Groesbeek, view of the 'National Liberation Museum 1944-1945' in Groesbeek. © Ton Kersten
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Archive for November 2009

It's broken again

2009-11-20 (35) by Ton Kersten, tagged as old

A new git (1.6.5.3) arrived and I thought I should create RPM's for this again.

This turned out to be rather tedious and frustrating.

Running

rpmbuild -ba git.spec

as usual gave me this error

I/O error : Attempt to load network entity http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.5/docbookx.dtd
/home/tonk/rpmbuild/BUILD/git-1.6.5.2/Documentation/git-add.xml:2: warning: \
failed to load external entity "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.5/docbookx.dtd"
Hmm, never seen that one before. Digging around in the Makefile and adding a lot of echo's to
display some debugging info, I found it.

I recently upgraded to CentOS 5.4 and now it turns out that CentOS breaks things. In the file /etc/asciidoc/docbook.conf` it says:

... and that's wrong. There is no file for version 4.5. I didn't feel like finding out how to repair all these packages and the "dependency hell" involved. I just didn't have the stomach for it, right now (not at 01:30 AM).

So, no nice repairs, but I just changed the above line to:

(See the subtle difference between the two, 4.5 versus 4.2)

Now it all works, although I still do not know which package really breaks things.

If I ever find out I will let you know.

MDNS name resolving problem

2009-11-10 (34) by Ton Kersten, tagged as old
Within a mixed Linux and Microsoft Windows network I ran into the following problem: A host with the hostname linux1.firm.local could be pinged and found with nslookup and dig, but it was impossible to start a ssh session. The result kept being: Unknown host. Playing Cherlock Holmes revealed that this had to do with Avahi and mdns, so with the .local part of the hostname. In my /etc/nsswitch.conf the hosts: line read: (Using Ubuntu 8.04, 9.04 and even 10.04) 
hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
This results in searching the IP address of the host through mdns4_minimal. The .local domain now spoils it for me (use strings on mdns4_minimal and be amazed. The problem can be solved very easy. Just replace the hosts: line in the /etc/nsswitch.conf with: 
hosts: files dns mdns4
See also: Avahi

UNIX version 7 on x86

2009-11-05 (33) by Ton Kersten, tagged as old

A co-worker at our company found a VMware image for an ancient UNIX version, called UNIX V7. This version dates back to the good old days of 1979, and therefore it is now already 30 years old. He found this at Nordier.

It's is incredible that a UNIX version of so long ago already supports multi-processing and multi-user.

I tried to run this version of UNIX on my VMware server version 2.0, but it got stuck at the command prompt. I could have spent a great deal of time getting it to work, but playing with KVM recently, I decided to convert the image to KVM.

This was quiet simple. 

qemu-img convert <vmware-flat-file> -O qcow2 <kvm-file>

I then defined a new virtual machine in KVM with this new image and it all ran as a charm.

For all UNIX adepts, like me, this is a very nice thing to have and to study, just to see how it worked 30 years ago.

The complete image is available in the files section.

Just extract the files and correct the disk image path in the v7x86.xml file and import the file into KVM.

virsh define v7x86.xml

Enjoy the files!