Edd's Rant

LPD Music Hack - How it's done

2010-11-28T07:24:00.001-08:00

People have been asking how to achieve the lpd music hack, which was used at Friday night geekery #1.First of all I would like to explain that the idea is not my own. OpenBSD developers have been using this technique at their hackathons for years now. I was first exposed to this hack at p2k9 when I was enrolled as an OpenBSD dev, then i asked for the configs at p2k10. So basically the message is

That Time When There Are No OpenBSD Snapshot Packages

2010-04-08T10:38:00.001-07:00

Every six months there is a period of time when efforts of package building shift from building snapshot packages (for -current and snapshots) to building release packages; It is usually about a month or so. Also snapshots of base usually are not built either.In the past I had just lived with it and not updated either my base or my packages, but recently I needed new packages. I would normally

Crawler Town

2010-02-21T12:33:00.000-08:00

Wow, check this Lego monstrosity out!

CodeByte: OpenBSD Linked Lists

2010-02-10T15:43:00.000-08:00

If you are ever doing systems programming on OpenBSD, there are a number of linked list macros pre-defined, which you may find useful. See the manual page for QUEUE(3).Here is a quick example I knocked up:#include #include #include #include #define SWM_MAX_ALT_WM_NAME 32struct alt_wm { SLIST_ENTRY(alt_wm) entries; char wm[SWM_MAX_ALT_WM_NAME];};intmain(

Easter Egg in DDD

2010-02-03T16:17:00.000-08:00

Everyone knows and loves ddd. I use this tool a whole lot for dynamic reverse engineering, but only today I found a cool easter egg.Start DDD from a terminalPress ^C on the terminal and a new menu appears in the GUIOn this menu is a tic-tac-toe game!

Setting up a printer on OpenBSD and CUPS for use at University of Kent Computing Lab

2009-11-18T04:03:00.000-08:00

So I have wasted much time trying to figure this out on a couple of occasions now, so I am going to document how it is done:Install cups - pkg_add -i cupsInstall samba-cups - pkg_add -i sambaDo the stuff it says to do in the install message.ln -s `which smbspool` /usr/local/libexec/cups/backend/smbStart cupsd - /usr/local/sbin/cupsdGoto localhost:631 in a browserAdd a samba printer with url

Slacker Update

2009-11-01T16:22:00.000-08:00

So I have fallen in to that cycle that we all do, the "Oh hai, I have not updated this in ages!" cycle.So the two areas of my geek life that have changed are, a) a change of University, b) life as a new OpenBSD developer.University of KentHaving finished my undergraduate degree at Bouremouth University, I have moved on to the University of Kent to do a PhD in reverse engineering of executable

Mastering Audio on OpenBSD

2009-06-16T10:23:00.000-07:00

As you probably know, hacking is more fun with music. Perhaps some Megadeth or some Genghis Tron? My point is; I can't hack with no music. I don't know if this is just me, but if my music skips when I change virtual desktop or build some code, my mind also skips. It distracts me and annoys me.Ever since I started running Gnome on my desktop, (which sometimes I do), this was the behavior I got.

Configuring X11 with SSH Keys without Gnome-keyring

2009-05-18T17:09:00.000-07:00

Hello,As requested by Didi, an example of how to configure X11 with SSH keys without gnome-keyring. I pulled parts of this from the default xdm Xsession of OpenBSD. Wack this is your .xsession or .xinitrc. You could do what I do and symlink them to the same file. I am lazy.ssh_keys() { id1=$HOME/.ssh/identity id2=$HOME/.ssh/id_dsa id3=$HOME/.ssh/id_rsa if [ -x /usr/bin

More LaTeX Gems from Dissertation Land

2009-05-13T04:04:00.000-07:00

Hello,Another quick post I am afraid. Here are two recent discoveries, which I think you will like and a web-link you may find useful:Dot TeXWith this package you may embed directly graphviz "dot" pictures into your LaTeX, for example:\usepackage[shell,pdf]{dottex}...\begin{dotpic}/* Styles */size = "3,4""Parser Grammar + Actions" [shape=box, width=1.9];"Parser C Code" [shape=box];"Tokeniser C

A couple of quick tips

2009-04-25T05:03:00.001-07:00

Since I have not had much time to blog recently, due to my dissertation, I felt bad.So heres a couple of small tips:Tracing Python Method CallsI wanted to just trace an indented stack trace on the fly, as a debugging aid. This is what I devised:pytrace_rx = re.compile(".*3c/phases/phase-.+/")def pytrace(frame, event, arg): """ this is for the -V flag (caps V) prints each

LLVM is Infinite!

