Making it easy to try DTrace4Linux

Posted on 7/25/2012 by Marc

DTrace4Linux is an attempt (from UK developer Paul Fox, also known for his CRiSP editor) to bring the power of DTrace to Linux. It’s a kernel module (No kernel recompilation required! Yay!) and userland tools.

I did a bit of hacking around with Vagrant and Puppet and VirtualBox to make it dead easy to try.

An OVA file for Ubuntu with DTrace4Linux kernel module already built and installed. Import the OVA into VirtualBox et al, boot it up, and try something like sudo dtrace -l
A .vmwarem vm that should be importable into VMware Player
Pull request with Vagrantfile — for Vagrant

Tweeted here.

DTrace for Linux

Posted on 3/25/2012 by Marc

I wanted to draw attention to the excellent work that Paul Fox has been doing in porting DTrace to Linux. And he recently created a GitHub repo for it, so it’s that much easier to contribute now.

If you have Linux kernel knowledge, I’d encourage you to get involved!

Running Dropbox on DreamHost

Posted on 4/19/2011 by Marc

As promised and after a nudge from Bruce, here’s how I was able to get the Dropbox Linux CLI software running on a DreamHost VPS server. This isn’t super hard but it wasn’t a trivial install, because the Dropbox software is closed-source and it contains binaries compiled against glibc 2.4, whereas my VPS server is using glibc 2.3.

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Making du report useful output for comparing across systems

Posted on 4/16/2011 by Marc

You have to be a little careful using the du command to compare output across systems. For example, a few weeks ago I backed up a bunch of files from our MacBook Pro to our NAS and then was running du commands to verify that directories on the systems had the same amount of data. There is a pitfall here, though…

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Ubuntu repository problem resolved

Posted on 11/18/2007 by Marc

The previously mentioned Ubuntu repository problem seems to have resolved itself. I am finally able to upgrade my Samba packages.

Ubuntu mirror troubles

Posted on 11/16/2007 by Marc

This has been happening all day every time I attempt to do apt-get dist-upgrade:

The following packages will be upgraded:
  libsmbclient samba samba-common smbclient smbfs
5 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 11.0MB of archives. After unpacking 4096B will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?]
Writing extended state information... Done
Err http://security.ubuntu.com feisty-security/main smbfs 3.0.24-2ubuntu1.3
  403 Forbidden
Err http://security.ubuntu.com feisty-security/main smbclient 3.0.24-2ubuntu1.3
  403 Forbidden
Err http://security.ubuntu.com feisty-security/main samba 3.0.24-2ubuntu1.3
  403 Forbidden
Err http://security.ubuntu.com feisty-security/main samba-common 3.0.24-2ubuntu1.3
  403 Forbidden
Err http://security.ubuntu.com feisty-security/main libsmbclient 3.0.24-2ubuntu1.3
  403 Forbidden
E: Failed to fetch

http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/s/samba/smbfs_3.0.24-2ubuntu1.3_i386.deb:

403 Forbidden

Possible fix for using apt through a broken HTTP proxy

Posted on 10/29/2007 by Marc

Seen on a work email list. A possible solution to the problem where files downloaded through apt-get on Ubuntu at work (where we have a squid HTTP proxy) periodically get corrupted.

Put the following in apt.conf:

Acquire::http::Pipeline-Depth "0";

Quote from man apt.conf:

One setting is provided to control the pipeline depth in cases where the remote server is not RFC conforming or buggy (such as Squid 2.0.2) Acquire::http::Pipeline-Depth can be a value from 0 to 5 indicating how many outstanding requests APT should send. A value of zero MUST be specified if the remote host does not properly linger on TCP connections – otherwise data corruption will occur. Hosts which require this are in violation of RFC 2068.

Marc Abramowitz

Category Archives: Linux