Category: FreeBSD

We finally decided what train to take. We will be travelling on thursday, arriving at Basel around 19.30 if nothing goes wrong.
My Plan for Friday is buying Christmas presents and CDs for myself at Basel City and maybe later visit the FreeBSD devsummit.
On Saturday I will _not_ participate at Basler Stadlauf, although it would have been fun.
Unfortunately it doesn’t look like the weather will be warmer than here. Next year EuroBSDCon needs to take place in the t-shirt season again.

If i plug my Logitech USB Keyboard into a Vivanco USB Hub instead of directly into the mainboard, FreeBSD hangs while probing the PCI Bus.

Can anybody explain this behaviour to me?

If i but whithout ACPI i get

atapci0: unable to map interrupt
ata2:  on atapci0
Fatal trap 12: page fault while in kernel mode
fault virtual address   = 0x8
fault code              = supervisor read, page not present
instruction pointer     = 0x8:0xffffffff802ce5f1
stack pointer           = 0x10:0xffffffff807ce8b0
frame pointer           = 0x10:0xffffffff807ce900
code segment            = base 0x0, limit 0xfffff, type 0x1b
= DPL 0, pres 1, long 1, def32 0, gran 1
processor eflags        = interrupt enabled, resume, IOPL = 0
current process         = 0 (swapper)
[thread pid 0 tid 0 ]
Stopped at      rman_get_bustag+0x1:    movq    0x8(%rdi),%rax
db> where
Tracing pid 0 tid 0 td 0xffffffff8066e240
rman_get_bustag() at rman_get_bustag+0x1
ata_pcichannel_reset() at ata_pcichannel_reset+0x8c
ata_attach() at ata_attach+0x135
device_attach() at device_attach+0x292
bus_generic_attach() at bus_generic_attach+0x18
ata_pci_attach() at ata_pci_attach+0x17c
device_attach() at device_attach+0x292
bus_generic_attach() at bus_generic_attach+0x18
pci_attach() at pci_attach+0x7a
device_attach() at device_attach+0x292
bus_generic_attach() at bus_generic_attach+0x18
legacy_pcib_attach() at legacy_pcib_attach+0x6e
bus_generic_attach() at bus_generic_attach+0x18
legacy_attach() at legacy_attach+0x9c
device_attach() at device_attach+0x292
bus_generic_attach() at bus_generic_attach+0x18
nexus_attach() at nexus_attach+0x19
device_attach() at device_attach+0x292
root_bus_configure() at root_bus_configure+0x1e
configure() at configure+0xa
mi_startup() at mi_startup+0xd3
btext() at btext+0x2c
db> panic

The new FreeBSD logo was announced today.
It got around 30% of the votes (imho there should have been a run-off ballot to get a real majority).
It was not my favorite, but it looks professional and will do as a logo. Now i hope there will soon be a lot of cool variations.

I missed my committers-day last week. I am now a committer since three years. In my first year i made around 1000 committs, in my second year 600 something and now i am down to 300 something.
Blames go to working fulltime for a few months and being too lazy to switch on my FreeBSD desktop and use the Minimac instead and not running FreeBSD on my Computer at work.
I really hope i will be able to increase my commit rate next year….

I nearly forgot registering for EuroBSDCon, yesterday was the last day of the early-bird discount.
I still need to book a Hotel today, probably Hotel Europe.

The first Google SoC Project was integrated into CVS. FreeBSD now has a new website, the first major redesign since nearly a decade.
Of course now many people complain that it does not render in their favorite browser with their favorite font settings or that it is more difficult to navigate, because there are no longer hundreds of links on the frontpage.
I will wait at least a week before i will make up my own opinion of the new website but from first glance it does look nearly as good as the old one.

Today i tried to update my Mailserver from dovecot 0.99.x to 1.0alpha3. Unfortunately the update requires several changes to the config file. And after i modified my config file i noticed that the new version has a bug.

Oct  2 20:40:51 knut dovecot: imap-login: Login: user=, method=PLAIN, rip=213.225.30.218, lip=213.9.70.77, TLS
Oct  2 20:40:51 knut dovecot: imap(arved): file istream-raw-mbox.c: line 450 (istream_raw_mbox_get_body_size): assertion failed: (rstream->mail_size != (uoff_t)-1)
Oct  2 20:40:51 knut dovecot: child 98776 (imap) killed with signal 6

Luckily i had a backup and i am now happily running 0.99 again. Let’s see if someone on the dovecot Mailinglist can help me with this problem.

Lioux launched a BitTorrent campaign.
He persuaded me to install the bittorrent port on jim, and donate 6KB/s (ca. 40% of my upstream bandwith) to his project. Additional i have set a limit of 6 connections, calculating that each connection should get 1KB.
After running one night, on next morning my nagios was crying because “the Internet is slow”. I checked with Hendriks excellent slurm program and noticed that my upstream was blowing out full speed (16KB/s, yes my ADSL line is slow).
I checked with tcpdump what caused this traffic and immediately noticed several wellknown hosts as primary offenders:

10:49:17.908038 IP 21322530218.direct.eti.at.53481 > g164193.upc-g.chello.nl.acmsoda: F 1347279866:1347279866(0) ack 1734755715 win 33304 
...
10:50:05.497482 IP 21322530218.direct.eti.at.52573 > panda.droso.net.6881: P 1:49(48) ack 1 win 33304 
10:50:05.545402 IP 200-140-3-148.bsace703.dsl.brasiltelecom.net.br.54871 > 21322530218.direct.eti.at.7241: R 3804027892:3804027892(0) win 0
10:50:05.606741 IP 21322530218.direct.eti.at.7241 > creme-brulee.marcuscom.com.51748: FP 0:7(7) ack 1 win 33304 
0:50:05.607486 IP 21322530218.direct.eti.at.54575 > foo.lovett.com.7241: . ack 1 win 33304 

. Obviously lioux persuaded some other fellow commiters (kwm, marcus, erwin and ade) to run BT as well and now we exchange our distfiles via BT (hooray!).
It looks like the traffic shaping algorithm is far from optimal and according to netstat the maximum connection number was also violated. And why is so much traffic required to coordinate the peers, as we all have the relevant files and don’t download anything?
My conclusion, currently bittorrent can’t compete with fetch(1), ftp(1) and an established mirror hierachy when it comes to distributing free software.

As now the most important Server is no longer in my flat, i needed to setup a monitoring service.
Nagios is the first choice. Unfortunately the docu lacks examples and an introduction for beginners. With special help from remko, who let me sneak at his config, and this tutorial i am now monitoring 25 services on my LAN and on my Server.
I really like it, when everything is green.

I finally got my own 1337 r00t Server. After a hint from Daniel Seuffert, that Elkhouse offers cheap FreeBSD root servers, i decided to get one, so that I will be able to use more of my ADSL bandwith for myself.
I will migrate content on this site step by step to Rollo, so expect some disruptions :-).
While doing the migration i decided to implement several improvements. First the apache runs now in a jail, second I have upgraded to php5 and third i intend to evaluate MT3.
The only thing that hasn’t been solved to my satisfaction yet is rollo’s reverse lookup, because I lack clue for configuring BIND in combination with CIDR (but “DNS & BIND” is on its way to me) and i have not yet moved one of my domains to Elkhouse.