I'm aware that this may cause some distress, and I'm curious to hear your opinion - mail me at the above address (or drop me a line on FB :-).

Also: FB is the only of those apps that I really use these days - I do not currently have plans to add any others. Again, if I'm flooded with pleas, this can be changed. It may actually save me from logging e.g. into Google+ and Twitter to share things there. What do you think?

[Tags: facebook, hubertf]

P.S.: Any volunteers to put blosxom into pkgsrc?

[Tags: blosxom, hubertf]

Thanks xkcd, from the information scientist inside me!

[Tags: data, hubertf, information, xkcd]

Here's the backmatter of the book: ``Practical exercises in system administration can render a machine unusable, and restoring the machine requires manpower which is often scarce. As a result, there is a lack of dedicated exercise machines which can be used in the education of system administration. The Virtual Unix Laboratory is an interactive e-learning system that provides a solution for this situation. After sign-up, machines are installed on which students can do their exercises with full "root"-access. At the end of the exercise, the system checks which parts were done correctly, and gives feedback.

The first part of this book describes the goals of the Virtual Unix Lab and related works, followed by observations about education of system administration. In the second part, the Verification Unit Domain Specific Language (VUDSL) is defined, and diagnosis of the Virtual Unix Lab exercise results and feedback to the user are realized with it. An evaluation of the system shows interesting results and identify areas for further improvement. The third part explains how tutoring and user adaption can be realized. An architecture for a tutoring component for the Virtual Unix Lab is described, and user adaption is based on the user model built by the tutoring component.''

The system was implemented on a machine running NetBSD, training systems available were NetBSD/sparc and Solaris/sparc. Interesting technical points where configuring access to the lab machines by enabling IPfilter rules from the user's webbrowser, and disabling the rules by an at(1) job. Also, the system to install the lab clients used disk images and NetBSD in netbooted environment.

I hope that's enough of a reason to post this here.
</commercial block>

[Tags: dsl, hubertf, Publications, training, vulab]

The system is the core part of my PhD-thesis (to come :), and I've published three technical reports that describe a number of aspects of the systems in lengthy details. Those interested can find them here:

• ``Education of System Administration'' (December 2007, english language, 39 pages)
• ``Implementing exercise result verification for the Virtual Unix Lab'' (December 2007, english language, 89 pages)
• ``Impact of the Virtual Unix Lab: Evaluation of end-of-semester paper tests'' (December 2007, english language, 71 pages)

An introduction and overview of the system's operation can be found in this EuroBSDCon paper.

The thesis will assume the version of the lab described above, including the domain specific languages techniques, diagnosis and feedback, and describe how to implement tutoring and user adaption on top of that.

[Tags: hubertf, vulab]

Back in 1994 I was doing a few first steps in X Window Programming, and I ported this effect from my Amiga to X, mostly as an exercise, after a friend got me the sources for the Amiga program. As I used xlock(more) then, I added it, and it became part of the official release. It went over to xscreensaver and whatnot, and seeing this now after 13 years makes me a bit nostalgic.

(I think I'll try not to think about the platform implications, going from X on a Sun to a Java plugin running inside a webbrowser on a *cough* Linux system. Who's got a Flash version of this? :-)

P.S.: To get back on-topic, of course you can run this without Java and a webbrowser on NetBSD, too:

$ cd /usr/pkgsrc/*/xlockmore
$ make install
$ xlock -mode galaxy 

Makes me wonder what for I'm running the infrastructure here...

[Tags: hubertf, ipv6, rants]

Those interested can find the config in the "May 2007" entry of the updates of my vpnc article.

