August 2004 Archives

Hendrik asked how i chose my hostnames.
When I switched from NT (yes, huckfinn ran NT from January 1998 until ca. May 1999) to Linux, the beauty of hostnames was new to me, so I named it uninspired "lxserver".
IIRC I switched to huckfinn, when i installed FreeBSD in 2001. Since I bought this machine at H & K, it had an "H & K" sticker on it. The only name with H and K that was suggested on IRC was "Hackme", which i didn't like :-), so it became huckfinn. Two other machines are named after characters from Mark Twain books, the sucessor of huckfinn was named polly, because it was bought at PBB and the alpha is named becky (because beta was already taken by the FreeBSD.org alpha cluster).
My next computer, which will take over the services currently running on huckfinn (Mail + INN) so it's name is already predefined as tomsawyer.
My other machines' names: When I bought my Athlon 1400 the first attribute i noticed was the waste heat, so i named it sauna.
The Athlon64 machine needed a name with "hammer" and that reminded me of the 80s 90s popstar McHammer MC Hammer ("U can't touch this").
The namesearching for my Laptop is already documented in this blog.
My NetBSD/i386 box is called Olga, because when I bought it, I wanted to install OpenBSD, but because I am incompatible with the OpenBSD installer it is now running NetBSD :-)
My sparc64 is named "fridge" because it looks like one.
And finally my Epia System has a really uninspired name, "via". I am still looking for better names, as i can change the name easily when I update it to FreeBSD 5.3.

$ uptime
12:53pm up 200 days, 20:25, 8 users, load averages: 0,07 0,03 0,00
$ uname -a
FreeBSD huckfinn 4.9-STABLE FreeBSD 4.9-STABLE #0: Mon Feb 9 21:55:40 CET 2004 arved@sauna.arved.de:/usr/obj/usr/local/home2/source/RELENG_4/src/sys/HUCKFINNipf i386
This is an infrequent event, not because FreeBSD is so unstable, but because I usually update the kernel on my machines about once a month. Additional this machine is not connected to an UPS, so this is the proof, there was no power failure in the last half year, Congratulations to Wien Energie.
BTW, i didn't update the kernel, because I plan to replace this machine, it is now 6 years old, Mini-ITX systems are less noisy and a bit faster then the 200Mhz K6 processor. I am just fearing that today's cheap IDE hard disks don't have the same quality. The hard disk is IIRC 5 years old (an 8GB SCSI IBM DDRS-39130D DC1B), and still carries my mail.

When people talk about Internet language, they usually think about the crippled english from Chats and Emails. But some german words found their way into the internet language. Next to "über" (as in uberh4X0r) the most common german word in IRC channels is ""Moin". I have seen it in english language IRC channels without people from northern Germany. When I asked if "moin" means something in their language, people said they heard it in some other IRC channel and started using it.
This morning I discovered in the backlog of #bsdaustria x-trem, a true Styrian joining the channel with "Moinsen", an even more colloquial form of Moin, which IIRC came up in the last 15 years.
I queried google groups, and the first use of "moin" in Usenet i found was 1988 in comp.sys.atari.st, the first use of "Moinsen" in April 1993 in de.soc.studium, the first use in non-german Newsgroups in February 1997 in rec.music.misc.
Unfortunately it is not possible to query for the first usage by an non-german Speaker.

Unlike Linux where (nearly) all Networkscards are named eth and all Harddisks are named hd.. BSD names every device after it's device driver. I like this behaviour, because you don't get unexpected results, if you load the modules in the wrong order.
Unfortunately there are now so many device drivers, that we are running out of letters, and conflicts happen, e.g. ct0 device is either a "WD33C93[ABC] based CBUS SCSI host adapter driver" found in japanese PC98 or a "Cronyx Tau WAN adapter", a strange hardware from Russia.
Today I found another conflict, ar0 is either an ATA RAID device node or a
"Digi/Arnet device driver" for another strange PPP/HDLC Adapter.
The greatest problem these conflicts cause, man pages have to have unique names. The ct-conflict was resolved by renaming the Cronyx driver to ctau in CURRENT, but the ar problem is difficult as the Arnet driver is unmaintained (== nobody wants to rename it) and the ATA maintainer is a dangerous axe-wearing Dane. I proposed that the ar.4 link is pointing to the Arnet driver on i386 and to the ATA Raid manpage on !i386.

