Florent Thoumie

WordPress-MU upgraded to 4.3

2012-06-24T12:47:13Z

Planet FreeBSD also got a new theme!

As usual, please let me know if you encounter any issue or if you have any feature request.

Pkgng to the rescue

2012-06-06T12:52:38Z

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything in here so I’ll try to remember how things work…

A few weeks, like a lot of people, I ordered a RaspberryPi to use as a mediacenter. Unfortunately it still hasn’t arrived and I got tired of my good old xbox that’s starting to be quite limiting in terms of what I can ask it. Anyway, I had an old-ish desktop in the attic that I decided to use in place of the RPi in the meantime. The thing is, it was running FreeBSD 8.1-BETA1, which also was quite old. I could have simply reinstalled everything but: a) I didn’t have an install cd and b) I decided to give pkgng a proper try (as opposed to just running it in a vm).

First step: upgrading to 9.0-RELEASE. Pretty easy thanks to freebsd-update, I did have to go via 8.1-RELEASE because of some metadata integrity check failing. Didn’t add too long to the process, so I’m not complaining.

Second step: updating the ports tree with portsnap (my tool of choice) and installing ports-mgmt/pkg.

Last step (ok this one is fairly long and more complicated): point PACKAGESITE to pkgbeta.freebsd.org and force-upgrade all packages (pkg update && pkg upgrade -fy).

Tada!

Backtracking slightly, the last step didn’t go without any trouble, pkgng complained about ports having file conflicts. In some cases, ports had been merged/deleted (so the easy fix was to pkg delete them first). In other cases, we were going from a versioned port to another one (e.g. mysql50-client to mysql55-client) so the register origin for the package had to be changed with pkg set –o databases/mysql50–client:databases/mysql55–client. Finally pkg upgrade -fy wasn’t complaining anymore.

So that was a few days ago, yesterday a new package set was uploaded. Since I pointed PACKAGESITE to http://pkgbeta.freebsd.org/freebsd-9-i386/latest/, pkg update picked up on the new packageset and more packages were available for upgrade. pkg upgrade worked without a hitch but a couple of apps that I had installed via ports (and not yet available as packages) weren’t upgraded along with graphics/png, which caused x11/slim to look for a non-existent png library. Note that I only used pkg(ng), not portmaster or portupgrade which would have picked up on the update since PORTREVISION for x11/slim was bumped. I am told that preserving shared libraries might be added to pkgng v1.1.

Anyway, congratulations to bapt@ and everybody else working on this! There are still a few rough edges but it’s working pretty darn well already!

Quiet FAIL

2011-03-23T12:11:14Z

Here’s me thinking “quiet” means “just tell me what I want to know”:

dev1578 ~ % yumdownloader -q—urls—source tmux
Loading “fastestmirror” plugin
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile

epel: yum.any

common: yum.any

base: yum.any

site-packages: yum.any

updates: yum.any

addons: yum.any

extras: yum.any
Enabling site-packages-source repository
No source RPM found for tmux – 1.2-1.x86_64
http://yum.any/yum/centos/5_1/site-packages/SRPMS/tmux-1.2-2.src.rpm

Moving on…

2010-12-03T22:08:45Z

After nearly 5 years, I’m finishing today my employment at BT Ireland. I couldn’t be more thankful to the people who gave me the opportunity to join the ISP Systems team (you know who you are Dave ) I’ve had a lot of fun, met a lot of nice people and learnt a lot but it’s now time to start something else, something new.

I’ll be starting my employment at Facebook next Monday and I can’t wait to meet my new colleagues!

I’m also hoping the weather conditions improve because public transportation has been fairly limited as of late…

WordPress-MU and ReviewBoard migrated to new VM

2010-11-19T12:06:51Z

I’ve just finished the migration of WordPress-MU and ReviewBoard over to the new VM (hosted by Your.org). Let me know if you notice anything that’s broken.

Thanks to Kevin Day for creating the VM!

PS: If you can’t reach either of blogs.freebsdish.org or reviews.freebsdish.org, then the old CNAME haven’t expired yet (TTL was set to 8 hours). Try again later.

Blogs/Planet down for maintainance

2010-11-18T20:29:59Z

Tomorrow, I’ll be moving the blogs.freebsdish.org WordPress-MU install from my own server to a VM graciously hosted by Your.org.

The service will be down from about 10am to 5pm GMT (worse case scenario).

