Annamirl reloaded

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.

routed on amd64

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.

Local BSD conference

Next to the three large BSDcon in Europe, US and Asia, many countries have local BSD conferences, e.g. Italy, Canada and of course Japan.
On #bsdaustria, Aleksander Fafula just pointed me to MeetBSD, Krak�w on November 27.
Unfortunately I don’t speak polish :-(.
But why is there nothing similar in Austria or even Germany? I know it is a lot of work, so are we just too lazy?
BTW, would you buy an Operating System from these guys?

New Earthling

Too many FreeBSD entries in a row. Time for something completly different.
My girlfriend’s brother does his best to save the pension system. Last week his seventh (if i counted correctly) child was born. Welcome on planet earth, Carl!

Upgrading to 5.3

After the release of FreeBSD 5.3 i upgraded my gateway from 5.2.1 to 5.3. Because of the upgrade-risk i migrated the webserver that runs this blog to jim.arved.de.
There were a few problems I had to solve, that caused a few hours downtime. First i had to add an IP alias for my public IP to lo0, because otherwise the webserver would not answer on requests (I need more public IPs, so I can stop using NAT). Then I had to patch MT to work with perl 5.8.4. I hope this was the only necessary patch, as I don’t have the time to switch to another blogging software.
The FreeBSD upgrade went flawless. Now there are only two machines left on my network that run 5.2.x.

Eurobsdcon reprise

Finally someone else wrote about EuroBSDCon, Dru Lavigne.
The most interesting paragraph of her review critizes the BSD Developers as antisocial:

My attempts at conversation fizzled out shortly after “hello”. During the talks, noone would sit in my row and the seats immediately ahead of and behind me were embarrassingly empty. I was starting to wonder if I was suffering from a bad case of BO.

I have to admit, neither did I attend her talk nor did i talk to her :-(.
But I also noticed that this EuroBSDcon was a bit antisocial.
Some Examples:

  • At normal geek events there is a keysigning party (well party is an euphemism but it is at least a start for getting to know everyone). In Karlsruhe people just exchanged keys with people they already knew.
  • There was no list of all attendants, so you couldn’t find out whom you forgot to talk to.
  • grog complains in his diary, that we had to pay for the drinks at the social event. The social-event suited in a hangar-like hall was too cold to socialize.

Maybe this is specific to EuroBSDcon were 20 languages were spoken and the age of the attendants varies between 20 and 58. Additional people have a lot of respect for each other. But i hope we can do better next year and didn’t scare off Dru.

My first FreeBSD-alpha and 5.3-RELEASE

Yesterday I installed FreeBSD 5.3-RC2 on the Alphastation. The only problem was a usability problem, the kernel/loader didn’t tell me, that output was going to the serial console. I named it roberta, not sure why, the first name that came to my mind, that sounds like an old lady.
Kris has stopped the alpha package builds half a year ago because FreeBSD alpha was too unstable, but there are still a lot of people running FreeBSD alpha, so let’s see when i will see my first crash.
I am currently building a 5-STABLE world and I will build some packages later.
BTW 5.3 was finally released yesterday. Read about it on /. or heise.