Steve Kemp's Blog

My Christmas day was primarily spent at home watching Red Dwarf.

Apart from that I made new releases of xen-shell and xen-tools.

I was suprised to recieve a sudden flurry of bug reports. No less than ten bugs reported by two users in one day! Still I fixed most of them and made a new release.

It was nice to notice Isaac Clerencia writing about using xen-tools for automated testing. The idea has occurred to me before: Create a fresh Xen installation of Debian then run a test suite and trash the system afterwards. I even setup a test Yawns builder for a while.

Are people finding interesting users for xen-tools? I’d love to have some use-cases, and more user-feedback is always appreciated. Feel free to get in touch or comment here.

Personally I use a few Xen guests on my home LAN and I regularly create new Sarge images for building backported Xen packages. Only recently did I move my home cfengine setup onto a domU.

In other news I recently received a copy of Programming Ruby from my Amazon wishlist, I’m learning a lot about Ruby and I think I’m in love. The only downside is the mental confusion I experience when I see ”@variable” and ”$variable” used. I am too wedded to Perl to stop thinking “array” and “string” respectively.

I should find a toy project to write in Ruby to get used to it. Right now nothing occurs, but I’m sure it is just a matter of time.

Disjointed:

Busy weekend: A brief trip to Glasgow, a lot of rat-lovin’ and a few minutes to hack on CFEngine package automation.

I discovered insane performance problems with running Ruby on Rails applications under libapache2-mod-fastcgi so I switched to Apache2, mod_proxy & mongrel.

The process wasn’t as painless as I’d expected – so I might write it up shortly.

In other rails-news: I can’t get typo running on Etch. Migration from wordpress 2 fails in strange ways. Help?!

In other news xmms on my AMD64 machine, reading /home/mp3 over an NFS share locks up every couple of days. Not sure if this is an AMD64 bit problem, or if the NFS usage is responsible. I should investigate. (The GUI is visible and responsible; but hitting “next”, “play”, etc, result in no action. I usually have to “kill” it – then restart.)

Puppet the system-administration tool, similar to CFengine is very nice.

What is less-nice is the lack of decent examples. The wiki has lots of "recipes", however these give no real explaination of how to install them.

I know that I need manifests/site.pp which will control which nodes get which actions applied to them, but beyond that I'm a little lost!

I'm hoping to replicate my cfengine setup. Most of it is pretty simple "append line to file if missing", and copying files from the central server. (The latter I've got working nicely.)

Hopefully somebody will now point me at a good tutorial that doesn't stop once it is installed (like this one.)

I leave my main desktop logged in for months a time; as demonstrated by my previous bug with the keyboard transition for xorg.

The screen is setup to lock after 5 minutes of idle, so there's no real security issue, and it is extremely convenient.

Every few weeks though my desktop gets into a funny state where no new windows may be opened.. Existing applications continue running without any problems, but no new windows/shells/whatever may be opened.

Tonight it happened again.

And the lightbulb went on in my head: My flat uses CFEngine to manage itself. (Two physical servers here, with 5-10 Xen guests, and a number of remote servers.)

One of the things that CFengine is configued to do is to tidy directories of files which are older than 30 days. Including /tmp.

So that explains that.

Every month the magic cookie in $TMP would be nuked, and X would disallow new connections.

I guess the next time this happens I should look at using Xauth to fix the issue, but generally I just logout, make coffee, smoke a cigarette, and login again.

In conclusion: I'm a stupid-head.

ObQuote: Fight Club