return void;

I’ve spent a majority of my break trying to get my system updated. Well, I’ve actually only been doing that for a week. I’ve spent the rest of that time trying to get my file server to share up the directory structure with POSIX extensions.

I’ve been using Samba for the last 2 years and have been pretty pleased with it. It allows me to mix my wife’s Windows XP laptop into the rest of the Linux network. It also works well enough with my Gentoo desktop machines that I’ve been able to accomplish most things. My meager 5 GB desktop harddrive is pushing it’s limit at about 4GB and has been doing so for some time. I have long dreamed about using my network storage for building software, as some applications (I’m looking at you OpenOffice) require 4+ GB just to compile.

What I basically needed was to be able to use regular POSIX extensions (permissions / ownership) on a network share. This is simply not possible with SMBFS as it’s owned by the user who mounted the share or the user specified in the mount options. You could also squash the user to a particular user on the server, but I didn’t really want to do that. You might also be able to use LDAP for authentication so that you can have the same login across multiple systems, but even with the exact same user on both machines, it still failed to allow the changing of permissions / ownership. According to the Samba manual, you should be able to enable POSIX extensions by enabling them on the lower level file system. Since I was using ReiserFS, I went ahead and added that to my kernel, and enabled the feature in Samba:

unix extensions = Yes

This still failed to provide the functionality I needed. I eventually gave up. After countless nights staying up way beyond my bedtime, I eventually decided to setup NFS on the same folder and just mount it as an NFS share when I need to. If you have problems getting your NFS server to mount in a reasonable time and correctly allow for the execution of configure scripts, mount it in the following manner:

mount -o nolock,user,exec,rw,lock host:/path/to/share /path/to/local

I then began the long arduous task of updating my system. Since I haven’t updated in about 5 months, I was expecting it to be annoying, but it was much worse. It took almost the entire week to rebuild everything. I ended up having to mask several packages:

=app-misc/lirc-0.8.2_pre2
=media-libs/libgphoto2-2.3.1-r4
=dev-scheme/guile-1.8.1-r3
media-sound/banshee

LIRC won’t even compile; I looked at the source and it looks like a simply copy-paste problem with a non-existent variable. I can’t remember the problems I had with libgphoto2 and guile, but they gave me enough grief to finally mask out. Banshee was a different animal. I currently do not have Banshee installed because I uninstalled it hoping to force a complete recompile. Now if only Gnome 2.18 would unmask.

I’ve been using Gentoo since the 1.0 pre-releases and this is one of the most difficult upgrade cycles I’ve had to go through in a long time. In fact, it’s almost as if the community problems that have been plaguing Gentoo have finally spilled over into the Portage maintenance. I am really shocked mostly with Banshee and LIRC not even compiling on my system; I would have thought someone in the AMD64 heard would have installed them to see that they don’t work and should be masked.

Now all I have to do is prepare for StarCraft 2.