Friday Night in the Big Rainy City
I'm sick of Red Hat, which is all around me, forcing me to compile and configure software ( that I don't really care about ) from scratch ( ironically ) because I refuse to use rpm ( prefab binaries ). Different wizards need different wands, and sometimes the mismatch is palpable.
The whole point of the original Unix was portability. To me, this includes freedom from depending on specific builds of other packages.
So I downloaded a Gentoo Rescue Image, which includes a bootstrap portage tree, and installed it on top of my Red Hat 9 workstation. I should just do a clean upgrade, I have most of my data in the /home partition. But it ain't broke -- I just need some packages and I don't want to go hunting around for the rpms. emerge sync updates the tree and downloads all the profiles. You link the right profile to /etc/make.profile, emerge portage and you're good to go.
Brilliant. I had a problem with autoconf that halted emerge portage in its tracks.
Now, I know how to fix that, but I don't know how to fix it in portage, which highlights why building by hand from source is such a Good Thing.
Bottom line: pending.
The other Friday night activity -- just as maddening but perhaps more successful -- was installing the nagios monitoring system on the same Linux box. From scratch, since I had no portage yet. But then, you get the feeling that nagios is *meant* to be installed by hand. If you love config files with reams of comments, this is the package for you. Personally, I just want this stuff to work, which made it a little painful to open and resave the 562 different .cfg files found in /usr/local/nagios/etc
I understand the reason why (at least in a pre-rendezvous/zeroconf world), and I appreciate the control which that will give me. But with **so much** sample config to wade through, something seems a little wrong. Every page of the manual pleads with you to read the manual, but all of the documentation is inside the config files. Really dumb.
Creating a php autoconfig package for nagios seems like a fine idea.
But I got it up and looking at a couple hosts on my local network. Neat. It still hasn't sent me any email, but I suppose I'm glad of that since none of the sample hosts has been online yet!
I'm sick of Red Hat, which is all around me, forcing me to compile and configure software ( that I don't really care about ) from scratch ( ironically ) because I refuse to use rpm ( prefab binaries ). Different wizards need different wands, and sometimes the mismatch is palpable.
The whole point of the original Unix was portability. To me, this includes freedom from depending on specific builds of other packages.
So I downloaded a Gentoo Rescue Image, which includes a bootstrap portage tree, and installed it on top of my Red Hat 9 workstation. I should just do a clean upgrade, I have most of my data in the /home partition. But it ain't broke -- I just need some packages and I don't want to go hunting around for the rpms. emerge sync updates the tree and downloads all the profiles. You link the right profile to /etc/make.profile, emerge portage and you're good to go.
Brilliant. I had a problem with autoconf that halted emerge portage in its tracks.
configure.in:5: your implementation of AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE comes from an
configure.in:5: old Automake version. You should recreate aclocal.m4
configure.in:5: with aclocal and run automake again.
make: *** [Makefile.in] Error 1
!!! ERROR: sys-devel/libtool-1.4.3-r4 failed.
!!! Function src_compile, Line 154, Exitcode 2
!!! (no error message)
Now, I know how to fix that, but I don't know how to fix it in portage, which highlights why building by hand from source is such a Good Thing.
Bottom line: pending.
The other Friday night activity -- just as maddening but perhaps more successful -- was installing the nagios monitoring system on the same Linux box. From scratch, since I had no portage yet. But then, you get the feeling that nagios is *meant* to be installed by hand. If you love config files with reams of comments, this is the package for you. Personally, I just want this stuff to work, which made it a little painful to open and resave the 562 different .cfg files found in /usr/local/nagios/etc
I understand the reason why (at least in a pre-rendezvous/zeroconf world), and I appreciate the control which that will give me. But with **so much** sample config to wade through, something seems a little wrong. Every page of the manual pleads with you to read the manual, but all of the documentation is inside the config files. Really dumb.
Creating a php autoconfig package for nagios seems like a fine idea.
But I got it up and looking at a couple hosts on my local network. Neat. It still hasn't sent me any email, but I suppose I'm glad of that since none of the sample hosts has been online yet!
