noop();

Building Mozilla Weave on FreeBSD

Guy Antony Halse — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:22:00 +0200

Mozilla Lab's Weave project provides bookmark and user data synchronisation between browsers. It's very useful, but doesn't currently support FreeBSD. Since I run Firefox 3.0 on FreeBSD, this is a little irritating to me ;) So, following the hints on Weave's wiki, I attempted to build Weave on my BSD box.

The script I came up with is a nasty hack. There *must* be a cleaner way to do this. Nevertheless, it successfully builds Weave 0.2.5 on FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE against the Firefox 3.0.1 sources.

To build Weave, you'll need a working ports system that's reasonably up-to-date (has www/firefox3). You'll also need gmake and python installed.

Download the latest Weave sources and untar them. Then copy my script into the top-level source directory (weave-c8bce0724360 at time of writing). cd into this directory, and run the buildweave.sh script. You'll be left with an XPI installer ready to install.

For those who're lazy, here's my pre-compiled version of Weave 0.2.5 for FreeBSD 7.0.

UPDATE 2008/08/10: Weave 0.2.6 released
Weave's been updated, so here's a pre-compiled version of 0.2.6.

EPrints, SPAM & deleting users

Guy Antony Halse — Thu, 29 May 2008 09:04:00 +0200

We run an instance of EPrints 2.3 and noticed recently that it was getting lots of SPAM. Well, more specifically, that a lot of spammers had registered accounts on the system with meaningful usernames like "cunnilingus". Fortunately our self-archiving policy requires that user submissions are approved, but nevertheless the multitude of irrelevent accounts was irritating.

It was then that I discovered that EPrints doesn't have a command-line way to delete users. There's a create_user, but no remove_user. Not being one who is daunted by such problems, I set about writing one. It turned out to be quite simple.

Since I'm a firm believer of making the wheel available, here's what I came up with. YMMV and all that.

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS to 8.04 LTS on a Xen VPS

Guy Antony Halse — Sun, 25 May 2008 23:58:00 +0200

I've just upgraded the server hosting this blog from Dapper (6.06 LTS) to Hardy (8.04 LTS). I started by following the instructions, which seemed simple enough.

Unfortunately, as apt started processing the post-install configurations I started seeing a lot of errors Lots of packages (apache, mysql, amavis, etc) had --configure fail with errors like:

Segmentation fault
dpkg: error processing w3m (--configure):
 subprocess post-install script returned error exit status 139

Googling the problem produced this, which suggested the problem was related to the fact that the machine in question was a VPS running under Xen. The suggested solution was to uninstall libc6-i686 and replace it with libc6-xen. Unfortunately I didn't have libc6-i686 installed, and installing libc6-xen didn't help ...

After much head scratching and experimentation, I stumbled across the answer. Or more realistically, I figured out what the failing packages had in common and it triggered a distant memory. All the packages use crypto of some form. SSl or TLS. And I vaugely remember that Xen has a problem with TLS that I had to fix in 6.06.

The suggested solution is to rename /lib/tls to /lib/tls.disabled. I'd already done this in the past (the directory was there as evidence), but the 8.04 upgrade had replaced /lib/tls. Sure enough, removing the directory fixed the problems :-) I then installed libc6-xen, which put in a Xen-friendly /lib/tls.