Month: February 2011

HOWTO: cre­at­ing your own updat­ed lin­ux RPM for the FreeB­SD linuxulator

Back­ground info

The FreeB­SD lin­ux com­pat­i­bil­i­ty envi­ron­ment cur­rent­ly uses RPMs from Fedo­ra 10. Unfor­tu­nate­ly Fedo­ra 10 is end of life since a while. For one of the RPMs (the pan­go one) we where aware of a secu­ri­ty vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. As we do not know if it is fea­si­ble to update the lin­ux­u­la­tor ports to some­thing more recent, I decid­ed to set­up a VM with Fedo­ra 10 and gen­er­ate a new RPM for the linux-f10-pango port. Thanks to Luchesar V. ILIEV for explain­ing me how to do this.

Set­up of the VM

I used Vir­tu­al­Box 4.0.4 on a Solaris 10 x86 machine. I con­fig­ured a fixed size disk of 16 GB and kept the default net­work set­up (after installing the guest tools / ker­nel mod­ules I switched to vir­tio, as I was not able to do any­thing use­ful besides a ping) and RAM size. The CD/DVD dri­ve was con­fig­ured to use the image of the full Fedo­ra 10 DVD for i386 systems.

Set­up of Fedo­ra 10

Boot­ing the VM from the DVD leads to the graph­i­cal Fedo­ra 10 install soft­ware (after chos­ing to install a new sys­tem on the con­sole). There I accept­ed all the defaults, except for the soft­ware to install. I des­e­lect­ed the Office and Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty group and select­ed the Soft­ware Devel­op­ment group. When I was asked if I want to install some addi­tion­al RPMs I had a look at the com­plete list and installed some I thought are nec­es­sary. I do not remem­ber any­more which ones I chose, but every­thing which looks relat­ed to RPM build­ing is a good candidate.

After a while the install will be fin­ished and you can boot into the new sys­tem (eject the DVD from the dri­ve before reboot). After reboot chose to install the Guest Addi­tions in the menu of the VM. This should mount the ISO image in the VM. As root exe­cute the file for Lin­ux. This will build some ker­nel mod­ules for bet­ter inte­gra­tion (e.g. seam­less inte­gra­tion of the mouse between your desk­top and the VM). At this point I reboot­ed and con­fig­ured vir­tio as the NIC. I also had to con­fig­ure the net­work set­tings by hand, as the GUI tool did not safe all the set­tings correctly.

Update and install of required RPMs

After the VM was up and the net­work con­fig­ured, I updat­ed the entire sys­tem (chose Sys­tem Update in the menu). To update the pan­go port, I had to install the libthai-devel RPM. I had the RPM for it (and all the files I need to build a new pan­go RPM) already down­loaded, so I did a “yum install /path/to/rpm”. At this point I was ready to cre­ate the RPM build environment.

The RPM build environment

As a nor­mal user I exe­cut­ed the com­mand rpmdev-setuptree which cre­ates the direc­to­ry rpm­build and pop­u­lates it with some direc­to­ries. Now you just need to find a suit­able .spec file and put it into rpmbuild/SPECS, put the sources (and maybe patch­es ref­er­enced in the .spec file) into rpmbuild/SOURCES, and you are ready to go (I patched pango.spec for a more recent pan­go ver­sion, basi­cal­ly just chang­ing the ver­sion num­bers). If you want to have a cus­tom pack­ager and ven­dor attribute in the RPM, you can add a line for each to ~/.rpmmacros, e.g. %pack­ager your­name­here and %ven­dor what­ev­eris­ap­pro­pri­ate. I used my @FreeBSD.org EMail address as the pack­ager, and FreeB­SD as the vendor.

Build­ing a RPM

I used rpm­build ‑ba –tar­get i386-redhat-linux-gnu –clean rpmbuild/SPECS/pango.spec to build the new pan­go RPM. If every­thing is OK, the result­ing RPMs (a source RPM, a dev­el RPM, a debug­in­fo RPM and the RPM for the bina­ries) are in rpmbuild/RPMS and rpmbuild/SRPMS. For a FreeB­SD port we just need the source RPM (to com­ply to the (L)GPL) and the RPM for the binaries.

