/dev/root 

I’ve got a sendmail setup with ldap_routing, it’s very convenient if you’ve got a distributed sendmail environment, in my case I’ve just got ldap_routing for mail hosts and not for addresses, so it’s expressed in the following form in sendmail.mc:

FEATURE(`ldap_routing',`ldap -T<TMPF> -k (mailacceptinggeneralid=%0) -v maildrophost',`null',`')dnl

When upgrading my sendmail platform to the new Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) I’ve found the following error:

readcf: config K line, map ldapmra: no map class

This is due to a change in behaviour in ldap_routing.m4 in 8.14.4, it’ll try to automatically add  -T<TMPF> which breaks the special `null’ behaviour.

The way recommended to fix this is to replace ldap_routing.m4 with the version from 8.14.3 which is available here.

In my case (Ubuntu) I just had to replace the file located at /usr/share/sendmail/cf/feature/ldap_routing.m4, then process sendmail.mc again and everything went back to normal :)

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) has updated MySQL to version 5.5, the update is not as straight forward as in other releases so some caution must be always taken.

Updating from MySQL 5.x

This is a fairly easy case, if you have any extra config in /etc/mysql/conf.d there’s a high chance that the new package will actually uninstall your old packages without replacing them, be extremely careful with that, also check that all your parameters are in line with MySQL 5.5 syntax.

First of all once the upgrade to 12.04 is finished, check which packages for mysql-server are installed:

$ sudo dpkg -l | grep mysql-server
ii mysql-server 5.5.22-0ubuntu1 MySQL database server (metapackage depending on the latest version)
rc mysql-server-5.1 5.1.61-0ubuntu0.11.10.1 MySQL database server binaries and system database setup
ii mysql-server-5.5 5.5.22-0ubuntu1 MySQL database server binaries and system database setup
ii mysql-server-core-5.5 5.5.22-0ubuntu1 MySQL database server binaries

If you see all the 5.5 packages installed congratulations, your upgrade was flawless, but in any other case you’ll only see the mysql-server-5.1 package, so you’ll need to install manually the packages.

$ sudo apt-get install mysql-server-5.5

This should in all cases suffice to get MySQL server running again if there’s no errors in your my.cnf.

Updating from MySQL 4.x

In this case the binary structure changes slightly so you’ll need to dump all your data and upload it to a fresh new MySQL 5.5 instance, there’s not much way around this unfortunately and not following this can result in corrupt data.

Today Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) has been released, this is a LTS release and as such the preferred choice for lots of sysadmin/devops folks like me.

In this release I’ve been involved in Cloudfoundry, but also in packaging puppet, mcollective, mcollective-plugins, rabbitmq-server, and ipxe. All of which I’m quite happy about, if you feel like yelling at someone you know where to find me.

This release also makes the official debut of juju as a stable technology, the slogan says its Devops Distilled but I see it more as a giant application deployer with amazing orchestration skills, all of them make it a great solution, which you can also mix up with your usual puppet and mcollective of course :)

Go ahead and take the tour, and start playing with it in the Cloud or on your computer.

Finally Ubuntu 11.10 has just been released, this is the last version before our next LTS (12.04) so it’s a big technological preview.

You can take an online tour here http://www.ubuntu.com/tour/

In this version I’ve contributed packages in mcollective, puppet and rabbitmq, but most of all I’ve been working in Openstack, Juju and Orchestra, have a look and enjoy! The next LTS will be very exciting.

We’ve been working very intensively these last three months with mcollective on Ubuntu, and it’ll be finally be available in natty, another great addition for this release alongside with cobbler.

Unfortunately, our plugins package didn’t make it on time for the natty release freeze, which makes mcollective on natty’s release on Apr 28th a bit limited, but we have the package available for your enjoyment \o/.

In order to be able to install mcollective-plugins into your system you should add this PPA by executing:
add-apt-repository ppa:lynxman/mcollective-1.0-plugins-natty

Once you added the new repo you can see all the plugins available by running apt-cache search mcollective-plugins and install them based on your mcollective needs.