Ohio LinuxFest 2009

So I'm trying to prepare for the 7-hour commute to OLF on Thursday and Friday's class. It should be fun, as always...

If anyone reading this is within driving distance (which, in my mind, includes most people in the eastern half of the US), I highly recommend making the trip. And they extended the registration deadline to midnight tonight (9/22), if I'm reading the site correctly...

Note for amavisd-new users

I just pushed amavisd-new 2.6.4 to rawhide. The major new change in this version is the introduction of a script called amavisd-snmp-subagent. To quote the release notes...

- newly supplied with the package is a program amavisd-snmp-subagent,
 acting as a SNMP AgentX, exporting amavisd statistical counters database
 (snmp.db) as well as a child process status database (nanny.db) to a
 SNMP daemon supporting the AgentX protocol (RFC 2741), such a NET-SNMP.

 It is similar to combined existing utility programs amavisd-agent
 and amavisd-nanny, but instead of writing results as text to stdout,
 it exports data to a SNMP server running on a host (same or remote),
 making them available to SNMP clients (such a Cacti or mrtg) for
 monitoring or alerting purposes.

See the release notes for more details.

Since this script introduces new dependencies, I made a sub-package for it, which includes an init script. All of this is completely untested, so if anyone would like to try it out, please grab it from rawhide (or koji until it shows up there) and let me know how it goes.

Hey, spot!

After reading spot's post, I wanted to try out chromium. Shortly after installing it, I realized that name resolution stopped working.

The problem? Installing chromium.i586 pulled in nss-mdns.i586 on my x86_64 system. I installed nss-mdns.x86_64 and the problem went away.

Whee!

Want to use chromium on x86_64? Do this:

cat > /etc/yum.repos.d/chromium.repo <<'END'
[chromium]
name=Chromium Test Packages
baseurl=http://spot.fedorapeople.org/chromium/F$releasever/
enabled=0
gpgcheck=0
END

yum --enablerepo=chromium install chromium nss-mdns.x86_64

Can a phone change your life?

To answer my own question, probably not. I did however get a Palm Pre when they came out (just over a month ago), and so far I like it. I was replacing a craptastic LG flip phone, so my smartphone expectations were rather low.

Here's what I like:

• Real web browser! (Usable on EVDO, but much better on Wi-Fi.)
  
• Camera that takes decent pictures.
• Some usable PDA functionality.
• Notifications add to the experience of using the phone instead of just being obnoxious.
• The "Sprint Navigation" app means I don't need to fight Kara for the TomTom. :-) (It's not as good as the TomTom, but it works well enough.)
  
• And, of course, bonus geek points for running Linux under the hood.
  

I don't know that I have any "issues" with the Pre, but I do have a short wish list...

• My old phone would let me forward text messages and send messages to multiple recipients. I miss that. Supposedly it's coming in a future update.
• The Clock app on the Pre is infinitely better than the one on my old phone, but my old phone would let me set a "quick alarm" for 1 minute, 10 minutes, 30 minutes, or 1 hour in the future. That was handy, if not nearly granular enough. A quick way to set alarms as an offset from now would be handy for a lot of reasons though.
  
• Admittedly, I'd kill for a terminal. :-) (And on that note, I may have to try out WebShell.) In general, I do have a little iPhone/Android app envy, but that should get better with time...

I can't say I'm completely thrilled with putting my information out "in the cloud", but Google already knows so much about me it is disturbing, so what the hell...

I don't know what I would do without Google and bugzilla.

Eric Sandeen is my new favorite person.

I'm finally watching a Fedora 11-based custom live CD boot...

Shiny

I love this effect.



I highly recommend perusing the gallery. Kara has some great stuff (although I think this is the only Fedora-related photo, and it was a happy accident).

ldapsync

Very slowly catching up...

A few years ago, I wrote a script that I called ldapsync that compares and synchronizes two LDAP servers. The options are designed to mirror the ones used by OpenLDAP's tools.

Usage:
    ldapsync [options]

     Options:
       --simpleauth -x      Use simple authentication (default)
       --binddn     -D      Secify the Distinguished Name to bind to LDAP
       --secret     -w      Specify the password
       --secretfile -y      Specify a file to read for a password
       --ldapuri    -H      Specify the URI of the LDAP server
       --searchbase -b      Specify search base
       --filter     -F      Search filter
       --scope      -s      Search scope (base, one, or sub)
       --tls        -Z[Z]   Try StartTLS (use twice to require TLS)
       --dryrun     -n      Show what changes would be made
       --help       -h      Help message
       --verbose    -v      Be more verbose
       --debug      -d      Turn on debugging

So to compare server1 with server2, you might use a command like this:

    ldapsync -n -x -b dc=example,dc=com \
            -H ldap://server1 \
            -H ldap://server2

Reality is probably a lot more complicated than that, but you get the idea...

Anyway, the script is useful as-is, but it is probably not complete. Maybe it will be useful to someone else...