Addi­tion­al info

The i386-redhat-linux-gnu string which is used for the –tar­get option of the rpm­build com­mand is what seems to be used to build the Fedo­ra 10 RPMs. After build­ing pan­go, the RPM has i686-pc-linux-gnu in some file­names instead (the default val­ue for this set­up). The bina­ries seem to be com­piled for i386, so there should be no prob­lem even for old systems.

Share/Save

A new linux-f10-pango port is ready

In the last days I took (and even had) the time to install a VM with Fedo­ra 10, updat­ed all the pack­ages after instal­la­tion, and cre­at­ed a new linux-f10-pango port (v 1.28.3). I did this because the port has a secu­ri­ty vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty accord­ing to our VuXML DB and there where more and more reports in the last months from users which had a prob­lem with this.

Dur­ing the update of the port I noticed that the port does not con­tain a FORBIDDEN entry, just por­tau­dit com­plains about it because there is an entry in the VuXML. That is not nice. I was told that the ports slush will be lift­ed soon (I need to bump some PORTRE­VI­SIONs), this means that I can com­mit the update prob­a­bly tomor­row, just in time when the new RPM should hit the FreeB­SD dis­tri­b­u­tion infra­struc­ture (MASTER_SITE_LOCAL is updat­ed once a day from a spe­cif­ic fold­er in our home directories).

Thanks to Luchesar V. ILIEV for the nice write­up of what to install in Fedo­ra 10 to be able to build RPMs, and the descrip­tion of how to build your own RPM.

Share/Save

Addi­tion­al FEATURE macros on the way

It seems I have a bit of free time now to take care about some FreeB­SD relat­ed things.

As part of this I already com­mit­ted the UFS/FFS relat­ed FEATURE macros which where devel­oped by kibab@ dur­ing the Google Sum­mer of Code 2010. The network/ALTQ relat­ed FEATURE macros are in the hands of bz@, he already reviewed them and wants to com­mit them (with some changes) as part of his improve­ments of parts of the net­work relat­ed code.

The GEOM relat­ed FEATURE macros I just send some min­utes ago to geom@ for review. All the rest went out to hackers@ for review. The rest in this case is relat­ed to AUDIT, CAM, IPC, KTR, MAC, NFS, NTP, PMC, SYSV and a few oth­er things.

If every­thing is com­mit­ted, it should look a bit like this if queried from user­land (not all fea­tures are shown, those are just the ones which are enabled in the ker­nel in one of my machines):

kern.features.scbus: 1
kern.features.geom_vol: 1
kern.features.geom_part_bsd: 1
kern.features.geom_part_ebr_compat: 1
kern.features.geom_part_ebr: 1
kern.features.geom_part_mbr: 1
kern.features.kposix_priority_scheduling: 1
kern.features.kdtrace_hooks: 1
kern.features.ktrace: 1
kern.features.invariant_support: 1
kern.features.compat_freebsd7: 1
kern.features.compat_freebsd6: 1
kern.features.pps_sync: 1
kern.features.stack: 1
kern.features.sysv_msg: 1
kern.features.sysv_sem: 1
kern.features.sysv_shm: 1
kern.features.posix_shm: 1
kern.features.ffs_snapshot: 1
kern.features.softupdates: 1
kern.features.ufs_acl: 1

Share/Save

OCP: Ora­cle Solaris 10 Sys­tem Administrator

After work­ing a long time with Solaris (I start­ed with 2.5.1 at about the time when Solaris 7 was released in 1998), my cur­rent boss decid­ed that it is time that I do a cer­ti­fi­ca­tion for it (clients like it). Two exams lat­er I have it now:

Since yes­ter­day I am offi­cial­ly an Ora­cle Cer­ti­fied Pro­fes­sion­al, Ora­cle Solaris 10 Sys­tem Admin­is­tra­tor.

The exam ques­tions where a bit strange. I asked myself if a real admin was proof read­ing them or not, but most prob­a­bly some­one with­out much knowl­edge about Solaris admin­is­tra­tion just took the study guides and tried to make some ques­tions out of it.

