Archive for the ‘Red Hat and CentOS’ Category

yum install and weird architecture behaviour

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

I was just trying to accomplish what you would think was a relatively easy task – installing the PHP-GD package from the Atomic Rocket Turtle repository for 64bit CentOS 5 and ran into a slightly cryptic problem.

Running yum install php-gd simply produced a dependancy error

php-gd-5.2.13-1.el5.art.i386 from atomic has depsolving problems
–> Missing Dependency: libt1.so.5 is needed by package php-gd-5.2.13-1.el5.art.i386 (atomic)
Error: Missing Dependency: libt1.so.5 is needed by package php-gd-5.2.13-1.el5.art.i386 (atomic)
You could try using –skip-broken to work around the problem
You could try running: package-cleanup –problems
package-cleanup –dupes
rpm -Va –nofiles –nodigest
The program package-cleanup is found in the yum-utils package.

A quick check that I’m using an up to date mirror along with a yum clean all to make sure nothing weird is happening leaves me back where I started, but a bit of digging later reveals that this is an interesting problem with yum on 64bit systems where it is trying to install the 32bit package and looking for 32bit dependancies. Forcing the install to be 64bit with yum install php-gd.x86_64 works first time :)

DomU kernel panic under Xen with R1Soft CDP agent

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

I ran into a weird problem on a freshly installed server today where one of the DomU virtual machines kept locking up with a kernel panic message:

BUG: soft lockup – CPU#1 stuck for 10s!

All of the other Xen DomU virtual machines running on the box were fine, so I was pretty sure it wasn’t a hardware bug. The only possible solutions that I could come up with were

  1. My somewhat aggressive stripping down of the Dom0 host
  2. Zimbra (as the Java process was always the one referenced as being stuck
  3. The kernel module for the R1Soft CDP backup agent that I had installed a few hours ago.

I’ve run Zimbra on a CentOS 5 Xen VM before (although not 5.4 admittedly), so didn’t think that would be the problem (anyway, user land software should never be able to cause a kernel panic – in theory at least ;-) )
Again, the other Xen DomU virtual machines were fine, so hopefully the configuration on the Xen Dom0 host machine itself shouldn’t be causing the problem.

Just to be safe, I updated the kernel-xen package from the default 2.6.18-164.el5 to the latest 2.6.18-164.15.1 which was only released a few days ago and doesn’t appear to be on all of the mirrors yet!
With this done and the virtual machine restarted I had to run r1soft-cki to load an updated kernel module for the R1Soft CDP backup agent and the virtual machine has been stable for several hours now. Fingers crossed it stays that way!

Weirdest Linux command ever

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

This morning I had to run possibly the most bizzare Linux command ever whilst stripping down a CentOS server:

yum remove troursers

That really brightened up my day and made me smile. :)

E-mail notifications from yum-updatesd

Monday, March 15th, 2010

After wrestling with yum-updatesd in a rather confused manner for some time, I finally discovered why it wasn’t e-mailing me notifications of updates; it needs the dbus service (messagebus) to be running, even if you are not using emit_via=dbus and with dbus_listener=false.

With the messagebus service running so that yum-updatesd could connect to the dbus service it didn’t need to use, it is just a case of setting emit_via=email and then adjusting the email_from, email_to and smtp_server settings in /etc/yum/yum-updatesd.conf appropriately.