The admins running Wikipedia are almost complete in migrating their servers from a mix of RedHat and Fedora to Ubuntu. The primary reasons behind the switch, according to Brion Vibber (Wikimedia CTO), were personal preference, Ubuntu availability on the desktop and better support/stability compared to Fedora. As a server, one might think that an enterprise option like RHEL or CentOS might make for a better choice, however both of these lack the appeal of Ubuntu and the flexibility in support.

Regardless of the reasons for the switch, this is another opportunity for people to question Fedora’s fast moving development pace (i.e. “bleeding edge”). Fedora user know that Fedora requires constant updating/upgrading and Fedora developers are obviously quite accustomed this and welcome it. An interesting thread on the Fedora development mailing list raised this topic and spawned a great deal of discussion. Some users/developers think that if Fedora provided a LTS stable release then perhaps situations like Wikipedia’s could have been avoided. Jesse Keating, Fedora Release Engineer, chimed in with a very well worded point:

Given the amount of churn we allow maintainers to introduce into our “stable” releases, I highly doubt Fedora would be suitable for any situation where a “LTS” was desired. There is just too much major version upgrading, behavioral changes, massive amounts of updates, rapidly invalid documentation, and high chance of regression in the “stable” updates. We should address that problem before ever thinking about extending the life.

Even if Fedora could address that problem, big organizations most likely won’t change their opinions. However if those issues could be addressed, many users probably wouldn’t be migrating away, and more importantly they would just have a much better operating system!

(As a personal point, I no longer use Fedora as a server. I recommend CentOS.)

Posted in: CentOS, Desktop, Fedora, Opinion, Red Hat, Server,

A fairly common question is: How do I determine which applications are making network connections?

While there are different ways to do this, a quick solution is with netstat. To see which applications are connecting to which network addresses, run the following as root (if you are not root certain output is limited):

# netstat -tuap

This will produce several columns of output the last column is PID/Program name. If you do not recognize the application name, use the PID number and use the ps command to find more information. For example (replace PID with the actual number):

# ps -p PID -F

For more information on the many other functions of either of these commands use the man utility:

# man netstat
# man ps

Posted in: Miscellaneous, Tips,

This is something I’ve always thought about looking up myself. Great tip for using pv command for seeing copy progress.

Example:

$ cat source/file.img | pv -s 100g -p -e -r > destination/file.img
[ 25MB/s] [==========> ] 13% ETA 0:54:35

Only problem: what package in CentOS includes pv?

Posted in: Miscellaneous, Tips,

It was announced in August that the Fedora Project suffered a security breach. As a result after a certain date, all software updates were disabled. As of recently, the updates were enabled with new signatures in place.

I recently updated my Fedora 9 32bit (i386) installation. The last time I updated my system was the last week of July, before the security announcement was made. The following are the steps I took to complete my update.

First I ran: yum update

This listed very few updates, however I saw the following error:

  --> Finished Dependency Resolution
kmod-nvidia-2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686-173.14.12-3.lvn9.i686 from livna has depsolving problems
  --> Missing Dependency: kernel-uname-r = 2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686 is needed by package kmod-nvidia-2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686-173.14.12-3.lvn9.i686 (livna)
xine-lib-extras-nonfree-1.1.15-1.lvn9.i386 from livna has depsolving problems
  --> Missing Dependency: xine-lib(plugin-abi) = 1.24 is needed by package xine-lib-extras-nonfree-1.1.15-1.lvn9.i386 (livna)
Error: Missing Dependency: kernel-uname-r = 2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686 is needed by package kmod-nvidia-2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686-173.14.12-3.lvn9.i686 (livna)
Error: Missing Dependency: xine-lib(plugin-abi) = 1.24 is needed by package xine-lib-extras-nonfree-1.1.15-1.lvn9.i386 (livna)

To resolve it, I just did:

yum remove kmod-nvidia xine-lib-extras-nonfree

This removed:

