mecab-devel, where are you?

To compile MySQL from srpm on AlmaLinux8, you need mecab-devel, which doesn't seem to exist. After some digging around, this is the solution I found :

sudo yum --enablerepo=powertools group install "Development Tools"
sudo yum install make gcc-c++ rpmbuild

mkdir -pv ~/rpmbuild/{BUILD,BUILDROOT,RPMS,SOURCES,SPECS,SRPMS}
cd ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES
wget 'https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0B4y35FiV1wh7cENtOXlicTFaRUE' -O mecab-0.996.tar.gz
cd ~/rpmbuild/SPECS
wget https://git.almalinux.org/rpms/mecab/raw/branch/c8-stream-8.0/SPECS/mecab.spec

rpmbuild -ba mecab.spec

cd ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/
sudo yum install mecab*.rpm

This isn't perfect. Why would someone host their code on Google drive? But it seems this is what the author wanted.

Scammers

1-450-886-7026 are scammers.

Attribute::Handlers vs Exporter

In Perl, how does one export an attribute handler?

Do the following:

package MyAttrDecl;
use strict;
use warnings;

require Exporter;
our @EXPORT = qw( _ATTR_CODE_MyAttr );
our @ISA = qw( Exporter );

  
sub MyAttr :ATTR(CODE) 
{
    my ($package, $symbol, $referent, $attr, $data, $phase, $filename, $linenum) = @_;
    my $name = *{$symbol}{NAME};
    warn "Adding an attribute to package=$package name=$name";
}

1;

The important part is _ATTR_CODE_MyAttr. Obviously you change this to match your code.

The above is called with the following:

use MyAttrDecl;

sub new :MyAttr( "/pos/v1" )
{
    return bless {}, shift;
}

virsh vs old VMs

So I upgraded my VM server. Fresh new NVMe drives in RAID1 with AlmaLinux 8 on them. I then copied all my VMs over, updated their machines to pc or q35 as needed and launched them to test them. Most booted up fine. Three of them failed with the following error.

qemu-kvm: block/io.c:1438: bdrv_aligned_preadv: Assertion `(offset & (align - 1)) == 0' failed.

Fortunately they weren't important VMs so I could wait until today to fix the problem. The solution was to use qemu-img to convert the rewrite the disk images.

cd /kvm/VM/pool
mkdir bad
mv vda.img bad
qemu-img convert bad/vda.img vda.img -p -O qcow2

That should work for most people. Note that I assume your images are qcow2 (which they should be). If you had some raw images, you could change qcow2 to raw above. Or change types='raw' to type='qcow2' via virsh edit VM.

Here we verify the new images.

modprobe nbd max_part=8
qemu-nbd --connect=/dev/nbd0 /kvm/VM/pool/vda.img
# disconcertingly, Alma will autoactivate any VGs on the image.  Otherwise we'd do
partx -a /dev/nbd0
pvscan /dev/nbd0p2
vgchange -ay VGNAME
# now things should be available
fsck -f /dev/nbd0p1
fsck -f /dev/mapper/VGNAME-lvname
vgchange -an VGNAME
qemu-nbd --disconnect=/dev/nbd0

My image had /boot as partition 1 and / as a LV in in partition2.