(I also have some scripts that do auto-detection of wirefull and wireless networks and setup connections accordingly, together with APM-based suspend and resume; I'll write some more about that some other time, as it's what NetBSD lacks when installed out of the box)

[Tags: hubertf, vpnc, wpa]

-	from a contributer of NetBSD,
	which had the least number of incidents reported for BSDs,
	as confirmed by the US-Cert in the past four years

[Tags: hubertf, openbsd, Security]

• Linuxdays Chemnitz: I was only there for my presentation on sunday, due to not feeling too well the days before. Still, Stefan, Jörg, Charlie and many others staffed the booth just fine, and I think every single household in and around Chemnitz has a NetBSD install and/or Live CD now. :)

  Related talks to mention are Stefan Schumacher's talk on hardening systems with systrace and deleting data. My own talk was not too NetBSD specific, showing an application on how to implement dynamic DNS with some retail web/domain hoster. Slides for my talks are available as OpenOffice .ODP and as PDF. (I'll reconsider the move from TeX/prosper to OpenOffice after it was NOT as easy as I expected to find a machine running OOo for presentation purpose, after my laptop's harddisk crashed on the way to Chemnitz!)

• While at roadshows: Stefan Schumacher has made DIN A4 pkgsrc flyers in english and german language.

• NetBSD's puff-based FUSE implementation "refuse" is now in a state to also run the NTFS-g3 filesystem, which offers read/write support for NTFS. It's available from pkgsrc/filesystems/fuse-ntfs-3g.

• Google News found me an article that NetBSD stack supports Geode NAS design: ``Wasabi Systems Inc.'s BSD-based NAS (network attached storage) software stack now supports a Geode-based reference design from AMD. Wasabi Storage Builder for NAS, combined with AMD's Geode LX NAS RDK (reference design kit), provides a secure, reliable platform for the development of NAS devices, according to Wasabi. ''

  While that's all fine for Wasabi, it should be noted that whatever the company Wasabi offers is not automatically available in the freely available operating system called NetBSD. Integration efforts would have to happen first, so the headline of that article is unfortunately misleading if not to say plain wrong!

• Another article that's more to the point: Julio M. Merino Vidal has worked on getting multiboot support into NetBSD, and in his article ``Making NetBSD Multiboot-Compatible'' he talks more about it.

• Andrew Doran has done lots of work on NetBSD's thread and SMP implementation recently, and he has made a comparison between performance of the Scheduler-Activations-based code in NetBSD 4 and the one that will be in NetBSD 5 (AKA NetBSD-current, currently numbered as 4.99.13). See his mail to tech-kern or watch the images for 'make cleandir' on an empty source tree and the MySQL supersmack benchmark.

• Google runs another Summer of Code, and this year it's not clear upfront who will be allowed as mentoring organizations. NetBSD is ready to participate again, and there's an official announcement from NetBSD about this, including pointers to our suggested/wanted list of projects and the project application HowTo. People interested in submitting a project proposal (via google!) are encouraged to use the remaining time until the deadline to discuss their proposals on the public NetBSD tech-* lists! (Personally I'll try to stay out of GSoC this year to finish some reallife work. At least that's the plan so far ...)

• Three new security advisories were released:
  • NetBSD Security Advisory 2007-001: Integer overflow in ktruser()
  • NetBSD Security Advisory 2007-002: Integer overflows in Render and DBE extensions
  • NetBSD Security Advisory 2007-003: BIND multiple denial of service vulnerabilities

• Another article that doesn't mention NetBSD but g4u: ``How to Install a New Hard Drive: Tech Clinic'' by Joel Johnson. From the article: `` To make your new drive work like your old drive, you'll need a disk "cloner." There are a myriad of options, from commercial solutions such as the old favorite Ghost from Symantec ($70; symantec.com) and Copy Commander from VCom ($35; v-com.com) to free applications, such as MaxBlast from Maxtor, that come bundled with hard drives. If you're comfortable mucking around with Linux/BSD, I've had great luck with the free g4u application. If you have a local file server, you can even send the disk image from your laptop to an FTP site, install the larger drive, then FTP it back to your laptop, obviating the need for a drive enclosure''.

