The Comms Room

12:11 AM

you know it's bad when you call TAC and overhear another TAC person talking and you know that other guy by name

Also bad is when you tell the users to keep an eye out for anomolous problems due to an upgrade the previous evening and come to find out from the users at 4pm that it's been broken all day but they all thought someone else had already filed a ticket for it.

wfaulk

you expect your users to know what "anomalous" means?

AdrianK

12:50 AM

@wfaulk They all have Bachelors or Masters degrees. If they don't know what that word means, they can sure as blazes ask one of their peers.

Sorry, that's a sore point. They whine about me using big words when they babble mental health jargon at me all day.

Also makes me very annoyed that people have been asking Debian to include a verify packages option in Dpkg since the mid-90s.

Zoredache

@AdrianK, most packages come with the md5 sums? Why not just check the md5sums?

I mean it might be nice to have a tool that does it for you, but you already have everything you need.

Journeyman Geek

@AdrianK: They're users.

AdrianK

@Zoredache Exactly. I wanted to give the developers an option to do it, rather than have to schedule a 30-minute training on what files to go check. They won't let me admin their box, but they frequently need my help...

'rpm -V' is rather handy

Journeyman Geek

@AdrianK: wiki.debian.org/SecureApt this dosen't count?

Zoredache

no he is looking for debsums

so he can do debsums {packagename}

or debsums --all

Journeyman Geek

1:01 AM

hmm

AdrianK

And the Devs won't install debsums because they don't understand it.

I think I'm gonna be another growler on the way home from the office tonight.

Journeyman Geek

ahh

Zoredache

they don't understand what an md5sums are? What kind of two-bit hacks do you employ?

AdrianK

@Zoredache They're nice young ladies, one and all. But we were hiring them at Burger King wages until this year.

Shane Madden

Why install .debs directly? Fire up an apt repository and everything's GPG signed.

Zoredache

1:04 AM

But they run Linux?

@ShaneMadden but what happens when the user is silly and trashes things in /usr or somewhere else?

AdrianK

@Zoredache Our agency does. It took them 6 weeks to get a functioning Debian LAMP stack where s/MySQL/Postgres/

Zoredache

But they run Debian on their workstations, or is that their dev environment?

AdrianK

Meh. If they bitch too much I'll drop everything else for a few days and write my debsums equivalent. Can't be much harder than convincing them that any other change I'd make would break their database.

It's not like it's all that hard now that I look at it.

Shane Madden

@Zoredache You yell at the user?

Zoredache

debsums is just a basic perl script...

AdrianK

1:09 AM

This is in Production. libssh2.so is segfaulting as of 4am this morning and uploads to our billing partners aren't working, so money's on the line.

Shane Madden

Ahh, gotcha.

AdrianK

The script loops through and read a line out of a file, does a SELECT to check to see if an update is necessary, and then does an update. Repeat about 15,000 times over 75 minutes.

Zoredache

And I suppose you don't have md5deep installed either? You could easily use that to check things give

AdrianK

Nope. They intentionally built this thing stripped down to almost nothing, hence no depsums.

Zoredache

Do you at least have md5sums?

I mean at the most basic you could do something like md5sum -c /var/lib/dpkg/info/zip.md5sums

AdrianK

1:14 AM

@Zoredache The files were there, thankfully. They didn't manage to hork up dpkg's default behaviors.

Zoredache

Or maybe md5sum -c /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.md5sums if you want to verify the entire system.

WesleyDavid

@MDMarra You like my analogies? Here's my latest in the comments on this question: serverfault.com/q/347940/9770

AdrianK

Sure enough. I need to spend some quality time working on Debian one of these days and really get my hands dirty.

WesleyDavid

@AdrianK Working with Debian assumes you get filthy.

AdrianK

assumes or assures?

WesleyDavid

1:16 AM

Filthier than WUBWUBWUB good dubstep WUBWUBWUB

Dear Server: Do you need to sit at "Applying Computer Settings" for 15 minutes every time I reboot you? rage

AdrianK

/sbin/start-stop-daemon doesn't match. Hope that one's a false positive.

WesleyDavid

Actually, my only annoyance at Debian was dealing with .debs - which was probably just due to my inexperience with them.

apt seems legit.

Shane Madden

@WesleyDavid apt-get is .debs ;p

WesleyDavid

Yeah, corrected.

