Vat of Knowledge

So there are a few tweaks I need to jot down so they don’t get lost.  When installing a Big Brother (BB) client on a Linux or Solaris platform, there are a couple of things you may run into:

Error in msgs “/var/log/messages is unreadable”

This is resolved by doing the following.

• Add the bb user to the group wheel.
  • usermod -a -G wheel bb
  • id bb
• chmod 740 /var/log/messages
• chown root:wheel /var/log/messages

You may also need to look at your anacron which rotates log files.  In CentOS (and I imagine RHEL), you can edit /etc/logrotate.conf, and appending the create line with:

create 740 root wheel

This all still did not work for me, so I simply did a chmod 744 /var/log/messages, which resolved it, but that makes the messages file world readable, which is not recommended.  Still needs some investigation.

Error in disk: Filesystem of $BBTMP is FULL

I seem to get this every time.  There seems to be an error in the file /usr/local/bb/bin/bb-disk.sh.  Edit the following two lines as follows:

line 60:eval “$DFCMD | $EGREP \”$DFUSE\” | $EGREP -v \”$DFEXCLUDE\” | $SORT \”+${DFSORT}\” > $BBTMP/DFOUT.$$”
line 75: wclen1=`eval “$DFCMD | $EGREP \”$DFUSE\” | $EGREP -v \”$DFEXCLUDE\” | $SORT \”+${DFSORT}\” | $WC”`

The
$SORT \”+${DFSORT}\”
is being evaluated to
/bin/sort “+4″
and it upsets sort (it thinks +4 is a file).

I fixed the problem by adding the option -k to both lines:

line 60:eval “$DFCMD | $EGREP \”$DFUSE\” | $EGREP -v \”$DFEXCLUDE\” | $SORT -k \”+${DFSORT}\” > $BBTMP/DFOUT.$$”
line 75: wclen1=`eval “$DFCMD | $EGREP \”$DFUSE\” | $EGREP -v \”$DFEXCLUDE\” | $SORT -k \”+${DFSORT}\” | $WC”`