Lenz Grimmer's blog

I recently added two new packages to my repository on the openSUSE Build Service:

• Maatkit is a collection of essential command-line utilities for MySQL. Each is completely stand-alone, without dependencies other than core Perl and the DBI drivers needed to connect to MySQL, and doesn't need to be "installed" - you can just execute the scripts. This makes the tools easy to use on systems where you can't install anything extra, such as customer sites or ISPs.
• protobuf - Protocol Buffers - Google's data interchange format. Protocol Buffers are a way of encoding structured data in an efficient yet extensible format. Google uses Protocol Buffers for almost all of its internal RPC protocols and file formats.

The protobuf package is required, if you want to compile drizzle. Packages are available for openSUSE, Fedora and Mandriva Linux. Feedback is welcome!

While we're on the topic of Bazaar - this week I got informed by the organizers of the FrOSCon 2008 conference that they accepted two of my talk proposals: one session will be an introduction to this source code management system (what a coincidence), the other one will be an introduction to OpenSolaris for Linux users, explaining some of the underlying technologies and how they differ from what a seasoned Linux user may be accustomed to.

And no, I have not given up on using Linux - quite the contrary! I have been very impressed by the latest OpenSUSE 11.0 release and already run it for since quite some time on several of my work systems. In fact, I already convinced several colleagues of mine to give it a try as well! I am amazed by the speed and "out of the box experience" of this version and I actually plan to install it on my Genesi Pegasos PowerPC machine as well, replacing Debian on there. But as a Sun employee, I of course have to familiarize myself with the other products and projects that we're involved in. And on the Server side, Solaris does have a few interesting features that Linux currently lacks. But I digress.

I look forward to speaking at FrOSCon again - it has been a great conference in the past two years. Very well organized, nice venue, a relaxed atmosphere and excellent technical sessions and speakers.

Other MySQLers submitted talks as well - for example, Giuseppe will give a presentation titled "MySQL Community How To", Susanne will give a PostgreSQL tutorial and others will participate in the separate PHP subconference. Don't miss it - this year's FrOSCon will take place on August 23rd&24th in St. Augustin, Germany (close to Bonn). For the first time, we will also try to set up a MySQL project table. So if you are there, make sure to stop by and have a chat with us!

 

Back when I still worked at SuSE, I was in charge of maintaining a number or packages of the distribution (actually, you should still be able to find traces of my work in the RPM changelogs). Nowadays, I maintain a number of packages for openSUSE and other distributions on the openSUSE Build Service, which is just brilliant for this purpose.

If you happen to live in northern Germany and are interested to learn more about the RPM package manager and how to build packages, consider coming to the TU Harburg this coming Thursday (March 13th). At 19:00, I will give a presentation about this topic in building, D, room D1023 (in cooperation with the Hamburg branch of the German Unix User Group). More information (in German) can be obtained from here.

See you there!

 

 

Like in the years before, I (and some other colleagues from MySQL) will be attending FOSDEM 2008 in Brussels, Belgium on February 23rd and 24th.

The schedule is packed as usual and lists several MySQL-related topics and sessions:

• Main tracks: Unicoding With PHP 6 by Andrei Zmievski and the talk about CakePHP by Garrett J Woodworth are certainly relevant for web developers using PHP.
• Lightning talks: Jan Kneschke will speak about MySQL Proxy (not yet listed in the schedule, but likely between 15-16 o'clock on Sunday). Other sessions with MySQL relevance/relations are Kettle: extracting, transforming and loading data by Matt Casters and Alfresco: fresh document management approach by Philippe Dubois.
• DevRooms: The Drupal people have set up a DevRoom with a session track - Kris Buytaert will talk about Drupal and MySQL High Availability. Another DevRoom worth visiting will be the one organized by the Belgian Ruby User Group - they set up a Ruby on Rails Developer Room. My friends from the openSUSE project also have a great number of sessions lined up for their openSUSE Developer Room: several talks about the Build Service (proudly powered by MySQL) and a session about the openSUSE redirector (a tool to set up and manage a content delivery network with MySQL) by Peter Poeml.

If you also plan to attend, please ping me if you would like to meet!

 

 

 

After getting very annoyed about the behaviour of pinepg in combination with gpg2 on my openSUSE 10.3 beta test system, I have now scratched my itch and switched to an alternative tool: pine-gpg-filter:

The distinguishing characteristic of this package (when compared against similar pine and gpg wrappers) is its ability to handle multiple roles or identities (i.e. different keys for different email addresses). Unlike some of the other pine and gpg wrappers, this one performs no passphrase caching (consider using gpg-agent in gnupg2).

They provide a "noarch" RPM directly from that site, but I've now also added it to my home:LenzGr repository in the openSUSE build service. Enjoy! 

In addition to the binary downloads that we provide from our site, Linux RPM builds of the MySQL Proxy (both the latest stable version as well as SVN snapshot releases, named mysql-proxy-snapshot) are now available for download from the server:/database repository of the openSUSE build service. It provides packages for a number of Linux distributions, e.g. Fedora 5/6, SLES 9/10 SuSE/openSUSE 10.x. By the way, this repository also contains RPMs of the current 5.0.45 MySQL Community Server for the distributions mentioned above. Thanks a lot to Darix for the initial checkin of the proxy package!

