Luckily, Jordan Sissel has built a tool called FPM (Effing Package Management), exactly for this: to ease the pain of building new packages; packages that you will use for your own infrastructure and you want them customized based on your own needs; and you don’t care about upstream rules and standards and other limitations when building such packages. This can be very useful for people deploying their own applications as rpms (or debs) and can simplify a lot of the process of building those packages.

FPM can be easily installed on your build system using rubygems:
gem install fpm

Once installed you can use fpm to build packages (targets):

• deb
• rpm
• solaris

from any of the following sources:

• directory (of compiled source of some application)
• gem
• python eggs
• rpm
• node npm packages

Use the command line help (fpm –help) or the wiki to see full details on how to use it. I’ll show some simple examples on how to build some packages from various input sources that I’ve found useful myself.

1. Package a directory – output of a ‘make install’ command

This is how you would usually package an application that you would install with:
./configure; make; make install
For example, here is how you can create an rpm of the latest version of memcached:
wget http://memcached.googlecode.com/files/memcached-1.4.7.tar.gz
tar -zxvf memcached-1.4.7.tar.gz
cd memcached-1.4.7
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
so far everything looks like a normal manual installation (that would be followed by make install). Still we will now install it in a separate folder so we can capture the output:
mkdir /tmp/installdir
make install DESTDIR=/tmp/installdir
and finally using fpm to create the rpm package:
fpm -s dir -t rpm -n memcached -v 1.4.7 -C /tmp/installdir
where -s is the input source type (directory), -t is the type of package (rpm), -n in the name of the package and -v is the version; -C is the directory where fpm will look for the files.
Note: you might need to install various libraries to build your package; for ex. in this case I had to install libevent-dev.

If you are packaging your own application you can do this just by pointing to your build folder and set the version of the app. Here is an example for an deb package:
fpm -s dir -t deb -n myapp -v 0.0.1 -C /build/myapp/0.0.1/

There are various other parameters that you can use but basically this is how simple it is to build a package from a directory.
Here is an example on how to define some dependencies on the package you are building (using -d; repeat it as many times as needed):
fpm -s dir -t deb -n memcached -v 1.4.7 -C /tmp/installdir \
-d "libstdc++6 (>= 4.4.5)" \
-d "libevent-1.4-2 (>= 1.4.13)"

2. Ruby gems or python egg – converted to packages

You can create a deb or rpm from a gem very simple with fpm:
fpm -s gem -t deb <gem_name>
this will download the gem and create a package named rubygem-<gem_name>
For example:
fpm -s gem -t deb fpm
will create a debian package for fpm: rubygem-fpm_0.3.7_all.deb

You can inspect it with dpkg –info and you can notice that in this case it will fill nicely all the fields with the maintainer, and dependencies on various other gems. Very cool.

If you use python and want to package various python eggs this will work exactly the same and you will use -s python (it will download the python packages with easy_install first).

Overall FPM is a great tool and can help you simplify the way you are building your own packages. Check it out and let me know what you think and if you found it useful. And if you found this useful don’t forget to thank Jordan for his great work on this awesome tool.

It looks like for some reason, xen-tools didn’t install the udev package. So in order to fix this issue, I had to connect (using the virtual console) to the xen machine:
xen console 1
and install udev:
apt-get install udev
strange enough the /dev/pts mount entry was present in /etc/fstab so all I had to do was to remount it with:
mount -a
(if you don’t have this entry make sure to add it in /etc/fstab:
devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=620 0 0
and if the folder /dev/pts doesn’t exist create it first and after that mount -a).

This should fix the ssh problem and you should now be able to ssh into the xen machine. Next to see if this is fixed in xen-tools in Squeeze, and if not to file a bug for it.

1. Update apt sources.list

The first thing we will do (after the backup of course) is to edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file and replace “lenny” with “squeeze“. Originally, this might look like this (for a system using the main US mirrors; your file might use a different local one):

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free

deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates lenny contrib non-free

after replacing lenny with squeeze the file will look like this:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free

deb http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main contrib non-free

2. Perform the system upgrade

After updating the sources file, you will have to refresh the indexes with:
aptitude update

Next let’s manually upgrade the core apt packages (this will pull in some extra dependencies, and this is perfectly fine):
aptitude install apt dpkg aptitude

And finally we will perform the bulk of package upgrades with:
aptitude safe-upgrade
this will take a while depending on what packages you have installed (that will need to be upgraded) and on your internet connection speed.

