Category: RedHat

Building Gearman under Red Hat Enterprise 4 (RHEL4) or older CentOS-versions

While building gearman on our older RHEL4 servers, there was two issues that surfaced:

  • The version of boost included in RHEL4 is too old (1.32) for gearman. I decided to download the new boost version (1.48.0 at the time of writing) and install it. Be sure to remove the old version with rpm -e boost-devel, so that you don’t get strange conflicts while attempting to build the benchmark tools: 
    benchmark/blobslap_worker.cc:89: undefined reference to 
`boost::program_options::options_description::m_default_line_length'
benchmark/benchmark_blobslap_worker-blobslap_worker.o(.text+0x1d9):
benchmark/blobslap_worker.cc:89: undefined reference to 
`boost::program_options::options_description::m_default_line_length'
  • Issues while trying to build the tests/ directory: 

    tests/stress_worker.cc: In function `test_return_t worker_ramp_TEST(void*)':
tests/stress_worker.cc:113: error: `pthread_timedjoin_np' was not declared in this scope
tests/stress_worker.cc:113: warning: unused variable 'pthread_timedjoin_np'
make: *** [tests/stress_worker.o] Error 1

    This can be solved by removing the whole section enclosed in the #ifdef _GNU_SOURCE
    section. Let the content in the #else-part in place. Removing this will not affect the usual (and any important parts of it) gearman distribution in any way.

The configure / make process of gearman needs a way to exclude the benchmark/ and tests/ parts of the project from being built.

Building Varnish on RedHat Enterprise Linux 4.0 (RHEL4)

We’re switching to Varnish as our reverse proxy service (and leaving mod_proxy under Apache), and as our web frontends still run RHEL4, there was a few small things that crept up while attempting to build Varnish from source (the supplied RPM packages are only for RHEL5).

You’ll need to have the pcre packages installed:

pcre pcre-devel

When running configure you might still get a notice about pcre not being available:

checking for PCRE... no
configure: error: Package requirements (libpcre) were not met:

Package libpcre was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `libpcre.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'libpcre' found

Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you
installed software in a non-standard prefix.

Alternatively, you may set the environment variables PCRE_CFLAGS
and PCRE_LIBS to avoid the need to call pkg-config.
See the pkg-config man page for more details.

You can solve this by setting the PCRE_CFLAGS and PCRE_LIBS environment variables:

export PCRE_LIBS="-L/usr/lib -lpcre"
export PCRE_CFLAGS=-I/usr/include/pcre

Re-run configure and run make, and things should hopefully build properly.

up2date: The package .. is signed, but with an unknown GPG key.

After attempting to install libevent-devel on one of our cluster nodes, up2date started complaining about missing GPG signatures. We use the Fedora EPEL repository for fairly new items, and apparently the key were missing / not updated.

The error messages:

warning: rpmts_HdrFromFdno: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 217521f6
The package .. is signed, but with an unknown GPG key. Aborting...
Package .. has a unknown GPG signature. Aborting...

The fix for us was to download the keys from Fedora’s key page (we just needed the EPEL-key), and add them with rpm:

wget https://fedoraproject.org/static/217521F6.txt
rpm --import 217521F6.txt

.. and things worked as it should yet again – and we still get our packages verified. You can also confirm that the key id from the error message (217521F6) is the same as the key that you’ve downloaded from Fedora (or if you’re using another repository they’ll probably provide their keys as well).