Much ado about scripting, Linux & Eclipse: card subject to change

2010-06-30

Update Site Aggregation: B3 vs. Tycho

Last year, I used to aggregate update sites with the Buckminster Aggregator, but since that won't install into Eclipse 3.6 (Helios), I had to migrate to the B3 Aggregator. This new version of the Aggregator is greatly expanded and worked fine until recently, when it has begun to suffer from a rather nasty p2 problem: instead of the Director just installing the aggregator into an Eclipse instance prior to then running the aggregation, I get "The copies of profile SDKProfile are not in sync," and the whole process dies. http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

So, in order to find a workaround, I went back to Tycho, and discovered you can merge update sites with little more than two simple files:

  • a site.xml, which lists the features to aggregate and how to categorize them, and
  • a pom.xml to list the source sites and drive the aggregation.

Unfortunately the Tycho solution doesn't include the ability to add associate sites to the metadata after generation, but that can simply be done as a downstream step (Tycho can call Ant using the maven-antrun-plugin).

2010-06-21

pogoplug network attached storage (NAS) for linux, mac, windows

A couple months ago I bought a PogoPlug. Because it's an ungodly pink colour and because I've been hella busy with other stuff, I finally unboxed it today, and discovered that while:

... setting it up for Linux was not entirely trivial.

While the above article helped, a couple points were not immediately obvious:

  • If you mount the drive as root, it's not accessible as anyone else; if you mount as the user, not even root can read it.
  • Use of a /etc/pogoplugfs.conf file is highly recommended, so that you can log in w/o having to key in your username and password every time. Create this file as root, and set it chmod 644 if not already:
    svcuser=you@email-provider.com
    svcpassword=web-login-password
    logseverity=10
  • To automount the drive on startup (eg., on my old xubuntu 6 system), as root, try creating a new file, /etc/init.d/pogoplug:
    #! /bin/sh
    ### BEGIN INIT INFO
    # Provides:          
    # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $syslog
    # Required-Stop:     $remote_fs $syslog
    # Should-Start:      $named
    # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
    # Default-Stop:      1
    # Short-Description: pogoplug fs mount as myusername
    # Description:       pogoplug fs mount as myusername
    ### END INIT INFO
    
    sudo -u myusername /usr/bin/pogoplugfs --mountpoint /media/pogoplug
    
    exit 0
  • Then, to activate this file, as root:
    chmod +x /etc/init.d/pogoplug; \
    for x in 2 3 4 5; do \
      cd /etc/rc${x}.d; ln -s /etc/init.d/pogoplug S99pogoplug; \
    done

With Fedora 12, I could simply create a startup task using System < Preferences < Startup Applications from the gnome menu.

2010-06-18

#FailWhale v2.0


#Fail Bot?
-- Someone's been watching too much made-for-tv sci-fi, I think