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coworkers and I find ourselves reaching for compilers more and more often as the included open-source tools become so outdated as to become obsolete.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?

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

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:

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.

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…

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.

The above hate has been purposely encouraged through the direct acts of John McCain and his campaign over the last few weeks. Audio of an official McCain robocall continuing their strategy of inciting such hate can be found here. The robo call tries to draw a link between Obama and Ayers. A link that is utter bullshit. Using the same metric one could argue Ronald Reagan was linked to the same terrorist.

We have been in an election season where one side has provoked his base into such a lather that racist shouts and death threats against the opposition are now common place in his rallys. In essence the Republican party is now focused on provoking hatred as a way to rally their base and appeal to moderates. Thankfully the moderates have not yet been reacting positively to this bullshit.

An example of one game type with the game and music sped up a bit can be seen here on Youtube:

Audiosurf – Tank! (Live)

I have some European heavy metal that is insanely difficult on the medium and high settings. A great way to kill 20 minutes of time once in a while.

On the other end of the spectrum is a game still under development called “fl0wer”. From some of the people behind the flash game “fl0w” the game fl0wer is more of a meditation tool than what many would recognize as a game.

Here is a great video that shows off the basics:

An HD version of this video and other videos can be found on the GameTrailers website under fl0wer.

In my opinion fl0wer is something that could really only be enjoyable with a HDTV and modern sound system. The fact the game is coming out for the PS3 is not a coincidence.

Study Finds Young People Remain Apathetic About Office Politics