Looking carefully, the first one is named django_extensions, but really the name should be “django-extensions”, and you can find the project with the not intuitive name of “django-commandline-extensions” here at googlecode.

Ok, let’s see the spec file:

%{!?python_sitelib: %define python_sitelib %(%{__python} -c “from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print get_python_lib()”)}

Name:           django-extensions
Version:        0.4.1
Release:        1%{?dist}
Summary:        Django command line extensions

Up to this point, standard stuff. The {?dist} should stand for “current distribution”, so it will end in a “fc11″ package.

Group:          Development/Languages
License:        BSD
URL:            http://code.google.com/p/django-command-extensions/
Source0:        %{name}-%{version}.tar.gz
Source1:        %{name}-docs-%{version}.tar.gz

The Group is standard for Python / Django libraries. License is taken from the project’s homepage, source is the standard .tar.gz file which is downloaded from the front page of the project. Source1 is extracted from the github 0.4.1 tag of the project and contains just the documentation to be built.

BuildRoot:      %{_tmppath}/%{name}-%{version}-%{release}-root-%(%{__id_u} -n)

BuildArch:      noarch
BuildRequires:  python-devel python-sphinx
Requires:       Django

%description
This is a repository for collecting global custom management extensions
for the Django Framework

The buildroot path is standard, arch is noarch (just python code…), the build requires gets the addition of python-sphinx (python documentation generator) which, at buildtime, generates html documentation from .rst files. Obviously runtime requirements are Django, while the description is a copy and paste from the project home page.

%package doc
Summary:        Documentation for django-extensions
Group:          Documentation
Requires:       %{name} = %{version}-%{release}
Provides:       %{name}-docs = %{version}-%{release}
Obsoletes:      %{name}-docs < %{version}-%{release}

%description doc
This package contains the documentation for the django-extension library

Wait a minute, what is this? Exactly, we are building not one but two packages. One for code, one for doc.

%prep
%setup -q -n %{name}-%{version}
%setup -a 1

Ok, now things become interesting. According to both the Fedora Project RPM Guide and the Maximum RPM book on rpm.org, the above section reads as: prepare environment; extract first source file silently in a directory named $name-$version (e.g. django-extension-0.4.1), then extract the second source file after changing directory to the newly created directory. This is necessary because I compressed just the docs directory level in the git-donwloaded file.

%build
%{__python} setup.py build

%install
rm -rf $RPM_BUILD_ROOT
%{__python} setup.py install -O1 –skip-build –root $RPM_BUILD_ROOT

(cd docs && make html)

All this stuff comes standard creating an empty python spec file, apart from the last line, which builds the html documentation. This is suggested also by Django spec file (go get it with a yumdownloader –source Django and rpm -ivh the src.rpm).

%clean
rm -rf $RPM_BUILD_ROOT

%files
%defattr(-,root,root,-)
%{python_sitelib}/*

Standard stuff again.

%files doc
%doc docs

doc packages files

%changelog
* Sun Aug 23 2009 Luca Botti <lucabotti…fedoraproject.org>
- Initial RPM Release

changelog description.

This file is uploaded at my fedorapeople.org‘s address and is submitted in bugzilla for review here. I am waiting for sponsorship. Thanks.

More packages will follow. Stay tuned.

But if you try sudo at the command line, you are met with some error regarding sudo configuration: Fedora does not sudo-enable your account to during system installation, so you are stuck.

What to do is simple:

su -
(insert your root password)
visudo <em> (as per kagesenshi comment #1)</em>

root    ALL=(ALL)       ALL

$username ALL=(ALL)     ALL

$username ALL=(ALL)      NOPASSWD: ALL

EDIT – Brian correctly suggests to uncomment the wheel group in /etc/sudoers and add the users to said group; while correct from a sysadmin point of view, I believe we should keep it simple for users that use Fedora “on the Desktop”. I strongly believe Using Fedora and Administering Fedora should be kept as separate activities as possible. Anyway, for more technically oriented users, you can find this way at the fedorasolved.org site.

It went…well, apart from a known issue with my motherboard network card. CentOS 5.3 installs all right without complaining, but every few seconds the network card delays the response.

Given that I use the little beast for dhcp, DNS and iscsi, this is not what i was looking for. Luckily enough, after searching for a while, I found the issue (module r8169) and built the r8168 with dkms provided by rpmforge.

Now all is going well. Another addition to the setup, I bought a Western Digital MyBook Studio II for backup and safety purposes. Two disks, one terabyte each, raid 1 setting.

Exported part of it through iscsi for the mac (storage of all digital photos through iPhoto, thanks) and the rest is for me. Connection is fast (esata2), and, anyway, I am using it mostly through WiFi, so anything could be fast enough (except USB 1.1, i think).

