Open Sourcery

More as a reminder to myself for when I need this again, but I’m sure everyone needs this at least once.

Having screwed up my kernel configs for my VirtualBox Gentoo image, I needed a serial console to catch the boot messages scrolling past in order to see if all the required hardware was being loaded by the kernel. I’ve never done this on a physical machine before but I am converted now and will acquire a USB to serial port converter in the near future…

Using this article as a base you need to do the following:

1. Enable serial ports for your virtual machine
2. Select “Host Pipe”
3. Enter /tmp/vboxconsole as the filename
4. Use netcat to read the console: nc -U /tmp/vboxconsole

When booting you need to amend your grub boot line to have the following at the end:

console=ttyS0,38400

Making it look something like this:

kernel=/kernel-2.6.30-r6 root=/dev/sda3 console=ttyS0,38400

Proceed to boot and look at netcat to see the entire boot output scroll past without disappearing into thin air when the kernel panics.

Man, I love virtualization. I tested this on Mac OS X 10.5 with VirtualBox 3.0.6, but it should work on any *nix platform. Some more Gentoo serial console madness can be found on the old Gentoo Wiki.

I spent some time getting PowerDNS on Rails to run on Ruby 1.9.1, which ended up being very easy due to the small amount of plugins & gems used by the project. The only change I had to make myself was to the acts_as_audited plugin, where the one-line fix got merged upstream.

The worst part of the process was getting the specs to run with rake spec. Using ./script/spec it worked on individual specs and on all the specs worked as advertised, but rake spec didn’t do anything.

After a lot of time spent in the debugger I wasn’t any wiser. The only difference was that in Ruby 1.8 the example groups were fully loaded, and in Ruby 1.9 they were empty. I gave up and started searching relentlessly for some information on the issue. I couldn’t find anything, until I found an indirect solution on the rspec wiki. It seems that if you have any versions of the test-unit gem after the 1.2.3 release installed, your Rails specs will simply not run. For me, removing test-unit 2.0.3 made the difference and the specs ran properly. PowerDNS on Rails has now joined the ranks of my Ruby 1.9 compatible projects.