Category: Computers & Networks

Via isotopp: news.individual.net now costs 10 EURO/year.
I registered ca. 7 years ago and still use the account as a backup for my providers newsserver (although mostly for lurking).
Now the alternatives are: a) Pay 10 Euros b) VPN or Tunnel to my universities news server c) news.arcor.de (I have not found out where to register for free access) d) Usenet is dead.

I tried to install Solaris 10 on my sparc, but failed.
Unfortunately the Firmware was too old to boot, so i followed the instructions at sunsolve to update the firmware.

Boot device: /pci@1f,4000/scsi@3/disk@0,0  File and args: /flash-update-450-latest
-
RED State Exception
TL=0000.0000.0000.0005 TT=0000.0000.0000.0010
TPC=0000.0000.f000.4200 TnPC=0000.0000.f000.4204 TSTATE=0000.0091.0000.1505
TL=0000.0000.0000.0004 TT=0000.0000.0000.0010
TPC=0000.0000.f000.4200 TnPC=0000.0000.f000.4204 TSTATE=0000.0091.0000.1505
TL=0000.0000.0000.0003 TT=0000.0000.0000.0010
TPC=0000.0000.f000.4680 TnPC=0000.0000.f000.4684 TSTATE=0000.0091.0000.1505
TL=0000.0000.0000.0002 TT=0000.0000.0000.0034
TPC=0000.0000.f000.3030 TnPC=0000.0000.f000.3034 TSTATE=0000.0091.0000.1505
TL=0000.0000.0000.0001 TT=0000.0000.0000.0034
TPC=0000.0000.f000.8084 TnPC=0000.0000.f000.8088 TSTATE=0000.0091.0000.1605

What am i doing wrong?

Web.de is next to GMX one of Germany’s largest FreeMail providers. BTW my first email address was arved@web.de.
Unfortunately they have a serious problem, because in the last half year, i was not able to send mail to web.de customers:

451 4.4.1 reply: read error from mx-ha01.web.de.
451 4.4.1 reply: read error from mx-ha02.web.de.
<....@web.de>... Deferred: Connection reset by mx-ha02.web.de.

So if you expect a reply from me don’t use web.de

For several months I own a Netgear GS105 Gigabit Ethernet Switch. Today I finally tested performance on my LAN using NetIO.
I own three Gigabit Ethernet NICs: mchammer.arved.de has a builtin 3Com 3C940 (supported by the FreeBSD sk(4) driver), sauna has an Intel 82540EM (supported by the FreeBSD em(4) driver) and jim.arved.de has an RTL8169 supported by the FreeBSD re(4) driver.
The goal of the test was to find out if it makes sense to exchange the NICs between jim (my server) and sauna (my i386-workstation). I suspected the Realtek card having the worst performance.
Here are the results:

Both tests involving jim had the same result, so i redid the test and found out that the limit is most likely not the NIC but the CPU (a 600Mhz EPIA) which was used 100% during the test.
So changing NICs is not useful, but instead i should consider buying a 1Ghz EPIA System, if i need more performance.

The Picture of the week shows the main antenna mast of Funkfeuer, the free viennese WLAN community. After last weeks storm someone secured the mast with a fiber cable.

More than one year ago, my old Laptop had an accident which resulted in a broken pccard slot. Just when i bought USB NICs it stopped booting at all.
Last week a PR about FreeBSD’s broken USB support for this laptop was closed. So I decided to do a last attempt to rescue annamirl from the dead.
I removed all remaining pieces of the PC-Card slot and it now boots again. Unfortunately I had to remove the keyboard ribbon cable from the mainboard and I haven’t figured out how to reconnect it. So I am now updating it with an external keyboard.
I will try to upload pictures later.

Today i sent my patch against routed, that fixed tracing on amd64, to the upstream author and Vernon Schryver released routed 2.31.
Now I just have to prepare a diff against FreeBSD and find an interested src-committer for review.

After TELNET has been replaced by SSH in many cases and serious admins have started to replace FTP with SFTP/SCP the most common insecure protocols are IMAP and POP3.
Although most Emailprograms support a secure Emailprotocol the insecure variants are still much more common. I have installed the dovecot IMAP/POP3-server on my mailserver, but unfortunately at the moment it does not support SSL because the gnutls version in the FreeBSD ports collection is incompatible, so i read mail via SSH/mutt which is probably a lot faster than waiting until Mail.app has synced my 70MB mailbox over my ADSL line.
At university i always wonder that even computer science students don’t think when they start their MUA while connected to the university WLAN.
And I wonder even more when I read their passwords, more than 15% of my small sample (a 45 minutes course) use their surname as password.

My home network gets more complicated with every device I add.
I made a new network diagram of my home network.
I am currently trying to use RIP via routed to announce the routes to the different networks (WLAN, FastEthernet, GigabitEthernet, FirewireEthernet and Internet). Unfortunately the documentation of routed on the internet is not very good. The Linux routed although based on the original BSD routed has diverged a lot from the current FreeBSD routed especially the syntax of the config file. Additional most people just start routed and it works, so there are very few /etc/gateways sample files on the net.
Currently announcing of the local networks works, but the default route isn’t propageted the right way (always prefer the cable-networks over the wireless networks). Maybe one reason is, that my ADSL router doesn’t announce the route to the Internet.

Continue reading “routed & RIP”

My current backup strategy is to upload some stuff on my shell accounts and copy other stuff on my external Firwire Harddisk.
Today I tried to do a backup from my Epia system, which has no firewire, so i connected the harddisk via USB. Did you remember that USB in FreeBSD sucks? Of course hotplugging didn’t work and results in bazillion messages on the console:

and hanging of every disk access. After the reboot the disk worked, I was able to dump the / filesystem. But when i tried to dump the /usr filesystem the box paniced.
Now I am looking for a better (reliable working) way to backup this system since Firewire is not an option.
Does anybody of you use tape backups? I got a DDS3-tape drive, but I never used it, as I need to get tapes somewhere. Should I try to install a professional backup solution like bacula? Or should I just use rsync to copy stuff from the Hard Disk to another machine.