Syslog

Installing OpenOffice.org 3.3.0

/ bronto / Leave a comment

Currently I am using Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS on my workstation. I will switch back to Debian as soon as I have time, but for now this is what I have to bear with.

Recently, I've been annoyed by a stupid bug in OpenOffice's presentation effects. This distribution ships with 3.2.0. Once I verified that 3.3 was not affected by this bug, I decided to install it on my system using the official DEB packages.

Unfortunately, the installation instructions in the installation guide are not completely accurate. Since I am going to do this installation on all my PCs, it's better I make a note. And I'll do it here.

The dpkg line in the installation procedure should actually read as:

dpkg -i --force-overwrite openoffice.org*.deb desktop-integration/openoffice.org3.3-debian-menus_3.3-9556_all.deb ooobasis3.3-*.deb

(prefix it with sudo if you are not root).

That will install openoffice on your system, and also update GNOME menus.

The gummy second

/ bronto / Leave a comment

Quoting a friend of mine regarding this:

The international scientific community worked their ass off to provide the world with an accurate time, accepting some discontinuities so that it won't drift too much from the "solar time". And what does Google do? They invent the gummy second!!!

😆

My first puppet facts

/ bronto / 2 Comments

An apparently simple problem: have puppet manage an host's own entries: the localhost one, and the hostname's one. Well, we have plenty of facts to help us with this: we have ipaddress, and hostname, and fqdn. It should be simple, right?

But think. What happens if the host is multihomed? What if one of the interfaces is a bond interface? Does facter choose a value for ipaddress in a smart way?

Unfortunately, it doesn't. And to make it smart, you have to feed it the right thing. And to feed it, you need to write code in Ruby. Oh oh…

I decided to give it a try, and to pull in some shell script to actually do the job (bad thing, I know, but I really don't have time to learn ruby; and when I'll use some time to learn another programming language, I'd go through python and perl 6 first). … Continue reading →

Too late to fix it

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We installed a new datacenter right before I went on vacation, and of course we set up an NTP synchronization subnet there. As always, we configured four NTP multicast servers, and the rest as clients (we are talking about several hundreds of servers). The servers were running Debian Linux "Squeeze", while the vast majority of the clients was running Debian Linux "Lenny". For reasons I am not going to discuss here, using Squeeze instead of Lenny is not an option.

Right after the configuration was done, I noticed a really odd thing: all clients displayed a poll interval of 1024 seconds for one of the servers. This is just nonsense, as each server sends an NTP packet every 64 seconds. Anyway, the clients were in good sync so I decided I would investigate this after my vacation. And so I did. … Continue reading →

Using rrdgraph for better NTP monitoring

/ bronto / 2 Comments

Munin is a great tool, and it seems quite easy to monitor how your NTP service is going overall. E.g.: it's easy to put a web page together with all the offset graphs for your servers.

Unfortunately, this is far from optimal. In fact, the graphs will have different scales on the y axis, so a glance is not enough to check how they are doing overall. You'll actually need to check which values are displayed at the left side of the graph. This is annoying, because if you don't pain enough attention, you could miss bad things happening.

That's why I threw a reluctant eye to rrdtool's graph stuff. I've always been scared by the apparent complexity of the syntax, but I found out that what I needed was easy indeed. … Continue reading →

Testing Oracle Solaris 11 Express

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I've been testing Oracle Solaris 11 Express recently. For those who don't remember it, Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems :rip: and killed OpenSolaris :rip: with no official statement, the only information about the process was a leaked internal note (I leave it to you to decide whether that that leakage was real, and if it was intentional or not).

Solaris 11 Express is what remains of OpenSolaris after Oracle decided how they should move forward with it.

The immediate change you may notice in case you want to download and test it is that the license has changed, and that you are not allowed to download it unless you explicitly accept the license. Up to my knowledge, the license allows you to use it for free for personal use, otherwise you need to buy some sort of support; I didn't investigate this further because, well, I am interested in it for personal use at the moment. Why? Well, many reasons. … Continue reading →