People who know me would say that usually I'm the first one to back Red Hat based distro's. I'm a big fan of RPM, spent much of my youth playing with early Red Hat boxes, and usually don't tend to enjoy working with Debian... but this week has been some what of a gigantic black hole of SUCK. What began as a small set of updates and bug fixes has turned into a total nightmare.

A few weeks ago Red Hat released RHEL 5.2, the second maintenance release for their series 5 server. As many people know, these updates don't happen all that often and there are few individual packages released in the interim. The whole point of this is that the applications can be tested and deemed stable before being sent out to a production environment. Unlike Fedora where you receive daily updates of the latest bleeding edge, these releases are supposed to be tried and tested heavily. Then there's nss_ldap 253-12...

Following up on my continuing work building Songbird for Fedora, PowerPC RPMs are now available. The initial builds needed a bit of massaging, so I focused on x86 until I was happy with how they turned out, but now it's time to complete the project. Since Fedora now officially supports ppc and ppc64 installs, it seemed only right to try and make this sexy bird run on the bastard child that is Linux on Mac. Besides, OS X is essentially a polished BSD/Linux variant anyways... so how hard could it be if the Songbird dev's have already conquered that hurdle? Not bad at all, as it turned out, but a sledgehammer did come in handy a few times.

So, without further ado, here they are. I've included all of the links for quick reference to those that are looking for non-ppc  builds. By the way, you can track our Fedora-extras inclusion process over at Bug #453422. These links are also listed over at the Songbird Contributed Builds wiki page. Thanks to all the help from the Songbird team, especially stevel. You guys kick some serious ass!

A couple of weeks ago I picked up a copy of Nevermore front man Warrel Dane's first solo release. I had been following news about the recording process for some time from various sites, including Dane's own webpage, so the cd wasn't completely new to me. Ever since the Dreaming Neon Black tour way back in 2000, I've been completely hooked on these guys, and having had the fortunate chance to meet them on a few occasions, I have a huge amount of respect the Seattle based group. So, naturally, as soon as I hear a member of the band is working on a solo album, I start picturing some potentially awesome material...

...but then I hear that the guitar work is being done by Peter Wichers, the ex-Soilwork guitar front man. Here are the possibilities with this scenario:

Recently, I had the pleasant experience of setting up ejabberd on Centos 5, and because of this afternoon of grueling fun, I've decided to point out some not so obvious problems that you may run into. Ultimately, we're going to be running this chat service in a clustered environment, which should be even *more* fun I'm sure, but lets start with the basics.

First of all, ejabberd is written in erlang, which is an extremely smart multi-threaded language, that is also extremely difficult to use for the casual user. Because of this, everything you know about setting up and running normal services written in C usually doesn't apply... and this is exactly where it gets interesting! Before even installing ejabberd, make sure that the version of erlang you have is identical to the version that ejabberd was built against. If you don't, ejabberd is proven to eat babies at will, and we can't have dead babies laying around on our operating system now can we.

When I setup my install I wasn't able to find any erlang packages lying around for Centos 5, so I built the most recent version. A quick rpm search for ejabberd, however, had plenty of packages around the interwebs that were ready to go. While this is not the best practice anyways, I figured what the hell, why not just use my local erlang and the world built ejabberd. Well... I quickly found out why.

[root@host ~]# /sbin/service ejabberd start
Starting ejabberd:                                         [  OK  ]

Ok, great!

Following up on the continuing saga, our midnight buddy, the sly office cleaning thief, has returned once again... but this time we have him with the lights on! Not only does he come in with the lights full blast, but he decides to make a second appearance about fifty minutes later, just in case we didn't get a good shot of him the first time. I think we're going to let this play out a bit longer and see what else tips up.