Unable to upgrade

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Jul 132011
 

The problem of self-thinking repositories like Ubuntu has (this server runs Ubuntu) is that you cannot always upgrade to the latest version of the software you use, without doing a OS-upgrade. I cannot upgrade WordPress any further because I cannot update PHP to the minimum required version. It’s not in the repositories.

So, I guess this is the point where I have to say: the 32-bit Ubuntu installation running on 64-bit hardware is long overdue its update, mainly because the upgrade means: complete re-installation. You cannot upgrade 32-bit to 64-bit. Perhaps later this week. I’ve got a spare 1TB disk here, now all I have to decide is which distro it’s going to be. Ubuntu again, or perhaps OpenSuSE like my desktop?

OpenSuSE 11.4

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Jun 262011
 

I was frustrated about not having Firefox 4 on my desktop, so last week I decided to upgrade OpenSuSE. I still used 11.2, so I figured I’d upgrade in two steps. First to 11.3, second to 11.4.

The upgrade to 11.3 went rather smoothly, apart from the fact that I did forget to include the NVidia repositories, so I did not get X up and running the first time. No biggie.

The upgrade to 11.4 should be simpler, I guessed, since I just succesfully upgraded to 11.3. To my surprise, I could not even get the system booted. The problem? For some reason my drives all got mixed up, so the /dev/sd[abcde] references where all wrong. What I eventually ended up doing, was a cat from the grub/menu.lst, sed-ing the correct /dev/disk/by-id-references in it, so it booted. Next I could “vi” my fstab, and changed all the references there. Reboot again. Pffffff….. Now it works.

Couple of things though. To use samba-shares, in 11.4 you have to disable Novell’s AppArmor, since there seems to be a bug that effects samba.

Another thing is the squeezebox server software. I had to actually uninstall and reinstall (a newer version while at it) it, to get it working again.

VMPlayer needed a higher version as well, but that was not a problem at all.

So, I now run 11.4.

vmplayer on OpenSuSE

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Jan 142011
 

For some reason vmplayer did not start anymore. It complained about the kernel modules. WTF? I did not change anything on the system, it has not been powered off, I did not install any updates, so…WTF!? I googled around and found in some forum that moving the binary directory from vmware’s lib-dir would do the trick. It did! Here’s what I did:


mv /usr/lib/vmware/modules/binary /usr/lib/vmware/modules/binary_old
depmod -a
vmplayer

And…voila! It works. Not sure why this happened tough.

Server outage

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Dec 112010
 

The server was down this afternoon. After reboot, my devices were mixed up, so I guess a disk (old one) died and that reshuffled the whole numbering. Up and running since an hour or so, not really sure whether I miss something or not. We’ll see.

Oracle 10gR2 x64 on CentOS 5.4 x64

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May 172010
 

I was asked to install Oracle 10gR2 on one of the clients new machines. Of course I had trouble installing it, since the OS was CentOS and not one of the certified Oracle platforms. The trouble with installing Oracle x64 on non-supported systems is the relinking process. You always run into libraries that cannot be found, or some other shit that’s still looking for 32-bit software/libraries. In my opinion x64 should be the default and all server software should be backported to x86, but that’s just my opinion.

Thanks to this post I was able get Oracle to install properly, basically because the list of prerequisite packages in Oracle’s installation guide is to short. This list (at least on CentOS 5.4) should do the trick:

binutils-2.17.50.0.6-2.el5
compat-gcc-34-3.4.6-4
compat-gcc-34-c++-3.4.6-4
compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3-61
compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3-61(i386)
control-center-2.16.0-14.el5
gcc-4.1.1-52.el5
gcc-c++-4.1.1-52.el5
gdbm-1.8.0-26.2.1
glibc-2.5-12
glibc-common-2.5-12
glibc-devel-2.5-12
glibc-devel-2.5-12(i386)
libgcc-4.1.1-52.el5(i386)
libgcc-4.1.1-52.el5(x86_64)
libgnome-2.16.0-6.el5
libstdc++-devel-3.4.3-22.1
libXp-1.0.0-8.i386
libXp-1.0.0-8.x64
make-3.81-1.1
sysstat-7.0.0-3.el5.x86_64.rpm
util-linux-2.13-0.44.e15.x86_64

You don’t need the exact versions. Just do a “yum install compat-gcc-34” for instance, and if the installed version is higher, you’re safe.

Server hardware

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Apr 052009
 

Today I exchanged the server hardware with the hardware leftover from my desktop upgrade. So the CPU is now a dual 3GHz (AMD 64-bits) instead of a single 1GHz 32-bits processor. And the memory has been expanded from 512MB to 4GB. Response of the weblog and the gallery should be a lot faster.

On the downside, the 80GB IDE disk stopped working, so I need to check what I’m missing now. As far as I know it was the old disk holding the gallery images, but they were moved to the SATA disk some time ago.

To do: upgrade from Ubuntu 32-bits to 64-bits and reconfigure X to use the new videocard (the troublesome ATI, instead of the ancient NVidia V7700 GeForce2 card).

More hardware

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Mar 072009
 

Yesterday I bought a Gigabit switch and a BluRay rewriter. The switch was mainly necessary because of the NAS-disk. Accessing it from several computers via 100Mbit makes the drive feel sluggish. Now on Gbit, it’s a lot faster. Of course the actual read and write times didn’t change, but browsing it and (dis)connecting it is faster.

After my last system upgrade, I found that I still had a PATA DVD-burner and the new motherboard only has 1 PATA connection (for two drives). Since I have two PATA drives in the system, I had to buy another burner. Instead of being el-cheapo and buying one for about 20-25 euro, I bought a BluRay-rewriter. The LG GGW-H20L. It’s not an easy task to play BluRay movies under Ubuntu, but creating them (since I own Nero Linux) is easy. The drive was recognized by Ubuntu and by Nero, and in no time I burned my first (rewritable) disc.

Upgraded my system

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Jan 242009
 

Today I bought new hardware and upgraded my desktop system. The “old” hardware will give my server more room to breathe (it’s an old P3 1GHz with 512MB memory, soon to be replaced by a AMD Athlon 64X2 6000+ with 4GB memory).
To upgrade my system, I replaced my motherboard, as well as the CPU (now a Phenom II 920), the memory (now 8 GByte) and the videocard (now an NVidia GeForce 9800GT by Gigabyte). Apart from the network card not being recognized automatically, the system was up and running after two reboots. The first to enable the network driver, and a second to enable the restricted NVidia driver.
Oh, and I replaced the 360W power supply with a 500W version. It also has a modular cable system, so only the power cords I need are attached, leaving you with less clutter in the case.

The Phenom II has a nice feature (or the motherboard has, I don’t know): you can group the 4 cores to act as one big core (ganged), or you can leave it to the default and have 4 cores (unganged).

Ubuntu now rocks again…!

Ubuntu 8.10 – part 5 (last part?)

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Jan 102009
 

Right. Yesterday the update manager presented me a kernel(headers) update, so I installed that. It required a reboot, which I just did. “X can only be started in low graphics mode”. WTF?! The last time I had this (see a couple of postings back) I reverted from the non-free ATI driver to the free driver. It meant a little performance loss, but it worked. Now the free ATI driver is not working anymore as well. “Saw a signal 11” is what it reports, basically saying: you’re fucked in the ass, so you’d better like it.

If I can’t fix this in a reasonable amount of time, this is the last thing Ubuntu does on my machine. What a fuck-up!

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