Category Archives: Tools

Compiling Git on CentOS 6

I recently had the need to compile Git on a CentOS 6 system, because the available version (v1.7.1) did not support the ls-remote command used  by the Jenkins Git plugin. The various posts I found via Google were missing a crucial prerequisite, hence this short post.

  • Uninstall old Git with
    yum remove git
  • Install required packages (for me!) with
    sudo yum install libcurl-devel zlib-devel asciidoc openssl-devel xmlto
    
  • Download source code from https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git
  • Extract source with
    gzip -dc <FILE> | tar -xvf -
  • Compilation and installation
    make configure
    ./configure --prefix=/usr
    make all
    sudo make install install-doc install-html

And that should be it.

Installing MySQL 8.0.22 CE and phpMyAdmin 5.0.4 on Debian 10

Quite recently I had decided to set up a VM with a database server in my home lab. My preferred server OS is Debian Linux (esp. since Red Hat announced the end of CentOS) and I wanted a recent version of MySQL, together with phpMyAdmin of course.

The MySQL installation was done following the instructions from here. Please make sure to check the MySQL page for the current version of mysql-apt-config_x.x.x-x_all.deb. The version mentioned in the article as an example is outdated.

For phpMyAdmin I followed the instructions from Digital Ocean, since I have had good experiences with other such documents from them. That document is meant for MariaDB, so things should work. Of course, you need to adjust the database command from mariadb to mysql, but that wasn’t too hard :-).

What did  not work, though, was the command to create the pma user for phpMyAdmin, which created the following output:

mysql> GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE ON phpmyadmin.* TO 'pma'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD';

ERROR 1064 (42000): You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD'' at line 1

The underlying reason is that MySQL 8 does not allow the implicit creation of users anymore. So you have to split the command into the creation and the grant of rights like this:

mysql> create user 'pma'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE ON phpmyadmin.* TO 'pma'@'localhost';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

The rest of the preparation went smoothly and soon I was presented with the login screen. However, I could not log in, but got the following error:

mysqli_real_connect(): The server requested authentication method unknown to the client [caching_sha2_password]

This is caused by a change of the default authentication in MySQL. To go back to the old way for a particular user, you can issue the following command in MySQL:

mysql> alter user 'pma'@'localhost' identified with mysql_native_password by 'PASSWORD';

With that change I was able to log on the phpMyAdmin. It should be noted, though, that this change has security implications. So please check this article if that approach is ok for you.

Chef Infra Server Moving to Cloud

As part of a blog post about the new v14 of Chef Infra Server, it was announced that from now on existing functionality will be deprecated in favor of the cloud version. It will be interesting to see how this works out. Personally, I have never been a friend of forcing customers off an existing product. It is a dangerous move that bears the risk of customers switching the vendor entirely. Especially so, if it comes with a major architectural shift like from on-premise to cloud.

I have been a happy user of Chef Server for about five years now, although only for a very small number of machines (single digit). The decision for Chef had been made at a time when Ansible was still in its early stages. But with this latest development I will need to move away from Chef. It is pity, because I really like the tool and have done various custom extensions.

Installing ecoDMS 18.09 on Debian 10.5

I had recently installed ecoDMS 18.09 on a Debian 10.5 VM and it was a pleasant experience overall. However, the following things had to be done differently compared to the installation manual

  • Install gnupg via sudo apt-get install gnupg (this seems to be installed out-of-the-box on Ubuntu)
  • Do not install any Java environment but let this be handled by the normal dependency management

The system is currently in light use (still in testing) for my newly founded company and runs quite well. The VM is hosted on ESXi 6 that runs on a Celeron 3900 (yes, two cores) and for a single user with just a few documents stored the performance is really nice.

I so far intend to stay with that system and will keep you updated.

 

Update on LaTeX Setup

This is a quick follow-up to my recent post on the LaTeX setup for 2020. I wanted to let you know that I have recently switched from Emacs to VS Code with the LaTeX Workshop extension as my primary LaTeX editor. I truly cannot remember what made me look into this direction, but I am happy that I did.

The main reason for switching was that the file management is so much easier with VS Code. My current project has a number of files spread over many sub-directories and the way LaTeX Workshop handles things makes me much more productive. I somehow miss AUCTeX, but overall I will certainly not go back.

