GridFTP on Archlinux

After having globus-gridftp-server and myproxy-server work on Gentoo linux, it was easy to convert the scripts to work on Arch linux. Following their guide, I tried myproxy-server at first and it worked nicely. Actually in their guide they should mention about ensuring that the executable is in PATH.

#!/bin/bash

. /etc/rc.conf
. /etc/rc.d/functions

GLOBUS_LOCATION=/home/phoenix/gt
DAEMON=myproxy-server
ARGS=

[ -r /etc/conf.d/$DAEMON ] && . /etc/conf.d/$DAEMON

PID=$(pidof -o %PPID $DAEMON)

case "$1" in
 start)
   stat_busy "Starting $DAEMON"
   [ -z "$PID" ] && $GLOBUS_LOCATION/sbin/$DAEMON $ARGS &>/dev/null
   if [ $? = 0 ]; then
     add_daemon $DAEMON
     stat_done
   else
     stat_fail
     exit 1
   fi
   ;;
 stop)
   stat_busy "Stopping $DAEMON"
   [ -n "$PID" ] && kill $PID &>/dev/null
   if [ $? = 0 ]; then
     rm_daemon $DAEMON
     stat_done
   else
     stat_fail
     exit 1
   fi
   ;;
 restart)
   $0 stop
   sleep 1
   $0 start
   ;;
 *)
   echo "usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}" 
esac

Now, getting the script for the gridftp-server working was a bit tricky as I had to pass the parameter for the port number and also to get it work as a daemon. I tried to provide the parameters from /etc/conf.d/gridftp-server; but somehow it was not reading the parameters from that file so I had to provide it in the rc script itself.

#!/bin/bash

. /etc/rc.conf
. /etc/rc.d/functions

export GLOBUS_LOCATION=/homephoenix/gt
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$GLOBUS_LOCATION/lib
source $GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/globus-user-env.sh
DAEMON=globus-gridftp-server
ARGS="-S -f -p 2811"

[ -r /etc/conf.d/$DAEMON ] && . /etc/conf.d/$DAEMON

PID=$(pidof -o %PPID $DAEMON)

case "$1" in
 start)
   stat_busy "Starting $DAEMON"
   [ -z "$PID" ] && $GLOBUS_LOCATION/sbin/$DAEMON $ARGS &>/dev/null
   if [ $? = 0 ]; then
     add_daemon $DAEMON
     stat_done
   else
     stat_fail
     exit 1
   fi
   ;;
 stop)
   stat_busy "Stopping $DAEMON"
   [ -n "$PID" ] && kill $PID &>/dev/null
   if [ $? = 0 ]; then
     rm_daemon $DAEMON
     stat_done
   else
     stat_fail
     exit 1
   fi
   ;;
 restart)
   $0 stop
   sleep 1
   $0 start
   ;;
 *)
   echo "usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}" 
esac

GridFTP on Gentoo

The Globus Project provides gridftp as one of the modules of its toolkit. I got the source and followed the quickstart guide to start the installation. However, the guide tells you how to run myproxy-server and globus-gridftp-server as xinet daemons. Although Gentoo provides xinetd package, that is not their preferred way of handling daemons. They use their own init scripts. So, I have tried to do it their way. My first script was for myproxy-server.

#!/sbin/runscript

start() {
    ebegin "Starting myproxy-server"
    start-stop-daemon --start --exec /home/titu/soc/gt/sbin/myproxy-server    eend $?
}

stop() {
    ebegin "Stopping myproxy-server"
    start-stop-daemon --stop --exec /home/titu/soc/gt/sbin/myproxy-server
    eend $?
}

My next script was for starting globus-gridftp-server as a daemon; however this process has having problems when I tried it the way I did for myproxy-server. Sometimes start-stop-daemon was not returning and sometimes start-stop-daemon was unable to stop. I tried to store PID values in a pid file by asking start-stop-daemon to create the pidfile by using -m option. However, it turned out that the PID in the pidfile was always slightly less than the actual PID. It was most likely because of forking. So, I modified the script using killall.

#!/sbin/runscript

start() {
    ebegin "Starting globus-gridftp-server"
    start-stop-daemon --start -b -e GLOBUS_LOCATION=/home/titu/soc/gt -e LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/titu/soc/gt/lib --exec /home/titu/soc/gt/sbin/globus-gridftp-server -- -S -f -p 2811
    eend $?
}

stop() {
    ebegin "Stopping globus-gridftp-server"
    killall globus-gridftp-server
    eend $?
}

It is essential to set environment variables for the gridftp server.

Automounting NTFS flash drives in Gentoo

Recently, I noticed flash drives with ntfs file systems on them were nicely automounted on my KDE on Archlinux. However, when I tried it in GNOME on Gentoo, it showed me an error message. Initially I thought if it is a desktop environment issue; but automounting is usually done by udev. So I decided to check for udev and ntfs-3g driver.

emerge -pv udev ntfs3g

I found that the ntfs3g package had "udev" USE flag disabled. I douted this might be the reason. To verify I ran a quick check using the following command.

equery u ntfs3g

I found "udev" USE flag installs udev rule to make udisks use ntfs-3g instead of the kernel NTFS driver. So, I
enabled it by adding the following line to /etc/portage/package.use

sys-fs/ntfs3g udev

Re-emerging the package solved the issue and I can nicely automount flash drives with ntfs filesystems.

What happened to Thunderbird 4?

I have been using Mozilla Thunderbird since version 2.0. Recently I saw a version bump directly from 3.x to 5.0. This is because Mozilla wanted to keep the version numbering same as Firefox. From the release notes, the main reason for such a bump seems to be the new Gecko 5 engine.

Recently Firefox versions have come up very fast. By the time add-ons became compatible with Firefox 4.x, Firefox 5.0 was out and some add-ons are incompatible with it. Mozilla should slow down the release cycle, decide what it wants to implement as part of its next release cycle and provide a feature rich and stable browser.