• I've had a look at the the BSD Certification Group's donation meter page tonight, and saw it's at 11% ($4.139US out of $35kUS) of what's needed right now. Looking at the list of who has contributed so far, I thought I'd mention this here: While you may think NetBSD does not need certification, think again how this may improve NetBSD's overall recognition in the industry. And in the end it's a *BSD* certification, and not FreeBSD and/or OpenBSD only - so I think NetBSD and its users should actively participate in the process to drive this.

  Go for it!

• Of course your favourite Open Source project may always need money, too, so think about it - a few bucks can make a difference. As for NetBSD, money's needed to buy new and replace old hardware, support public relations and handle legal fees.

  Personally, I'd like to see this expanded for having more people do work on public relations, setting up booths at roadshows and going to conferences, but that's not a cheap goal: Having materials like flyers, CDs, flags, posters etc. available is one thing, and paying for travel, accommodation and possibly conference and booth fees easily sum up to several hundred $/EUR per conference, and there's quite a number of them, all over the year and all over the planet.

  Another goal that I think would be nice to achieve is being able to reward people for contributing to the NetBSD project's code base, e.g. by implementing specific subsystems, various projects (think "Google Summer of Code") or fix critical bugs.

  For all this, money is needed. As a non-profit organization, the NetBSD Project does not sell its goods and instead gives it away for freely for the benefit of everyone. As a return, we're glad for every user -- private and commercial -- as well as companies to think about what they get, and give something back.

• Personally I'm still looking for someone to pay me for working part-time on NetBSD documentation and public relations. Current state of things as far as I'm concerned is that I'm devoting a lot of my personal time to NetBSD right now for free, while working on my PhD thesis; Once this is done, I'll have to find a job that's paying my bills, and I'd very much appreciate to continue working on NetBSD, but this won't be for free then any more. Timeframe for this is Q3/2007, so if you think things should continue as far as I'm concerned, contact me!

   ... idling ...
   ...
   <dork> http://www.blabla.com/
   <you> WTF?!
   ...
   ... idling ...  

Now here's an idea to fix this: The problem comes from the fact that people just cut the URL from their browser's address bar. Now, what if taking an address from the browser would not only take the URL, but some useful text, like the URL's title. Which is already loaded and displayed right now anyways, or which could probably be loaded when right-clicking on an URL and selecting "Copy Link Location" in Firefox. I.e. the idea is to have something like "bla bla bla - http://www.blabla.com/" copied, instead of just "http://www.blabla.com/":

   ... idling ...
   ...
   <dork> bla bla bla - http://www.blabla.com/
    * you is instantly enlightened!
   ...
   ... idling ...  

=> more meaning of URLs in chats, international understanding, peace on earth!

(If someone earns a lot of money from this idea, I'd like to get a share of it :-)

[Tags: hubertf, rants]

Bad news first: I haven't seen any money from Google so far. This is due to their policy that they start paying only after you hit $100US one month, which I didn't do the first month (and that mostly because I enabled this in mid-september). I expect this to change in the future, though.

So what happened so far? The two websites I have Google AdWords on are the g4u homepage and my NetBSD blog. In the past ~2 months, the g4u homepage got about 42.000 hits and the blog got 9.100 hits. On the g4u page, 539 people were interested in the ads displayed, while ads on the blogs were of interest to 180 people. I admit I have no idea how Google determines payment per hit/click, but the money they show I've "earned" is $129 for the g4u homepage and $71 for the blog.

So far that's nothing that will pay my bills, but at least it will pay some food every now and then, or some stuff I could use for future NetBSD booths...

