Gentoo has been messing with samba packages (again). I guess we are supposed to use just samba now, no more samba-server, samba-client, mount-cifs, blah blah blah. OK, fine. I switched over one machine and everything fell apart. Why? Apparently when you remove mount-cifs (which properly blocks the samba upgrade), YOUR SAMBA USERS GET WIPED OUT. Fun stuff. Best part is, if you browse to your samba shares your machine will totally hang! Seriously! How often do you get to see that in linux? Readd them and you’ll be good to go… hope you don’t have a lot of them!

su -
smbpasswd -a yourusername

I’m starting to see a fork in the road of my life: accept this level of noise (a given in any open source environment) and deal with it (mostly like through use of several machines, one poor bastard that is updated regularly, and others that get updated when things look good); or give up and switch to a different environment (what though? nothing better exists..)…

Spamassassin had a bug with rule handling on 2010 dates, assigning 3 spam points for valid email dates erroneously marked as “grossly old”. I bumped up the whole server (gentoo makes it soooo easy), but mysql whined that my gcc was too old. A little investigating, and it turns out you have to run [gcc-config] to tell gentoo to start using the newer version.

A nasty old kernel setting has been creeping along in my .config file for a while now, and finally exploded on me, trashing tons of files on my carefully maintained media file server. I’m not quite so cocky about my raid setup now that the flaky filesystem flew right under its radar and kicked my ass. gentoo once again proves it is the powertool with which you can really hurt yourself. Wahoo!

And to hammer that home, a recent iptables update cleared out my saved rules. I had cycled the cable modem before I realized the problem, and had to propogate new DNS records to get back up and running. I hate dynamic IP’s. 😛

Bumped everything in an attempt to find a working daap server to serve my music to stupid performance-and-playlist-challenged iTunes.

  • on the server, udev kindly requested that I remove crufty old CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED && _V2 – in menuconfig, uncheck General->remove blahblahblah.
  • silly apache [/etc/conf.d/apache2] conf file update, make sure you don’t lose PHP and PERL support
  • ridiculous KDE 3.5 errors keep coming, and KDE 4 having all kinds of blocks – I say just keep [–unmerge]’ing ’til it works!
  • I used [emerge –skipfirst –resume] to get past nepomuk failure cruft.  Googled some, looks like a crappy old java config file is still pointing to a crappy old java JDK.  MAN I hate the lies that are Java…  [rm /etc/env.d/20java && emerge –oneshot -av soprano && emerge -Davu world].  Whatevah…

Next I compiled some new kernels.  To get OpenGL working on the ATI-driven  media center so MythTV is all purdy…

  • bump kernel and reboot
  • emerge -av ati-drivers
  • [eselect opengl set ati]
  • [aticonfig –ovt opengl]

Still need to fix the lousy alsa sound mixing for my hirez mkv files, I’m getting mixer channel errors in the MythTV log…

And xbmc is still segmentation faulting on startup…

I now have a shiny new RoundCube 0.3 install, thanks gentoo! And I bumped up the server with an [emerge -Davu world] as well. A glorious new day. :>

The gory details follow. (continued…)