My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Category: Me (Page 4 of 26)

Who wants my old job?

When I left IBM in November 2016 to join ASML a month later, I thought I had found a job (managing a Linux server infrastructure) that would keep me busy for years. At ASML things are not always what they seem, and instead my actual scope turned out to be a lot bigger, so I became the Technical Application Manager within the IT team responsible for the Electrical Engineering Infrastructure (EEI) which is used by the Electrical Development group within Development & Engineering. A challenging and fun job, working with a terrific team, and I can confidently say (our IT director confirmed) that we are the most socially coherent group within IT.

Not even two years later, and a restructuring of the IT department causes me to say farewell to this job…

No, I was not fired. In fact, I did so well that I got a new job. ASML D&E is growing insanely fast, last month the company hired more than 500 new employees in Veldhoven (our HQ) alone. The IT department has a challenge there, as we need to keep up with the pace, in terms of capacity and also the force of innovation. The real challenge? You  can hire a lot of highly intelligent motivated people but as a company you need to stay coherent and keep focus on the business priorities. I.e. you need team and group leads who are able to inspire and guide their teams. Ideally these TL’s and GL’s should not be hired, they should mature within the organization so that they actually know what is needed to get the job done. ASML is not a run-of-the-mill company in that regard.

And that is why I was tagged as Solution Team Manager of a team which will focus on virtual product development (providing services to our data analysts and simulation engineers). I will also manage our group’s “general services” meaning architects, project managers, infra coordinators and the technical application manager. And there he is! I left my old job and started a new job, and now I have a vacancy in my team.

Who is interested to work for and with me? Read the job vacancy here: https://asml.csod.com/ats/careersite/JobDetails.aspx?id=5303&site=1 and let me know if you are interested. This will not be exactly the job I had for the past two years – I have some other plans for the TAM that I was never able to execute myself,

If you want to know more about the company, ASML, click the video at the top of this blog post and get inspired.

The work location will be Veldhoven, The Netherlands. It’s a permanent pool position (i.e. no flex job, you’ll be on the ASML payroll with all the perks that that includes). Please only respond if you actually think you are qualified – our HR department is very strict in their initial pruning and filters out more than 80% of applicants before their resumes can land on our desks and I want to avoid any disappointment.

 

Indisposed

Temporarily Inactive

The Alien Pastures blog will be quiet for a little while due to personal circumstances.

Be good.

me

Tracking development of slackware in git

Something had been nagging me for a long time, and I finally had enough of that itch and decided to deal with it.

As you know, there’s a private and a public side to Slackware’s development. The discussions and decisions are handled internally among the members of ‘the team’ and are not shared with the public at large until an update is done to the ‘slackware-current’ tree which can be found on every Internet mirror.
Thus you have access to the latest state of development always. But for some people it is a compelling idea to be able to access the development updates in a public repository like git – where you can track the changes over time.

A recent discussion on LinuxQuestions brought up the topic of SlackBuild scripts in Slackware-current. The scripts you can find in the -current directory tree on the Slackware mirrors are always the latest version. Sometimes there’s a good reason to want to go back in time and fetch an earlier version. In the thread post with the appropriate number “1337” it is ponce (Matteo Bernardini) who replies with a link to a git repository maintained by Adrien Nader which already has been tracking the development in -current for nearly 8 years!. So it’s quite a convenient way to retrieve a historical version of any script.

Me being me, it’s the existence of that repository which has been nagging me for a couple of years. Why? Because I wondered how it was done. And if I question an issue long enough, I will eventually create my own solution – as a learning exercise of course, but also to give back to the community.

And so, today arrived. I was pondering – if I were to create a git repository for tracking the developments in -current, what would I want in there? Exactly the same as Adrien’s? The answer has been “no” for a while. The most important capability that is missing from Adrien’s repo is that it contains a lot of compressed files that are impossible to read. Think of patches and doinst.sh scripts, and more. So I gave myself the task to implement a git repository with uncompressed files, as an improvement on the original effort. Also, it should track all relevant files in the complete tree, not just in the “./source/” subdirectory. In particular the documentation files (various .TXT files).

The result is a script, maintain_current_git.sh, and a repository, https://git.slackware.nl/current/ .
The repository just had its first commit. For those who want to check out a commit in order to compile a package from there, the maintain_current_git.sh script generates another script called ‘recompress.sh‘ and stores that script in the root directory of the repository. When you run this recompress script in the root directory of the repository, it will re-compress all the files that had been un-compressed before committing them to git. That way, a SlackBuild script will find the correct files and will function as intended. Note that you would still have to download the source tarballs from somewhere, because this repository of mine will only track the Slackware-specific files.

I decided that it is prudent and more respectful to not import Adrien’s work into my own repository. The two are similar but different and I think everyone of you can choose which repository suits your needs better.

I have scheduled the above script to run twice a day and update the git repository when new updates become available.
As with all my scripts, this one has a “-h” parameter to explain its usage. Let me know if it – and the git repository – are useful to you.
This particular script may be a bit messy because I have not spent a lot of time polishing it. I hope that’s OK 😉

Have fun!

Attn: bear’s Slackware 14.2 mirror (32bit) will be removed due to space constraints

I have been maintaining a mirror for the Slackware 14.2 (32bit) distribution on my ‘bear‘ server. Its URL is http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackware/slackware-14.2/ .

Unfortunately this server runs off a SSD disk which is just 120 GB in size. It has its limits with regard to what I can store there. Lack of disk space is forcing me to remove this mirror copy of the 32bit Slackware 14.2 today. My own repositories are growing and are hungrily looking at that occupied space.
If you were mirroring from my server, you can switch to one of the other highly esteemed mirrors:

The 64bit mirror is not going to go away, I like to have a mirror of the latest stable release on ‘bear‘ (ok… only 64bit from now on). When a future Slackware 15.0 gets released, its mirror will then take the place of the 14.2 mirror on ‘bear‘.

Eric

Welcome slackware.nl

I acquired the slackware.nl domain. More precisely, the domain was given to me – for free – by its previous owner whose name I will not divulge unless he gives me permission to do so (someone sympathetic to Slackware but no longer using Slackware himself). Thanks!

So, I setup some server configurations using slackware.nl for stuff I am hosting under (mostly) alienbase.nl:

Note: you may want to add the CACert root certificate to your machine to get rid of warnings that the SSL certificate of slackware.nl is not trusted.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2024 Alien Pastures

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