Here are some changes that you might want to pay special attention during the upgrade:
- dash: squeeze uses dash instead of /bin/sh as the default system shell. This is the recommended way and it is supposed to be faster and improve the system overall performance. I recommend to use it and accept this change.
- grub2: is the default in squeeze and the upgrade will recommend to upgrade from your existing grub. This is a major change and for this reason initially the boot loader will be chainloaded in the existing menu.lst to verify it works fine. If you want to upgrade I would recommend to do the chainload and test it with at least one reboot before removing grub legacy.
- sysv-rc: to improve the boot process the upgrade will offer to move to dependency-based sequencing. This is irreversible but highly recommended. I had no problem with it and don’t see why anyone would not want this.
- UUIDs: the installer will recommend to switch from regular disk devices (aka /dev/sda*) to disk IDs (aka UUID=c6ecae74-6754-4ad0-986d-98dd9cbfd293) in various configuration places like /etc/fstab, /boot/grub/menu.lst. I personally don’t like that, but didn’t want to take the risk for the device to change its name with the new kernel and went with the change. If you do the same pls. doublecheck the changed files before rebooting.

Now it is time to reboot your system for the first time into squeeze. Fingers crossed and in a few minutes you will be running squeeze (as always an out of band impi console is handy when doing such upgrades)

3. Complete the upgrade

If you upgraded to grub2 and want to remove the chainloaded grub-legacy you can remove it completely from the system with:
upgrade-from-grub-legacy
and the output will look like this:
0
Installation finished. No error reported.
Generating grub.cfg ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-5-amd64
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-5-amd64
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-2-amd64
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-2-amd64
done

You can now run:
aptitude full-upgrade
and this will complete some extra packages that were not straitforward and not seen as safe by the normal upgrade process (there might be none, depending on the state of your existing system). Evaluate them before moving forward. And finally once you are done reboot once more (to see that grub2 is working fine by itself) and you will be running the latest uptodate squeeze system.

4. (Optional) Convert your ext3 filesystems to ext4

This step is optional and if you are happy with the ext3 filesystem then you can safely skip it. Myself, I’ve done this most of the time so I thought it might be useful to add it here for anyone else interested to do the same.

First doublecheck if you are running the 2.6.32 squeeze kernel:
uname -a
Linux srv01 2.6.32-5-amd64 #1 SMP Wed Jan 12 03:40:32 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Older than 2.6.28 kernels (like lenny 2.6.26 for example) don’t have native support for ext4, so this will fail for an older kernel. Because ext4 is backwards compatible with ext3, all we have to do is to change the mount definitions to ext4 in fstab:
vim /etc/fstab
and change the filesystem from ext3 to ext4 for any devices you might have. Make a note on the devices you change, and reboot the machine. After the reboot the machine will use the ext4 driver for the old filesystem even though it doesn’t take full advantage of the ext4 capabilities. To complete this and enable the extra ext4 features we will need to run for each filesystem:
tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index <device>
like, for example for /dev/sda1:
tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/sda1
this will only be activated when the filesystem is unmounted and we can achieve this with yet another reboot (especially for the root filesystem), and the system will auto fsck them (as the last command marked the filesystem as dirty) and perform the upgrade. I would highly recommend for this to have a remote console on the system as in most of the cases the auto fsck will fail and you will have to run it manually from the console.

Hopefully this howto will help you upgrade your debian system to squeeze with ext4. If you have encountered anything special during the upgrade feel free to share it with others using the comment box bellow.

This week the Debian project released the 6th update to its stable release Lenny, 5.0.6. All recent security updates have been added, as well as some other fixes. The linux-2.6 package was also updated for increased hardware support.

Backports service is now official

I was very happy to hear that the debian backports project is now an official debian project. I always used (and liked) the backports.org repository to easily bring in updated software to the stable release. Now, after it become an official project and not just a fun project of three developers will hopefully be even better and have more software added into backports much faster. Don’t forget to change your apt sources config to point to backports.debian.org (old backports.org mirror will still work for a while).
deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports lenny-backports main contrib non-free

Debian growth over time

Also on some unrelated news Romain Francoise published some interesting stats on the growth of the Debian archive over time:

• woody (2002): 8273 packages
• sarge (2005): 15195 packages (+83.7%)
• etch (2007): 18043 packages (+18.7%)
• lenny (2009): 22277 packages (+23.5%)
• squeeze (2010?): 28870 packages (+29.6%)

Wow… now that is really impressive.

Squeeze

Just like all the previous releases, this is another character from Toy Story – wheezy – a rubber squeeze toy penguin with a red bow tie (that appears only in the 2nd movie). This will be the first character selected as a Debian version name which has not appeared in all the movies.

