cpan2rpm

Posted: 2009-09-12 18:46:56 by Alasdair Keyes

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When developing new applications, I often find that I make use of CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) http://search.cpan.org and use modules in applications that I write.

The standard way of installing modules is by using cpan from the command line

# cpan -i Perl::Module

This is fine when installing the module on just one server, but if you have a cluster or the module needs to be distributed to other machines, running cpan on each is time consuming and difficult to script, especially if the module needs to be installed automatically on newly built machines.

The answer for this is cpan2rpm, it holds no suprises, it takes an module from CPAN and builds an RPM for it, you can then add the RPM to a YUM repository.

Download it here http://sourceforge.net/projects/cpan2rpm/ I'm going with the RPM as it makes installation so much easier

It has a number of dependencies, mostly perl modules, but also rpm-build, so make sure you have that installed

# wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/cpan2rpm/files/cpan2rpm/2.027/cpan2rpm-2.027-1.noarch.rpm/download
# yum install rpm-build
# rpm -ivh cpan2rpm-2.027-1.noarch.rpm

There are many options for it, you can add author information and also sign the generated RPM, but for simple use that's not necessary, something as simple as

# cpan2rpm --no-sign Perl::Module
-- cpan2rpm - Ver: 2.027 --
Upgrade check
Fetch: HTTP

-- module: Perl::Module --
Found perl-module-1.00.tar.gz
...
...
...
+ exit 0
RPM: /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/noarch/perl-Perl-Module-1.00.noarch.rpm
SRPM: /usr/src/redhat/SRPMS/perl-Perl-Module-1.00.src.rpm
-- Done --
[1]+  Terminated              perl_module

You can then install the RPM on your machine

# rpm -ivh usr/src/redhat/RPMS/noarch/perl-Perl-Module-1.00.noarch.rpm

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/etc/shadow hash generation in shell

Posted: 2009-08-17 17:25:51 by Alasdair Keyes

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I've been playing about with system templating recently, configuring a base Linux system then allowing it to be customised for future roll-out without starting the machine up. I found the following little trick to generating password hashes as they appear within the /etc/shadow file. It uses the mkpasswd binary, there are many ways to generate the hash which use openssl and various password apps, but this was the most simple I came across.

I don't believe mkpasswd is in the CentOS yum repo, but is available in Ubuntu's apt repo (apt-get install mkpasswd).

MD5 hashed passwords as found as default on Redhat/CentOS systems

# mkpasswd -m md5 password saltsalt
$1$saltsalt$qjXMvbEw8oaL.CzflDtaK/

SHA512 hashed passwords as found on Ubuntu

# mkpasswd -m sha-512 password saltsaltsaltsalt
$6$saltsaltsaltsalt$bcXJ8qxwY5sQ4v8MTl.0B1jeZ0z0JlA9jjmbUoCJZ.1wYXiLTU.q2ILyrDJLm890lyfuF7sWAeli0yjOyFPkf0

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