Cisco CSS and Tacacs+

2010-10-20T15:14:46Z

Long time no blog, I figured I could write something useful for a change.

I noticed a while ago that my /var/log/daemon.log was getting filled by warnings like these:

Oct 20 16:07:12 entropy01 tac_plus[1301]: connect from x.x.x.x [x.x.x.x] Oct 20 16:07:12 entropy01 tac_plus[1301]: x.x.x.x: exception on fd 2 Oct 20 16:07:12 entropy01 tac_plus[1301]: Read -1 bytes from x.x.x.x , expecting 12

Well, after a good 15 minutes (and no help from Google), I found that you need to disable Tacacs+ keep-alive on the CSS like so:

CSS11503(config)# tacacs-server y.y.y.y 49 frequency 0

You’re welcome.

PC-BSD Install backend committed to SVN

2010-06-25T09:01:01Z

I had a nice surprise reading my Facebook timeline this morning: Matt Olander announcing that Warner Losh committed the PC-BSD installer backend to the FreeBSD SVN repository.

I didn’t know anything about it before BSDCan this year, so here’s a quick summary of what I remember (and is of interest, to me at least):

Can install either PC-BSD or vanilla FreeBSD

Supports ZFS and GELI partitions

The backend is all shell and quite easy to read/modify to suit your needs

There are at least two frontends: a QT one (default for PC-BSD) and a dialog/curses (not quite sure, fairly recent in any case) one that looks like it would be a good drop-in replacement for sysinstall.

It supports a configuration file that isn’t dissimilar to the one you can use with sysinstall at the moment: the frontend actually only generates a config file and the backend does the job without intervention.

So really, how is that for morning awesomeness?

BSDCan 2010 Report

2010-05-29T15:12:47Z

First I’d like to start this post by thanking the FreeBSD Foundation for funding my trip. I’ve been contemplating attending BSDCan for years and without their financial support I would have missed it this year again.

I’ve been a FreeBSD ports committer since 2006. In 2007, my commit privileges were extended to the src tree. In 2008, Pav approached me to become part of the Ports Management Team.

I’ve had the chance to meet up with a few people (Ed Maste, Garrett Cooper, Tim Kientzle) and discuss the coordination of the work that is being done and will be done on package tools as part of Google Summer of Code. During the developer summit, Mark Linimon, Erwin Lansing and myself held a discussion about the current state of packages and how to improve the user experience. A few people offered suggestions and portmgr took good note of them. I did take some time to go through the problem reports assigned to portmgr. I also attended a chat about FreeBSD mirrors along with some members of core, admins and portmgr.

There were a lot of interesting talks during the conference and obviously choices had to be made on which ones I would go see. I really enjoyed Will Backman’s keynote. The talk about the PCBSD installer was very interesting and it looked like there could be a drop-in replacement for sysinstall in the very near future. Lawrance Stewart’s talk was a good summary of what tools to use when doing FreeBSD developement work.

BSDCan 2010 was a great time, I really enjoyed it and I feel it was time spent in a productive fashion. I would like to thank the following people: Dan Langille and his volunteers for the brilliant conference they put together, Sam Leffler / Philip Paeps / Gavin Atkinson / Jonathan Anderson for sharing a room with me, Jordan Hubbard for a memorable meal in the Works Burger in Glebe and Kevin Van Vechten for the invaluable insight on American Sports and the FreeBSD Foundation, once again, for sponsoring my trip.

Attending conferences makes the difference between being a contributor and being part of a community. It is the perfect opportunity to meet new people with similar interests, meet people you’ve been exchanging emails with (putting a face on a name) and make sure you stay updated with the works in progress.

BSDCan and Planet FreeBSD TLC

2010-05-13T19:43:20Z

I’ve had the chance to attend BSDCan this year (thanks to the FreeBSD Foundation) and while Day 0 had been packed full of fail (some of it being caused by a lack of preparation, some was out of my control), the following days definitely made up for it. I’ll write a proper summary when I come back home, this isn’t really the object of this post…

I just noticed BSDTalk wasn’t aggregated on planet, it was only in the sidebar as a simple link. This is now fixed and I’ve also added Dan’s “FreeBSD Diary” and Dru’s “A Year in the Life of a BSD Guru”.

I’d like to use the opportunity to ask what other blogs you think should be aggregated and/or listed, also how you think I can make the blogs.freebsdish.org service better.