Tue 13 May 2008
http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/Fedora/9/
A new release of Fedora is out again so it is time to check out the upgrade. This time it is the Fedora 9 release. The upgrade from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9 is almost exactly like the upgrade to Fedora 8. Here are the steps you need to do the upgrade from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9:
Thu 24 Apr 2008
I recently got a new work PC and was worried that stuck somewhere in the 40G hard drive of the old PC was something I would one day need. The new PC had 300G of space so I figured I would just copy the entire drive over and keep it forever. This isn't the most difficult task in the world and I actually started out using ssh to transfer the image.
Thu 8 Nov 2007
Fedora 8 has been released so it is time to upgrade once again. First you should go back and upgrade to Fedora 7 if you haven't already. From there it is even easier this time to upgrade. Here are the steps you need to do the upgrade from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8:
Sat 2 Jun 2007
Now that Fedora 7 is out I figured it was time to update the EC2 instance howto. It is almost exactly the same as creating a FC6 instance so if you want to know the details you can reference that article.
Sat 2 Jun 2007
Now that Fedora 7 has been release it is time to upgrade from that crusty old Fedora Core 6. Note that they have removed the "Core" from the name so a few things have changed with the paths used in yum. Last year I did a post on how to upgrade from FC5 to FC6 and this upgrade happened on the first box I used for that.
Notes on disk labels:
There are a few things listed in the release notes under Upgrade Related Issues.
The first was to make sure all your drives have labels. You can do this by running the command "/sbin/blkid" and then checking that each line that is not part of the LVM system has a LABEL entry. If you need to add a label to a drive use the "/sbin/e2label" command and then edit your /etc/fstab to use the label on boot instead of the device.
You don't need to label LVM drives since the LVM keeps track of the drives it uses on its own. The only drive I had on a stock install that wasn't under the LVM was /boot and it had a label already.
After you upgrade they sugest running the following command and then upgrading anything that has a date before the upgrade date:
Wed 14 Feb 2007
I broke down and wanted to install Adobe Acrobat Reader 7 on my FC6 box to replace xpdf. After installing it from the tar.gz version the acroread startup script bombed out with the error: expr substr 2400000000000 1
After a little searching I didn't find much help so I started looking at the script myself to see if I could track down the problem. It turns out that it wasn't that hard to fix. First off the script file was located at: /usr/bin/acroread
Open the script file and find the function named "check_gtk_ver_and_set_lib_path". This is the location of the first error you will hit. To fix the error you will need to change:
to
You will find this two places and it needs to be changed in both. If you don't notice the 2nd place it is right after the first in a loop:
The second problem you will have is located in the function "get_gtk_file_ver". Find this function and change the following line:
to
Now you should be able to run acroread without errors.
Tags: acroread, fedora, script
Mon 29 Jan 2007
I just finished reading a post to the Media Temple blog about their MySQL problems . I think it is an excellent example of what happens when you only have one side of the house trying to fix a problem. The post leaves out some details but they make it clear that they believe their problems were caused by badly written apps hammering the database. It sounds like they tried very hard to fix the issues on the hardware and MySQL side but couldn't so have switched the way they are provisioning the database systems to more isolate the problem sites. The moral of that story is that even when you are smart you can't always fix software problems on the systems side.
The Media Temple guys don't go into any great detail on their current shared MySQL system but I would think that if nothing else they ran into the problems listed in this post: performance of complex queries. At some point you just have too many people trying to hit your database for any one person to achieve efficiency.
Tags: mysql, administration
Tue 16 Jan 2007
After working on my FC6 AMI I started thinking about how small of an AMI I could create. The goal would be to have a 10 meg or less image that is very specialized for doing something like serving images with lighttpd or apache. I started very very small but the lack of console access on EC2 makes it hard to debug errors so I moved on to try and find a reasonable sized distro that I was more sure would work. I managed to find a Debian image that is pretty small and decided to see if I could make it work for EC2.
Fri 12 Jan 2007
I've been playing around with the EC2 service at Amazon and figured I would document a little about how you create your own FC6 AMI. The Amazon documentation goes over everything you need to know about creating your own FC4 AMI and if you don't want to roll your own you can use one of the public AMIs. Amazon just started letting people publish their own AMIs on their site so you should expect to see more as time goes by.
Fri 8 Dec 2006
Adding cue-points allows you to spice up your flash videos created with FFMpeg. Adding metadata to a FLV will allow you to introduce cue-points that have their own metadata that can be display when the cue-point is reached or let you jump to that cue-point. In the following tutorial you will learn how to add metadata to your FLV files using flvtool2 and how it is useful for adding cue-points.
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