john.parnefjord.se Reflections & findings

When I tried to update tripwire on a Debian Etch installation the other day it failed with the error:

  Interactive Update failed.      
### Error: Report file could not be parsed.  Report may be corrupt.        
### Exiting... 

I used the ordinary syntax to do the update, ie:

  tripwire --update --twrfile /var/lib/tripwire/report/server-YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS.twr

On another server it worked perfectly, the only difference is that they use different locales, so I tried running with another locale on the failing server:

SANSurfer FC HBA is a tool by Qlogic to manage SAN connections from a server. If you happen to run a Debian box it may be the case that you run it headless. In that case you may run the CLI version of SANSurfer. Unfortunately, quite a lot of vendors just distribute their programs as RPMs not DEBs, and SANSurfer is no exception.

As I can't distribute the program as a Debian package I can at leats show you how I made a package myself to make it easier to install on several machines. In my case these machines are IBM X3950 with Qlogic 2460 HBA cards.

Discovered this cool web site the other day that makes it very easy to install Debian without the need of burning any CD or DVD. The service is called Goodbye Microsoft and it assumes that you sit on a Windows box when starting the installer.

So if you are ready for the switch then just navigate to Goodbye Microsoft and press install.

At the 8th of april Debian GNU/Linux 4.0, a.k.a. Etch, was officially released. The Debian project has worked for about 21 months with Etch and it contains some interesting features. Among the highlights for Etch are:

Some days ago I noticed that ntpd wrote an error to the syslog. The message read:

Feb 13 12:11:06 servername ntpd[4415]: sendto(192.168.100.100) (fd=-1): Bad file descriptor

At first I believed there was an error in the configuration file, so I reinstalled the package to be sure that I hadn't misconfigured anything. Looking at the running processes I noticed that there were two ntp daemons running. So I stopped the ntpd using

/etc/init.d/ntp stop 

Installation

This describes how I installed the EMC Legato client version 7.1.12 on Debian GNU/Linux 32-bit and 64-bit. If you intend to install these binaries on system with AMD64 architechture you have to install ia32-libs. Version 7.3.2 is to be released with 64-bit support. The following procedure is just for the CLI, as the servers I'm responsible for have no graphical or desktop interface. The Legato client is shipped as RPM-package, so to start with you have to alienate the file: