I upgraded to Parallels 4 the other day, and hadn’t really had time prior to today to do anything more than open my old VMs and upgrade them to the new version. So today I decided to put it through some paces. I have a massive Gentoo Server VM built in VMWare (one that I built for work) and decided to see if I couldn’t use the Parallels Transporter to convert it for use on my MBP. I first tried to import the whole Virtual Machine and it failed most unceremoniously and quickly. Whether this is due to the disks being broken into 2GB chunks or due to the OS being Gentoo I’m not sure. So, on with plan 2. Use the Transporter to import the disks and then plug those into a new image. While it took a long (long) time, Parallels did successfully import the 2 disks from the VMWare image. I then created a new Virtual Machine and pointed the VM’s first hard disk at the first image, and added a second hard disk pointed at the second image I imported. Although when I imported the first disk image I set it to be a “Bootable Disk” Parallels complained and said there was no OS on the disk and it would not be bootable. I continued anyway, and good thing I did.

After setting up the VM I started it up and sure enough, it booted fine. I did have to change the setting in /etc/fstab as the second hard disk showed up in Parallels as /dev/hdc rather than /dev/hdb.

A little tinkering with network settings (changing from eth0 to eth2) and all was running swimmingly. Since the servers on the VM rely on shared folders being available in /mnt/hgfs/ (the VMWare Workstation & VMWare Player host shared folder mount point) and Parallels will not share folders except with a Windows VM (due to the need to install Windows-specific tools) I added some configuration to /etc/fstab to use samba to mount shares from the host. (Of course, it helps to remember to turn on Windows file sharing in the OS X host too!)

EDIT: Parallels Tools for Linux Guests does, indeed, share out OS X host folders! Thanks to Vasily Averin, developer of the shared folders driver for Linux guests for pointing that out. It puts the folders in /mnt/psf which means a couple symlinks and I was on my way. Thanks!

In addition to all this tinkering to bring in a VMWare image, I ran some updates on the other Gentoo Linux image I upgraded from Parallels 3, and tried out the new “Modality” view while portage was runnning a bunch of updates. If you haven’t seen it yet, it makes a tiny semi-transparent window of the VM which stays on top of all your other apps. You can pull it down somewhere out of your way and keep an eye on how your updates are coming along. Actually pretty handy for things like attended installs and such.

Coherence in Windows seems to run even smoother than previously and I noticed that my machine wasn’t heating up nearly so bad as it used to. When you are working on a laptop this is a very good thing, indeed.

There was a lot of talk in the upgrade information about an iPhone app to controll your VMs but it doesn’t seem to be out yet. I will keep watching the app store for it though.

When I shut down the server, prior to moving, I installed an extra hard drive I had laying around before packing it up to be shipped. With the move, and all the work and busy running about since then, I managed to forget that there was a 40GB drive, just waiting to be used.

The other day, I noticed in my daily email from the emerge –sync that cron runs, that it was unable to complete because there was not enough space on the disk. I logged on and df -h showed me that, yes, the drive was full. I did some cleanup and maintenance on the drive and managed to clear out about 1GB of space. This is important, because I needed to increase the size of my boot partition. When I first built this server (using Gentoo 2006.0) I had been having terrific results with a tiny little 32MB boot partition. Now I was having problems, because the boot partition didn’t have enough room to build the initrd for 2.6.27-gentoo-r1. I’m not sure why, but for some reason every kernel I have tried to compile after 2.6.25-gentoo-r1 (including r2, r3, r4, and r5 of the same kernel branch) would create an initrd that was in the 25MB range. Well, that plus a kernel and the configs and you have a no-go on a 32MB boot partition.

Anyway, after cleaning up the drive I was going to use parted to shrink the root partition and grow the boot partition. But parted requires that ext2 and ext3 partitions always start from the same block. Not a problem, the plan was to shrink the root partition, move the swap partition there and then grow the boot partition. Then the really hard part would have come - finding another drive (since this one was too small) and taking the entire server down for a rebuild. Ugh.