Source: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2010/09/msg00000.html

To see what versions of java we have installed on the system (from debian packages):
update-java-alternatives -l
java-1.5.0-sun 53 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun
java-6-sun 63 /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

We can see that the default version is 1.6 in my case (as it was the last installed):
java -version
java version "1.6.0_20"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_20-b02)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 16.3-b01, mixed mode, sharing)

We can change the default version with: update-java-alternatives –jre -s <ver> , like:
update-java-alternatives --jre -s java-1.5.0-sun
and now the default is 1.5:
java -version
java version "1.5.0_22"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_22-b03)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_22-b03, mixed mode, sharing)

This is quite handy if you need to have multiple java versions installed, and need a quick way to change the default one (you can access any of them directly from their own path of course).

The upcoming debian stable release will include:
- Linux 2.6.32 kernel
- Apache 2.2.16, PHP 5.3.2, MySQL 5.1.48, PostgreSQL 8.4.4
- Python 2.6 and 3.1, Perl 5.10, Ruby 1.8.7.299 and 1.9.2~svn28788, GCC 4.4
- DKMS, a framework to generate Linux kernel modules whose sources do not reside in the Linux kernel source tree.
- Dependency-based ordering of init scripts using insserv, allowing parallel execution to shorten the time needed to boot the system.

Hopefully we will see Squeeze going stable in the next 4-6 months, ideally by the end of the year!

Release Announcement: http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100806

The daemons noitd and stratcond are written in C, and the database used is postgressql, while the web interface is written in php. We will need to install a few dependencies to be able to compile noitd/stratcond:

Dependencies

apt-get install autoconf build-essential \
zlib1g-dev uuid-dev libpcre3-dev libssl-dev libpq-dev \
libxslt-dev libapr1-dev libaprutil1-dev xsltproc \
libncurses5-dev python libssh2-1-dev libsnmp-dev \
sun-java6-jdk

In case you don’t have already installed svn, we will need that also (to download the sources):
apt-get install subversion

Compiling

Next we will download the source and compile it. I used the trunk version bellow, but you might want use a stable tag (Urskek is the latest when writing this):
cd /usr/local/src/
svn co https://labs.omniti.com/reconnoiter/trunk reconnoiter
cd reconnoiter
autoconf
./configure
make
make install

Database

We need to instal PostgreSQL 8.4 and this is not available in lenny; the simplest way we can do this is to use the backports package. To enable the backports sources add this line
deb http://www.backports.org/debian lenny-backports main contrib non-free
to your /etc/apt/sources.list and run apt-get update to refresh your apt indexes. And finally add the backports key into apt:
apt-get install debian-backports-keyring

Now we can install postgres 8.4 using:
apt-get -t lenny-backports install postgresql

Next we’ll need to edit /etc/postgresql/8.4/main/pg_hba.conf and replace this line
local all all identwith
local all all trust
and restart postgres:
/etc/init.d/postgresql-8.4 restart
to allow local access without password.

Next we can install the dbs, using:
su postgres
cd /usr/local/src/reconnoiter/sql
psql
\i scaffolding.sql
\q

DB crontab

You can find a sample crontab in the sql folder that needs to be customized for our particular setup (/opt/psql835/bin -> /usr/bin/), and it should look like this:

su postgres
crontab -l
# m h  dom mon dow   command
#rollup jobs
* * * * * /usr/bin/psql -d reconnoiter -U stratcon -c "select stratcon.rollup_metric_numeric(rollup) from metric_numeric_rollup_config order by seconds asc;" >/tmp/rollup.log 2>&1
#cleanup jobs
01 00 * * * /usr/bin/psql -d reconnoiter -U reconnoiter -c "select stratcon.archive_part_maint('noit.metric_numeric_archive', 'whence', 'day', 7);" 1>/dev/null
01 00 * * * /usr/bin/psql -d reconnoiter -U reconnoiter -c "select stratcon.archive_part_maint('noit.metric_text_archive', 'whence', 'day', 7);" 1>/dev/null
01 00 * * * /usr/bin/psql -d reconnoiter -U reconnoiter -c "select stratcon.archive_part_maint('noit.check_status_archive', 'whence', 'day', 7);" 1>/dev/null
01 00 * * * /usr/bin/psql -d reconnoiter -U reconnoiter -c "select stratcon.archive_part_maint('noit.check_archive', 'whence', 'day', 7);" 1>/dev/null
01 00 * * * /usr/bin/psql -d reconnoiter -U reconnoiter -c "delete from prism.saved_graphs where saved = false and last_update/dev/null

