I after installing Fedora7 I thought I’d take a look at the stats the project had gathered, I saw some centos devices, but couldn’t find a rpm.

I’ve had a go at building one, it mostly works (this is my nagios box), it’s a rebuild of the f7 source, I have to frig about with the spec file, so I’ve published my source rpm here, search for Nick in the .spec file, you’ll see my bodge.

The smolt rpms are in my yum repo, feel free to download the packages and have a go.

• smolt-0.9.8.1-1.noarch.rpm
• smolt-firstboot-0.9.8.1-1.noarch.rpm

Why has it taken me so long to spot this ? Looks like this draft was written on the 13th May, if I hadn’t have been just about to download FC7 then I’d have missed it !

EPEL - Fedora Project Wiki
EPEL is a volunteer-based community effort from the Fedora project to create a repository of high-quality add-on packages that complement the Fedora-based Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its compatible spinoffs like CentOS or Scientific Linux.

About time, and thank you redhat/fedora, want fedora extra packages in centos, then install this epel-release .rpm frickin’ sweet !

I’ve taken to using CentOS on my servers, and fedora on my Laptop. New job, means new laptop, and to avoid fedora update hell, I thought I’d try CentOS on my laptop.

All seems good other than my wifi card not being detected, and for some reason googling for “centos 5 intel 3945” didn’t provide a working anserwer, actually I found the answer by googling for “supplementary disk centos 5” which finds this thread that says…

Install dag’s repo (this rpm), and then install dkms-ipw3945 (yum will pick up the dependancies)

yum install dkms-ipw3945

Next enable network manager…

Whilst doing some routine maintenance, I noticed that I never published the rkhunter rpm I built, the software is officially supported at rootkit.nl but for ease I wanted a yum available rpm

There are somethings that you just never get round to, my nagios box was still running whitebox linux, and I’ve finally gotten round “upgrading” it to CentOS… yeah ok, upgrade is arguable, but you get my point.

First off a warning: Don’t do this ! All the documentation, for CentOS, RHEL, Fedora, any redhat linux all say, clean installs are the best way, and upgrades are not advised…. therefore I offer no support or warranty that this will work, in fact, I you advise you to read this post, but step away from your consoles !

Following a request I’ve rebuilt a later tripwire rpm (2.4.1.1); I think at this point it would be prudent to point out that the rpms found here are not maintained, and I do not offer any kind of support - you use them at your own risk - but you’re welcome to make requests !

tripwire-2.4.1.1-1.i386.rpm

My Yum repo has also been updated, config file here

A couple of weeks ago, I was proper ill with flu; the problem with looking after your own server is that only you can fix it - it’s well and good having monitoring systems (nagios) telling you about faults, but if you can’t read or see the alerts the fault won’t get resolved.

During this time I was ill, for an unknown reason the mySQL process on my server died, as such my website (and others I look after) were down for 8 hours. The fix was simple, one command, restart the service and normal service was resumed (excuse the pun).

Recently I decided to re-organise my bookmarks toolbar, and added links to my nagios and cacti installations. I noticed that the favicons where missing.

For cacti, there’s a how to, but I found it a little over kill - I didn’t need step 2 , as my catci install is an rpm from dag, and I didn’t bother with step 4, as it worked without it, but hey ymmv!

Nagios was simpler, depending on how you installed nagios, will effect file permission , owners, directories etc. Again, I’ve got another dag rpm, so for me I logged in as root,

I think it’s safe to say, if you can’t get something to work then the manual is rubbish or the user is stupid, with setting up snmp v3 on linux, the user is me, so the fault is probably lies there.

SNMPv3 moves away from the community string idea from older version, and into a username & password combo. The correct tool for creating users is snmpusm, but no matter how many times I read the man page I can’t work it out. I get that you copy a user from the initial user, but how do you create the initial user ? If I try on my box I just get an “snmp timeout” error.

I don’t know everything about linux, who does ? So if I put one into a production environment I want to know if anything changes.

It took a couple of goes, but I finally managed to build a tripwire rpm for Redhat Enterprise Linux, I’ve been testing it for a couple of weeks, all looks good.

It’s available from my files directory or my repo , if you have any problems let me know

This has been on my to do list for a while… I have finally converted my little reporsitory of rpm’s into a proper yum repo !

The old xfce repo has been mergered into a new Whitebox repo, which in fact can be used for CentOS, WBEL or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

A new fedora repo exists as well, those with a keen eye will see new rpm sections for FC5 64_86 (my new pc!).

All packages will be signed with my gpg key, and config files can be found here:

Sorry yum friends, when I saw the announcement from xfce about Xfce 4.2.3.1 I sighed, not because my love for xfce has changed, but I remember what I’d forgotten.

When my place of work moved office I lost my white box build server as soon as I’ve got one, I’ll get the rpms built, in the mean time please see www.xfce.org

XFCE 4.2.2 has been released, and to be honest I’ve struggled to get the rpm rebuilds done… just no time :’( !

Anyway the official announcement was here
http://foo-projects.org/pipermail/xfce-announce/2005-May/000021.html

You can update your whitebox installation using [LINICKX].com ! Check that you have something like this in your /etc/yum.conf…

Then… from a shell do:

…and your done

I’ve got a few posts in my wordpress drafts that are based around rebuilding RPMS, I figure that before I finish them it makes sense to wrte a Getting Started Guide.

The first thing is based around the “Unix Golden Rule”: Only use root when you have to.

To rebuild rpms you need a cirtain directory stucture, it is located in /usr/src/redhat, but since it is owned by root you’re gonna need on in your $HOME. The following does the job:

UPDATE: 15th Aug 06 - This repo has moved, please see this post.

Yesterday I think google & I fell out, I’ve got WBEL installed on a really old PC and GNOME is just too fat

I discovered XFCE when I was playing with Fedora Core 2 some time ago. I found it to be a nice light weight windowmager / Desktop Evnvirmoent that used very little memory; so in my wisdom I decided to install XFCE onto my WBEL box, and to my suprise I couldn’t find a Yum Repo. This left me with three options (1) put up with twm (2) find another alternative, read their manual, and learn how to use xyz window manager or (3) Build XFCE for WBEL from source.