I know I might bag out CentOS at the best of times, but Karanbir Singh – our fearless leader of all CentOS developers has announced the immediate availability of CentOS-5.7 for i386 and x86_64 Architectures.
Well, what are you waiting for? yum upgrade.
Yesterday I posted about having an existing ssh-agent load on all new shells. Here are two more handy snippets of code from my .bash_profile
The first code snippet is a follow on from yesterday, were I can type ‘lock’ or ‘unlock’ into my shell and the ssh-agent will follow on accordingly. When your ssh-agent is locked, users that have access to the ssh-agent will be required to type in your SSH agent password.
function lock () { ssh-add -x }
function unlock () { ssh-add -X }
The next snippet of code adds a ‘ns’ command. I have issues trying to remember IPs – especially when they are not used too often. This command lets me easily remember 
alias ns='for x in ns1 ns2 ns3 ns4 ; do host $x.google.com; done'
When run:
[tim@2-xlc-controller ~]$ ns ns1.google.com has address 216.239.32.10 ns2.google.com has address 216.239.34.10 ns3.google.com has address 216.239.36.10 ns4.google.com has address 216.239.38.10
The last dirty one liner that I love is another simple time saver. Many people use the ‘whois‘ command to find out what nameservers are used by a domain name. It’s not too long before you work out that it is not really the best way to be finding out what the domain name’s nameservers are.
function nameservers() { echo $1\'s nameservers are:; dig +trace $1 | grep NS | grep "^$1."; }
This handy one liner allows me to do awesome things like:
[tim@3-xlc-controller ~]$ nameservers google.com google.com's nameservers are: google.com. 172800 IN NS ns2.google.com. google.com. 172800 IN NS ns1.google.com. google.com. 172800 IN NS ns3.google.com. google.com. 172800 IN NS ns4.google.com.
I love ssh-agent, but always found that running source ~/.ssh.agent annoyed me!
That was before I wrote this code, which I absolutely love:
source ~/.ssh.agent
PID=$SSH_AGENT_PID
if [ -f /proc/$SSH_AGENT_PID/cmdline ]; then
CMD=`cat /proc/$SSH_AGENT_PID/cmdline`;
if [ "$CMD" != "ssh-agent" ] ; then
PID=0
fi
else
PID=0
fi;
if [ "$PID" -eq 0 ]; then
ssh-agent > ~/.ssh.agent
source ~/.ssh.agent
ssh-add
fi;
Put simply, when added to your .bash_profile this code will ensure that your current ssh-agent is loaded. You may now ssh freely into servers without always typing that 100 character SSH Key password
I love RedHat Linux. I think it is a beautiful piece of engineering. Hundreds of thousands of man hours spent ensuring systems that have packages installed keep running. Continuously.
One thing however that I have found is that my favorite RHEL clone for years, CentOS has been slacking. Bad.
For example, RedHat Enterprise Linux 6 was released 10/11/2010, not bad, seeing as it’s previous version, RHEL5 was released 15/3/2007 – Three and a half years earlier. CentOS? Well, Version 6 of CentOS was released July 10. In the time that it took for CentOS to release their new fresh build of CentOS 6, RedHat had already released their first service pack/major update to RedHat, RedHat Enterprise Linux 6.1.
I must point out here, the fact that CentOS does not have 6.1 is not a security issue. Any security patches for RHEL have made their way to CentOS.
Scientific Linux on the other hand have been tracking the updates and new releases very well. They had their remix of RHEL released for public consumption on March 3 – not too much of a short wait. The fact that it is not a very faithful clone has scared me from moving to it, but with the long wait of CentOS 6.1, I am starting to think that it might just be time to change my mind and grow up!
I love Android, and I love that Google is offering such a good mobile operating system, for free. Many people might just remember that Microsoft grew to prominence in the IT industry in much a similar way. They provided DOS for free (or at least at a low cost) to OEMs, which provided them with much of the market share that they have now.
