Paul's Linux Software Page

News and introduction

Thu May 27 20:32:43 EST 2004 I'm working on getting Bird's Eye, my project to create Linux monitoring software, up and running at the moment.  You can find more information at its home page: birdseye.homelinux.net

Sat Apr 24 23:16:13 EST 2004 I've released shoregen, my centralised shorewall configuration script.  See the shoregen documentation for more details.

Sat Apr 17 18:25:35 EST 2004
More cleanups of my yum repository have been made in the last few weeks, along with a new version of check-packages, and a new build of isag.

Wed Mar 10 21:08:02 EST 2004
I'm moving my repository to support yum, and use it for package distribution instead of distribute.  You will find yum headers in my repository now, but be very cautious about what you apply, because i haven't got a correct versioning system in place yet, and Red Hat 7.3 RPMS are mixed in with Red Hat 9 and Fedora Core 1.  I hope to address this in the next few weeks.

Sometime around Sat Feb 09 08:58:06 EST 2002
There's nothing earth shattering here, but hopefully these few offerings will help to make your life easier.  I strongly encourage you NOT to trust any of these packages if they are not signed with my GPG key (which can be found here). 

You can find some of these packages mirrored on www.rpmfind.net.   Just ask for me.

I try to follow the Linux kernel version number convention for my packages, so 1.1.0 is the first issue of a development series, while 1.2.3 is the fourth release of a stable series.  This doesn't apply to third party packages.

My software
shoregen
Shoregen is a script that generates shorewall configurations for multiple firewalls from a common set of rules and policies. Only the minimal information necessary for operation is stored on each firewall. Download from the RPM or tarball directory.  (Be sure to verify the MD5 checksum with my signature if you use the latter.)
distribute
These are the tools that i use to build RPM packages from my CVS repository.  The tools are:
build-rpm Extract sources and spec. file parts from CVS and build an RPM package using them.  Parts of the spec. file are automatically built.
clean-rpm Clean up files built by RPM for a particular package (and optionally version and release number).
distribute Copy packages to a system and install them. This is not fully working and has recently been deprecated in favour of yum, which is a far superior solution.
There's no documentation in the distribute package yet, but this should get you started:
  1. Create a directory for RPM and put it in ~/.rpmmacros like this:
      %_topdir /your/dir
    To make sure it's worked properly, run
      rpm --eval '%{_topdir}'
    You can try any of %{_builddir} %{_rpmdir} %{_sourcedir} %{_specdir} %{_srcrpmdir} in place of %{_topdir}.  (All of these can be configured independently, but RPM automatically sets them relative to %{_topdir}.)
  2. Put your code in your CVS repository, with the top-level directory named for the package.  e.g. To check out this package, cvs co distribute must operate correctly.
  3. Tag your CVS code with the tag "src-VER-REL", where VER is the version and REL is the release of the software (dots mangled to underscores, of course).  e.g.  To tag distribute version 1.1.2 release 1, run cvs tag src-1_1_2-1 from the distribute package directory.
  4. Tag your spec file parts in CVS, in the directory "spec/" under the package top-level directory.  See the spec files of the packages for examples.  Spec file parts must be tagged just like the source.
  5. Run:
      build-rpm NAME VER REL
    This should create the following files:
      %{_rpmdir}/arch/NAME-VER-REL.arch.rpm
      %{_specdir}/NAME-VER-REL.spec
      %{_srcrpmdir}/NAME-VER-REL.src.rpm
      %{_sourcedir}/NAME-VER-REL.tar.gz
  6. To clean up these files, run:
    1. clean-rpm NAME VER REL
check-packages

Sat Apr 17 18:30:00 EST 2004
The latest changes in check-packages make it a little cleverer in working out your hostname (not that it needs to be normally), and a bit quieter, which should cut down on unnecessary emails.

Wed Mar 10 21:01:48 EST 2004
Lately check-packages has morphed into something more to help me manage upgrades and changes to packages on the system.  The latest version has merged some features in from the sysmgt package (and more will follow), which track the packages on your system which are out of date according to one or both of yum and up2date.

Sometime around Sat Feb 09 12:00:49 EST 2002
Tripwire is great, but it's overkill for non-exposed systems.  To be really useful, tripwire's database should be on read-only media, which isn't practical when it changes every time you log in as root or start/stop a piece of software.

I use check-packages as a poor man's tripwire.  I rewrote Simon Mudd's nightly RPM checker (previously packaged by Kirk Bauer).  My version is a little cleaner to install and is designed to be completely quiet if nothing has happened.

test

This is a package that does nothing.  It is used to test that distribute is working correctly.  It could be marginally useful as a template for creating new packages.

Third-party packages
isag

Sat Apr 17 18:31:06 EST 2004
Recently a new release of isag was issued to address a minor security problem with tempfile management.  I've created a new RPM for this release, and tested briefly on the following distributions:

  • Red Hat Linux 7.3
  • Red Hat Linux 9
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1
  • Fedora Core 1
Starting with this package, i've reverted to the official isag version number.  Previously my builds used the sysstat version number, since i obtained isag from the sysstat contrib directory.  Now that isag has its own site, i'll be following the canonical version numbers closely.  For anyone who's installed a previous version of my package, this means you'll need to use "rpm -Uvh --oldpackage" to install it, as the version number is quite a bit lower than the sysstat package.  Future versions should not have this problem, and should install easily via yum.

Sometime in 2003, i think
Red Hat dropped support for isag in their sysstat package at Red Hat 8.0 - yet another of their undocumented, illogical changes. :-(  This is a separately-installable package that provides the isag script and related documentation.  The version number is from the sysstat package, not the original isag package.

Others

Tue Sep 9 22:12:08 EST 2003
I've updated my RPM build of AMaViS - A Mail Virus Scanner to work with Red Hat 9 and sendmail's libmilter.  All of the non-Red-Hat-supplied dependencies (except 'zoo' - try rpmfind.net for that) can be found here as well.  (The perl modules are made with cpan2rpm.)  These packages are untested and should be used with caution.

Sun Aug 17 12:53:35 EST 2003
For some inconceivable reason, Red Hat have stopped shipping IBM's jikes, a great Java compiler.  I've built it here to work with Red Hat 9.

Sun Aug 10 08:13:40 EST 2003
My latest build of jpilot fixes some problems with permissions on plugin and theme directories.  These jpilot RPMS are mirrored on the jpilot Download Page.

Sun Jul 13 20:54:36 EST 2003
I use Judd Montgomery's great jpilot.  These packages are built for a stock Red Hat 9 system.

Sat Jun 21 11:21:46 EST 2003
I've made some RPM packages of the perl dependencies required to install Koha.  These should make it a little easier for people to install Koha on Red Hat Linux.  They have been built on Red Hat Linux 9, but the SRPMS should build cleanly on 8.0 using rpmbuild --rebuild.  In addition to these RPMS, you'll need yaz, libyaz, and possibly libyaz-devel from Index Data as well.

Sometime in 2002, i think
This is a build of AMaViS - A Mail Virus Scanner which is built for sendmail-milter.  It is designed to be easy to install on Red Hat 7.x systems.  You will still need some of the auxiliary packages listed on the AMaViS site, but many of the dependencies can be fulfilled from the Red Hat install CDs.

Sometime before that
This is a package of the dshield iptables framework client designed to install easily on a Red Hat 7.x system.  I use it in conjunction with shorewall.

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