2009-03-15T08:45:00.000-07:00

I have been busy writing my dissertation, which is why I have not had much time to blog. Sorry :PHeres some fun anyway, my first infinite loop in LLVM IR:loop_check: ; preds = %entry, %loop_body br i1 false, label %loop_exit, label %loop_bodyloop_body: ; preds = %loop_check br label %loop_checkloop_exit: ; preds = %loop_check ret i32 0Can

'Real' Spam (Pun intended)

2009-02-27T09:52:00.000-08:00

OK, so yesterday I get an email with a subject line "Helix Community Newsletter - Volume One".I don't recall asking to be added. The email is in HTML, so I disregard it and carry on working on my project, with the intention of dealing with it later (unsubscribing). That is annoying enough in itself.Enter the HTML email hater dude. He replies to the list saying something along the lines of "hey

Chill

2009-02-24T18:23:00.000-08:00

I just watched "high fidelity" and it inspired me to make a chillout playlist. Heres what I came up with:Tricky - Makes Me Wanna Die Moby - Everloving Botch - AfghamistamMassive Attack - Small_Time_Shot_AwayAir - La Femme D'ArgentDJ Shadow - Building Steam With A Grain Of SaltLinkin Park - SessionIsis - maritimePure Reason Revolution - Nimos &

Good amd config and hotplug config for OpenBSD

2009-02-22T09:33:00.000-08:00

This is a backup for me, and perhaps of use to anyone else?amd, acting like /net in solaris and a hotplugd which mounts usb sticks:/etc/amd/amd.net---/defaults type:=host;fs:=${autodir}/${rhost}/root;rhost:=${key}* opts:=rw,nosuid,grpid/etc/hotplug/attach---#!/bin/shdevclass=$1devname=$2case ${devclass} in2) echo "hotplug:attach: Disk device detected (${devname})" slices=`

Even Spam Is Poor :(

2009-02-19T07:46:00.000-08:00

Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 05:11:13 -0800 (PST)From: Arno Kumpel Reply-To: arnokumpel@live.comSubject: REPLY ME IMMEDIATELYTo: misc@openbsd.orgX-Converted-To-Plain-Text: from multipart/alternative by demime 1.01dX-Converted-To-Plain-Text: Alternative section used was text/plainX-Loop: misc@openbsd.orgPrecedence: listI have a new email address!You can now email me at: arkumpel2@yahoo.com - I have the

FOSDEM 2009

2009-02-12T03:18:00.001-08:00

Having driven through the slush and snow out of Bournemouth, the 4 of us were somewhat tired, parked up at Dover docks. Glancing to the left a clamped car is visible and also the parking warden lurking... waiting for us to stay here for one second over 15 minutes.It was FOSDEM time! After the guys somehow bribed the ferry staff to give us a cheaper ticket using a twix (all legit! He told us when

Telnet Vs Rlogin

2009-01-28T12:25:00.000-08:00

I was helping Chris with his networking presentation, and wanted to know the difference between telnet and rlogin, and so natrually googled it.The first hit explained this well, but I was shocked to see a .arpa email address. The mail was sent in 1988! Puts its all in perspective. Hats off the the developers back in the 80's!http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/multimedia/misc/tcp_ip/8811.mm.www/0099.html

And the multimedia streaming box thing of the century is discovered?

2009-01-02T09:22:00.000-08:00

I have been looking for ages for a set top box which can stream video to a TV from NFS or Samba (our OpenBSD server).First I discovered the Neuros OSD, which looked promising, but had some bad rap in some reviews I read. Then I found this:Popcorn Hour a-110I WANT IT!

Un-bricking a Cisco 2924 XL.

2008-12-21T12:30:00.000-08:00

I'll just upgrade your firmwareSaid Matt prior to deleting the firmware and rendering the switch as a paperweight. Wonderful, wonderful :)Here's how I fixed it.Go to cisco.com and find the name of the firmware tarball you need. Attempt to download it and reliase that you cant, as you are not a customer.Go to google and type that file name in.Obtain some dodgy firmware of some public ftp

Me and Didi Messing About

2008-12-01T16:54:00.000-08:00

Look cool in front of windows users:for i in {1..10}; do xterm -e "while true; do dmesg ; done" & ; done

XBox 360 Credit card fun... Ridiculous.

2008-11-07T15:19:00.000-08:00

Received: by 10.114.60.4 with HTTP; Fri, 7 Nov 2008 15:18:19 -0800 (PST)Message-ID: Date: Fri, 7 Nov 2008 23:18:19 +0000From: "Edd Barrett" To: "Chris Taylor" Subject: Oh noes! M$ ffsMIME-Version: 1.0Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bitContent-Disposition: inlineDelivered-To: xxxHi Chris,FOR F**K SAKES.I added my credit card to your xbox live account to get

The UK's no. 1 new university

2008-11-02T10:15:00.000-08:00

I noticed that one of lecturers was sending me email with a email signature:"The UK's no. 1 new university"And thought.. hmm. That doesn't sound like him.It was only when another lecturer mailed me with the same sig, that this is something the exchange server is appending to outgoing email.A quick google search reveals the Bournemouth Uni website sitting proudly at the top of the page. They have

University Degredation?