Athen 2004 (no link, because I don't agree with their Hyperlink Polilcy) dominates the media. Olympic Games are one of the rare moments where you can read about rowing in mainstream media. Before i was dragged into the Internet, I spent a lot of time (at least 20 hours a week) with rowing. Marcel Hacker, who won the Single Sculls Final B is only one year older than me and was one of the reasons to start in the lightweight class. Meike Evers is the only starter from Schleswig Holstein this time and was part of the german team, that won the Women Quadruple Sculls.
Unfortunately I stopped rowing, when I moved to Vienna four years ago, because I am not living near the river danube and I am spending too much time in front of the computer.
Since my coach license expired last year it is also very unlikely that I will ever visit Olympic Games as a coach :-).

On August 21 1994 Jordan K. Hubbard committed the first version of bsd.port.mk, which is the base of the FreeBSD ports system, to the FreeBSD CVS Repository. It was a 150 lines Makefile. Today there are 4910 lines, but large parts have been moved to seperate Makefiles.
Currently there have been 497 CVS revisons. Here is the list of people that did most of the commits:

According to Freshports there are currently nearly 12.000 ports and it is still growing with a rate of 200/month.
Currently 150-170 active committers are keeping the ports collection up to date.
Happy birthday ports collection!

Yesterday Pav asked me about a gcc 3.4 bug in one of his ports, crack-attack. I found a fix, and then tested the program. It was so addicting, that i spent most of the last hours playing crack-attack until i became a headache.

The bleeding edge now starts with a 6.
[arved@mchammer:~]% uname -a
FreeBSD mchammer.arved.de 6.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 6.0-CURRENT #22: Thu Aug 19 09:27:19 CEST 2004 root@mchammer.arved.de:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/MCHAMMER amd64
We now finally have a RELENG_5 branch, and rumours are it even compiles under some circumstances. Still a long way to 5-STABLE but at least there is now a supported alternative to the outdated 4-STABLE.
I will update fridge to RELENG_5 next week, because I had my first panic on the sparc64 this weekend.
My insight of the weekend: My flat gets too hot for two humans with five running computers.

Yesterday www.FreeBSD.org was down. I don't know the reason, but Netcraft already wrote an article with colorful graphics.
Soon the Code Freeze for 5.3 will start. Everybody is rushing in last minute changes, most important for my machines, tjr committed the kernelpart of the linux32 emulator for amd64, njl committed ACPI locking, des fixed fetch(1) on amd64 and iedowse committed a fix for the axe(4) driver. This weeks cvs summary will be a lot of work.
Of course various changes caused a lot of breakage, especially SMP deadlocks and a broken lnc(4). So only upgrade to CURRENT if you want to share the pain.
Portsfreeze was announced to start on September 3, but as there are nearly 900 failing packages on CURRENT/amd64 most of them caused by the gcc 3.4 import, there is a lot to do. Especially I need to get familar with the new obscure C++ errors.

My Bloggercode:

B4 d+ t+ k s u-- f i o+ x- e l c-

While producing my code i somehow had the feeling, that i already wrote about this, but i couldn't find it in the archive.

Today I wrote a small perl-script that extracts CDP Information from Cisco devices via SNMP and writes the resulting graph into a dotfile. Here is a sample image.
You can download the script here.
I would like to add more information to the vertices, but i need to know more about the dot language first.

It is summer when I have to connect the second chassis fan on my AMD64.
Current CPU temperature: 45�C
Current Mainboard temperature: 34�C

Bad Segeberg, where i lived before I moved to Vienna in 2000, was mentioned on FM4, my favorite austrian radio station, last week. Stermann & Grissemann claim to play a role at the Karl May Festival.
Listen to the MP3s: part 1, part 2.

