For folks that read LWN there is a good article about Fedora 12 that has some rumors about RHEL 6.  Some rumors are more believable than others, however.  Peering deeply into Red Hat’s Bugzilla I do see quite a lot of activity with RHEL 6 internal spins and testing.  So the signs are picking up.  I imagine a public beta might appear this spring.  The LWN article has a comment that mentions a public beta release at this year’s Red Hat Summit in June.  I’m really hoping for sooner than that, but only time will tell at this point.

gconftool-2 -g /apps/metacity/general/focus_mode

If you create a probe that outputs lines of text that look like

group: foobar

this will make the Bcfg2 client a member of the group “foobar.”  In fact, I’ve already discovered an interesting probe that will help in figuring out the basics for each machine.  Its called whatami.  It outputs useful groups like:

group: Linux
group: x86_64
group: rhel
group: 5

It uses parts of the LSB and other system information to figure out what Linux distribution, version, arch, etc. of the machine.

Perhaps, an easy way to help get machines in the right group is to have a local file on disk that has an initial set of groups that the local administrator can modify if needed.

In Bcfg2 you’ll need the ‘Probes’ and ‘TGenshi’ plugins turned on.  (You can use the TCheetah plugin instead, but this example will use TGenshi.)  Create a probe to return the output of the file or simply exit successfully if the file is not present.

#!/bin/bash
FILE=/etc/hosers.local
[ -f $FILE ] || exit 0
cat $FILE
exit 0

Next, in the TGenshi directory, setup a template to generate that file. We simply use the output of the probe:

{# We just want to ensure this file exists #}\
${metadata.Probes["hosers"]}

Run the Bcfg2 client on a test host and it will create the file if it does not exist. If it does exist its content will be preserved.

Ever wanted screen to tell you if there was activity on another window in the background?  Have you wanted that information always in the status line not just flashed up for 5 seconds and then gone?  Stick this in your ~/.screenrc file:

msgwait 30
defmonitor on
hardstatus on
hardstatus alwayslastline "%-Lw%{= BW}%50>%n%f* %t%{-}%+Lw%< %=[%c, %D, %d/%m/%y]"

Don’t want to restart screen?  Type:

C-a :source $HOME/.screenrc

The “defmonitor on” option will cause screen to put a ‘@’ in the status line next to each window name that has had activity.  You can toggle the monitoring on and off per window with C-a M.

I found the status line here:

http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~svan/configs/screenrc

Of course, the manual is always your friend:

http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/manual

http://linuxczar.net/code/bcfg2/1.0pre5/

I did have a couple issues with the 1.2.3-1 bitlbee package un EPEL.  It segfaults connecting to jabber servers.  However, this has been fixed in the forth coming 1.2.3-4 package.  See bug 501786.

Next, Bitlbee would not connect to jabber chats that require a password.  I found this issue fixed in bitlbee’s ticket tracking system.  Ticket 397.

Once I had those issues patched I have a very functional bitlbee setup. Here is my source package.

• bitlbee-1.2.3-5.src.rpm

%__gpg_check_password_cmd

(the command run to validate the password you give RPM during signing) and the

%__gpg_sign_cmd

(the command used to actually sign packages) macros.  After that, you just need to deal with RPM’s usage of getpass(3) to grab the password from the controlling tty.

As much as we love Tcl, the expect tool works the best for this provided you can incant enough RPM macro foo into it.  I’ve written a messy expect script that takes several arguments to automatically sign packages.  The first is the GPG key ID which I normally use an email address in angle brackets.  The second argument is a file name that contains the pass phrase.  The rest of the arguments are the RPM packages to sign.

http://linuxczar.net/code/autosign.exp

Excepting patches.

http://linuxczar.net/code/bcfg2/

You can find the specs and other package bits here:

https://svn.linux.ncsu.edu/svn/clspackages/rpms/bcfg2/