2008-10-15T03:10:00.000-07:00

I can't help but feel the University is in a state of utter chaos with regards to its IT systems and priorities this year.2 of my 3 units have not been implementing the online learning environment (MyBU), because the lecturers don't have accounts. Furthermore, one of these lecturers don't have an email address @bournemouth.ac.uk even!One UNIX lab was lost since last year, as it is seen as a dying

The annoying "firefox bug"

2008-09-08T08:38:00.000-07:00

The annoying firefox bug is infact a bug in xorg :OI *think* i have fixed it using XAA acceleration without offscreen pixmaps:Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" true"The other suggestion I heard on the lists was to switch from XAA to EXA Acceleration.

Soekris Playtime

2008-09-01T07:21:00.000-07:00

Today I recieved my Soekris net4501 After going to the local electronics store to get a 1GB CF and a power adaptor (the one supplied was US), I boot it up with the console attached to my main desktop: comBIOS ver. 1.05 20020419 Copyright (C) 2000-2001 Soekris Engineering. Soekris Engineering net4501 CPU 80486 134 Mhz 0064 Mbyte Memory PXE-M00: BootManage UNDI, PXE-2.0

TeX Live 2008 Network Installer Ready

2008-08-23T04:46:00.000-07:00

Greetings,Just a note to inform you that the TeX Live 2008 network installer is now ready for use. You can download it for windows and unix/linux here:ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/texlive/tlnet/2008/This was the result of the new database format and perl API which the guys have been busy at work with for a while. Usage of the DVD/CD of TeX Live is now being discouraged, as it has

Fun Game

2008-08-19T08:44:00.000-07:00

How many packages does gnome depend on for OpenBSD?I have installed gnome-session on a clean BSD box.Nearest guess gets a biscuit :)

Wow, the linux community has some swell aspirations...

2008-08-15T01:48:00.000-07:00

I refer you to this article here.Our open source expert foresees the future of Linux: By 2012 the OS will have matured into three basic usage models.Web-based apps rule, virtualization is a breeze,and command-line hacking for basic system configurationis a thing of the past.[frustrated sigh here]OpenOffice will be either in or fast approaching its fourth revision, with features like

Woopsy! Solaris, IRIX and Linux systems symlink implementation.

2008-08-14T06:13:00.000-07:00

In some UNIX systems, the link(symlink, newpath) operation haschanged over time: instead of recursively following the symlink andcreating a hardlink to the file thus found, it creates a hardlinkto the symlink itself. This behavior disagrees with, for example,the POSIX.1-2001 and X/Open XPG4v2 standards, and is the defaulton current Solaris, IRIX and Linux systems. On systems with

Solaris Community Confused as Blastwave Closes Doors?

2008-08-07T05:06:00.000-07:00

I was looking for a package of trac for Solaris today, so off I wen to good old trusty Blastwave to see if they had built a package.Hmm. This looks different. After a while of fudging around clicking random links, it occurred to me that I may actually have to read the message in the middle of the page in order to get into the site.All assets of Blastwave.org Inc. are frozen until further notice.

Placement Log / Stuff

2008-07-30T02:55:00.000-07:00

Since last time I blogged:Kerberos/NISEventually got this working. I could not work out for a while why the kerberos client was not even bothering to query the KDC, which in the end turned out to be something to do with the keytab configuration. That was not much fun to find after vast truss and source code reading. Atleast it could have been something more tragic :PTeX User Group Conference

Wacky TeX Usage

2008-07-16T16:51:00.000-07:00

Woa

Placement Log 27/06/08 - LLVM + Gnome + Krb5

2008-06-27T02:32:00.000-07:00

So many keystrokes...A series of events has occured since my last blog post.LLVMFinal year project progress has been slow. Laurie had a great idea for a project which I was really up for attempting, but it seems I was almost struck down at the first hurdle. Building the support software."LLVM is a robust system, particularly well suited for developing new mid-level language-independent analyses

Funroll-Loops is teh back!