Zoredache

@WesleyDavid You have a broken group policy, and it is waiting for the ~10 minute default timeout

WesleyDavid

1:20 AM

I seem to remember blacking out while use dpkg..

Zoredache

dpkg is about the same as any other binary package. It is just an archive that has a tar of the files to be installed, and a few scripts for performing the installation.

the syntax for the dpkg command itself can be a big obscure though.

AdrianK

@Zoredache Yup. just a zip or whatever with extra things shoved in. Otherwise 'alien' wouldn't work with a damn.

And there's 70 packages waiting to be updated on the production box. I'm handing this steaming turd back to the Devs.

WesleyDavid

@ShaneMadden And I meant more things like .debs using names for dependency resolution.

Not necessarily the apt-get application itself. I realize that sentence of mine that you responded to makes zero sense. =P

@Zoredache Yes, I was about to search event logs to see what the dilly was.

Zoredache

@WesleyDavid Sorry, what would it use instead of names?

Shane Madden

@WesleyDavid As opposed to the "not a damn thing" that RPM has for dependency resolution?

WesleyDavid

1:25 AM

@Zoredache My understanding of RPM package management (slim) was that it doesn't use naming schemes for dependency resolution

Hrmm... maybe not. What was I thinking about...

AdrianK

@Zoredache Package signatures would be a good start, with a cross-index to human-readable package names.

Shane Madden

@AdrianK How would one specify range of versions?

WesleyDavid

Welp, my understanding of package management is apparently hosed. Give me a few months and we'll continue this conversation.

Zoredache

@AdrianK but how would that work if there was a security update that didn't change any functionality?

WesleyDavid

Although I've never understood the flamers in their "RPM Hell" rages.

AdrianK

1:29 AM

@ShaneMadden Signatures was the wrong word and not where I was going with that thought. Multiple qualifying IDs, rather. At this point though, that line of thought is going down the Registry rabbit-hole and is making me nauseous.

I think I'll concede the point instead. I REALLY don't like registries.

Shane Madden

Haha, fair enough, sorry.

AdrianK

I'm quite irritated that something like Ubuntu changing the formatting of their package names broke so many things for my test systems though.

Shane Madden

@AdrianK You mean their funky ~ubuntu1 strangeness?

AdrianK

@ShaneMadden I can deal with funky as long as they don't go changing things around and break stuff. Break stuff? Rage on...

Shane Madden

@AdrianK Oh, they'll definitely break stuff.

AdrianK

1:33 AM

@ShaneMadden Canonical? Oh HELLS Yes!

Shane Madden

rpm and deb definitely both have their quirks, though. The first time that I realized a dpkg reinstall didn't really reinstall everything in the package? Kinda have to wonder what someone was thinking.

AdrianK

@ShaneMadden Yep.

Shane Madden

And the way that Recommends: on a package are basically a second, softer Depends: is completely nonsense

Zoredache

@AdrianK the ubuntu devs break stuff often because they somewhat follow Debian. Debian break packages because upstream changes, or because of bug reports, refactoring or so on. Changes are rarely arbitrary.

AdrianK

I ran into that while when trying to get a bugfix osf Samba onto 9.10 that Canonical wasn't going to install.

@Zoredache True. Which however makes me sullen and grumpy instead of angry and ragey. The latter is more fun, you know.

@Zoredache my memory is failing me at this hour, are you the FreeBSD advocate?

Shane Madden

1:37 AM

They do occasionally decide that they can do something better than debian and break things that way too

Zoredache

No, I would call myself very strongly Debian based.

I think @voretaq7, is the guy that is really into freebsd.

Shane Madden

@ChrisS too

AdrianK

@Zoredache Ah. I'm sure Debian's a wonderful distro and kind to its mother, or whatever, but our group's habit of installing absolutely no package that's not approved by unanimous consensus has soured me on what's probably a perfectly acceptable distro.

2

@Zoredache there was go. I end up talking with him and @WesleyDavid in the evenings

Zoredache

@AdrianK The many servers I manage are very much under my dictatorial control. 98% of what happens on them happens because I decree it. Occasionally, I allow the customers to make a couple decisions... But that is only so they will keep giving me money.

AdrianK

@Zoredache Mmm. The cheery glow of authority to go with the responsibility. Gives me a warm shivery feeling., it does.

gnite gents. Time to go hit the books some more.

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