Any­way, my boss should be hap­py now, and I have some­thing to add to my CV.

Share/Save

My cur­rent list of acti­vat­ed WP-plugins

Here is the list of the Word­Press plu­g­ins I have acti­vat­ed since a long time. Some of them I could maybe deac­ti­vate (maybe 4 – 5) but some­how I was too lazy so far to make some time to have a look at this. All in all I regard most of them as essen­tial in some way for my blog.

  • AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button
    Help peo­ple share, book­mark, and email your posts & pages using any ser­vice, such as Face­book, Twit­ter, Google Buzz, Digg and many more.
  • AddToAny: Sub­scribe Button
    Help read­ers sub­scribe to your blog using any feed read­er or feed service.
  • After The Deadline
    Adds a con­tex­tu­al spell, style, and gram­mar check­er to Word­Press. Write bet­ter and spend less time edit­ing. Vis­it your pro­file to con­fig­ure. See the Proof­read­ing Sup­port page for help.
  • Akismet
    Akismet checks your com­ments against the Akismet web ser­vice to see if they look like spam or not. You need an API key to use it. You can review the spam it catch­es under “Com­ments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your tem­plate. See also: WP Stats plugin.
  • aLinks
    A Word­Press plu­g­in that auto­mat­i­cal­ly links key­words in your blog post.
  • All in One SEO Pack
    Out-of-the-box SEO for your Word­Press blog.
  • AskA­pache RewriteRules Viewer
    Dis­plays the Inter­nal Word­Press Rewrite Rules in Detailed Glory.
  • Bet­ter Plu­g­in Com­pat­i­bil­i­ty Control
    Adds ver­sion com­pat­i­bil­i­ty info to the plu­g­ins page to inform the admin at a glance if a plu­g­in is com­pat­i­ble with the cur­rent WP version.
  • Bet­ter Search
    Replace the default Word­Press search with a con­tex­tu­al search. Search results are sort­ed by rel­e­van­cy ensur­ing a bet­ter vis­i­tor search experience.
  • Bro­ken Link Checker
    Checks your blog for bro­ken links and miss­ing images and noti­fies you on the dash­board if any are found.
  • Change Admin Username
    Lets you change your user­name to some­thing oth­er than “admin”.
  • Con­tex­tu­al Relat­ed Posts
    Show user defined num­ber of con­tex­tu­al­ly relat­ed posts.
  • Cute Pro­files
    Cute Pro­files adds all your Social Pro­file icons ver­ti­cal­ly on left or right side of your pages, which will remain vis­i­ble all the time though the page is scrolled and with­out con­sum­ing the side­bar space.
  • Dash­board: Lat­est Spam
    Dis­plays the lat­est spam on your Word­Press 2.5+ dash­board so you can make sure there were no false pos­i­tives. Uses Defen­sio to hide obvi­ous spam if you have it installed.
  • Easy Chart Builder
    Cre­ates a chart direct­ly in your post or page via short­cut. Man­ages siz­ing of chart to sup­port wptouch and oth­er mobile themes.
  • Exploit Scan­ner
    Scans your Word­Press site for pos­si­ble exploits.
  • FD Word Statistics
    Com­putes Gunning-Fog, Flesch, and Flesch-Kincaid read­abil­i­ty index­es about posts as they are edit­ed for the pur­pose of improv­ing their readability.
  • GD Press Tools
    GD Press Tools is a col­lec­tion of var­i­ous admin­is­tra­tion, seo, main­te­nance and secu­ri­ty relat­ed tools that can help with every­day blog tasks and blog optimizations.
  • GD Sim­ple Widgets
    Col­lec­tion of pow­er­ful, easy to use wid­gets that expand default wid­gets. Plu­g­in also adds few more must-have wid­gets for posts, authors and comments.
  • GD Star Rating
    GD Star Rat­ing plu­g­in allows you to set up advanced rat­ing and review sys­tem for posts, pages and com­ments in your blog using sin­gle, mul­ti and thumbs ratings.
  • GeoSmart