(BTW, if you want to help out in that regard directly: I'm VERY MUCH appreciating more help from the NetBSD community at conferences etc. where NetBSD booths are, after manning the Systems booth alone for three days last week; for the monetary help you can speed that up with paypal ;-)

[Tags: g4u, hubertf]

Tuesday, Oct 24th: 2nd Systems day

• NetBSD's procfs with -o linux has /emul/linux/proc/$$/exe as hardlink, while Linux has a symlink. This breaks compatibility that some database applications expect, see my posting to http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-kern/2006/10/25/0000.html
• Some user feedback: "NetBSD documentation is outdated - it used to be great for 2.0, but it's lacking now." -- We need a documentation-hackathon to fix stuff: htdocs/Documentation, htdocs/guide, src/distrib/notes
• There was interest in offering NetBSD as alternative operating system from a company working on mobile producs with AMD Alchemy (= MIPS) and Geode (=i386). I've pointed them at our list of possible consultants and the port-mips@, port-i386 and netbsd-jobs@ lists
• One company offered to do a funny kind of (free!) advertizement for us: have our logo and a slogen printed on invoices they do for their customers. The customers would be people in traditional office environments handling invoices, so I'm not sure what message to tell the average secretary... any ideas?
• A user asked about NetBSD on Cobalt machines, and how to install; I've pointed at the Restore CD (http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/blog.html/nb_20060403_1314.html)
• We had a NetBSD/Xen showcase, consisting of a PC with a 2GHZ AMD CPU, 2GB RAM, 19" TFT etc. showing X with KDE and a webbrowser accessing Tomcat web application services (JPetStore) on two seperate domains, which were in turn talking to PostgreSQL servers running in two other domains.

  The showcase attracted many people, and there were lots of questions about Xen, mostly of general kind about Xen (what is it, what does it do, running DOS & Windows XP, ...) . Too bad the showcase still has Xen2 running - there are already plans to change that for the next event, though! :-)

• A company inquired about supporting NetBSD from their hardware debugger
• In her opening speech of Systems, the mayor of Munich thanks Limux project and Linux New Media publishing for bringing Open Source to Munich & Systems. Unfortunately no word about Systems and C&L who did the real work of bringing all the projects there - and no word on those, either. Sounds like bad communication, and I'm thinking abour writing her a letter and thanking her for the great time we're having.

• 25 of 50 burned CDs gone after two days, with an easy monday; 30/50 gone after day three - maybe should have brought 100... (also: have the CD surface printed, plus get some paper bags for the CDs next time... preferably in NetBSD-orange :-) (Note: ordered 200 orange paper CD sleeves)
• There was an inquiry about the state of native Java - still pending, I'm afraid, waiting for ALL the regression tests to pass.
• Someone had an urge to run SCO binaries for some database systems and business applications in a production environment. Pointed them at compat_ibcs2(8).
• XenMan is a nice GUI frontend for managing local and remote Xen domains, allowing domain startup and shutdown, accessing the console, etc. - see http://sourceforge.net/projects/xenman/ (someone please put this into pkgsrc!)
• A company was interested in using NetBSD on settop-boxes, using handheld/embedded hardware - got them in contact with someone who's working in that environment.
• We should document our build environment for custom ramdisk and boot images for embedded devices, as this raised quite some interest when I gave an introduction (crunchgen, src/distrib, makefs, ...)
• I've learned that my town, Regensburger, has a Linux user group. They didn't know about our BSD user group "HappaBSD" either.
• Several people asked about using pkgsrc on Mac OS X and Debian, I've pointed them at my (now a bit outdated...) 21C3 paper (http://www.feyrer.de/Texts/Own/21c3-pkgsrc-paper.pdf) and the generic NetBSD documentation

One observation I've made during the whole event is that NetBSD needs to do more work on building up a user community - attracting people, handing out CDs (and assorted stuff like t-shirts and posters won't hurt either!), and encouraging them to participate at user group events and tradeshows like Systems.

NetBSD as an operating system has a lot to offer, and given it's ancestry of BSD, the classic platforms we inherited and the new embedded and server platforms we've added makes an excellent operating system - now we just have to market it. Join us!

[Tags: Events, hubertf]

• The overall impression was that the first day was pretty quiet - I've noticed people at many booths (not only the Open Source ones, esp. many of the "business" type ones) standing idly, waiting for visitors to come by.

