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:

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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.

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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:

1. yum update
2. yum clean all
3. I like to repeated update and clean all a second time to make sure everything got updated
4. Run the following command to update the yum repo on your box:
   rpm -Uhv http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/fedora/linux/releases/8/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-8-3.noarch.rpm  http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/fedora/linux/releases/8/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-notes-8.0.0-3.noarch.rpm
5. Next do a yum -y update
6. I needed to remove a couple packages to get the dependencies to work out. This seems to be a normal need now when upgrading but isn't usually a big deal. In this case I had to remove the heliodor and beryl-settings that both had to do with beryl.
7. In my case the total set of packages it needed to download was 1.2G so it took about an hour to download and install. Now it was time for a reboot.
8. The reboot went so fast I almost didn't believe it rebooted. This was the smoothest upgrade I have had so far.

Tags: linux, fedora

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

There seems to be a lot of questions on how to set up dyndns with EC2. It is fairly easy to do but I haven't seen anyone put everything together to do it yet so I figured I would write a little example using ZoneEdit. I picked ZoneEdit because it lets you sign up and host 5 domains for free.

First you need to sign up for a free ZoneEdit account and add your domain. I'll assume you can do this. Don't forget to change your domain to point to the ZoneEdit DNS servers.

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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

Some time ago Oracle introduced their Instant Client as an alternative to needing a full install of the Oracle client to run your own apps or SQLPlus. I've been putting the Instant Client to good use these days and figured I would give a quick howto on getting it set up.

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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.

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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.

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Not long ago I was curious about using Java to look up DNS information so I decided to put together a little DNSBL/RBL checker so I could experiment with Java DNS lookups and some PHP/Java communications. There isn't a lot of Java DNS stuff out there but it was easy to tell that the tool for this job is the DNSJava library.
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