A description of the algorithms used by Yum and RPM to compare package versions.

I posted back in January about RPM Spec Files for nodejs 0.9.5 and v8 on CentOS 6. In that post I also said that I was unable to get recent NodeJS to build on CentOS 5 because of a long chain of dependencies including node-gyp, v8, http-parser, glibc …

Between RHEL/CentOS 5 and 6 the default RPM compression format was changed to xz. As such, trying to build a recent Fedora or Cent6 SRPM on Cent5 will error out with a message like error: unpacking of archive failed on file foo;51a4c2a5: cpio: MD5 sum mismatch because tar …

This post is part of a series of older draft posts from a few months ago that I’m just getting around to publishing. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a build system that meets my requirements (see the last paragraph).

At work, we have a handful - currently a really …

The latest version of nodejs that I could find as an RPM for CentOS was 0.6.16, from http://patches.fedorapeople.org/oldnode/stable/. That’s the one that puppetlabs currently uses in their puppetlabs-nodejs module. There is, however, a nodejs 0.9.5 RPM in the Fedora Rawhide …

Since I started my last job, I’ve been using Nagstamon on my workstation; it’s a really handy little system tray application that monitors a Nagios/Icinga instance and shows status updates/summary in a handy fashion, including flashing and (optionally) a sound alert when something changes. Unfortunately, there …

I’ve been doing a lot of RPM packaging lately, and on different (and very old) distros and versions. Sometimes I lose track of all of the macros used in specfiles (_bindir _sbindir dist _localstatedir, etc). There’s no terribly easy way to dump a list of all of the …

I try my absolute best to always install software on my Linux boxes as RPMs, installed through Yum (yes, I use CentOS on servers and Fedora on my desktops/laptops). Not only is this more-or-less required to sanely manage configuration through Puppet, but it also lets me recreate a …

Lately I’ve been playing around with the VMWare vSphere SDK for Perl, since the new job uses a bunch of VMWare stuff (and I’ve been starting my foray into Perl as a new language, and am amazed by the massive number of modules out there). As much as …