• At the NetBSD booth there was a moderate stream of people dropping by, which left me enough time to get the NetBSD/Xen showcase going that Daniel Seuffert brought: A 2GHz AMD PC with 2GB RAM, running Xen with five domains: two database domains running PostgreSQL, two "application server" domains running Tomcat and the JPetstore Demo (which access the two PostgreSQL database machines), and one domain for the "client" stuff - KDE, xcon, two Konqueror windows to show the two JPetstores on the two different machines (identified by ther IP address), a Konsole terminal with tabs for Dom0 and the four DomUs as well as some vncviewer windows to show how DomUs can be managed graphically. All domains were running NetBSD, of course.

  Overall the Xen showcase was quite an attraction for people, and overall feedback was very good!

  (A screenshot of that showcase can be found here)

• FreePascal needs work for porting to NetBSD - they have several options for generating code, ranging from assembling with binutils (possibly setup for crosscompiling!) and linking against libc to emitting code that does bypass libc and issue system calls directly(!!! all in the name of supporting old Linux systems...).

  For a working port, a first step would be to go the "use binutils and libc" way. For that, the equivalent of crt0.o need to be setup. (Now where's the source for crt0.o again?)

• Wikipedia.de pointed out that the German language NetBSD entry needs work!!! I also asked Henning Schlottmann about adding our logo to the Wikipedia Deutschland (which was removed twice because we didn't waant to give up our copyright / trademark), and it seems it's added again now! Thanks Henning!

• People asked why there is no native OpenOffice 2 for NetBSD. Good question - any takers?

!!! We're low on NetBSD booth staff! If you're at/near the Systems roadshow in Munich and can help out at the NetBSD booth, esp. Wed/Thu/Fri, send mail to hubertf@NetBSD.org. Thanks!

Besides CeBit, Systems is the second largest computer show in Germany for "business professionals" and "information technology". Thanks to the work of Rosa Riebl from Computer- und Literaturverlag (CUL) and Daniel Ettle, there are a number of booths for Open Source projects again this year, and NetBSD is among them. Being the poor sod who's manning the booth, here are some first impressions from today, which consisted mostly of arrival and booth setup, the show will open its doors to the public tomorrow at 9am:

• Driving to Munich & booth setup

• Daniel Seuffert brought some NetBSD flags, flyers and his Xen showcase (machine with NetBSD/Xen preinstalled plus 19" TFT)

• Material from me includes more flyers, posters, my Shark running a slideshow, and some candy to attract people. I expected things like t-shirt sales to not be allowed at Systems and left them at home; I only learned later that it would have been ok. Oh well.

• I had a chat with a guy from the Joomla booth, and they asked when we will import Joomla into pkgsrc. Given the short episode (import & immediate removal due to "security reasons") the other day, I think there's some more focussing needed in pkgsrc to get to it's goal of providing software easily (and not making it NOT available because our current procedures can't handle things).

  It would be nice to offer such systems like Joomla to be available out of the box with a full set of packages, without further fiddling. (see usability/user friendliness...)

• FreeBSD and OpenBSD will have several people manning their booths all the time. Unfortunately the NetBSD people that helped out in past years are all either sick or busy this year, so that I'll have to run the NetBSD booth alone all the time, and Danie 'DaN' Ettle will help me out on thursday and friday, when I'll have to get back to my job, too. I'd hope for a bit more activity from our user community:

  !!! We're low on NetBSD booth staff! If you're at/near the Systems roadshow in Munich and can help out at the NetBSD booth, esp. Wed/Thu/Fri, send mail to hubertf@NetBSD.org. Thanks!

For those that haven't followed things too closely, there was a Mentor Summit for Google's "Summer of Code" last saturday in Mountain View, California. Google invited two mentors/admins from every participating GSoC project, and for NetBSD, Alistair Crooks (agc) and I (hubertf) were there to chat with people, listen to talks and share our experiences.

I've posted my session notes and references to the summit's wiki to the netbsd-users list, so have a look there if you're interested of what may come up in case there's another "Summer of Code" next year, and what experiences students, mentors and admins made in the past years and what they may learn from for the future.

