addressed by the fix going out next week.

Thanks to the individual who emailed me and thanks to Red Hat for working on this.

Red Hat Network = Failure

This blog is pretty much becoming a rant blog because of all the failure I see at work.

The failure of today and several times a month for the past few months: Red Hat Network.

[root@xxxx ~]# yum update
Loading "downloadonly" plugin
Loading "security" plugin
Loading "rhnplugin" plugin
rhel-x86_64-server-5      100% |=========================| 1.4 kB    00:00
primary.xml.gz            100% |=========================|  137 B    00:00
Skipping security plugin, no data
Setting up Update Process
Skipping security plugin, no data
Skipping security plugin, no data
No Packages marked for Update

No data, eh? Run it a few more times and it eventually decides there are packages to update and does the following:

Transaction Summary
=============================================================================
Install      2 Package(s)
Update      85 Package(s)
Remove       2 Package(s)         

Total download size: 169 M
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages:

Error Downloading Packages:
  cups-libs - 1:1.2.4-11.18.el5_2.3.i386: failed to retrieve getPackage/cups-libs-1.2.4-11.18.el5_2.3.i386.rpm from rhel-x86_64-server-5
error was [Errno 14] HTTP Error 404: Not Found

Why do I have to see this crap a couple times a month? Red Hat with all its income can’t run the equivalent of a mirror site? Or do they just not give a crap about customers not big enough to have a local satellite server? CentOS is easier to maintain and deploy at this point.

I thought I’d be smart this time and try to pre-download everything a couple days ahead of time. Too bad you can’t even use that when RHN returns empty data sets to yum. The “rhnplugin” for yum should be renamed “failwhale” because Twitter gives better service uptime these days than RHN’s download servers.

Now excuse me while I scounge around other servers yum cache directory for the glibc and kernel updates…

Viacom Fails At The Internet

As part of Viacom and Time Warner Cable’s current spat over licensing fees Viacom has resorted to putting a pop-up message on it’s websites targeted towards Time Warner customers.

Unfortunately they somehow include the college network that I help run as if we were Time Warner residential customers. The IP allocation is under our name, the DNS reverse resolves for IP addresses contain our name, we have our own ASN with redundant BGP paths over fiber. And yet because we use Time Warner’s Commercial division as an upstream we are somehow on a list of netblocks that are Time Warner residential customers. This is retarded. I can’t see any possible reason for us to be on that list other than Viacom is blindly looking up BGP paths and punishing anyone whose path travels through Time Warner.

I spammed a few email addresses on Viacom’s side to ask them to remove us in case they decide to escalate this little spat and outright block TWC customers from viewing videos on their website. But considering any useful contacts are usually hidden at such companies I doubt I’ll ever get a response.

In the meanwhile I’m glad most of our students are not here as these message would create a lot of confusion.