My 2020 Setup for LaTeX

Here is a short write-up of my current LaTeX setup. Since I sometimes need to process documents on Linux systems (usually in a CI/CD context) the natural choice for me these days is TeX Live on Windows.

My preferred editor is probably less common, especially on Windows: Emacs. I have been using it for more than 20 years and with the right add-ons (AUCTeX and RefTeX) it is still the best LaTeX editor for me. Would I recommend it to someone today who does not already know how to use Emacs? Probably not, given the learning curve. But in the late 1990s there was no real alternative on Linux. And LaTeX on Linux it had be for creating high-quality graphics with Xfig and replace text in the EPS files with full-blown LaTeX code for amazing formulas etc.

But let’s go back to the present time. Here is what I did:

  • Download Windows installer for TeX Live
  • Start installer with administrator rights (right-click) and accept all default settings, then wait a really long time (more than three hours on an old Lenovo Thinkpad T520)
  • Install Emacs. I still have EmacsW32 lying around (you need to fix some security settings), but it is no longer available for download. If you look for an alternative, perhaps you find something here.
  • Install Sumatra PDF. The critical feature for me is that it does not hold a write-lock on the file. So when the output PDF is updated in the background by latexmk, it does not cause any problems. I did the installation as administrator and changed the location to C:\Program Files\SumatraPDF because I personally prefer it that way.

That’s all. Enjoy writing 🙂

Getting Started with Chef Infra Server

A while ago Chef Software announced that they would move all source code to the Apache 2.0 license (see announcement for details), which is something I welcome. Not so much welcomed by many was the fact that they also announced to stop “free binary distributions”. In the past you could freely download and use the core parts of their offering, if that was sufficient for your needs. What upset many people was that the heads-up period for this change was rather short and many answers were left open. It also did not help that naturally their web site held many references to the old model, so people were confused.

In the meantime it seems that Chef has loosened their position on binary distributions a bit. There is now a number of binaries that are available under the Apache 2.0 license and they can be found here. This means that you can use Chef freely, if you are willing to compromise on some features. Thanks a lot for this!

This post will describe what I did to set up a fresh Chef environment with only freely available parts. You need just two things to get started with Chef: the server and the administration & development kit. The latter goes by the name of ChefDK and can be installed on all machines on which development and administration work happens. It comes with various command line tools that allow you to perform the tasks needed.

Interestingly, you will find almost no references to ChefDK on the official web pages. Instead its successor “Chef Workstation” will be positioned as the tool to use. There is only one slight problem here: The latest free version is pretty old (v0.4.2) and did not work for me, as well as various other people. That was when I decided to download the latest free version of ChefDK and give it a try. It worked immediately and since I had not needed any of the additional features that come with Chef Workstation, I never looked back.

No GUI is part of those free components. Of course Chef offer such a GUI (web-based) which is named Chef Management Console. It is basically a wrapper over the server’s REST API. Unfortunately the Management Console is “free” only up to 25 nodes. For that reason, but also because its functionality is somewhat limited compared to the command line tools, I decided to not cover it here.

Please check the licenses by yourself, when you follow the instructions below. It is solely your own responsibility to ensure compliance.

Below you will find a description of what I did to get things up and running. If you have a different environment (e.g. use Ubuntu instead of CentOS) you will need to check the details for your needs. But overall the approach should stay the same.

Environment

The environment I will use looks like this

  • Chef server: Linux VM with CentOS 7 64 bit (minimal selection of programs)
  • Chef client 1: Linux VM like for Chef server
  • Development and administration: Windows 10 Pro 64bit (v1909)

I am not sure yet whether I will expand this in the future. If you are interested, please drop a comment below.

Please check that your system meets the prerequisites for running Chef server.

Component Versions

The download is a bit tricky, since we don’t want to end up with something that falls under a commercial license. As of this writing (April 2020) the following component binaries are the latest that come under an Apache 2.0 license. I verified the latter by clicking at “License Information” underneath each of the binaries that I plan to use.

  • Chef Infra Server: v12.19.31 (go here to check for changes)
  • Chef DK: 3.13.1 (go here to check for changes)

As to the download method Chef offer various methods. Typically I would recommend to use the package manager of your Linux distribution, but this will likely cause issues from a license perspective sooner or later.

