How to install ruby 1.9.2 on Ubuntu 10.04

The current LTS version of Ubuntu is 10.04 and the most current version of ruby it ships with is 1.9.1. Unfurtunately 1.9.1 wasn’t that great of a release and anyone using the 1.9 branch really should use the stable 1.9.2.

After doing a bit of researching I found some information on how the best approach to get ruby installed is. Downloading the source, compiling it and registering the installed version with the package manager.

The following little bash script takes care of installing ruby 1.9.2 on a ubuntu or debian based system (or any other version if you change the $Version variable in the script). The script just consolidates information found online and wraps it up into a nice bashscript

 

How to easily add colored text output in bash scripts

Here is small snippet that can give your shell scripts some nice output: colortext.sh As with the debug.sh script, just download it to the same directory as your own script and add it with

It contains one simple function called text with the syntax text “text to be output”. Color can be red, green, yellow, blue or grey. The function does not automatically add a linebreak to the putput, so pop a \n in there if you need it. I prefer using it together with printf for clean and easy color output.

Here are some examples of how the function can be used, and below the corresponding output:

Output:

normal text
blue text, yellow text
Status of script: [ERROR]
Status of script: [OK]

How to add debugging to shellscripts

Debugging bash scripts is pretty straightforward, throwing around a couple echo and set -x quickly gives you what you need. But what if you want to add a nice breakpoint,  debugging to lots of paces in the code or turn all debugging on or off at once? Then this little script I wrote is the right thing for you: debug.sh just download it to the same directory as your script and include it with the following line:

It contains 4 simple functions that will make your bash coding easier.
debug and breakpoint both print the argument with a timestamp to STDERR
You can turn off all the functions by adding a DEBUG=false into your code

Example:

Output:

Wireshark remote capturing

yeah, this is real simple stuff, not really worth writing a script for it. but on the other hand it saves me from remembering how to do it every time I need it (which isn’t often). So here is a little script to setup remote capturing with wireshark.
All it basically does is ssh to the remote host and tcpdump sucking the output via stdout through the ssh connection to a local pipe, that is then used by wireshark to display the stream. Because of this you may want to make sure you aren’t capturing your own ssh data when doing this 😉

XEN 3.4 with ipv6 routing

Yes, there are a few postings out there about getting ipv6 routing running with XEN. But I’ll throw this online anyway since there are a few changes I had to make for it to work on my server. This text is intended for people who know their way around Linux and XEN so it will be a bit technical and won’t spell out every single step you have to make.

Most of the changes are based off scripts and information from BenV and wnagele (latter is interesting for me since I am also running XEN on a hetzner server). Have a look at the two links if anything is unclear. Now let’s start the fun 🙂

First of all we need IPv6 up and running on the host (dom0). Add the IP and gateway to your /etc/network/interfaces
This is what mine looks like:
iface eth0 inet6 static
address 2a01:4f8:100:1123::2
netmask 64
gateway 2a01:4f8:100:1120::1
pre-up ip -6 route add 2a01:4f8:100:1120::1 dev eth0

Check if the IP address is responding to the outside world (e.g. with wiberg.nu/iptools.php), if everything looks ok, proceed …
Now we need to enable a few things to get routing and neighbor discovery running on the host (dom0). Edit your /etc/sysctl.conf and add/change these 2 entries (and while you are at it, set them with “sysctl -w” too):
net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding=1
net.ipv6.conf.all.proxy_ndp=1

So, your host should by now be online with ipv6 and soon be able to route packets to it’s guests. By default XEN will only take care of IPv4 when a guest is created, so here is a small patchfile that adds support for IPv6: xen-ipv6-vif-route.patch. The patch changes vif-route and vif-common.sh, while these files may be in different places depending on your distribution, /etc/xen/scripts/ is where they can commonly be found. Download the patch to the directory with the scripts to be changed and execute a “patch -p0 < xen-ipv6-vif-route.patch” (vif-common.sh gets a few new IPv6 functions, and iptables now won’t try to change stuff for IPv6 IPs. vif-route changes are: ndp is enabled for the vif device and the route/neighbor IPv6 settings are set)

So, now that the scripts know how to setup all our IPv6 needs, we need to add the IPv6 IP to our guest settings (.cfg file typically found in /etc/xen/). What we want to change is the “vif” setting. Add the IPv6 IP of the guest to the IPv4 IP (just the IP without the trailing /network, space separated form the IPv4 IP):
vif = [ 'mac=B1:A3:3F:25:11:B8, ip=2a01:4f8:100:1123::5 188.40.34.101' ]

Now you can create the guest(domU) and add the IPv6 IP to the /etc/network/interfaces of the guest if you haven’t so already (it uses the host (dom0) as the gateway).

iface eth0 inet6 static
address 2a01:4f8:100:1123::5
netmask 64
gateway 2a01:4f8:100:1123::2

Restart the networking on the guest (or reboot it) and you should now be able to ping the guest from the internet. See, easy wasn’t it 🙂