steveha's questions

I'm asking this question on behalf of a friend. I don't have access to this hardware, but I can contact my friend to get more info as required.

Does anyone know how to get wake-on-lan to work on a Dell 4550 with any recent version of Ubuntu? My friend saw on the Ubuntu discussion forums that someone had wake-on-lan working with Ubuntu 8.04, but he hasn't seen anything newer than that.

Here is his statement:

I inherited a 4550 (my gamer son got a newer machine) and I can't get WOL to work with Ubuntu 9.04 or 9.10. I can set and see the 'g' in ethtool, and the LEDs adjacent to the built-in Ethernet connector stay on when the machine is is in suspend mode. Pressing the power button in suspend mode wakes up the machine (about five seconds to the Ubuntu splash screen; no booting).

(BTW, those Ethernet LEDs didn't stay on when running 9.04.)

I'm sending magic packets from my Linux-based router machine (not Ubuntu). If I'm logged into the 4550, I can run tcpdump port 40000 (default port for magic packets on the router box), and I can see the magic packets; I can dump them with tcpdump -xx -XX too. But with all of the above working, the 4550 won't wake on lan.

What am I missing?

Thanks in advance.

P.S. Merry Christmas and happy holidays everyone!

I have my own email server, and it serves a couple of dozen users. I need to replace it right now, and I want the replacement to be a virtual server image running under a hypervisor.

My plans for the new server system include the following:

• Run only free, open-source software.

• Run at least three virtual images: email server, HTTP server, and SSH server. I plan to run a web-email system (such as SquirrelMail).

• Hypervisor OS will be Debian Stable (which, right now, is Debian 5.0 "lenny"). Guest OSes will also be Debian Stable.

• Software RAID using the two hard drives in a mirroring (RAID 1) configuration.

I need to get the hypervisor and the email guest image up and running as soon as possible, because I am worried that my old server may be about to have a hardware failure. (It is rebooting itself about three times a day!)

This is my golden opportunity to set things up right for the future. What is the perfect setup? How should I configure my system?

My major questions:

• Should I use KVM? I was planning to use Xen but I have seen, in other ServerFault questions, some people recommending KVM as the best choice for the future. I need something stable and reliable now, and I need to get it working quickly... if Xen is more stable or if KVM is tricky, I can go with Xen for now. (Debian will not soon drop support for Xen!)

• Should I use LVM with my hypervisor, or leave that out? I tend to like things to be as simple as possible, and LVM seems like it would add another whole layer of complexity; but on the other hand, I think it is stable and mature by now, and perhaps the flexibility will be valuable if the needs of my virtual server images change.

• Is there some GUI or web-based tool I can use to administer KVM/Xen? My current email server doesn't even have X11 on it; I only administer it via SSH.

• Any other advice or tips would be gratefully accepted.

In case you want to know about my hardware, here are the important basics:

• AMD BE-2300 chip (dual-core; does support AMD-V virtualization instructions)

• 4 GB RAM

• two identical 250 GB Seagate hard drives

I have set up Git on a server, using gitosis to control commit access. I would like to configure my Git system so that anyone inside our firewall can have read access to the Git repository, and I would like to set up Gitweb as well.

I have found several Gitweb setup tutorials on various blogs, but they differ in various details and some of them are out-of-date. I'd like this question to have an up-to-date answer.

My specific setup is Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I have successfully installed Git, gitosis, and the Gitweb and Apache packages. However, I have not figured out how to configure Apache to actually grant access to Gitweb.

How do I set up my server to allow read-only access to Git, and to allow Gitweb to work?

At work I need to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 5 on one particular server. I am experienced with Linux, but not much with RHEL (more with Debian and Ubuntu).

I want to install gitosis, but the EPEL package for gitosis depends on python-setuptools; and python-setuptools in turn depends on python-devel.

yum cannot find python-devel.

python-devel does not seem to exist in EPEL. This leads me to believe that it is probably supported in RHEL 5 directly; maybe EPEL isn't offering it because it's part of RHEL?

Checking with RPM search on pbone.net, I do find that Centos has a python-devel package, which again makes me think that python-devel ought to be provided by RHEL.

The yum.conf file on the server has a [main] entry with the line "distroverpkg=redhat-release" in it. The directory "yum.repos.d" has these repository files: epel.repo epel-testing.repo rhel-debuginfo.repo

Should python-devel be in the "redhat-release" repository? Is there some other official RHEL repository I should be including in my yum config?

Thanks for any help.

Additional information: Here is the output from the command yum repolist all:

# yum repolist all
Loaded plugins: rhnplugin, security
repo id                repo name                                  status
epel                   Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 5 - i3 enabled: 3,423
epel-debuginfo         Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 5 - i3 disabled
epel-source            Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 5 - i3 disabled
epel-testing           Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 5 - Te disabled
epel-testing-debuginfo Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 5 - Te disabled
epel-testing-source    Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 5 - Te disabled
rhel-debuginfo         Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5Client - i386 -  disabled
rhel-i386-client-5     Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop (v. 5 for enabled: 5,025
repolist: 8,448

It's interesting to me that this computer does not seem to have rhel-i386-server-5 as a repo. Is python-devel considered a server package? Can anyone tell me how to enable the server repo?

I looked for some setting to enable this, and all I could find was the file /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/rhnplugin.conf, which contains this:

[main]
enabled = 1
gpgcheck = 1

[rhel-i386-server-5]
enabled = 1

Editing to add additional information:

# yum install gitosis
Loaded plugins: rhnplugin, security
Setting up Install Process
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package gitosis.noarch 0:0.2-6.20080825git.el5 set to be updated
--> Processing Dependency: python-setuptools for package: gitosis
--> Running transaction check
---> Package python-setuptools.noarch 0:0.6c7-1.el5 set to be updated
--> Processing Dependency: python-devel for package: python-setuptools
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
python-setuptools-0.6c7-1.el5.noarch from epel has depsolving problems
  --> Missing Dependency: python-devel is needed by package python-setuptools-0.6c7-1.el5.noarch (epel)
Error: Missing Dependency: python-devel is needed by package python-setuptools-0.6c7-1.el5.noarch (epel)
 You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
 You could try running: package-cleanup --problems
                        package-cleanup --dupes
                        rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest

Since it was requested, output of yum search python | grep -i devel:

# yum search python | grep -i devel
TurboGears.noarch : Back-to-front web development in Python
kobo.noarch : Python modules for tools development
nettle-devel.i386 : Development headers for a low-level cryptographic library
postgresql-python.i386 : Development module for Python code to access a
python-cherrypy.noarch : A pythonic, object-oriented web development framework
python-tools.i386 : A collection of development tools included with Python.
python-tunepimp.i386 : Python bindings for developing programs that will use
wxPython-devel.i386 : Development files for wxPython add-on modules