2008-06-20T08:25:00.000-07:00

Yay,Once again we can laugh at the ridiculous extents that gentoo users go to to optimise firefox:b0rk

Random Wallpapers for the OpenBSD masses

2008-06-18T08:02:00.000-07:00

I though it might be nice to have a random cycling wallpaper every so often on my desktop, which is an OpenBSD machine. I saw many apps to do this in ports, but they all required python etc. So being a minimalist, I decided to try to make a shell script which can do it.#!/bin/sh# Edd's Background changer# $Id: xrndbg,v 1.1 2008/06/17 21:03:33 e9507526 Exp $BGDIR=/home/edd/eck/bgNUMBGS=`ls ${BGDIR

Placement Log 2008-06-10

2008-06-10T02:06:00.000-07:00

The latest focus of my placement has been the lab image rebuilds, which I am determined to make easier to use for students and supplying a raft more software. This mainly consisted of grokking the blastwave repository for useful shiznak. Blastwave software varies. Sometimes it just works, others you hack around until it does.KDE required some awful hacksedd@dec23 1$ cat `which kate`#!/bin/

Bournemouth Locals - Be Vigilant

2008-05-27T06:52:00.000-07:00

During the weekend I required some money to buy wellies and food :)I was at chippenham folk festival ofcourse, but the money I had transfered from my saving into my current account had gone someplace.After drying off from the festival it turns out 3 withdrawals had been made it canada, (KIRKLAND). Bah! Some asshole had cloned my card and cleaned out my account. Fay then informed me that also our

Why Sun Kit Makes Great Servers

2008-05-27T02:07:00.000-07:00

How many times have we seen commodity x64 servers overheating and disks melting due to fans failing. Lots. So here is one reason I like sun servers for defeating this problem.Today I came in returned to the machine hosting the next accademic year's lab image on. It is a sunfire v210 (dual 1.2ghz UltraSparc III). I had been loading it up with all sorts of software from blastwave last week and now

Scary NIC Hacks

2008-05-15T08:26:00.000-07:00

0h n03s

25 Year Old BSD Bug - Press Coverage

2008-05-12T01:52:00.001-07:00

Wow,The buggy behavior I reported to Marc Balmer in OpenBSD, but that also effects FreeBSD, NetBSD and Apple OS X, was covered on OS News, Slashdot and Undeadly. Wow!

Placement Log Update - LDAP/Kerberos

2008-05-06T07:16:00.000-07:00

I decided to drop the week numbers on placement logs. It seems pointless because I slack.So the last month or so has been occupied with trying to set up a single sign in for windows, linux and solaris. I regret to say that LDAP falls far short of what we were expecting. It seems that everyone has their own way of accessing the directory, in particular solaris (needs all sorts of extra schema's

OpenSolaris - Release for Real

2008-05-06T04:40:00.000-07:00

Sun have yesterday released OpenSolaris. This time for real. It is what we knew priviously as project indiana. It seems sun finally have a package manager and the install CD is only one disk (as opposed to 5 for nevada).Will it be any good?I am going to try it on my laptop later.OpenSolaris Website

The Discovery of a Very Old Bug!

2008-05-03T07:10:00.000-07:00

We have a new file server in our house, which serves up NFS and samba, mostly for shared films and music.I installed OpenBSD-4.2 on the rather aged now 700mHz box and set up NFS, no problems. Me and NFS have a love/hate relationship. I hate it because it is insecure and uses RPC, but I love it because it is so simple to share files with. You just have to be very careful about where you implement

The future of Web Multimedia

2008-05-02T09:22:00.000-07:00

Wow,I'm amazed that Adobe are opening most of the flash technology. It seems to be that HTML-5 and Silverlight could be harsh competition for them. In all fairness I would be amazed if microsofts silverlight EVER takes off. Microsoft continue to make their proprietary crap (in the age of open standards) and push it upon the world, its so selfish. And I'm not even being an open source hippie, I

Insulting Source Code - The Future?

2008-04-23T15:21:00.000-07:00

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=477454

Hotplugd

2008-04-09T03:15:00.000-07:00

I am posting my hotplugd attach and detach scripts before I lose them.For those of you who are not familair, hotplugd is a daemon which you may configure to take action when a new peice of hardware is plugged in. I am only using it for USB stick mounting, but you can also do things like run a dhcp client if a network card is plugged in etc./etc/hotplug/attach---8<---#!/bin/shdevclass=$1devname=

What to do if your neighbour is stealing your WIFI

2008-04-01T04:16:00.000-07:00

People often steal WIFI. It's annoying to say the least, especially as WEP encryption is so poor.This guy realised this any re-scupltured his lan to punish those freeloading hippies.Very amusing

Placement Log Weeks 25-32

2008-03-18T06:53:00.000-07:00

Gimme a L,A,Z,Y what have you got.... Yeh sorry.Most of my time recently has been spent with building a new web server with solaris 10u4, which is now up and running hosting my web page. Much new territory was covered in the land of solaris, especially as apache tomcat must be installed and ready for anyone to use. That was my first and probably last contact with Java on a web server. The JASS

Getting stuff done in windows on the command line.