    GeoSmart auto­mat­i­cal­ly adds city-precise loca­tion infor­ma­tion for com­ment authors to com­ment meta­da­ta. GeoSmart can also dis­play a Google map show­ing com­ment author dis­tri­b­u­tion across the globe. In addi­tion, GeoSmart ships with a mul­ti­ple instance capa­ble side­bar wid­get that dis­plays a map show­ing the loca­tions of the most recent vis­i­tors to your blog. Requires PHP 5 and Word­Press 2.8+. Map dis­play requires a Google Maps API Key.
  • Glob­al Translator
    Auto­mat­i­cal­ly trans­lates a blog in 48 dif­fer­ent lan­guages by wrap­ping four dif­fer­ent online trans­la­tion engines (Google Trans­la­tion Engine, Babelfish Trans­la­tion Engine, FreeTranslations.com, Promt). After upload­ing this plu­g­in click ‘Acti­vate’ and then after­wards you must vis­it the options page and enter your blog lan­guage to enable the translator.
  • Google XML Sitemaps
    This plu­g­in will gen­er­ate a spe­cial XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to bet­ter index your blog.
  • Gra­vatar Signup Encouragement
    Dis­plays mes­sage to users with­out gra­vatar that they don’t have one with link to Gra­vatar’s sign-up page (e‑mail included).
  • Health Check
    Checks the health of your Word­Press install
  • http:BL Word­Press Plugin
    http:BL Word­Press Plu­g­in allows you to ver­i­fy IP address­es of clients con­nect­ing to your blog against the Project Hon­ey Pot database.
  • Import HTML Pages
    Imports well-formed sta­t­ic HTML pages into Word­Press posts or pages. Requires PHP5. Now with Dreamweaver tem­plate sup­port and Word HTML cleanup.
  • InfoLink
    Adds a but­ton to the Edi­tor, easy link­ing to Wikipedia, IMDB or add a link with google search.
  • Lim­it Login Attempts
    Lim­it rate of login attempts, includ­ing by way of cook­ies, for each IP.
  • One-Time Pass­word
    One-Time Pass­word Sys­tem con­form­ing to RFC 2289 to pro­tect your weblog in less trust­wor­thy envi­ron­ments, like inter­net cafés.
  • Plu­g­in Manager
    Plu­g­in Man­ag­er lets you to view, down­load and install plu­g­ins from wordpress.org from an AJAX’ed inter­face, instead of man­u­al­ly down­load­ing, extract­ing and upload­ing each plugin.
  • Plu­g­ins Garbage Collector
    It scans your Word­Press data­base and shows what var­i­ous things old plu­g­ins which were deac­ti­vat­ed, unin­stalled) left in it. The list of addi­tion­al data­base tables used by plu­g­ins with quant of records, size, and plu­g­in name is shown.
  • Quick Stats
    Logs hits with refer­rer, ip, host, client and url infor­ma­tion. RSS track­er fea­ture lets you track­er your vis­i­tors in near real­time using an RSS read­er software.
  • Search Meter
    Keeps track of what your vis­i­tors are search­ing for. After you have acti­vat­ed this plu­g­in, you can check the Search Meter sec­tion in the Dash­board to see what your vis­i­tors are search­ing for on your blog.
  • SEO Smart Links
    SEO Smart Links pro­vides auto­mat­ic SEO ben­e­fits for your site in addi­tion to cus­tom key­word lists, nofol­low and much more.
  • Sim­ple Track­back Validation
    Elim­i­nates spam track­backs by (1) check­ing if the IP address of the track­back sender is equal to the IP address of the web­serv­er the track­back URL is refer­ring to and (2) by retriev­ing the web page locat­ed at the URL used in the track­back and check­ing if the page con­tains a link to your blog.
  • Smartlink­er
    Smartlink­er is a tool­bar on the Word­Press TinyM­CE edi­tor that enables you to hyper­link words and phras­es in your blog. A word/phrase can be the name of a per­son, place or thing.
  • Table of Con­tents Creator