 

JFYI, I recently updated several packages in my home:LenzGr and the devel:tools:scm repositories of the openSUSE Build Service:

• bzr (Version 0.18)
• darcs (Version 1.0.9)
• google-perftools (Version 0.92)
• KeyJnote (Version 0.10.0)
• Mercurial (Version 0.9.4)

Enjoy! And Kudos to the folks that develop and maintain the build service, this is a great service to the Community.

After a longer pause I finally had a moment to work on my packages in the openSUSE Build Service. I now added RPMs for the Google Performance Tools and enabled building on openSUSE 10.2. From the perftools project page:

Perf Tools is a collection of a high-performance multi-threaded malloc() implementation, plus some pretty nifty performance analysis tools.

I hope you will find them useful. It would be interesting to see, if a KDE desktop linked against tcmalloc() is significantly faster than using the default glibc malloc()...

JFYI: as discussed on the opensuse-buildservice mailing list today, I now moved my mercurial packages to the devel:tools:scm Project on the openSUSE build service now. Updated packages will be available from there instead of my home project.

Yes, I am an eyecandy and screensaver fan. I now added an RPM of the "Electric Sheep" screensaver to my RPM repository on the fabolous SUSE build service. Have fun!

Encouraged by this flattering comment, I went through my full collection of SUSE RPMs, picked the ones worth updating to the latest versions and submitted them to my package repository at the openSUSE build service now:

• bchunk 1.2.0 - A CD image format converter from .bin/.cue to .iso/.cdr/.wav.
• kvdr 0.64 - A KDE Front-End for VDR (Video Disk Recorder)
• samefile 2.12 - Find identical files on your file system
• rss-glx 0.8.1 - Really Slick Screensavers
• rzip 2.1 - A large-file compression program

I hope none of these are already maintained somewhere else, this is something I still haven't figured out - how can I search the existing projects for certain packages?

The Build Service totally rocks, especially since it can be conveniently used from the command line as well. I submitted my first two packages via the web frontend, but have now switched to using the osc command line tool exclusively. Kudos to the openSUSE Build Service Team, building packages on other platforms has never been that easy!

Thanks to Duncan Mac-Vicar for the friendly reminder: I finally bit the bullet and started using the openSUSE Build Service for building and hosting the RPMs that I build for SUSE Linux by myself. I've now moved the KeyJnote and mercurial RPMs for SUSE Linux 10.1 to my own repository there. Future RPMs will also be provided from there exclusively. Kudos to the openSUSE team for providing this service!

Yesterday I received a sample copy of the "SUSE Linux 10.1 OSS - vorkon" DVD, which was assembled by Nicolaus Millin. While I have not installed it yet (as I by now have a very well running installation of SUSE Linux 10.1 on my laptop), the content of the DVD sounds very promising. In addition to incorporating all the updates that have been published since SUSE Linux 10.1 was released (around 100), this version also includes additional drivers like the 3D graphics drivers from ATI and nVidia, network card drivers like ndiswrapper, madwifi and rt2500 as well as drivers for AVM products and Logitech QuickCams. So the base system should already run very smooth and provides a lot of stuff that one usually has to download and install after the initial installation of SUSE Linux OSS.

But the fun doesn't stop here! Nicolaus also added a number of interesting applications, usually not included in SUSE Linux OSS, such as Adobe Reader 7.0, moneyplex, RealPlayer, FlashPlayer, Cinepaint, FlightGear and several extensions for Mozilla Firefox. He also included many LAMP applications (based on the famous Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP stack), that have already been preconfigured and are ready to use right after installing the packages! This is where the name "vorkon" comes from - "vorkonfiguriert" means "preconfigured" in German. Some of the LAMP apps included are eGroupware, Gallery2, Joomla!, MediaWiki, nagios, phpBB, Serendipity, Typo3 and several others.

All in all this looks like a well-rounded package - it reminds me a lot of how SUSE Linux used to be when people referred to it as the "everything but the kitchen sink" distribution. Unfortunately it seems as if the legal restrictions of being owned by a US company have caused a lot of the former SUSE benefits to vanish - nowadays one has to hunt for a lot of stuff like drivers and uncrippled applications after the initial installation just as with any other Linux distribution. Thanks to Nicolaus for scratching that itch!

You can purchase SUSE Linux 10.1 "vorkon" via amazon.de - for just 19,95 EUR this is a very attractive product, especially for Linux Newcomers. Give it a try!

In case you use Mercurial as your preferred distributed revision control system, an RPM of version 0.9 for SUSE Linux 10.1 is now available from my RPM section. Have fun!

Long time no post! Last Sunday I spotted the following email in my junk mailfolder:

Date: Sun, 21 May 2006 19:08:39 +0200
From: root <root@metis.lenznet>
To:  <lenz@localhost.metis.lenznet>
Subject: SMART error (OfflineUncorrectableSector) detected on host: metis

This email was generated by the smartd daemon running on:

   host name: metis
  DNS domain: lenznet
  NIS domain:

The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:

Device: /dev/hda, 1 Offline uncorrectable sectors

For details see host's SYSLOG (default: /var/log/messages).

You can also use the smartctl utility for further investigation.
No additional email messages about this problem will be sent.

Which did not sound too good. In addition to that, the system had failed to resume from a suspend to disk earlier that day - the kernel experienced disk read errors while trying to load the suspended image from the swap partition. Fortunately a fresh reboot still worked and I ran a more thorough analysis of the disk drive by using smartctl -t long /dev/hda. Using various Open Source tools from a SUSE Linux 10.1 rescue system (which boots off the first installation CD) helped me to backup and restore my data without losing anything (except for some time, of course).