2008-02-25T06:06:00.000-08:00

Notes, for you, me and the world of UNIX geeks forced to admin windows servers.There are 2 different sets of permissions in windows NT with NTFS filesystems: Filesystem ACL's Share ACL's icacls/calcs = chmod on UNIX = Filesystem permissionsnet share creates shares = like the share command in solaris.fsutil is used to modify disk quota'srmtshare can be used to change share permissions. As

Where is OpenSolaris Heading? And yet another one of my "sun.. wtf?" rants. Sorry

2008-02-19T11:29:00.000-08:00

So where are Sun heading with OpenSolaris? Is it true that "the linux twunts are ruining solaris"?To some degree I think sun should limit the number of projects that they allow onto opensolaris.org. Some of them to me seem somewhat unnecessary. I will not name any incase I offend anyone, but my point is perhaps this everyone can have their own code in solaris is a bit linux-kernel-treeish =

No more pandora?

2008-02-13T16:58:00.000-08:00

Dear Pandora Visitor,We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.

Transparent Qemu Networking with OpenBSD

2008-02-06T06:44:00.001-08:00

I am very impressed with how easy OpenBSD has made it to host virtual machines using qemu. I was looking into how we could all host our own servers on one machine to save electricity next year.What do you think of this idea Didi?Obviously much security would need to be implemented, and dave would have to converted to running solaris for some reason, but this is a serious electricity saver IF it

Good Wine Times

2008-02-03T15:31:00.001-08:00

The old vinyard X logo is back!!!!!!!

Google blog search

2008-02-03T14:57:00.000-08:00

I just found "google blog search". I googled my name:This is hilareous:http://timothycomeau.com/blog/575/---8<---Too cool for a mere browserPublished on 30 January 2008 in Uncategorized. Print This Post Print This PostRe: Real men don’t attack straw men[Posted December 19, 2007 by corbet]From: Richard StallmanTo: “Edd Barrett”Subject: Re: Real men don’t attack straw menDate: Sat, 15 Dec 2007 16:

Placement Log 21, 22, 23, 24

2008-02-01T03:55:00.000-08:00

And heres your (cough) weekly update.Work has infact been very busy recently. We have been looking into virtualising as many servers as possible onto the more powerful machines. This was a decision made by shaun, as we have a lot of high end equipment which is just sat there "watching daytime tv" as it were. We now use both Xen and Zones. We did have a brief dabble into branded zones, but they

Coloured builds?! What next?

2008-01-22T07:17:00.001-08:00

Vinyard X logo.

2008-01-21T14:40:00.000-08:00

Im a little upset the vineyard X wine has changed it's logo and no longer resembles the Xorg logo :(Old logoNew oneSad times my friend

Modern Vs Old Skool Software Development

2008-01-09T05:59:00.000-08:00

Whilst digging through the room full of shit in our corridor, we found an amiga 1200.Will is a big fan of amigas, and we engaged in discussion about whether we could play a quick game of Zool. Will owns zool, but he reckons that the disk will be corrupted by now. As disk images exist, we could simply dd one onto a floppy right?The it occurred to me.... Games in this day and age run ontop of an

Placement Log - Weeks 17,18, 19 and 20

2008-01-03T04:42:00.000-08:00

Hello you lot,Once again I have been very lazy in updating my blog, but then so have you guys :POver the last month I have been doing a few bits:The Windows/Sunray ExperimentI have next to me a test rig allowing users to log in to either windows or UNIX on a sunray thinclient, whilst sharing their home directory in both. Unfortunately Windows roaming profile is shit unless you can use folder

/dev/cat

2007-12-18T06:18:00.000-08:00

An amusing chat on a silc session:13:58 < #2> my cat is high on catnip13:58 < #2> its awsome14:01 < #1> is it going bonkers?=14:03 < #3> hmm, perhaps the cat was a bit too rambunxious14:04 < #2> totally14:04 < #2> he's making a bloody mess of things14:04 < #1> next time, don't poor the catnip inside your computer :P14:05 < #2> i put it in a small bowl, and put the bowl on the bathroom floor,

OpenCon 2007 - Saturday

2007-12-11T05:10:00.000-08:00

On saturday morning I was awoken by the phone ringing. i left it to ring in the hope that Will might get it... I somewhat regretted drinking so much the previous night...i eventually give in and answer the phone. I am greeted by the german. "Come on you fuckers! Get aaapp! I have been awake for hours".Wooooahhhrr. I felt like crap.Nothing a touch of breakfast and coffee cant solve. right?Wrong.