Now given that this is *my* (hubertf's) weblog, I thought I'd put some of the (more or less) funny but off-topic things in here, in case anyone cares what else happened on the trip to Mountain View and back.

Friday, Oct 13th: Travel & arrival

• Security checks at Munich airport (MUC) suck: they want my hand lotion (two small tubes) in a plastic bag. Both my deodorant and my tooth paste (which was almost empty!) were confiscated as they're security threats. Yeah, right - I'll bring you down with my toothpaste.

  On a related note and in retrospect, I find it interesting that the security checks in Munich were by far the most strict ones. None of the checks in San Francisco and Chicago could compare to those.

• After many hours of flight, taking BART and Caltrain to Mountain View from SFO was ok, even if I had to discover that the schedule on the web isn't upto date. Walking from the train station to the hotel was a lesser fun - I just remembered that you were expected to have a car in this country. (No cabs at ~midnite there, either... doh!)

• I've posted my session notes etc. to the netbsd-users list for further discussing.
• In the evening, a group of NetBSD people had food & drinks in the 21st Amendment brewery club/restaurant in San Francisco, including Alistair Crooks, Darren Reed, Jef Rizzo, Jan Schauman, Jan's wife and me.

• Find a hotel to spend the night from sunday to monday. While I have a very nice offer to use mrg@'s couch, I realized that doing the commute to SFO in the morning would be too time consuming. Also, as I wanted to do some sightseeing in San Francisco today, not having to go back all the way back to Mountain View in the evening was a good decision. (Remember for next time: rent a car!!!)
• I've walked around Market Street and the area surrounding it most of the day, freshing up memories from my last stay there 13 years ago
• Surfing the web back in my hotel room, which had wireless network access, I found that MoinMoin Wiki (which was used for documenting some of the GSoC Mentor Summit's activities) can export as DocBook/XML. Maybe NetBSD make use of that, at least for htdocs/Documentation. (sure not for htdocs/guide, no idea for htdocs/Ports and I don't know what else we have in htdocs... probably ways too much!)

• Not much to say, 4+9 hours of flight (via Chicago) in economy class sucked. Home tuesday Oct 17th at ~2pm, and first thing to do at home is get a new cell phone as my old Siemens A55 kicked the bucket on the flight to the US. Doh!

The agenda's still building up, but my personal point of interest is how much "research" to have in the actual project proposals - I'm under the impression that the NetBSD project proposals could/should be a lot clearer, and leave less decisions or open questions to the student working on a project. Of course it means a lot more work and to at least halfways think through a project before proposing it, but at the end it will mean a clearer defined goal for the student towards which to work. Depending on the actual project, of course.

[Tags: google-soc, hubertf]

Feel free to use the extra links to inform yourself about related news and products, it won't hurt me! ;-)

P.S.: I've also updated the image of the dancing daemon a bit to make it more fit for the NetBSD theme. The idea is from EFNet #NetBSD's mspo. :)

[Tags: g4u, hubertf]

The problem is getting the necessary cash to do that, and that's where I've started wondering if adding ads to my NetBSD blog, the short articles as well as the g4u homepage would bring in enough revenue to do the stunt.

Before forcing this down my users' (your!) throat, I'd like to hear some feedback from you -- ads on my NetBSD blog and g4u homepage, good or bad? Tell me!

If I don't get a total uproar I'll probably give it a few months trial period to evaluate this. If someone feels like sharing their lottery win instead, or just putting their money where their VERY big mouth is , I'll be happy to take donations - let me know!

Update: Stefan got me a link to the Google Will Eat Itself project.

[Tags: g4u, hubertf]

``Auch im Informatikjahr 2006 ist das Erlebnisschiff von Wissenschaft im Dialog wieder auf Tour und legt in zahlreichen Städten entlang der deutschen Wasserstraßen an. Die Ausstellung an Bord des 105 Meter langen Binnenschiffs zeigt von Mai bis September, wie Informatik den Sport und seine Geräte verändert.''

