Author Archives: paulehr

Installing Spacewalk 1.5 on CentOS 6.0

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For the past couple of mornings I been working on getting Spacewalk 1.5 to run on CentOS 6 using Oracle Express as a backend in my VMWare lab at home. The reason being is that I am looking to bring Red Hat’s Satellite product into my work environment to manage the 40+ Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers. Seeing how Spacewalk is an opensource implementation of it I figured it would be a good way to test a few things before grabbing the 30 day trial from Red Hat. I wanted to document a few gotchas that I ran into while setting this up that are not documented on Spacewalk’s wiki and how I fixed them.

The first issue I ran into was after the installation of Oracle’s 10g express edition as a back-end to Spacewalk. After the install when you are suppose to run sqlplus and connect to the database, I was getting the following error:

 sqlplus: error while loading shared libraries: libsqlplus.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

After you install the instant client and sqlplus RPMS as per the wiki, run the oracle_env.sh script in order to set Oracle’s environmental variables. which is located in:

  /usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/bin/oracle_env.sh

Add this to your profile so that way it gets ran every time you log in. In my case I copied and pasted the contents of the script to my /etc/bashrc as I am using bash by default.

The next issue that came up was during the installation of spacewalk-oracle via yum. the package failed a dependency for selinux-policy. Spacewalk wanted version 3.7.19-93 and CentOS 6 only has with 3.7.19-54. I had opened a bugzilla with spacewalk and Jan Pazdziora was nice enough to point me to this entry on the mailing list. I had to grab the source RPM for selinux-policy from RHEL 6.1 and build a binary RPM for it. After it was built and updated, the rest of the installation ran ok.

The last issue I ran into was that the osa-dispatcher and tomcat6 was not connecting to the Oracle XE instance. I kept getting TNS connection time out errors even though I can log into the XE instance with sqlplus and tns ping the database. I also noticed that I did not see any connection attempts being logged in the sqlnet.log file. After doing some research it appeared that I missing the tnsnames.ora file in /etc. I created a symlink from /usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/network/admin/tnsnames.ora to /etc/tnsnames.ora and restarted spacewalk. I then restarted spacewalk and now everything works.

I am at the point right now where spacewalk is up and running but nothing is configured yet.

HoPE Manifesto

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This morning I followed a link from Smashing Magazine Twitter feed to an article by Nate Westheimer titled “The HoPE Manifesto: How I Taught Myself to Code“. The blog post chronicles his journey from some one who didn’t code, to be able to get enough experience with Ruby on Rails to start building prototype applications to test out new ideas.

I found this blog post to be pretty inspirational and motivating. I have friends and peers in the IT field that are programmers. Either they do it as their 9-5 gig, freelance business, or as a hobby. I think it’s pretty amazing being able to write software and I’ve always had an itch to do it as well. But I always fall into the same traps:

  • I can’t stay committed to a single language/technology. I’ve bounced around from learning Perl (my best one), Python, PHP, Java, C#, Mono, and C++. Unfortunately I never got really good at one language.
  • I can neither come up with a good idea that has already been done before or I have an idea that is way too ambitious and I fall flat on my face.
  • Real Life
I am hoping to give learning another crack here shortly. In the blog article Nathan talks about use Rails as his platform of choice. I might go down that route as well because I always had an interest in building web applications. I am also have an idea or two for a project I would like to work on and now would be a good time to dive in. The only thing I am not sure I can do with my current obligations is do a full on 5 day immersion or Sweat Lodge. I might have to do s scaled down version of that with my vacation coming up. I do not think my wife would appreciate it too much if I was to spend my entire vacation glued to my computer.

This thing on?

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Welcome to the new site!

It’s been a long time since I blogged over at my first site grid7.org and I found it about time that I started doing it again. This time I wanted to have a certain amount of focus with this site then I did with the previous one and I thought the name was pretty damn cool.

The first thing I would like to focus the new site on is I want to write about my attempt to start creating and selling themes for Envato’s Themeforest. One of the things I have always been interested in for awhile now is building pretty kickass websites. However due to work, school and life in general I have never had the chance or the motivation to really sharpen those skills. I am hoping by getting a theme approved on the marketplace and start getting some extra income through it, it will give me the motivation I need to create even more themes.

As you can see the site now is a pretty bare bones Thematic theme for WordPress. By going through and getting better at web design and WordPress customization I can evolve the look of the site and reflect the hard work I am putting into it. While I am working on the site, I will write about the different steps I am taking and what my thought process was for doing something the way I did it. Think of this as a giant case study.

The next thing I would like to focus on to try and rekindle my love for sketching/cartooning. Up until the end of high-school I used to be a pretty prolific drawer and I used to fill sketchbooks and class notebooks all the time. I had aspirations of going to art school and landing up at some place like Industrial Light and Magic being a concept artist, but I couldn’t afford it and ended up getting into my second love….computers. One of the things that is starting to motivate me to draw again is seeing a ton of concept artists posting their sketch books online to see and inspiring people like me to get drawing again. I hope by doing the same I could somehow pay it forward by getting other’s inspired to get drawing or to stick with it.

Because I have a pretty insane schedule my writing will not be as numerous as I hope it to be, however I will try and crank out at least one post per week minimum.