Oh look - More Philisophical Computing Idiocy

2007-12-11T01:54:00.000-08:00

Time and time again....http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=119730630513821&w=2Sure free software is great, thats why I develop OpenSource, but every software developer has the right to release their own code under any license they want be it open or closed. And I think closed source software has it's place.http://vext01.blogspot.com/2006/12/computing-annoyance-philisophical.html

OpenCon 2007 - Friday

2007-12-10T06:23:00.000-08:00

On Friday the 30th of November, myself and William Poodle queued at the security gate of Gatwick (London) airport awaiting a flight to Venice for OpenCon 2007."OpenCON was born in September 2004 from an idea by Matteo Cantoni (goony) and Fabio Cazzin (fabioFVZ). The main aim is to create a conference entirely dedicated to OpenBSD and to gather users and OpenBSD enthusiasts from all over the world

Placement Log - Weeks 15 and 16

2007-11-23T08:07:00.000-08:00

This editions theme:"Don't install BrokenSolaris - You wouldn't purposely burn your own house. Would you?"Solaris is so damned picky about what hardware it wil run on. It does things like just hanging for no apparent reason during install, and I'm just about sick of it. I can install 10 OpenBSD boxes in the time I can 1 solaris box. Argghh!Anyway recently I have been teaching MCS students socket

What is this adapter for?

2007-11-20T01:23:00.001-08:00

Seriuosly... It's pointless?It comes with Xeon x64 apples.Any ideas?

Playing With The New SoftRAID driver in OpenBSD

2007-11-15T06:32:00.000-08:00

Up until now, RAIDFrame(from NetBSD) has been the defacto software RAID solution for OpenBSD. It is less than perfect and the BSD developer know this.Under development now is the new "SoftRAID" driver, which is supposed to greatly simplify management of software raid volumes. Read on as I explore.Do not use the SoftRAID driver for production use until it is stable!!! At the tiem of writing the

Oh sun.

2007-11-12T02:03:00.000-08:00

"The dhcpmgr utility speeds up the configuration process by omitting prompts for non-essential server options by using default values for them."Don't make me laugh. It takes 2 hours to start dhcpmgr.

Slashdot and Just Flames

2007-11-09T07:38:00.000-08:00

I have not read slashdot for years, as generally I find it is a waste of time.I got bored today and had an unexpected chuckle (not quite a lol), at the first comment on this article:HereUh oh (Score:5, Funny)by $RANDOMLUSER (804576) on Thursday October 25, @10:55AM (#21114697)> Theo de Raadt asserts...CAUTION: flame war ahead.I guess you might say I am a bit sick, but I enjoy watching people burn

Placement Log - Week 12, 13 and 14 - Attempt 2 - ZFS and shell script

2007-11-08T03:15:00.000-08:00

Inspiration at last...ZFS:I have been playing with the ZFS pool on the zones server in order to expand the number of zones on it. I must say, I am incredibly impressed, and we are not even using any of the advanced features. You just throw a number of disks into a "pool" and say "OI! ZFS, 5GB please for /opt/somedir", and it just does it.I believe that are are all sorts of rollback and redundancy

Placement Log - Week 12, 13 and 14

2007-11-07T01:40:00.000-08:00

Unix frustrations have been plentiful recently. Sometimes, you just wish things would just work (TM).I'm feeling a total lack of inspiration for writing right now, but feel obliged to do so, as I have not written in a while.Hey, It's not all UNIX. The studio stuff has just arrived and we have been cabling the gas chambers. I can hear will and shaun arguing about something in the corridor:Will: "

An Introduction to the Sparc64 Boot EEPROM

2007-10-25T08:36:00.000-07:00

The bootprom found in sun systems is a very powerful and efficient way of administering disks and booting... If you know how to use it... I knew very basic EEPROM business before I started placement, but since then I have learnt much more (through both Shaun, Sun docs and the OpenBSD mailing lists). Lets take a look at what is going on in these beasties:The ConsoleWhen you boot up a Sun box, you

Integrating MediaWiki with TeX

2007-10-23T05:52:00.000-07:00

The researchers here at the University work primarily in TeX (the typesetter). We need to go over why as we all know the benifits of TeX in an accademic environment right?Anyway, I want to demonstrate a couple of tools that add functionality to MediaWiki using TeX as a rendering backend.TexvcTexvc converts Validates and Converts AMS math into a PNG image, so that it may be used in a wiki web page

Mounting FFS Slices Under Windows

2007-10-21T03:01:00.000-07:00

I have just found a very useful piece of software, which allows me to mount my OpenBSD disk slices under windows:So above we see winamp playing music from the X drive, which is the OpenBSD disk slice wd1a.Project Home Page

TeXLive Now The Default TeX Distribution For OpenBSD

2007-10-18T05:50:00.001-07:00

My goal is now complete :) I wanted to replace the rather limited teTeX distribution with TeXLive for OpenBSD. Steven@ has recently switched all ports depending upon teTeX to texlive. For example here we see kdegraphics3 depending upon TeXLive:HereThis is a great achievement for me, and I feel like all of this work has finally been worthwhile. Thanks to everyone who made this possible.

New Studio's

2007-10-18T01:46:00.000-07:00

Aka the "gas chambers".