!!! I would suggest to run the daily crons manually once as they create the needed tables and in case you don’t have them you will receive various errors (I know I lost a lot of time trying to figure out why those were not there). This should be just like:
/usr/bin/psql -d reconnoiter -U reconnoiter -c "select stratcon.archive_part_maint('noit.metric_text_archive', 'whence', 'day', 7);"
and so on for each of the 5 daily crons from above.

keys

For a production install you will obviously create some real certs, but in my case where I was just testing this out the test certs build by the installer are just fine:
cd /usr/local/src/reconnoiter/test
cp test-*.crt test-*.key /usr/local/etc/

In dealing with the configuration files uuid’s you will find useful the uuidgen program from the uuid-runtime package:
apt-get install uuid-runtime
that will generate a new uuid on each run:
uuidgen
22426aa0-db34-437d-a891-e759ffbdb494

noitd

We will start from the sample configuration:
mv /usr/local/etc/noit.conf.sample /usr/local/etc/noit.conf
and edit/remove it as needed. Be sure to edit the sslconfig part with the keys you copied above. For more details on the config file look on the wiki.

Finally run noitd and see if all is good:
/usr/local/sbin/noitd -c /usr/local/etc/noit.conf -D
If there are no errors stop it, and run it in the background (without -D):
/usr/local/sbin/noitd -c /usr/local/etc/noit.conf

stratcon

For stratcon we are going to use a similar approach:
mv /usr/local/etc/stratcon.conf.sample /usr/local/etc/stratcon.conf
and then customize the config based on our needs. Set the keys in sslconfig section and the db details

    <dbconfig>
      <host>localhost</host>
      <dbname>reconnoiter</dbname>
      <user>stratcon</user>
      <password>unguessable</password>
    </dbconfig>    

the password is “stratcon” or whatever you set in scaffolding.sql if you customized it (a good idea ).
and finally run it with debuging in the foreground:
/usr/local/sbin/stratcond -c /usr/local/etc/stratcon.conf -D
and if all is good (you did ran the db creation task, right?) you can start it in the background without -D and move to the final step:
/usr/local/sbin/stratcond -c /usr/local/etc/stratcon.conf

Web interface

Finally the last step is to configure the web interface. For this we need to be sure we have apache/php installed and the pgsql module:
apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-pgsql
and to enable the rewrite module
a2enmod rewrite
Next we would copy the web files ui to some place like /var/www/ui and create a vhost for reconnoiter inside /etc/apache2/sites-available:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  DocumentRoot /var/www/ui/web/htdocs

  <Directory "/">
      Options None
      AllowOverride None
      Order allow,deny
      Deny from all
  </Directory>
  <FilesMatch "^\.ht">
      Order allow,deny
      Deny from all
      Satisfy All
  </FilesMatch>
  <Directory "/var/www/ui/web/htdocs/">
      php_value include_path /var/www/ui/web/lib
      php_value short_open_tag off
      Options FollowSymLinks Indexes
      AllowOverride All
      Order deny,allow
      Allow from all
  </Directory>

  LogLevel warn
  LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b" common

  ErrorLog /var/www/ui/web/logs/error_log
  CustomLog /var/www/ui/web/logs/access_log common

  AddType application/x-compress .Z
  AddType application/x-gzip .gz .tgz
  AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
  DefaultType text/plain

  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteRule ^(/data/.+)$ http://localhost:80$1 [P,L,QSA]
</VirtualHost>

enable the config:
a2ensite reconnoiter
and restart apache to enable it: /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

After this hopefully you can open the web interface and start adding some metrics. My goal was to test this with collectd and if there is interest I could describe the details on how to make reconnoiter work with collectd in another post. let me know…

“The Debian project is pleased to announce the fifth update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (codename “lenny”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems.

Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away 5.0 CDs or DVDs but only to update via an up-to- date Debian mirror after an installation, to cause any out of date packages to be updated.

Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won’t have to update many packages and most updates from security.debian.org are included in this update.

New CD and DVD images containing updated packages and the regular installation media accompanied with the package archive respectively will be available soon at the regular locations.”

Release Announcement: http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100626

Squeeze freeze was planed for December 2009, meaning it is already way behind schedule, and it looks that it is not so easy for the Debian project to switch to a fixed 2 year release cycle (or freeze cycle). This was pushed back because of the high number of critical bugs for a release freeze. Based on past experiences there will be at least 4 months needed after the freeze to release the next stable version, meaning this could show up by the end of the year if everything works out fine. But realistically, this could take 6-8 months after the freeze, and push the release date in 2011.