EuroBSDcon day 2

On Sunday it was naturally hard to get up early to arrive at roberto’s talk in time. I must admit i still don’t see the need for a Distributed Sourcecodemangementsystem especially with todays ubitous Internet access.
Afterwards i listened to Andre’s talks on FreeBSDs TCP/IP stack. The first one didn’t contain much news for people following the FreeBSD Mailinglists but the second was quite interesting but unfortunately he ran out of time.
After lunch at the university mensa i listened to Riondas talk about jails. Although i am using FreeBSD jails for a few months now “in production” i learned something new.
The mystery session was a bit poor, although the panel did a good job it ended up in a bikeshed, because everyone wanted to tell his opinion about BSDs PR whithout listening to the previous comments.
After the end we went to a strange Kitsch-pub to drink a few beers because we had a few hours until our train to Vienna left in the evening. While changing trains at Zürich main station we met Rionda for his train back to Italy.
Now i need to catch up sleep and other stuff…

EuroBSDcon day 1 part 2

Later I went to silby’s TCP/IP talk, which had some quite interesting graphs how broken Linux is and how many differences there are between the different BSDs.
After lunch was the X session. Matthias Hopf of SUSE showed some nice 3D effects and Matthieu Herrb announced the death of imake with Xorg 7.0. Next i went to Emmanuel Dreyfus’ talk about IPSEC, where he tried to explain the whole mess of IPSec extensions and implementations.
In the OpenBSD Firewall talk Ryan McBride demonstrated redundant firewalls and used an axe to hack a Twistedpair cable, good show. Finally Ed Maste talked about locking of FreeBSD network stack, he did a good job as rwatson incarnation of the day.
The social event was in a nice cellar. There were ugly beers from all over Europe (yes we made the mistake of trying most of them) and a spicy gulasch to make the people thirsty. There was a drinking contest of the various Operating Systems teams. Of course FreeBSD went ahead of the other projects fast because most of the attendees were FreeBSD people and we wondered what happend if the beer glass stats that show the consumed beers overflows.
But later a lot of FreeBSD people left being sure they will win the contest. Now the OpenBSD people took over by confusing the Barkeepers with singing Humpa songs and giving OpenBSD shirts to them.
I think we left around 1:30, so i am not sure if they managed to take over the lead.

EuroBSDCon day 1

Today the “real” con started. The opening talk buy the university host was a bit strange, he tried to link the Unix time line to molecular biology.
Later a guy from ix magazin tried to explain why they don’t publich more *BSD articles and phk told the auditorium what rwatson did in his early days.
In the first slot i went to Adrian Steinmann “Single User Secure Shell”, which is basically a RAMDISK containg an SSH daemon. It was a nice talk, and it might be useful in FreeBSD hosting environments.
Next i will attend the GEOM Hard Disk encryption talk
BTW It looks like IMAPS/POPS is much more common than last year. I haven’t got any useful passwords yet.

Places to avoid in Basel

Today after eating breakfast we went into town buying stuff, i spent a fortune at Musikhug, bought CDs for 280,- CHF. And i am still tempted to spend more money there. The CD range was a lot better than any shop in Vienna. And of course they had Swiss Mundartmusi :-).
After taking a lot of pictures ( I will upload them later, i have forgotten my camera cable at the hotel) we went back to the hotel to detect that the WLAN gateway asked for another 15 CHF although we had paid another 10 hours. So we went to university to use the free conference WLAN instead.
It looks like Basel closed its university for EuroBSDcon, the whole University is reserverd for us.

Basel

We have been travelling to Basel by train today. Most spectacular event on the travel, at Landeck we had to leave the train and mount a bus to Bludenz, because the railroad was unpassable. The Bus drove below the Arlberg through several long tunnels. In Bludenz we were told, that our train doesn’t drive to Basel, but to Zürich, and we had to change trains there. We spent 20 minutes investigating the Zürich main station shopping center before moving on to Basel. In Basel we had no Problems to find the Hotel. We checked in and than went into the cold to look for something to eat at a reasonable price.
We ended at the “Bierhalle” of Brauner Mutz were you could drink Feldschlösschen beer and eat suisse dishes. They even had some kind of live band.

Getting ready for EuroBSDCon

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.

First Snow and my Christmas present

Yesterday you could see snow flakes if you had a lot of imagination. Today you don’t need imagination. Yeah.
Related, yesterday i bought my personal Christmas present. I now own an MP3 player, an Ipod.
Now i am adequate equipped for my trip to Basel next week.
I managed to crash it immediately after powering it on, and i am not too impressed by a device that has no hardware reset button. Luckily since i updated the Ipod Updater on my Mac from the driver CD, it is working flawlessly. Looks like Panther does not get the new Ipod Updater via Software Update, a small hint from Apple to buy the Tiger upgrade.
What I also don’t like, that it is not possible to do anything on the Ipod, while it is mounted the Mac, and the message “Do not disconnect” should be replaced by “umount before disconnecting” or something like that.

High Spirits

Why can’t BTO Spider put Playlists on the Web like all other FM4 people?
This is the second time i wanted to look up a track played on the radio and ended on BTO Spiders homepage. The ones he has online are a week old, and missing the timestamps, so no idea which song i liked.
Oh, an when he is constantly using a sample from “Groove is in the heart”, why can’t he play the whole song.

Hardware sux

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

Sorting CDs

After FreeBSD 6.0 was released, the ports tree is now completly open for commits, so on the same day a GNOME update (incl. glib20) and a KDE update hit the tree. So while all my machines (except the Mac) where running portupgrade, i decided to hear my Propellerheads CD again.
It took me several minutes to find it, although i knew in which shelf i stored it. So it looks like i need a new sorting system for my CDs. At the Moment they are sorted by a mixture of genre, date of purchase and randomness. But this system has several flaws. First there is no common definition of how to sort genres in a 2D shelf (e.g. yesterday i was surprised that the BoF record store sorts Gothic Music next to TOP40 Samplers). Next i am getting old, and start to forget in which order i bought my several hundred CDs.
For example “Decksanddrumsandrocknroll” that is now happily spinning in my CD-Player was bought somewhere between 1998 and 2000, so it was located in the shelf “CDs bought in Germany” sorted next to Fatboy Slim (reasonable roughly same genre), Tricky (bought in 95 and not the same genre), Deee-Lite and Pizzicato Five.
Maybe i should restart my project of ripping all my CDs (last time i gave up after ripping 80 CDs).