So I fired up parted and did a print all to see the block numbers for my partitions, and there it was, 40GB of unused space on another drive. (You probably heard the facepalm from wherever you are and wondered what that noise was.)

So, using good old cfdisk I created 3 partitions on the new drive, a 19GB ext3 partition, a 20GB ext3 partition and a 1GB swap partition. I copied the contents of /usr to the first, and the contents of /var to the second and used a little command chaining to put those where they belonged. (If you are curious, it went something like mv /usr /usr.old && mkdir /usr && mount /dev/hdd1 /usr followed by the same sort of chain for /var and then restarting a few services that point to files in var or usr).

I then did a swapon /dev/hdd3 swapoff /dev/hda2 and then edited fstab to match the new layout. Now for the fun part. Since I didn’t see a way in parted to delete a partition I shrunk the old swap partition down to 1MB, and then resized the boot partition to fill the new space. I did run into an issue where parted gave the error “Error: Filesystem has an incompatible feature enabled.” I found the fix for that to be using tune2fs to turn off resize_inode. That means no online resizing, but since this is not on an LVM that is not an issue. So, run tune2fs -O^resize_inode /dev/hda1 and then run parted and whoosh! A larger boot partition that will fit the massively fat initrd I am trying to stuff in there, and things are better. And with /usr and /var split off onto the new disk the root file system disk now has 11GB of space available.

And, in the spirit of doing things the hard way, I am posting this from my iPhone while laying about waiting for the stomach cramps to subside enough to sleep. (I hate this flu.)

After upgrading my entire system, moving from Apache 2.0.x to 2.2.6 I ran into an interesting problem (actually, a couple.) Some of the configurations have moved, and things that used to be in the Gentoo dist httpd.conf have been broken out into config files in the /etc/apache2/modules.d/ directory. So, copying my old vhosts file in was not a good idea. And doing a merge of the old and new httpd.conf files was also a mistake. Once I figured out that I had the Listen 80 directive in one file and Listen 192.168.1.10:80 in another I understood why it failed to start. So, I fixed all the configs to match the new setup, and tried again. It started up just fine, and seemed okay, until I tried to connect. I kept getting 403 errors.

I went through the standard checks, checking the file permissions, .htaccess settings, and so on, to no avail. A quick Google search pointed me to the fix from Victor Trac. He found the offending bit in the new broken out config in /etc/apache2/modules.d/00_default_settings.conf where it contains:

<Directory />

        Options FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride None
        Order deny,allow
        Deny from all
</Directory>

The fix is either to change that to Allow from all and define Deny where needed in each virtual host or to override it in every virtual host. Since I tend to set up my hosts with the idea that the server allows everything and it is up to the host to deny where needed I chose the first option, reloaded Apache and everything is sweet again.

Edit:

I found I was having an error with the RewriteRules after switching from Apache 2.0.x to 2.2.x - I found the fix on the Gentoo forums, which required adding an extra RewriteCond line in the .htaccess file.

The old .htaccess: and the new:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

and the new:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond $1 !\.php$
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

Technorati Tags: Apache 2.2, 403, Gentoo

While things have been hectic preparing for the big move, some things have fallen by wayside. Like updating the server (ok, I can’t just blame that on moving, it hasn’t been done in a while) and updating the MySpace crossposter from Roderick Russell to version 2.0. That part, at least, was a piece of cake, and the options panel makes setup much easier.

It turns out the server was still running on the Gentoo 2006.0 profile and in order to bring things up to date I needed to get it to the 2007.0 profile. For anyone who hasn’t tried this, here is the easy way: run emerge –sync and then change the symlink /etc/make.profile to point to the newer profile (in this case /usr/portage/profiles/default-linux/x86/2007.0 - after that run emerge -u portage and then revdep-rebuild (in order to use revdep-rebuild you need to have the gentoolkit installed, which can be done via emerge gentoolkit. (It takes about 5 minutes to download and build.)

