North Star Labs

In order to support the same version of python across all of our servers, I’ve also build Python 2.5.2 RPM’s for RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 (Tikanga).

This build is far more straightforward than the build for RHEL4, as the system X11 libraries link without patching Setup.dist and RHEL5 comes with a supported version of expat so statically linking  the library into the pyexpat module isn’t required.

The SRPM: python25-2.5.2-1.el5.src.rpm

Build command:

rpmbuild –define ‘__python_ver 25′ –define ‘dist .el5′ -ba ~/redhat/SPECS/python.spec

This package will not conflict with the system python package.  Scripts should use #!/usr/bin/env python25 to make sure the proper python is being used.

I’ve successfully built Python 2.5.2 RPM’s for RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 (Nahant).  The package is named python25 as not to conflict with the system’s python package.

Other than some minor tweaks to the patch process to account for the location of X11 libraries and db4.2, the only major change is that the pyexpat module is statically linked against libexpat.a since expat version 1.95.8 is required and not available in RHEL4.  If you build my SRPM, you’ll need to download an SRPM for expat-1.95.8 then build and install expat-devel-1.95.8 or greater.  Once present, the python25 SRPM will statically link in the correct version of the library.

The SRPM: python25-2.5.2-1.el4.src.rpm

Working with Apache today, I ran into an issue where the process would appear to start OK, returning a zero exit status, yet strace was showing a SIGCHLD being caught.

Needless to say, the server wasn’t actually running for any length of time, but I found the following strace command immensely helpful in figuring out the problem.

  strace -o /tmp/httpd.strace -ff /usr/sbin/httpd

Because apache spawns a number of children, strace with -ff attaches to each child and recorded the system calls in /tmp/httpd.strace.$PID

As it turns out, I was receiving the following error in the child processes:

    bind(5, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(443), sin_addr=inet_addr("0.0.0.0")}, 16) \
    = -1 EADDRINUSE (Address already in use)

Over the past few months, I’ve been getting fed up with stability issues plaguing my OpenWRT based Linksys WRT54GS v2.0 router. Wireless under OpenWRT was very unreliable, often cutting out in the recent version of White Russian I was running.

Based on the advice of a friend, I’ve re-flashed my firmware to DD-WRT v23 SP2, and I must say, I’m quite impressed. The Web interface is very slick and clean, UPnP is working out of the box, QoS is present and configurable, though I haven’t tested it very much yet, the web interface allows SSH public keys to be configured easily, and stores them in NVRAM variables, and my dynamic DNS host name is also easily configured through the web interface.

All in all, I’m finding DD-WRT to be much more developed and polished than OpenWRT. I’ll comment on this post after a week or so in the event I have stability issues.