die Seilerwerks

While trying to install pastebot on my CentOS5 sandbox for interal IRC usage, I found that I had to install a number of other perl modules upon which pastebot depended. This however became very frustrating as nearly all of them failed.

I ended up following the dependency chain to eventually find out that IO::Compress::Base was failing because the Scalar::Util module, installed stock by CentOS, lacked the “XS” extension. A Google search led me to this bug report confirming it. Fortunately the problem is easily solved by doing a “force install Scalar::Util” in cpan.

I assume that this problem also exists in RHEL5, and some LUGmates have reported similar breakage in Fedora.

This past week has been spent packaging and re-installing some “legacy” SQL reporting scripts. Since before my time here, these scripts have been run out of the oracle OS user’s home directory, running as the oracle user, scheduled in the oracle user’s crontab. It’s been a security bug crawling under my skin for some time now, and I should have fixed it a long time ago. Giving developers (or any non-DBA) access to the oracle OS user means giving them the ability to start or shutdown the instance(s) , and even drop the database if they knew the commands.

Besides the security concerns, these reports were not in our CVS and had no installation package. We create RPMs of all of our in-house software that goes onto our RHEL servers, which makes system administration a LOT easier.

So in the end, the shell and SQL files will be in CVS, have a proper installation method and be inventoried in the RPM database on those machines, and will have their own cron file in /etc/cron.d running as a non-privileged user.

There’s still a lot to be done before I’m satisfied from a security perspective, but it’s nice to get these out of the way.

Update: An added bonus is finding out that some of the scripts are obsolete and can just be taken out!

Hampus Linden, the Swedish werewolf in London, has posted a light review of Oracle on CentOS 5, the latest release to match the new RedHat Enterprise Linux 5. CentOS is basically RHEL without the paid support, great for testing/development environments.