    Table of Con­tents Cre­ator (TOCC) auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­ates a dynam­ic site wide table of con­tents that is always up-to-date. All entries are nav­i­ga­ble mak­ing your site very SEO friend­ly. TOCC can be con­fig­ured to dis­play sta­t­ic pages, blog entries and forum com­ments. Anoth­er great fea­ture of TOCC is the abil­i­ty to include anchor tags on any page marked with a spe­cial class. This fea­ture allows links to arti­cles, down­loads or even oth­er sites to appear with­in the table of con­tents as if they are part of your site’s nav­i­ga­tion. To gen­er­ate a table of con­tents, sim­ply include the <!– toc-creator –> tag on any page, or use the handy page cre­ation fea­ture locat­ed on the plu­g­in admin page.
  • TinyM­CE Advanced
    Enables advanced fea­tures and plu­g­ins in TinyM­CE, the visu­al edi­tor in WordPress.
  • Update Noti­fi­er
    Sends email noti­fi­ca­tions to the admin if a new ver­sion of Word­Press avail­able. Noti­fi­ca­tions about updates for plu­g­ins and themes can also be sent.
  • Weasel’s No HTTP Author
    Checks to see if the author name in your com­ments con­tains “HTTP:” to help fil­ter out spam. This only sets the “spam” flag on the com­ment; Akismet does the dirty work and actu­al­ly removes and reports the comment.
  • Where did they go from here
    Show “Read­ers who viewed this page, also viewed” links on your page. Much like Amazon.com’s prod­uct pages. Based on the plu­g­in by Mark Ghosh.
  • Who is Online
    Dis­plays who is cur­rent­ly on your blog and for how long.
  • WordPress.com Stats
    Tracks views, post/page views, refer­rers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key.
  • WP-Polls
    Adds an AJAX poll sys­tem to your Word­Press blog. You can eas­i­ly include a poll into your Word­Press’s blog post/page. WP-Polls is extreme­ly cus­tomiz­able via tem­plates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you want­ed. It now sup­ports mul­ti­ple selec­tion of answers.
  • WP-Print
    Dis­plays a print­able ver­sion of your Word­Press blog’s post/page.
  • WP-Stats-Dashboard
    Dis­plays the WordPress.com stats graph, your traf­fic and social met­rics mon­i­tor­ing on your dashboard.
  • wp-Typography
    Improve your web typog­ra­phy with: (1) hyphen­ation — over 40 lan­guages sup­port­ed, (2) Space con­trol, includes: wid­ow pro­tec­tion, glu­ing val­ues to units, and forced inter­nal wrap­ping of long URLs & email address­es, (3) Intel­li­gent char­ac­ter replace­ment, includ­ing smart han­dling of: quote marks, dash­es, ellipses, trade­marks, math sym­bols, frac­tions, and ordi­nal suf­fix­es, and (4) CSS hooks for styling: amper­sands, upper­case words, num­bers, ini­tial quotes & guillemets.
  • WP Ajax Edit Comments
    The most pow­er­ful comment-editing solu­tion for Word­Press. Users can edit their own com­ments for a lim­it­ed time, while admins can edit all comments.
  • WP Math Publisher
    Dis­play math­e­mat­i­cal equa­tions with­in your posts and com­ments. Put your plain text math­mat­i­cal expres­sions between [pmath size=xx]…[/pmath] tags. The option­al size attribute con­trols how large the images will be dis­played. Use­ful xx inte­ger val­ues range from 8 to 24. Size defaults to 12 when attribute omit­ted. Pas­cal Bra­chet’s PHP Math Pub­lish­er library is included.
  • WP Mini­fy
    This plu­g­in uses the Mini­fy engine to com­bine and com­press JS and CSS files to improve page load time.
  • WP Secu­ri­ty Scan
    Per­form secu­ri­ty scan of Word­Press installation.
  • WP Super Cache
    Very fast caching plu­g­in for WordPress.
  • WP Update Message
    Add an update mes­sage to your pages or posts to let your read­ers know what has been updated.

I do not need some con­tact man­age­ment plu­g­in, if some­one wants to con­tact me he can use my EMail address. I do not have a prob­lem hav­ing my EMail address in a robot-readable for­mat, my anti-SPAM soft­ware is well tuned for my mailbox.

Share/Save
Exit mobile version
%%footer%%