Category: linux

sysdeputil.c:162: error: expected declaration specifiers or ‘…’ before ‘capset’

linux technology

I have no freaking clue what I am doing. So be careful just following this blindly.
When I initially googled for this issue I did not find this specific solution:

When tried to install vsftpd.2.0.7 from source on a centos 5.2 64 bit machine I get the error:

sysdeputil.c:162: error: expected declaration specifiers or '...' before 'capset'

Followed by allot of similar errors. I was able to address this by


yum install libcap-devel.x86_64

At which point the linker complained:

/lib/libcap.so.1: could not read symbols: File in wrong format

I had to actually commend out the line

locate_library /lib/libcap.so.1 && echo "/lib/libcap.so.1";

in vsf_findlibs.sh. After that it compiled and seemed work.

how easy was that!

internet linux malware

While trailing the log files this messages showed up:


Jan 12 16:49:13 andreaswacker vsftpd(pam_unix)[20094]: authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty= ruser= rhost=74.141.98.100

turns out some bot/script etc from 74.141.98.100 was trying to find an ftp user with a stupid name. Would have had no luck, but I don’t like my log files to be cluttered. So it turned out that a simple


iptables -I INPUT -s 74.141.98.100 -j DROP

blocks that IP address from now on. Nice. I think I will use that often now. There are lots of misconfigured systems out there. Like that Windows 98 computer in the philipines downloading the same file 5000 times yesterday. Thank you iptables.

kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: WARNING: Character ioctl (0x108) timed out, resetting card.

linux

while burning in a new machine with a 3ware 9560 adapter I got twice the following error messages:


kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: WARNING Character ioctl (0x108) timed out, resetting card.
kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: INFO Cache synchronization completed:unit=0.

Looking at the source it seems that 0x108 is TW_IOCTL_FIRMWARE_PASS_THROUGH

I had these errors only when smartd was configured to probe the drives on the 3ware card. This was under max load
during the burn in of the array. Not sure if there were any other errors etc. It seemed harmless enough, but then again
no errors are better than spurious warning etc. Once I have a couple of days of a clean running machine I probably will
turn smartd on again to see if the connection indeed exists.

old computers that still work

linux M$ OSX

A new problem that is looking for solutions: Computers are worth replacing while they are still work fine.

Some solutions

Interesting is the theme that the OS is often the reason to kick it to the curb: It is outdated (OS9), just got slower and slower (windows used to do that, does it still? Luckily I have no idea) or it just filled with malware (That WOULD be a windows feature). The hardware might do some good. I am always surprised how little harddrives have been. “Back in the day”.

postfix: can’t create user output file

internet linux technology

people alerted me that they got an email bounce saying:

Final-Recipient: rfc822; andreas@interdubs.com
Original-Recipient: rfc822; andreas@andreaswacker.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0
Diagnostic-Code: X-Postfix; can't create user output file

it turned out that my local mail file that I keep as a backup was bigger than 1000 Megabyte. Seems to be that postfix (or whichever program delivers the mail locally to /var/spool/mail) does not like to write to files that are bigger than that number. Scary the file grew to that size within one year.

install apple developer tools in the command line

Apple confessions of a pixel pusher linux OSX

Since years I work on a couple of computers via command line. Since they are real unix computers it all works remarkably well. For a specific solution I need to run osacompile. AppleScript needs to get compiled. I did not find a way to distribute it as text. So finally I got a hold of an OS X machine in the internet. More on that part later. osacompile really wants to run the application that it will talk to later. Also rather odd. But, hey, we talk Apple here. A sect in disguise of a technology company. So everything is possible. Or rather impossible. Like adding a development environment. The Box happened to have no Dev Tools installed. Usually that’s maybe a bit timely but overall straight forward. Installing development tools on a unix computer.
With Apple OS X 10.4.11 it turns out that doing so via ssh is not as trivial. You can download the source code. But first you need to create a developer account with ADC. It’s free. It’s annoying. They keep forgetting my password. Once you logged in,
you could download the dmg file to your local machine. I could have done that and waited only a couple of weeks for my DSL to upload the 900+ MB file to the final server I need it on. Downloading the dmg directly did not work. I had to fake a login. Which is easier as it seems. In the browser that is logged in (firefox I assume) you look for a cookie called ADCDownloadAuth. This you copy paste into the following command line:

curl -b "ADCDownloadAuth=SomeVeryLongCookieString" -O \
http://adcdownload.apple.com/Developer_Tools/xcode_2.5_developer_tools/xcode25_8m2558_developerdvd.dmg

At least that’s the valid file of today.
Once you have the file you attach (aka mount) it via:

hdiutil attach xcode25_8m2558_developerdvd.dmg

and navigate into

/Volumes/Xcode Tools/Packages

to then run:

sudo installer -verbose -pkg XcodeTools.mpkg -target /

Don’t run this against XcodeTools.mpkg in /Volumes/Xcode Tools directly. This results in the error message:

2008-01-09 03:47:43.889 installer[2843] IFPkg::_parseOldStyleForLanguage - can't find .info file (XcodeTools)

which does not google very sucessful.

