Author: arved

How many computers run FreeBSD?

I sometimes wonder, how many computers around me run FreeBSD.
Starting with a small sample: In my house, which is an average viennese house with a mixture of old and young people, there are 17 Computers. Five run Microsoft Operating Systems (I have not converted my neighbors), One Mac, Two NetBSD and the rest runs FreeBSD. Of course I am invalidating the sample :-).
A larger sample is my university. The network contains around 8000 Computers, I guess around half of them run Microsoft Operating Systems and a third runs Linux. As far as I know there are around 10 to 15 machines (less than 0,25%) running FreeBSD (My workstation, my lapotop, winf.at, two or three machines at the RISE, two or three at the DBAI, two or three at the IBK and one at the faculty of architecture)
I would really like to know how many machines run FreeBSD in Vienna or Austria. I found only one old survey in the Google Cache.
I started a short list of FreeBSD servers in Austria by googling for “Powered by FreeBSD” but there are probably a lot more out there.

I forgot my blog’s birthday

I am blogging now for nearly 13 months. I wrote nearly 300 articles.
A snapshot of the mainpage in February was archived at archive.org
Not much has changed, I am still writing too much about Computers.
Now I can enjoy reading what happend in the past one year ago. For example one year ago i was on holiday at the North Sea. This year i will visit Berlin next week. For the first time I will travel by airplane, because the train connection to Berlin really sucks.

hostname

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.

200 days

$ 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.

Internet Language

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.

Too few letters

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.

Too old for the Olympic Games

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 :-).

10 years FreeBSD ports

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:

260 asami
122 jkh
31 kris
24 obrien
22 marcus
22 ache

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!