pitter patter on the keyboard

I’m sure anyone who works for ClearFoundation and sees this will think “well, you can’t please everyone!” but this is a list of things they have managed to horribly screw up that every admin needs to know before plunging head first into ClearOS 6.3 or worse, an earlier 6.x:

• You can no longer limit or reserve bandwidth for a whole IP or IP range. I know the documentation says you can. You can’t. This was apparently done in 6.2 then carried into 6.3 to make bandwidth management play along with multiwan – something that seemed to be possible for years until now. From the app’s review tab:

  by Asad Siddiqui – June 20, 2012

  Following modifications are required;The bandwidth limitations are on network card interface only, there is no option of limiting bandwith on the basis of single IP address or range of IP addresses. Although this was provided in Clark Connect.This option may kindly be added in this application

• Speaking of apps: WTF, apps? 6.x is clearly the Foundation’s idea of caching in on “cloud” and “app” clichés. Software is no longer packaged, it is apped and you don’t get your apps from a repo you get them from the marketplace. It’s like they’ve tried to make a routing distribution appeal to a twelve year old girl. Routers are not something that should be built by people who have no concept of routing and making it approachable to those who do not is aggravating to those who do. This is not a desktop distribution, why are they trying to broaden their target demographic?

  I see what you did there. I couldn’t disapprove more.

• There is no way (at least that I’ve found so far) to uninstall apps in the webconfig. You must feel around and guess the package name then yum erase it.
• Every god-damned page in the webconfig now has a huge, unnecessary app column taking up valuable space in the hopes that they might up-sell you on the commercial apps you already passed up on install. Fsck off, I’m trying to configure my firewall – I don’t give a crap how many stars it has.
• Even more of the setup process is done in the web interface now and god help you if you happen to put in a wrong name server or you may find yourself wondering why it’s taking forever to not time out when it looks for new packages.
• Registering with ClearSDN is now mandatory; you’re SOL if you think you can set up the router without an active connection and drop it in later. Wonderful. ET phone home!
• Kernel-devel doesn’t actually contain the kernel sources and kernel-sourcecode is missing. You have to do it the hard way:

  wget http://mirror2-houston.clearsdn.com/clearos/community/6.3.0/dev/SRPMS/kernel-2.6.32-279.2.1.v6.src.rpm
  rpm2cpio kernel-2.6.32-279.2.1.v6.src.rpm > kernel.cpio
  cpio -idmv < kernel.cpio
  cd rpmbuild/SOURCES/
  cp linux-2.6.32-279.2.1.el6.tar.bz2 /usr/src/
  cd /usr/src/
  tar xjf linux-2.6.32-279.2.1.el6.tar.bz2

• “Development Tools” package group has been replaced with clearos-centric clearos-devel. This pulls in 170 packages meant to help you design apps and whatnot but mostly useless if all you need is a C build environment.
• No more free IPsec! There is still a paid-for “Dynamic VPN” app which provides this functionality but the old IPsec module has been dropped for good.

Doubtless I will have plenty more nasty things to say about this new major version as time goes on and it reveals its sins to me. Do check in from time to time.

The only nice thing I have to say is way to go on the 64 bit version – now if only they would provide Xen images in addition to every other virtualization platform that should NOT be used to run a router…

RENDER UNTO BETA WHAT IS BETA’S.

Gentoo recently made the switch from lzma-utils to xz-utils, to quote the project page at http://tukaani.org/lzma/:

LZMA Utils are legacy data compression software with high compression ratio. LZMA Utils are no longer developed, although critical bugs may be fixed as long as fixing them doesn’t require huge changes to the code.

Users of LZMA Utils should move to XZ Utils. XZ Utils support the legacy .lzma format used by LZMA Utils, and can also emulate the command line tools of LZMA Utils. This should make transition from LZMA Utils to XZ Utils relatively easy.

As you are probably aware, Portage has largely used lzma for the past year – before which bzip2 was the compression standard of choice. If alarm bells went off in your head when you saw this message:

[blocks B     ] app-arch/lzma-utils ("app-arch/lzma-utils" is blocking app-arch/xz-utils-4.999.9_beta)

You can rest easy uninstalling lzma, the xz-utils package comes in a good ol’ fashioned tarball and it works as a drop-in replacement for it so it’s safe to unmerge lzma-utils completely then – before emerging anything else – emerge xz-utils:

# emerge --unmerge lzma-utils; emerge xz-utils

 app-arch/lzma-utils
 selected: 4.32.7
 protected: none   
 omitted: none   

>>> 'Selected' packages are slated for removal.
>>> 'Protected' and 'omitted' packages will not be removed.

>>> Waiting 5 seconds before starting...
>>> (Control-C to abort)...
>>> Unmerging in: 5 4 3 2 1
>>> Unmerging app-arch/lzma-utils-4.32.7...

 * GNU info directory index is up-to-date.
Calculating dependencies... done!

# emerge xz-utils
Calculating dependencies... done!

>>> Verifying ebuild manifests

>>> Emerging (1 of 1) app-arch/xz-utils-4.999.9_beta
>>> Downloading 'http://gentoo.osuosl.org/distfiles/xz-4.999.9beta.tar.gz'

I’ll take this opportunity to point out that in this day and age the word beta has become such a gimmick that Gentoo is including so-called beta software as part of its core system. Back in my day beta meant beta and you had to walk 17 miles uphill both ways to get to the nearest phone jack. Mind you we didn’t call them modems in those days, we called em clinkerdinkers….

Way to go, Internet.