rm-rf.ca

Cobbler4j, a simple java wrapper for talking to Cobbler's XMLRPC interface, is now available in the JBoss Maven Repository.

Steve Salevan has also provided us with the start of a functional test suite, details can be found in apitests/README. Just a few tests there now but we're hoping to expand on it whenever possible. Quite pleased about this, coming into the code base fresh I've found making changes quite unnerving, without knowing what you might break and how to cover all the execution paths.

Just a quick note on installing Fedora 12 on the wife's new Inspiron 15. She's been a Ubuntu user on her previous laptop for a year or so now as suspend/wireless problems just continually popped up after Fedora updates or upgrades, but with new hardware I figured it was time for another go.

Once installed it was awesome, full resolution (Intel graphics), working sound, working wireless (I sprung for the upgrade to Intel wireless which IMO pays off for anyone planning to run Linux), working webcam, and most impressive of all beautifully working suspend, all without doing anything. Really working nicely for her.

Perhaps for the first time ever, I've managed to upgrade Fedora with preupgrade. This was relatively without incident, just one irritating bug with /boot running out of disk space as preupgrade tries to store the 120M install image here on a partition that by default, is only 200M. Relatively painless workaround documented here. Preupgrade itself was quite neat in that the upgrade appears to be completely automated, aside from selecting the grub boot entry and confirming network details as part of the above workaround, I think the whole thing would have run to completion and rebooted without me being there at all. (which is nice as the machine is in my basement)

Upon reboot Eclipse would crash with a permission denied error, appears the upgrade re-enabled selinux. Fixable with "setsebool -P allow_execstack 1", and I'm going to try to keep selinux enabled this time for as long as possible.

Running basically the same thing since this weekend and loving it, it's also been pretty rock solid. In my opinion (DISCLAIMER: don't listen to me) the preview release is a great time to upgrade if you're anxious and a little bit savy. Release notes here, and you can get it here.

I couldn't stick with this setup for long but I had to take a photo before I scaled it back. The third display on the right was kinda hard on the neck, and two systems plus three LCDs generates a whole lot of heat in a very small office and summer is nearly here. (we hit 29 C here which is a good two if not three months ahead of schedule for Nova Scotia) I've now scaled back to just the two displays on the left hooked up to my desktop in a dual head configuration, and moved the workstation visible down to the basement.

While my initial attempt to get rolling with the Fedora 11 Beta was pretty rocky, one of the bugzilla's regarding Anaconda's inability to recognize my existing install for an upgrade got duped on another bug about an intermittent udev timeout. Indeed if at first Anaconda didn't realize it could upgrade my system, rebooting off the ISO corrected the problem, might take a few tries if you experience something similar.

New video card arrived today, an ATI Radeon HD 3650 with two DVI ports, but it's been quite a bit of trouble getting a fluid dual monitor setup working. I think most of the issues are related to my use of two different monitors, one a standard LCD capable of 1600x1200 and the other a widescreen LCD capable of 1680x1050.

Out of the box I think mirroring worked at a common resolution as is expected, but gnome-display-properties wouldn't do much for me without an xorg.conf in place so I had to generate one and then hack it up a bit. At some point this afternoon I had both displays in their native resolution, though on the "shorter" of the two the mouse would technically go off screen above or below (depending on how I had them arranged in gnome-display-properties), although the gnome panels displayed in the correct location. (which wasn't bad)

As usual I get over-anxious and upgrade my main desktop (which I shouldn't as I rely on it for work and as a firewall), can't work due to bugs and end up re-installing the previous version.

Firstly Anaconda didn't recognize my pre-existing F10 install for an upgrade and just wanted to go head-long into a fresh install which I ended up doing. During this the custom partitioning screen didn't recognize my LVM partition, just showed it as type none, though going back and then forward again fixed the problem. After that Anaconda crashed twice on me, once after writing partition tables to disk (tried again and it was ok) and again at the end when it tried to eject my DVD. (though by this point the system was installed)

Spacewalk 0.5 has been released, this time with support for Fedora 10. (yes really!) Check out Jesus' announcement for more details.

Fedora 11 Beta, consider your thunder *stolen*.

Anyone know of a reason why a setup like this *wouldn't* work: three physical network interfaces, bridges created for all three but two reserved exclusively for a guest operating system, the host won't even use them. Run cable modem into one, connect the other to uplink on a wireless router, run a cable from there back into the third interface for the host operating system.

Seems to me is should be doable but before I go break the bank on a $15 USB ethernet adapter (only have room for one more NIC on the motherboard) I thought I'd check. :) I guess the big question is around the bridged interfaces, must they have an IP assigned on the host? Hrm.