Author: arved

New Earthling

Too many FreeBSD entries in a row. Time for something completly different.
My girlfriend’s brother does his best to save the pension system. Last week his seventh (if i counted correctly) child was born. Welcome on planet earth, Carl!

Upgrading to 5.3

After the release of FreeBSD 5.3 i upgraded my gateway from 5.2.1 to 5.3. Because of the upgrade-risk i migrated the webserver that runs this blog to jim.arved.de.
There were a few problems I had to solve, that caused a few hours downtime. First i had to add an IP alias for my public IP to lo0, because otherwise the webserver would not answer on requests (I need more public IPs, so I can stop using NAT). Then I had to patch MT to work with perl 5.8.4. I hope this was the only necessary patch, as I don’t have the time to switch to another blogging software.
The FreeBSD upgrade went flawless. Now there are only two machines left on my network that run 5.2.x.

Eurobsdcon reprise

Finally someone else wrote about EuroBSDCon, Dru Lavigne.
The most interesting paragraph of her review critizes the BSD Developers as antisocial:

My attempts at conversation fizzled out shortly after “hello”. During the talks, noone would sit in my row and the seats immediately ahead of and behind me were embarrassingly empty. I was starting to wonder if I was suffering from a bad case of BO.

I have to admit, neither did I attend her talk nor did i talk to her :-(.
But I also noticed that this EuroBSDcon was a bit antisocial.
Some Examples:

  • At normal geek events there is a keysigning party (well party is an euphemism but it is at least a start for getting to know everyone). In Karlsruhe people just exchanged keys with people they already knew.
  • There was no list of all attendants, so you couldn’t find out whom you forgot to talk to.
  • grog complains in his diary, that we had to pay for the drinks at the social event. The social-event suited in a hangar-like hall was too cold to socialize.

Maybe this is specific to EuroBSDcon were 20 languages were spoken and the age of the attendants varies between 20 and 58. Additional people have a lot of respect for each other. But i hope we can do better next year and didn’t scare off Dru.

My first FreeBSD-alpha and 5.3-RELEASE

Yesterday I installed FreeBSD 5.3-RC2 on the Alphastation. The only problem was a usability problem, the kernel/loader didn’t tell me, that output was going to the serial console. I named it roberta, not sure why, the first name that came to my mind, that sounds like an old lady.
Kris has stopped the alpha package builds half a year ago because FreeBSD alpha was too unstable, but there are still a lot of people running FreeBSD alpha, so let’s see when i will see my first crash.
I am currently building a 5-STABLE world and I will build some packages later.
BTW 5.3 was finally released yesterday. Read about it on /. or heise.

WLAN Security at EuroBSDCon

The Read.me handed out at conference registration said “Consider the WLAN as untrusted”. I checked how many people read the Read.me and ran dsniff during the whole conference and compared the result to my universitys wlan. It was better, but I still got too many passwords:
4 POP3 Accounts, 1 non-anymous ftp account and 6 IMAP accounts.
At least one IMAP account i could map to a well known FreeBSD committer.
So if you didn’t used IMAP/SSL and especially if your password starts with “icr” you should change it, because maybe I will consider selling it to the slashdot troll.
BTW this one is really embarrassing for a BSD conference:
—————–
10/31/04 13:53:24 tcp 172.31.1.133.3161 -> ftp.freesbie.org.21 (ftp)
USER anonymous
PASS IEUser@

Talks continued

Later I attended the ALTQ talk by Adrian Penisoara. I persuaded Arjan van Leeuwen to install SubEthaEdit and it seems to work, although there are some limitations to a real revision control software.
Next talk was by dinoex about his work on a lightweighted package cluster and Yannick Cadin about DHCP (spent most of the time reading email so i didn’t get much of the content). The last talk of the day was by Henning Brauer about bgpd. Interesting presentation but typical OpenBSD argumentation.
After that we left for the social event, an exhibition by Luigi Colani with a lot of airplanes and cars. Maybe I will upload some pictures later. Unfortunately the exhibition hall was cold and the band made a lot of Noise while trying to fight the enormous echoing.
We left early and drank a lot of beer at some pub mlaier recommended.
Today I am awake an hour too early because I forgot about Daylight saving time 🙁
In 10 minutes rwatson starts the second day of talks.

Talks1: Application Checkpointing

Antti Kantee – “Using Application-Driven Checkpointing Logic for Hot Spare High Availability”
–> See conference proceedings.
– Good technical talk. interested attendantes.
– Outlines the possibilies, advantages and disadvantages of Userland Checkpointing.
– Good: Application knows about all the relevant data Bad: Every Application needs to adapted, Some parts like Network which are provied by the OS are difficult to access
agc & uwe@NetBSD.org: NetBSD on Handhelds
— Nothing works out of the box, as usual with NetBSD :-). The Beamer doesn’t recognize the screen resolution, slides are too large.
— Nice Image of a portable Computer made out of a normal PC
— showed a Journada with Windows CE.
— lots of experimental stuff.
— As usually agc’s presentations are too long