BTW, The most interesting news from Bad Segeberg in the last half year was probably the decline of M�bel Kraft, once one of the largest German furniture shops.

What a nice long german word. Today I got three letters from the tax office titled "Einkommensteuerbescheid 2000", "Einkommensteuerbescheid 2001/2002" and "Einkommensteuerbescheid 2003", the result of my income tax assessment. I am not sure why they were not able to send one single letter, although they were able to summarize the results into one "Buchungsmitteilung".
I am glad, i am not working as a tax collector since i didn't understand much from reading the 15 pages and i am not sure what happens now. In the best case the finance office transfers me 1599.06 EUR or 1442,38 EUR (if they keep the interest). In the worst case nothing happens or i have to pay 35,44 EUR (the result of 2003).
Starting with 2003 it is possible to do the income tax assessment online via Finanz-online, but it doesn't look like it would simplify the process. Someone needs to tell them that an email address containing a "+" is valid and that it is bad practice to display passwords in clear text on the screen.

Finally one of my neighbors got Wireless LAN. Of course my gf was the first to discover it. The SSID is "SpeedTouch687D93", which looks like default (The last part is the MAC Address). Unfortunately he or she uses WEP, and i haven't found anything about default keys for the SpeedTouch Accesspoints. According to the manuals i found on the net they have WEP disabled by default.
Additional i learned, that dwepdump from bsd-airtools does not work with my Orinoco card neither under FreeBSD 4.x nor FreeBSD 5.x. Looks like i need to download a Knoppix and get airsnort running.

A lot of people don't copy images they write about to their own blogs. adamw got in trouble with his hoster, because one image consumed a lot of bandwith.
Read on, what happened to the bandwith thieves.
BTW the most popular image from my blog is this one:
It's on the first page if you google for "last" at google images. Luckily my ADSL line is able to cope with the traffic.

I registered for EuroBSDcon yesterday, after Patrick sent a reminder to the de.comp.os.unix.bsd Newsgroup. He fears that if too few people register the conference has to be canceled, so please register if you are planning to go there. I have not yet planned where to sleep. The conference hotel's website is not browseable, neither with Konqueror nor with Firefox. Other alternatives are the Youth Hostel (cheap & uncomfortable) or a cheaper hotel.
A bit more than two weeks until aKademy, and I am still unsure if i should go there. Last Year in Nove Hrady was a very nice event, but Ludwigsburg is far away and compared to last year I am less involved into KDE.
Something completely different:

If weather on Saturday is nice, i will probably visit the Freerepublicparade.

Finally i got my summer hair cut. 5-10cm shorter. It feels strange to feel every breeze on my scalp. <insert complaint about hairloss here>

I am currently trying to build a spamtrap with Spamassasin. The idea: I add
another emailaddress to my website. Every email to that address is piped to "sa-learn --spam". My problem, sa-learn needs to save the gathered information somewhere, and i am not sure where. It looks like spamc stores the information from autolearning on the spamd-server, but sa-learn stores the information local. I don't want to run a mailserver on the spamd-machine just for this task. Any ideas?

Today I finally set up Xinerama for the first time. I am now running with XFree86 with 2560x1024 taking advantage of my Matrox G550 Dual Head. I am still looking for double-sized Wallpapers especially one with a daemon. I am still experimenting with the position of the KDE kicker. At the moment it is in the middle covering both monitors. But it is not possible to configure absolute positions for the kicker applets, so i have to adjust the positions depending on the number of open windows.
Here is my XF86Config:

I might as well copy&paste the entry from April.
Today, in fact yesterday or half an hour ago, was the deadline to submit a document for the "Folgenabsch�tzung von IT" course. I had the whole month time to work on this document, but i started yesterday at around 14.00.
Of course my document is very short, in German and of poor quality. But finally, now the real holidays start (including upgrading my CURRENT boxes to gcc 3.4 and start ports fixing)
BTW. This is the first time i have used Quanta to write an HTML document. It crashed once (I can't remember my gvim crashing), but luckily it recovered most of the unsaved document. The UI is cluttered with a lot of non-intuitive useless controls, but the tag autocompletion is something you can get used to.