After running revdep-rebuild it was time to run the dreaded emerge -auv world. Running verbose shows clearly what is getting replaced, updated, added, etc and you get the nice red blocking messages.

In my case, pecl-zip was blocking php-5.2.4, and no amount of forcing was going to help, so for the duration of the upgrade I unmerged pecl-zip. I also had some blocking in that the current version of Postfix was not compatible with the new version, so the choice is to unmerge Postfix and then emerge (too long of a down-time) or by doing a FORCE_UPGRADE=1 emerge –buildpkgonly postfix followed by /etc/init.d/postfix stop and then emerge –usepkgonly postfix followed by a quick etc-update to merge the config file with the new configs and then restart the server with /etc/init.d/postfix start. Total downtime for the mail server: 2 minutes.

I am currently updating the last of the software (mostly admin and gnu tools) and then will build a new kernel. Of course, since there is a newer version of GCC included in the updates, everything that wasn’t updated will get rebuilt with another call to revdep-rebuild before I configure and compile the new kernel.

It’s not like any of this is difficult, especially when most of the ebuilds are so good about giving you help in their error messages (if there are errors) and often tell you in the message how to fix it step-by-step. Now, if I could just find the build that reminds me every week or so to run emerge –sync and check for updates. Hmmm - I might even put that in a weekly or daily cron job:

#!/bin/bash
#update notifier
usr/bin/emerge --sync > /dev/null 2>&1 || true --nospinner && /usr/bin/emerge -puv world

Then it is just a matter of seeing what shows up as needing to be updated, and I can compare that with messages from the Gentoo Linux Security Advisories to determine which can wait and which are needed right now.

Technorati Tags: Gentoo

While the debates carry on over what can be done to make Linux more feasible in the desktop market (in other words desirable enough that average users say “I want that!”) the one argument that seems to rise to the top is eye candy. Does it affect how an OS works? No. Does it change the way programs behave? Maybe superficially. Does it change the way users interact with the OS and the programs? You bet!

I had a chance to play with Kororaa, a Gentoo-based live CD with AIGL/Xgl and a great install-to-disk tool. And while Xgl is not quite ready for prime-time (I encountered a couple crashes where xdm would completely exit and restart) it is getting close. And the eye candy features (adjustable transparency on windows, the rotating cube desktop, the “liquid-ish” movement of the windows) add a certain amount of “ooh factor.” But the biggest thing I found myself using were three very handy tools: [Ctrl+Shift+Alt+ left or right arrow] to rotate the desktop cube with the active window following, the hot-corner to display all the open windows as tiles, and the [Ctrl+Alt+PgDown] to “flatten” the cube, allowing you to see all the sides at once and use the arrow keys to select one of the desktops to switch to. While many will consider this to still be nothing more than eye-candy, I found it so utile that I am (a little too) eagerly awaiting the next Xgl implementation.

So who, besides me, thinks that these are as useful as they are eye candy-ish? Well, Apple, for one. They already have the hot-corner to display all the open windows, the ability to show all the open windows of one application, and (with Parallels at least - and rumor has it in the next OSX version) the cube concept of the multiple desktops.

Replacing the old PIII 733MHz server with a slightly less old PIII 1GHz server was mostly very straightforward. That in and of itself doesn’t seem like much, until you consider that the old server was running a stripped out Vector with a chrooted lampp, and the replacement is running Gentoo with the traditional-one-tool-at-a-time type installation.

It was mostly simple, since every single tool I use has a Gentoo ebuild. Everything seemed to be going just fine, until I discovered the hard way that the Gentoo ebuild for XMail is b0rked. :-/

Well, since it is way past my bedtime I am going to put it down for the night and try to tackle it tomorrow. But, until I get it working all mail to evardsson.com and talkingfox.com will bounce. Sorry.