Placement Log, Weeks 9, 10 and 11

2007-10-17T02:34:00.000-07:00

So what have I been up to then?1::Configuring the desktops for the SunRays.This would have been an easy task, had gnome not existed. As far as I am concerned gnome is the biggest, bloatiest mess I have ever had the misfortune of crossing paths with.All we wanted to do was customise the main menu for all users, adding some grid submission commands, so that the load from thing slike web-browsers,

Quick Script to Make LaTeX Colour Definitions

2007-10-16T07:03:00.000-07:00

Allows you to paste a colour from the gimp and make a latex colour. Got annoyed with needing a calculator nearby.#!/usr/bin/env ruby$VERBOSE = trueelems = [0.0, 0.0, 0.0]constant = 1.0/255.0print "Enter your hex: "triplet = gets().chomp()for i in 0..2 do elems[i] = triplet[i*2, 2] elems[i] = elems[i].hex() * constantendprint "\\definecolor{colourname}{rgb}{%\n"print " #{elems[0]}, #{elems[1]}, #

Theo De Raadt Offered A Job At Google

2007-10-14T15:04:00.000-07:00

I wish to share a gem of a mailing list post with you. So yesterday I was reading misc@openbsd.org, as I do every day. Some usual rant.. Some people needing help and also a post entitled "Google employment opportunity". OK this sounds interesting, lets see what job is on offer:---8<---Hi Theo,---8<---Hmm.. This is a mailing list... Why would you post "Hi Theo"?.---8<---My name is xxxx xxx, and I

Automounter on OpenBSD

2007-10-10T13:28:00.000-07:00

Here is my notes on setting up OpenBSD to automount NFS shares. Sorry it's boring, but I'll need it for reference at some point.$ cat /etc/amd/master/net amd.net$ cat /etc/amd/amd.net/defaults type:=host;fs:=${autodir}/${rhost};rhost:=${key}* opts:=ro,soft,intr,udp

Placement Log - Weeks 9 and 10

2007-09-27T05:36:00.000-07:00

I have no idea if these week numbers are adding up properly. The weeks seem to be just flying. Also I have a headache. The kind that feels like you've been on holiday to auschwitz for a couple of weeks.Lets start out with some classic nix admin gripe:Shaun asked me to delete everyones home directory who was not in the NIS domain. "Fine that's easy enough", I said. A quick script hack later and I

PCC for OpenBSD?

2007-09-16T03:29:00.000-07:00

The OpenBSD developers have always dreamed of ditching GCC as thier primary compiler because they don't like the GPL license. It seems they have become that little closer with the import of PCC (A BSD licensed compiler). This is both good and bad. It is good because it has been coined as "5 to 10 times faster than gcc" and is BSD licensed, but on the other hand, loads of 3rd party stuff, just

Placement Log - Weeks 8 and 9

2007-09-14T03:58:00.000-07:00

The last 2 weeks have been busy.A cocktail of PHP, networking, server building, porting and coffee (and tv? Naa. Don't have a license).Linux screwed us over some more with its complete lack of MAX_CLI_VER for NFS. Yay. Ofcourse I am not the only one pissed at linux recently (More). It seems linux is taking a sad and fasciast turn toward un-freedom and traitory to it's fellow open source projects.

Placement Log - Weeks 5,6 and 7

2007-08-30T01:42:00.000-07:00

It appears i have become quite lazy...The last 3 weeks have been spent setting up the linux hosts on the grid. Taking a peek behind me I see about 30 or linux boxen. Some i386, some dual amd64. The installs were done using a PXE disk imager software called DRBL.The NFS bug magically fixed itself one night. Erratic behavior rules... honest.I have been working on TeXLive a fair amount. I want to

When Dinosaurs Become Extinct..

2007-08-30T01:39:00.000-07:00

Thank lord theres a new solaris installer

The Joys of Software Licensing

2007-08-29T02:25:00.000-07:00

Another license war has started, this time over a wireless driver from OpenBSD. Allegedly the linux guys stole the driver and removed the BSD copyright and put a GPLv2 in it's place. Sure... They could have denied it, played it cool.... But CVS dropped them in it.Full ArtcileUh-oh. Here comes Theo...It boggles the mind. One writes legal text which says "You may not delete this", and their

Placement Log: Week 4

2007-08-14T09:02:00.000-07:00

Week 4 and Shaun is away.A bit late, so this is Week 4 + 1/2 of week 5 :PThe week was mostly spent imaging more SunFire v210's and getting Kate installed on them.The problem with Sun and their KDE "packages", which are distributed on the Software Companion DVD is that they don't work with Solaris 10 as they should. After much ambling around on google, for "libstdc++ not found kde solairs", I give

Wiil's Computing Nicety: Programming in POSIX

2007-08-10T06:49:00.000-07:00

The other day Will said "I love programming in POSIX". At the time it didn't really sink in, but I realise that I take this sort of wonder for granted. /bin/sh scripts should on every single *NIX system under the sun. I would seriously miss this functionality if it weren't there. What made me realise this was a small shell script which I am adding to the TeXLive Base package for OpenBSD. See if

Computing Saviour: MultiXterm

2007-08-09T04:12:00.001-07:00

This is a cracker.Multi xterm is a part of the expect suite which allows you to start lots of xterms on different remote hosts and have just one stdin for all of them.Why is this useful to me? I administrate 9 identical servers here at uni. Before I would login 9 times to these machines to make changes. Now i do it once.Speculate amongst yourselves..

