Tag: 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.

parser error : Detected an entity reference loop

While importing a rather large XML-document (45MB+) into a database today, I ran into a weird problem on one specific server. The server runs SUSE Enterprise and presented an error that neither other test server gave. After a bit of digging around on the web I were able to collect enough information from several different threads about what could be the source of the problem.

It seems that the limit was introduced in libxml2 about half a year ago to avoid some other memory problems, but this apparently borked quite a few legitimate uses. As I have very little experience with administrating SUSE Enterprise based servers, I quickly shrugged off trying to update the packages and possibly recompiling PHP. Luckily one of the comments in a thread about the problem saved the day.

If you find yourself running into this message; swap your named entities in the XML file (such as < and >) to numeric entities (such as < and >). This way libxml2 just replaces everything with the byte value while parsing instead of trying to be smart and keep an updated cache.