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.
Author: arved
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
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!
Addicted
Yesterday Pav asked me about a gcc 3.4 bug in one of his ports, crack-attack. I found a fix, and then tested the program. It was so addicting, that i spent most of the last hours playing crack-attack until i became a headache.
The bleeding edge
The bleeding edge now starts with a 6.
[arved@mchammer:~]% uname -a
FreeBSD mchammer.arved.de 6.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 6.0-CURRENT #22: Thu Aug 19 09:27:19 CEST 2004 root@mchammer.arved.de:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/MCHAMMER amd64
We now finally have a RELENG_5 branch, and rumours are it even compiles under some circumstances. Still a long way to 5-STABLE but at least there is now a supported alternative to the outdated 4-STABLE.
I will update fridge to RELENG_5 next week, because I had my first panic on the sparc64 this weekend.
My insight of the weekend: My flat gets too hot for two humans with five running computers.
webserver down & Code freeze
Yesterday www.FreeBSD.org was down. I don’t know the reason, but Netcraft already wrote an article with colorful graphics.
Soon the Code Freeze for 5.3 will start. Everybody is rushing in last minute changes, most important for my machines, tjr committed the kernelpart of the linux32 emulator for amd64, njl committed ACPI locking, des fixed fetch(1) on amd64 and iedowse committed a fix for the axe(4) driver. This weeks cvs summary will be a lot of work.
Of course various changes caused a lot of breakage, especially SMP deadlocks and a broken lnc(4). So only upgrade to CURRENT if you want to share the pain.
Portsfreeze was announced to start on September 3, but as there are nearly 900 failing packages on CURRENT/amd64 most of them caused by the gcc 3.4 import, there is a lot to do. Especially I need to get familar with the new obscure C++ errors.
Bloggercode
My Bloggercode:
B4 d+ t+ k s u-- f i o+ x- e l c-
While producing my code i somehow had the feeling, that i already wrote about this, but i couldn’t find it in the archive.
cdpdiscover
Today I wrote a small perl-script that extracts CDP Information from Cisco devices via SNMP and writes the resulting graph into a dotfile. Here is a sample image.
You can download the script here.
I would like to add more information to the vertices, but i need to know more about the dot language first.
Definition of Summer
It is summer when I have to connect the second chassis fan on my AMD64.
Current CPU temperature: 45�C
Current Mainboard temperature: 34�C
Bad Segeberg on FM4
Bad Segeberg, where i lived before I moved to Vienna in 2000, was mentioned on FM4, my favorite austrian radio station, last week. Stermann & Grissemann claim to play a role at the Karl May Festival.
Listen to the MP3s: part 1, part 2.
BTW, The most interesting news from Bad Segeberg in the last half year was probably the decline of M�bel Kraft, once one of the largest German furniture shops.