Das Erlebnisschiff wird kommenden Samstag und Sonntag in Regensburg gastieren und Ausstellungen und Vortraege zu relevanten Themen bieten. Mit dabei sind fuer den Fachbereich Informatik der Fachhochschule Regensburg Ingo Frank und meine Wenigkeit, wir werden u.a. eine mit Kuenstlicher Intelligenz gesteuerte Carrera-Rennbahn, Anwendungen zur Robotik sowie einen Video-Rendering Cluster vorstellen, der vor ein paar Jahren zum Erstellen der Zieleinlaufsvideos und -fotos beim Regensburger Stadtmarathon zum Einsatz kam.

Vielleicht hat ja der/die eine oder andere am kommenden Wochenende noch nichts vor und mag mal vorbeischau'n!

Wann: Samstag 16.9. und Sonntag 17.9.2006, jeweils 10 bis 19h
Wo: Donaulaende 9, naehe Villapark, Regensburg
Eintritt: Kostenlos

Mehr Infos gibt's unter hier.

[Tags: Events, hubertf]

Doing some digging, it seems that

    \usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx} 

    \usepackage{graphicx} 

/home/cvs/src-current/obj.i386/tooldir/bin/nbinstallboot  -t raw  \
	-mi386  bootxx /home/cvs/src-current/obj.i386/destdir/usr/\
	mdec/bootxx_cd9660
nbinstallboot: Invalid magic in stage1 bootstrap 0 != 7886b6d1
nbinstallboot: Set bootstrap operation failed 

I've verified that daily releng builds work, so this was probably a problem on my side, but where? I didn't want to blindly rebuild the whole toolchain on this slow PC, so tried investigating. Comparing /usr/mdec/bootxx_cd990 from my own and the releng build showed that there *was* some difference, so I continued looking in src/sys/arch/i386/stand/bootxx/bootxx_cd9660 to see what the matter was. Using hexdump -C showed that there was a difference between my bootxx_cd9660 and the releng one, and after getting the intermediate files of the build (bootxx_cd9660.tmp, cdboot.o) from a helpful being on #NetBSD, nm(1) showed that my version of cdboot.o lacked several symbols, e.g. a "start1".

As the cdboot.o file is made directly from a cdboot.S file, there's probably not much chance for the compiler to break things, and I didn't really believe that the assembler would add symbols on its own. Asking other people, they confirmed that they had "start1" in their cdboot.S files, while my copy of the same file lacked such a symbol. From there it was just a quick look at src/sys/arch/i386/stand/cdboot/CVS/Entries to fine the problem:

miyu% cat CVS/Entries
/Makefile/1.6/Wed Jun 28 20:23:05 2006//
/cdboot.S/1.2/Mon Aug  7 23:24:18 2006//T1.2
D 

Next thing to do: cd src ; cvs up -A, just to be on the safe side.

[Tags: cvs, hubertf, rants]

Maybe NetBSD should add some holes to the operating system and at the same time start making money from selling anti-virus products, personals firewalls and whatnot... doh!

[Tags: hubertf, rants]

Those that didn't pay attention^W^Whaven't followed the discusion can read the full proposal. for all the details.

Now we'll see if someone finds this useful (or if I just go and commit this, or lose interest over yet another pointless bikeshed "discussion").

[Tags: hubertf, iso]

``Business is unpredictable and unsafe. The Internet is dangerous. Many blogs have been written about these dangers, and there's no way we can list them all here. Read the blogs. The Internet is covered in slippery slopes with loose, slippery and unpredictable footing. The RIAA can make matters worse. Patent trolls are everywhere. You may fall, be spammed or suffer a DOS attack. There are hidden viruses and worms. You could break your computer. There is wild code, which may be vicious, poisonous or carriers of dread malware. These include viruses and worms. E-mail can be poisonous as well. We don't do anything to protect you from any of this. We do not inspect, supervise or maintain the Internet, blogosphere, ISP's or other features, natural or otherwise.''

