Linux Czar

Its been in the rumor mill for some time. However, today was the first time I’ve seen it reported by a news outlet and I definitely think that its worthy to repost here. Red Hat has plans to release the RHN code as Open Source.

• Red Hat to open source its Network product - InfoWorld

Something I am very excited about. Even as the maintainer of Current. The rumor mill has it that this will be RHN 5.0.0.

Things I’d really like to see in an open source RHN are support for open source databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL. Oracle 9iR2 is a little dated. A conversion path is also doubleplusgood.

I wrote up a short wiki document about setting up and using the device mapper multipathing tools and LVM in Linux. Its targeted at my work environment and our EMC Clariion. However, I thought it might also be useful for others. Especially, if you suffer from the horrid PowerPath packages. Must suppress the need to rant. Also, includes instructions on the proper device nodes to use in your fstab which solves the “timing problem” that some folks have reported.

• http://www.linux.ncsu.edu/moin/RealmLinuxServers/Multipathing

Email is a great way to stay informed about what’s going on in the Linux world. I get probably around 500 - 800 emails a day and, unless I’ve stopped reading the list, at least know that something has passed across my radar. Enough so that if a question or situation comes up I remember that I’ve gotten email about that.

Email is a great way to get pissed off too. I just received a bit of bugzilla email for Bug #150828. For the life of RHEL 4 (close to 2 years now) PHP and perl/python modules have been compiled against different versions of the MySQL libraries. These are very important parts to running any sort of web application. There’s even an acronym for it, LAMP. So if you load two incompatible MySQL libraries into Apache (say you run some PHP code here and some Python there) guess what happens? Apache segfaults.

This isn’t an Apache problem, this is various bits of RHEL 4 being built against different versions of libraries. The fix is simple. The python-MySQL package is built against the lesser version of MySQL and I rebuilt it…2 years ago. Yet, to this day Red Hat has not been able to correct the bug. Its always promised for Update N+1. No reason for the delay is given.

Frustration. Once again I have to carry forward customizations that should be unnecessary.