Placement Log: Week 3 II

2007-08-02T15:46:00.000-07:00

This is really taking the piss:bash-3.00# ps -ef | grep dd root 1473 1463 1 12:51:32 pts/3 7:17 dd of=/dev/rdsk/c2t0d0s2 root 1611 1609 0 23:49:31 pts/5 0:00 grep ddbash-3.00# dateThu Aug 2 23:49:34 BST 2007It's only a 72GB disk and the network is supposed to be gigabit!!!Note to self. Don't dd over netcat ever again.

Placement Log: Week 3

2007-08-02T08:23:00.000-07:00

Hello.Week 3 has been spent trying and failing to image disks for lots of identical servers. I'm sat next to a box as i type which is dd'ing a disk over the network. It's been going for about 4 hours so far. Great!On wednesday Shaun hauled in two large servers which were donated to us from intel. You can imagine the delight when we found they were dual CPU, dual core (per CPU, eqaling 16 cores),

Placement Log: Week 2

2007-08-02T04:05:00.000-07:00

Week 2 was spent learning and implementing a NIS domain (Network information system). NIS is a prehistoric directory service that pretty much every sysadmin under the sun uses unless they feel like making their life difficult. Everyone always bangs on about the relevance of the term "YP" in the context of NIS, so go google it. It's not important anyway.NIS is great where:- You are the only person

Placement Log: Week 1

2007-08-02T03:55:00.000-07:00

Week one was suprisingly not spent watching god-awful safety videos, not dissimilar from the insurance adverts you see on tv. "Have you been injured"... Thankfully the University does not see this necessary, or they do not mind me being injured.I have spent time adjusting to the way Shaun works, whilst moving the contents of the old server room, right up to the top of the building, next to a

TeXLive for OpenBSD

2007-07-17T15:34:00.000-07:00

My TexLive port was committed to the OpenBSD ports tree tonight :PList: openbsd-ports-cvsSubject: CVS: cvs.openbsd.org: portsFrom: Jasper Lievisse Adriaanse Date: 2007-07-17 21:56:41Message-ID: 200707172156.l6HLufoK030429 () cvs ! openbsd ! org[Download message RAW]CVSROOT: /cvsModule name: portsChanges by: jasper@cvs.openbsd.org 2007/07/17 15:56:41Log message: import

Comuting Annoyance - Solaris Installer

2007-07-16T04:05:00.000-07:00

- Confirm Information ----------------------------------------------------------- > Confirm the following information. If it is correct, press F2; to change any information, press F4. Name service: NIS Domain name: dec Name server: Specify one Server's host name: dec1 Server's IP address: 172.16.49.1 ------------------

Have a gorilla?

2007-06-28T07:20:00.000-07:00

An ftp session (ftp.openbsd.org):[...snip]227 Entering Passive Mode (129,128,5,191,171,189)LIST -aL150 Have a Gorilla.226 There, everyone likes a Gorilla.Why yes I do.. I suppose.

Computing Mystery Solved: Unicode in GVim

2007-06-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

Whilst testing the xunicode package for XelaTeX I realised that I had no idea how to insert unicode characters in my favorite editor! What has teh world come to...Anyhow. Heres how its done in GVim:Switch to UTF-8(A common unicode storage format, which is ASCII compatible) mode::set encoding=utf-8You might want to put that in your gvimrc if you are going to use unicode a fair amount.Now switch to

Computing Annoyance - Hardware on the stairs

2007-06-18T10:06:00.000-07:00

So this morning I thought I'd start my day with a poached egg and a cuppa tea. After catching all the things that fall out the fridge as you open it, I was well on the way to the perfect breakfast. No milk.. Never mind. I like tea black too. Superb, egg is on the toast and mashed up how i like it. Now then... Upstairs for consumption in front of daytime TV (longleat zoo program).As I ascend the

Computing Nicety - Making a difference

2007-06-18T04:38:00.000-07:00

Having returned from seeing MegaDeth in London (Astoria), I went to check undeadly. I noticed the following article:OpenBSD - Free as in airWhich linked to a kerneltrap article:HereNice to know I can make a difference!

Computing Annoyance - People stealing our Uni stuff.

2007-06-14T06:11:00.000-07:00

I'm really pissed off because someone stole the projector from the UNIX lab at University. Not only can we not use the beamer, but also the Uni has locked the lab. Now I can't use it.Get a Job!