I think this should be brought to every user's attention before they get access to a computer. And re-acknowledged every day. Anyone care to provide stickers, also in translated forms? :)

[Tags: funny, hubertf, rants]

Also, it seems paypal changed some details on their webpage, and the paypal buttons on both the the g4u homepage and the NetBSD t-shirt page were broken. I have fixed them (even if I don't like the new images they offer as much as I liked the old ones :-), and for g4u there's now also a subscription possible to send me some spare cash you may have on a regular base.

[Tags: g4u, hubertf, paypal]

Personally, I did some work on cksum(1) to implement checksum verification. I've wished that ever since, as NetBSD releases come with those nice checksum files (BSDSUM CKSUM MD5 SHA512 SYSVSUM). Now this can be done a bit easier:

miyu% cksum -o 1 -c BSDSUM
miyu% cksum -o 2 -c SYSVSUM 
miyu% cksum -c CKSUM 
miyu% cat MD5 SHA512 | cksum -c
miyu%  

^- No, this is not NetBSD-related at all, but the website served me as source of personal amusement. The (assumed) fact that lawyers killing web forums and thus killing free speach SUCKS! I hope people will be able to stop this madness.

[Tags: hubertf, rants]

Looking at "normal" mount(8) output is pretty familiar, e.g. on my Sun SPARCstation 5 that has two local partitions and an NFS mount from another machine:

smaug# mount 
/dev/sd0a on / type ffs (local)
/dev/sd0e on /usr type ffs (local)
procfs on /proc type procfs (read-only, local)
kernfs on /kern type kernfs (read-only, local)
server.ipv6.fh-regensburg.de:/disk5 on /disk5 type nfs 

smaug# mount -v
/dev/sd0a on / type ffs (local, root file system, fsid: 0x700/0x78b, \
	reads: sync 475428 async 32, writes: sync 79953 async 7238)
/dev/sd0e on /usr type ffs (local, fsid: 0x704/0x78b, reads: sync \
	711144 async 65, writes: sync 2 async 24)
procfs on /proc type procfs (read-only, local, fsid: 0x1b01/0x1ae1b, \
	reads: sync 0 async 0, writes: sync 0 async 0)
kernfs on /kern type kernfs (read-only, local, fsid: 0x8b01/0x1d28b, \
	reads: sync 0 async 0, writes: sync 0 async 0)
server.ipv6.fh-regensburg.de:/disk5 on /disk5 type nfs (fsid: 0xb01/0x70b, \
	reads: sync 0 async 0, writes: sync 0 async 0) 

But there is more information, if you use "-v" twice (long lines continued with \ again):

smaug# mount -vv
mount_ffs: /dev/sd0a on /: specified device does not match mounted device
/dev/sd0a on / type ffs (local, root file system, fsid: 0x700/0x78b, reads: \
	sync 475441 async 32, writes: sync 79953 async 7240)
/dev/sd0e on /usr type ffs (local, fsid: 0x704/0x78b, reads: sync 711205 \
	async 65, writes: sync 2 async 24)
procfs on /proc type procfs (read-only, local, fsid: 0x1b01/0x1ae1b, reads: \
	sync 0 async 0, writes: sync 0 async 0, [procfs: version=1, \
	flags=0x0])
kernfs on /kern type kernfs (read-only, local, fsid: 0x8b01/0x1d28b, reads: \
	sync 0 async 0, writes: sync 0 async 0)
server.ipv6.fh-regensburg.de:/disk5 on /disk5 type nfs (fsid: 0xb01/0x70b, \
	reads: sync 0 async 0, writes: sync 0 async 0, [nfs: \
	addr=2001:638:a01:5:125:2aff:fe82:cade, port=2049, addrlen=28, \
	sotype=2, proto=0, fhsize=0, flags=0x8281, \
	wsize=8192, rsize=8192, readdirsize=8192, timeo=300, retrans=10, \
	maxgrouplist=16, readahead=2, leaseterm=30, deadthresh=9]) 

Enjoy!

[Tags: Docs, hubertf]