EDG System Administration

I recently updated the kernel on our mailserver and found that spamassassin would no longer run. I was getting an error message something like this:

Errno architecture (i386-linux-thread-multi-2.6.9-78.0.1.elsmp) does not match executable architecture (i386-linux-thread-multi-2.6.18-128.1.1.el5) at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Errno.pm line 11.
Compilation failed in require at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/i386-linux-thread-multi/IO/Socket.pm line 17.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/i386-linux-thread-multi/IO/Socket.pm line 17.
Compilation failed in require.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted.

The solution was to get rid of everything that I installed with cpan. That means I just renamed /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl to something else and remade the site_perl directory with the following files:

/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.5
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.5/i386-linux-thread-multi
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.5/i386-linux-thread-multi/auto
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.6
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.6/i386-linux-thread-multi
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.6/i386-linux-thread-multi/auto
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7/i386-linux-thread-multi
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7/i386-linux-thread-multi/auto
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/i386-linux-thread-multi
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/i386-linux-thread-multi/auto

After that, spamassassin started with no problems.

So, how to install other cpan modules without using cpan? (Since it can cause problems.) I added the Dag repository (http://dag.wieers.com/) to my setup. Just create a file /etc/yum.repos.d/dag.repo with the following:

#
# DAG (http://dag.wieers.com) additional RPMS repository
#
[main]
[dag]
name=DAG (http://dag.wieers.com) additional RPMS repository
baseurl=http://linuxsoft.cern.ch/dag/redhat/el4/en/$basearch/dag
gpgkey=http://linuxsoft.cern.ch/cern/slc4X/$basearch/docs/RPM-GPG-KEY-dag
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1

They actually have rpms for a lot of the modules. Then, I can simply run:

yum install perl-File-Find-Rule

We had been having some problems simulating a very simple circuit on our linux and sun workstations. The problem was that we were getting errors on the sun, but not on the linux workstation. It was found that the linux systems had the MMSIM package from Cadence installed, while the suns had not. So, the suns were using the version of spectre that came with the IC package, while the linux workstations were using the version from MMSIM. The solution was to install the MMSIM package on the suns and to make sure that the path to the MMSIM files came before the path to the IC files in /etc/.cshrc.

# Make sure MMSIM comes before ICHOME in PATH, so we get correct spectre program
setenv MMSIMHOME /net/sw/sun/cad/mmsim
setenv PATH ${PATH}:${MMSIMHOME}/tools/bin:${MMSIMHOME}/tools/dfII/etc

setenv ICHOME /net/sw/sun/cad/ic/ic5141USR5
setenv PATH ${PATH}:${ICHOME}/tools/dfII/bin:${ICHOME}/tools/bin:${ICHOME}/tools/plot/bin

setenv IUSHOME /net/sw/sun/cad/ius
setenv PATH ${PATH}:${IUSHOME}/tools/bin