Removing:
 kmod-nvidia                      i686   173.14.05-4.lvn9  installed   0.0
 xine-lib-extras-nonfree          i386   1.1.12-1.lvn9     installed   1.2 M
Removing for dependencies:
 amarok-extras-nonfree            i386   1.4.8-1.lvn9      installed   376
 kmod-nvidia-2.6.25.4-30.fc9.i686 i686   173.14.05-3.lvn9  installed   7.5 M
 kmod-nvidia-2.6.25.6-55.fc9.i686 i686   173.14.05-4.lvn9  installed   7.5 M
 xorg-x11-drv-nvidia              i386   173.14.05-1.lvn9  installed   7.0 M
 xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs         i386   173.14.05-1.lvn9  installed    17 M

I knew that a new repository would be configured, so instead of downloading any updates from the previous repository, I just ran the following:

yum update fedora-release

After that, I did the actual update (the “yes” option -y is recommended considering the amount of updates):

yum -y update

This listed, for me, 35 new packages, 443 updated packages and 2 packages to remove - for a total download size of: 991 MB !!!

After the download completed, and before the actual installation/update occurred, I saw the following (which is what is expected):

warning: rpmts_HdrFromFdno: Header V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 6df2196f
Importing GPG key 0x6DF2196F "Fedora (8 and 9) <fedora @fedoraproject.org>" from /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-8-and-9-i386
Is this ok [y/N]: y

After all the updates were installed, I fixed the xine-lib-extra-nonfree update issue (basically adding what I had previously removed). The following ran with no problems:

yum install xine-lib-extras-nonfree amarok-extras-nonfree

NVIDIA Driver Issue

When trying to update/install the Nvidia binary driver using yum:

yum install kmod-nvidia

The same error from above persisted:

  --> Finished Dependency Resolution
kmod-nvidia-2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686-173.14.12-3.lvn9.i686 from livna has depsolving problems
  --> Missing Dependency: kernel-uname-r = 2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686 is needed by package kmod-nvidia-2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686-173.14.12-3.lvn9.i686 (livna)
Error: Missing Dependency: kernel-uname-r = 2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686 is needed by package kmod-nvidia-2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686-173.14.12-3.lvn9.i686 (livna)

Apparently, this problem is due to Livna build system being down. The following is the recommended alternate solution:

yum install akmod-nvidia

Then you just need to reboot and you are done!!! (This is already required due to the new kernel).

However I ran the following to test the akmod system. This is OPTIONAL as the following will automatically happen after rebooting: First Identify the newest installed kernel:

[mirandam@charon ~]$ rpm -q kernel
kernel-2.6.25.6-55.fc9.i686
kernel-2.6.26.3-29.fc9.i686

Create the proper matching kmod files for that kernel:

[mirandam@charon ~]$ sudo /usr/sbin/akmods --kernels **2.6.26.3-29.fc9.i686**
Checking kmods exist for **2.6.26.3-29.fc9.i686**              [WARNING]
Building and installing nvidia-kmod                        [  OK  ]

Then I was done. Every step worked for me to bring my Fedora 9 system up to date. I rebooted and the akmod detected I had already created the necessary kmod files.

I should have done all of this earlier. For more help and issues, please read: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Enabling_new_signing_key

I am glad that issue has been resolved.

Posted in: F9, Fedora, Security, Setup,

Using Firefox 3. Very simply, I know that Redhat’s main website (https://www.redhat.com) works perfectly fine. However when I exclude the “www”, and go to the same website: https://redhat.com, apparently something is wrong?

I see Secure Connection Failed. (Should I be concerned???) So I click the “add exception link…” … which turns into button … So I click the “Add Exception…” Button … which opens a dialog So I click the “Get Certificate” Button So I can enable the “Confirm Security Exception” Button, so I can click on that.

Who is the genius who came up with that work flow?

Is this misleading? Confusing? I wonder … but you decide for yourself.

I will simply say it is annoying as hell.

Posted in: Miscellaneous, Opinion, Security, Software,