Spider

tail command

• in FC8 and above, starting spider gives an error :

 sort open failed: +2n: no such file or directory 
 basename: missing operand
 try  'basename --help' for more information

explanation: 7.1. Core utilities POSIX changes

The coreutils package now follows the POSIX standard version 200112. This change in behavior might affect scripts and command arguments that were previously deprecated. For example, if you have a newer system but are running software that assumes an older version of POSIX and uses sort +1 or tail +10, you can work around any compatibility problems by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment. Refer to the section on standards in the coreutils info manual for more information on this. You can run the following command to read this information.

solution put
setenv _POSIX2_VERSION 199209
in .cshrc file

Alternately, you can include this environment variable as part of a wrapper script.

Protomo

Pango issues

• Protomo requires an older pango than is installed with CentOS5^?
• Old pango is not compatible with Firefox 3, so need different environments for firefox and protomo
• set up ff_env to use new libraries

Robot linux PC

• Robot PC - full backup on March 19 2009
• Subsequently motherboard failed
• drive would not boot in any other computer
• OS is Fedora Core 8
• error was as follows:

Reading all physical volumes.  This may take a while..
Activating logical volumes
  volume group "VolGroup00" not found
Unable to access resume device (UUID=xxxx)
Creating root device.
Mounting root filesystem.
mount: error mounting /dev/root on /sysroot as ext3: No such file or directory
Setting up other filesystems.
setuproot: moving /dev/fail: No such file or directory
setuproot: error mounting /proc: No such file or directory
setuproot: error mounting /sys: No such file or directory

• Was able to boot with FC8 CD in rescue mode, and drives and volumes mounted successfully
• Seems to be a problem with logical volumes, as "normal" partitioning schemes work with the same hardware
• Solution:
• After booting with Rescue and entering shell:

chroot /mnt/sysimage

• Create the file /etc/sysconfig/mkinitrd with the following line:

MODULES="scsi_wait_scan"

• make a new initrd as follows:

/sbin/mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.6.26.8-57.fc8.new.img vmlinuz-2.6.26.8-57.fc8

• Edit /boot/grub/grub.conf to add a line to boot from the newly created initrd file (/boot/initrd-2.6.26.8-57.fc8.new.img in this case)
• Reboot using new initrd

Reference

• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=466071 -- lists bug as being in FC10, but seems present in FC8 as well

• Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW =

-- BillRice - 21 Oct 2008