Happy? Yes, now I am confident my backups will survive a disk failure. I did not find iscsi-target (IET implementation) in a CentOS 64 bit package, through.

In the previous weekend, I already had installed the preview release on my notebook, as a clean install. It all worked perfectly, marking this version of Fedora the most interesting Linux Distribution release I ever tried.

Fast, beautiful (thanks to Byte-Code colleague Samuele Storari and his Solar theme), this version, while looking similar to older 9 release, feels definitely more polished and performing.

After the release, I yum-upgraded my home server (the Atom 330 I mentioned in the past), and it worked out really fine, with no issues at all. It’s a simpler environment (no gnome, and a initlevel at 3), but everything (iscsi, samba, DNS, DHCP) continued working as before.

On a side note, my iscsi disk is one of two USB disks attached to the server, so I was wondering how to ensure the block device naming and availability. After contemplating custom udev rules, all that was necessary was a look at /dev/disk. I discovered I can access block devices (like disks) through the /dev/disk/by-id, for example.

Really interesting.

Although I already have an integrated smart card reader in my Latitude D630 (which does not work with Linux, at last try) I bought one to check for alternative OS compatibility. Well, to my surprise, the thing is an ACR38 smart card reader, which, manufactured by ACS offer here drivers also for Linux.
So first step is good, hardware. I’ll check later with software and services.

I like my Linux Notebook. I really do. I started to dual boot Suse Linux back in 2002, I set it up as primary OS in 2003, I removed dual booting in 2005, using some virtualization solution or the other for things that required Windows. By the way, during these years, I saw less and less needs to do that.
During these time, as professional, I bought several notebooks (If I remeber correctly, about five notbeooks from 2001 to 2008). In these times, when I was to change my notebook, the old one would be used by my wife in our home network.
Well, let me say that – it was a pain, getting back to 2000/XP to fix things, with all the cycle of installation, maintenance and antivirus.
These year, i asked to my wife if she were willing to try a Mac. Shock and horror, but less shock than a windows machine in my house. Also, I am attracted to Mac OS X. I admit that.
So this MacBook ended in our home, and my wife is using that mainly by herself. No maintenance required.

Backup, backup, always backup

I am quite fearful to lose my digital data. Projects, documentation, invoices, mails, mostly reside on thin slices of metal with some magnetic coating… scratching heads hanging over them with only microns of thin air. Scary, indeed? It’s your hard disk.
So, for the macbook, the solution in Leopard was… time machine. Quite ambitious as a backup application, indeed easy to setup and use.
One drawback: only directly attached (firewire and USB) disks, or the Apple time capsule. See, a year ago I ended up aquiring this NAS device (Freecom FSG-3 250 GB, wireless) which, altough useful, i found somewhat limited.
Anyway, i could back to this NAS with some hacking, which was not recomended. In the meantime, i replaced the FSG-3 with a dual desktop abaco computer ( Abaco ) . So now I have this full featured x86 dual core low power machine. I began thinking again of the backup over the network with time machine.

What I did

Initialize Time Machine
First step, was to take the USB disk i was willing to use as a backup unit, partition it, and format as a HFSplus file system. HFSplus is the Mac OS X journaled file system, think ext3. On this unit, attached via USB, i started to use Time Machine through the control panel. This way, first backup is done locally, probably faster than on the network.

Install iSCSI Target
iSCSI target is the Server machine which exports file systems and / or devices. A client uses an iSCSI Initiator to connect to a target. When connected, the device is seen as a local device, with all defaults options available. Exposing a target is a simple three line configuration file:

Target iqn.yyyy-MM.domain.name:uniqueidentifier
Lun 0 Path=/dev/sdc,Type=fileio
Alias MacLacie

Test iSCSI
Before going further in the iSCSI path I checked the configuration installing the Linux Initiator on my machine. After some fiddling with the console, a sudden iscsi start opened a nautilus connection with the content of remote, iSCSI attached disk. Server was working.

MacOS side
I was under the impression that Leopard had a native iSCSI initiator, but that is not the case. I downloaded and installed the free (but not open source) globalSAN iSCSI Initiator from studio network solutions

Reconfigure Time Machine
You can attach the iSCSI device through the control panel applet in System Preferences. After that, the device is sensed and usable from Time Machine. Backup through wireless of a delta (around 600 MB) then took around ten minutes. Not bad.

What I have to do

• Hal rules rewrite the device is seen as /dev/sdc through HAL. I have to rewrite some rules to force device location (cannot use UUID for device…)
• Services check Shut down the machine and restart – everything should work ok