The install seems to work, from what I can tell so far. I have gcc and make. And that’s all I cared for.

umask and uid for discreet flame

confessions of a pixel pusher linux

Autodesk aka Discreet Flame Flint Inferno applications run under irix or linux. Which is great. Unfortunately it is a long standing practise of those people in montreal to seperate different versions of their application by giving them a different user. Of course that’s just plain wrong and stupid. But if you pay north of 40,000 US$ for a single software seat you stop making reasonable demands. Discreet / AutoDesk does this since more than 14 years, why should they stop?

A couple of simple commands can fix the biggest issues with this. The first one is that each install creates a new user id. The fix is to edit /etc/passwd and give the new user a common id (100 in this example). We assume it was 101 for the new install. Running the following command as root:


find /usr/discreet/NEWLYINSTALLEDVERSION -user 101 -exec chown 100 {} \;

will fix the permissions.

Another annoyance is that they set the umask in the .cshrc of each login. If you run a couple of versions side by side it’s pretty tedious to fix these flags manually. The following does so for all installed versions.

Under Linux you can use sed for this:


cd /usr/discreet
sed -i.bak.umask "s/umask 002/umask 000/" */.cshrc

For Irix you would need to turn to perl:

cd /usr/discreet
perl -i.bak.umask -p -e "s/umask 002/umask 000/" */.cshrc

This will make the umask wide open for the user running flame or one of the other Discreet products. Some people might like that everybody can now delete
and overwrite files. Others don’t.

mail fseek: Invalid argument panic: temporary file seek

internet linux malware

With a full mailbox mail might die with:

fseek: Invalid argument
panic: temporary file seek
Aborted

of course it’s all spam. That aside it seems that

mutt

can deal with these big mail boxes.

php5 without myql for fc4 php version and pcre library 6.6

linux

For historical reasons I run a Fedora core 4. It turns out that php5 is configured NOT to use mysql in this default install. Which is stupid, but what can you do?
Well, for starters you could follow: helpful howto.
The php source Version that it uses is 5.1.2. And it turns out that this is needed: Trying the current 5.2.1 resulted in

configure: error: The PCRE extension requires PCRE library version >= 6.6

In other words php 5.2.1 insists on having perl compatible regular expressions with a version number higher than 6.6. We ignore the fact that Perl Regular Expressions probably have not changed in the last ten years. So I am not sure why, -o- why, php 5.2 should now be insisting on a new Version.
Over at Centos there is a how to to get pcre 6.6 installed. Only problem is, that it does not fly on fedora core 4. To new for it I suppose.

So in the end I got php 5.1.2 from here and the beforementioned how to worked like a charm. Here my mirror of that specific php Version.

distro history

history linux technology

I am not a sysadmin. Ok, I adminstrate machine, but mostly so that I can go back and write some more horrible code. Coding for unix system is the most fun. I still remember when the Sun spark pizzabox showed up in the adjacent office and it came with a huge box of documentation: “They want you to know all this? Awesome!” On DOS PCs I was used to an environment where equipement makers would not share any knowledge.
After working on Intergraph work stations I then spent years with Irix. Which was nice at the time, since SGI had lots of money and even used some of it wisely. Of course the writing was on the wall. And running a web server on basically free hardware (except for electricity) was intruiging enough to try to deal with Linux. I am still trying to do that. Redhat was what came my way first. It worked ok, but at some point I got sick of rpm dependency stacks. Debian looked good with apt-get. So I built two boxes running that, and they drive me crazy. No chkconfig, ‘just’ use ‘sysv-rc-conf’. Once in a while I have to deal with Suse, but new machines I build with Fedora. Yum is pretty much making me happy these days. I simply don’t understand why somebody thought it would be a great idea to rename httpd to apache (or vice versa). And there are lots and lots of these differences. You don’t notice them when you stay with one system. But switching back and forth makes this annoying. Comes with the concept of free and open software I guess. But somebody I would like to have the cake and eat it too.

The quality of software is quiet interesting: the core of things seems to work really well for linux. Not so much ‘core’ as in ‘kernel’ but rather functionalities. The fringes, the configurations, the interface to adminstrate these things is pretty horrible. The babylonic /etc/init.d/ confusion is only one example. Another one would be that sar is by default off after you installed it on debian. You have to go into /etc/default/sysstat and enable it. Trickier to find than it should be.