It can be seen as actually quite smart that Google are offering their OS for such a low price.
Google commissioned Ascender, a digital typeface foundry and software development company located in the Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village, Illinois in the United States to create the fonts that are used by the Android user interface.
Ascender engineered the new set of system User Interface (UI) fonts named “Droid” for the Android platform built by the Open Handset Alliance. The fonts provided by Ascender allow highly legible text resulting in easy to use interfaces.
The fonts are open source, licensed under the Apache Software License.
Finding a download link to the fonts can be a bit tricky, but one of the easiest ways to get the fonts is to download them from Google’s Web Fonts project.
Here is Droid Sans, Droid Sans Mono and Droid Serif.
Failing that there is this link here to a Mercurial repository, but I didn’t tell you that, now did I?
Looking at my emails, I just realised that I forgot to pay for Drupal Downunder. -.-”
Hello Linux Conference, I can’t wait until you begin!
Red Hat is pleased to announce the availability of the latest update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, release 5.6 (with kernel-2.6.18-238.el5)!
In virtualisation land, one of the major changes have been the addition of the virtio balloon driver. This new driver in Red Hat 5.6 allows guests to express to the hypervisor how much memory they require. The balloon driver allows the host to efficiently allocate memory to the guest and allow free memory to be allocated to other guests and processes.
Also, In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6, a global synchronization point is added to pvclock, providing a more stable time source for guests, which is good because this has been the cause of so many time slips in guest clocks.
RHEL 5.6 also pushes the BIND server to the latest release number.
And guess what. Oh my goodness: PHP 5.3! I know, it seems strange, but finally Red Hat ships with PHP 5.3 as default!
There are many other noteworthy changes in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6, and I would highly suggest that you read the release notes for Red Hat 5.6.
Karanbir (the lead developer of CentOS) has asked on Twitter what should be released and how: CentOS 5.6 or CentOS 6? Arrfab has stated the reasons why CentOS 5.6 should be released first:
and although I am excited to see CentOS 6.0 be released, I must say that I agree that CentOS 5.6 should be released first.
*sigh*
[tim@beast ~]$ df / -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/disk/by-uuid/ebc29b81-cc7e-4fa5-9777-8953f54752ff 9.9G 9.3G 70M 100% /
Why oh why do I do this to myself?
A typical day’s worth of updating my machines usually looks a bit like this:
[tim@myhost tmp]$ sudo pacman -Syu :: Synchronizing package databases... core is up to date extra is up to date community is up to date multilib is up to date :: Starting full system upgrade... warning: gnome-disk-utility: ignoring package upgrade (2.30.1-1 => 2.32.0-2) warning: gvfs: ignoring package upgrade (1.6.3-1 => 1.6.6-1) warning: kernel26: ignoring package upgrade (2.6.34.3-1 => 2.6.36.3-1) warning: kernel26-headers: ignoring package upgrade (2.6.34.3-1 => 2.6.36.3-1) warning: libbonoboui: ignoring package upgrade (2.24.3-1 => 2.24.4-1) warning: libgnome: ignoring package upgrade (2.30.0-1 => 2.32.0-3) warning: nvidia: ignoring package upgrade (256.53-1 => 260.19.29-1) warning: nvidia-utils: ignoring package upgrade (256.53-1 => 260.19.29-1) warning: proftpd: local (1.3.3-5) is newer than extra (1.3.3c-1) warning: rdesktop: local (1.6.0_rc1-1) is newer than extra (1.6.0-5) warning: udev: ignoring package upgrade (151-3 => 165-1) warning: udisks: ignoring package upgrade (1.0.0-0.20100223 => 1.0.2-1) warning: youtube-dl: local (2010.12.09-2) is newer than community (2010.12.09-1) resolving dependencies... looking for inter-conflicts...
You know it’s bad when you have so many custom packages, that you may as well have your own distribution .