Server Installation and Initial Setup

So what we will do instead is perform a manual download by executing the following steps (they are a sub-set of the official steps and all I needed to do on my system):

  • All steps below assume that you are logged in as root on your designated Chef server. If you use sudo, please adjust accordingly.
  • Ensure required programs are installed
    yum install -y curl wget
  • Open ports 80 and 443 in the firwall
    firewall-cmd --permanent --zone public --add-service http && firewall-cmd --permanent --zone public --add-service https && firewall-cmd --reload
  • Disable SELinux
    setenforce Permissive
  • Download install script from Chef (more information here)
    curl -L https://omnitruck.chef.io/install.sh > chef-install.sh
  • Make install script executable
    chmod 755 chef-install.sh
  • Download and install Chef server binary package: The RPM will end up somewhere in /tmp and be installed automatically for you. This will take a while (the download size is around 243 MB), depending on your Internet connection’s bandwidth.
    ./chef-install.sh -P chef-server -v "12.19.31"
  • Perform initial setup and start all necessary components, this will take quite a while
    chef-server-ctl reconfigure
  • Create admin user
    chef-server-ctl user-create USERNAME FIRSTNAME LASTNAME EMAIL 'PASSWORD' --filename USERNAME.pem
  • Create organization
    chef-server-ctl org-create ORG_SHORT_NAME 'Org Full Name' --association-user USERNAME --filename ORG_SHORT_NAME-validator.pem
  • Copy both certificates (USERNAME.pem and ORG_SHORT_NAME-validator.pem) to your Windows machine. I use FileZilla (installers without bloatware can be found here) for such cases.
ChefDK Installation and Initial Setup

What I describe below is a condensed version of what worked for me. More details can be found on the official web pages.

  • I use $HOME in the context below to refer to the user’s home directory on the Windows machine.  You must manually translate it to the correct value (e.g. C:\Users\chris in my case).
  • Download the latest free version of ChefDK for Windows 10 from here and install it
  • Check success of installation by running the following command from a command prompt:
    chef -v
  • Create directory and base version of configuration file for connectivity by running
    knife configure (it may look like it hangs, just give it some time)
  • Copy USERNAME.pem and SHORTNAME-validator.pem to $HOME/.chef
  • Add your server’s certificate (self-signed!) to the list of trusted certificates with
    knife ssl fetch
  • Verify that things work by executing knife environment list, it should return _default as the only existing environment
  • The generated configuration file was named $HOME/.chef/credentials in my case and I decided to rename it config.rb (which is the new name in the official documentation) and also update the contents:
    • Remove the line with [default] at the beginning which seemed to cause issues
    • Add knife[:editor] = '"C:\Program Files\Notepad++\notepad++.exe" -nosession -multiInst' as the Windows equivalent of setting the EDITOR environment variable on Linux.
Initial Project

We will  create a very simple project here

  • Go into the directory where you want all your Chef development work to reside (I use $HOME/src; the comment regarding the use of $HOME from above still applies) and open a command prompt
  • Create a new Chef repo (where all development files live)
    chef generate repo chef-repo (chef-repo is the name, you can of course change that)
  • You will see that  a new directory ($HOME/src/chef-repo) has been created with a number of files in it. Among them is  ./cookbooks/example , which we will upload as a first test. Cookbooks are where instructions are stored in Chef.
  • To be able to upload it, the cookbook path must be configured, so you need to add to $HOME/.chef/config.rb the following line:
           cookbook_path   ["$HOME/src/chef-repo/cookbooks"]
    (example:  cookbook_path ["c:/Users/chris/src/chef-repo/cookbooks"])
  • You can now upload the cookbook via knife cookbook upload example
Client Setup

In order to have the cookbook executed you must now add it to the recipe list (they take the cooking theme seriously at Chef) of the machines, where you want it to run. But first you must bootstrap this machine for Chef.

  • The bootstrap happens with the following command (I recommend to check all possible options by via knife bootstrap --help) executed on your Windows machine :
    knife bootstrap MACHINE_FQDN --node-name MACHINE_NAME_IN_CHEF --ssh-user root --ssh-password ROOT_PASSWORD
  • You can now add the recipe to the client’s run-list for execution:
       knife node run_list add MACHINE_NAME_IN_CHEF example
    and should get a message similar to
      MACHINE_NAME_IN_CHEF :
        run_list:
          recipe[example]
  • You can now check the execution by logging into your client and execute chef-client as root.  It will also be executed about every 30 minutes or so. But checking the result directly is always a good idea after you changed something.

Congratulation, you can now maintain your machines in a fully automated fashion!