Author: arved

Grilled fly

Yesterday, when I went to bed, I switched on my bedside lamp. A few minutes later i noticed a strange smell and a few moments later i had to open all windows. First I thought my lamp was dying but than i noticed that a fly scrabbled into the halogen lamp and was now grilled.
I really wish you that you never have to smell something like that.

I’m back

I am back from Berlin. I will write about my journey when I recovered and sorted the photos.
I managed to kill the default route of my mailserver when I switched off the Wireless LAN, so my email bounced for two days, but it should be working again now.

Backup

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:

Sep 4 10:14:16 via kernel: umass0: BBB reset failed, IOERROR
Sep 4 10:14:16 via kernel: umass0: BBB bulk-in clear stall failed, IOERROR
Sep 4 10:14:16 via kernel: umass0: BBB bulk-out clear stall failed, IOERROR

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.

METAR data

I tried to write my own weather plugin similar to the wordpress plugin Hendrik uses.
I ended fixing Jeremey Zawodny’s p5-Geo-METAR plugin.
I have learned that americans measure air pressure in inches of mercury.
And I have learned a lot more about the METAR format, a standard for weather reports, than I wanted to know.
Sampsa Toivanen wrote a nice overview.
More Useful links:

I committed a first patch to the FreeBSD port.
But then I got tired and installed the ugly php code of the WordPress plugin.

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.