These blog articles were very detailed on purpose, to have full logfiles available just in case needed. I have used these logs to prepare my pkgsrcCon 2013 talk about Ansible and Amazon's EC2, so things can be looked at without actually running anything. As it turns out this was good, because the 32bit NetBSD instances that I've used during my pkgsrcCon demonstration actually decided to do a kernel panic, and the presentation was a bit more on the theoretical side than I originally planned.

Now after pkgsrcCon is over, I would like to publish the presentation slides with all the details, and especially the playbooks and all other files to look at - enjoy!

[Tags: amazon, ansible, aws, ec2, pkgsrc, xen]

I've mused a lot about the transition from system planning over system setup to system operation recently. Different kinds of databases may be involved, that serve different purposes: On the planning end, topics like version management, license management, life cycle management and enterprise architecture management come into play. When this transits into operation, other aspects like system and network configuration get more important, while others fade away.

At the end, someone or something has to make adjustments to systems in order to get them into service, and keep them there. This is either done with a lot of manual labor to keep documentation (CMDB, or whatever serves) and the systems in sync, or - more likely - documentation will grow stale quickly and rot away.

With a growing set of hosts, the latter is not an option, and transparency becomes increasingly important. This is where system "orchestration" tools like cfengine, puppet, chef and ansible come into play. You write a system definition there, and the machine is configured according to this definition automatically: Configuration files can be adjusted, accounts created, software packages installed, services enabled, etc.

System Orchestration Alternatives

Looking at the state of affairs, many people seem to be fond of Puppet these days. This comes with a pretty long list of dependencies (and thus complexity to maintain), and configuration files have to be written in Ruby (which I don't know). So I chose Ansible as alternative to investigate - it comes with very little overhead (no separate daemon on neither the central machine nor any of the configured systems, just using SSH) and its own "Playbook" language seems easy enough to start with, yet complete enough to be used in large environments (as the list of customers listed on the homepage shows).

Packaging Ansible, First Try

My first try to get going with Ansible on NetBSD was to use the version 0.9 archive available, instead of using a GIT checkout. The included (GNU) Makefile tries to determine the version from the git checkout. Which the archive is not. Using information not available in the archive either. Checking if the source code was checked out from GIT by looking if there's a git binary available is not the best idea here, and so I dropped the ball, cursing the fact that not all the world is Linux. Sort of.

Looking briefly at a fresh git checkout that this worked there, but as NetBSD's pkgsrc doesn't support git checkouts (yet, as far as I know?), I moved back to the 0.9 archive.

Packaging Ansible, Second Try

Leaving out the git-based version games, the next fun was to get the Python setup script to install the files in the right place. Having missed much pkgsrc development recently, and not being into Python either way, this proved unneccessary - Joerg Sonnenberg pointed me at existing pkgsrc infrastructure for Python programs, and with them the program was packaged successfully in no time. For now, the package is available on my website, I'll look into review and import into pkgsrc next.

Ansible on NetBSD - What Works, And What Needs More Work

Modules tested successfully on NetBSD 6:

• ping
• command
• copy
• facter
• group add/delete
• mysql_db add/delete
• user add/delete (without system=true)

• user add/delete (with system=true)
• service (needs work)

Examples: Ansible On NetBSD

Here's an example session with basic operation:

% cat work/ansible/hosts.HF
#127.0.0.1 ansible_python_interpreter=/usr/pkg/bin/python2.7
127.0.0.1
    
% ansible -i work/ansible/hosts.HF -s all -m ping
  127.0.0.1 | success >> {  
    "changed": false,
    "ping": "pong"
  }

% finger testuser
finger: testuser: no such user

% ansible -i work/ansible/hosts.HF -s all -m user -a "name=testuser state=present"
127.0.0.1 | success >> {
    "changed": true, 
    "comment": "", 
    "createhome": true, 
    "group": 100, 
    "home": "/home/testuser", 
    "name": "testuser", 
    "shell": "/bin/sh", 
    "state": "present", 
    "system": false, 
    "uid": 1005
}

% finger testuser
Login: testuser                         Name: 
Directory: /home/testuser               Shell: /bin/sh
Never logged in.
No Mail.
No Plan.

% ansible -i work/ansible/hosts.HF -s all -m user -a "name=testuser state=absent"
127.0.0.1 | success >> {
    "changed": true, 
    "force": false, 
    "name": "testuser", 
    "remove": false, 
    "state": "absent"
}

% finger testuser
finger: testuser: no such user

• NetBSD and MirBSD developer Benny Siegert gave a talk titled "pkgsrc on MirBSD" - see his slides! pkgsrc is a framework for packaging and building 3rd party applications from source. Besides MirBSD, it runs on many other platforms like Linux and Mac OS X.
• While building from source is fine, it costs a lot of time. pkgsrc can also create binary packages, and to manage those, there is "pkgin", a binary package manager. Its developer, Emile 'iMil' Heitor introduced it in a talk - see the slides (PDF)!

• MINIX3 and BSD, by Arun Thomas
• The Lua Scripting Language in the NetBSD Kernel, by Marc Balmer
• Touch your NetBSD - towards tablet integration, by Pierre Pronchery
• pkgsrc on MirBSD, by Benny Siegert (slides)
• Introduction to pkgsrc, and to package creation in NetBSD, by Noud de Brouwer
• pkgin, a binary package manager for pkgsrc, also by Emile Heitor (slides)
• Automated package building, by Nicolas Thauvin

• Izumi Tsutsui's NetBSD/cobalt restore CD is available based on NetBSD versions 5.0.2 5.1_RC2. See the for information on what it is and how to use it.

• A negative symbol lookup cache was added to NetBSD's loader for shared libraries and shared objects, ld.so_elf, by Roy Marples: ``I've been researching why Evolution from GNOME takes over 5 minutes to load on my quad core amd64 beast. It boils down to dlsym looking for a symbol that does not exist directly and as such examining every needed library. However, the current implementation does not remember what libraries it as already checked. Normally this isn't a problem, but with the way Evolution is built the search chain is massive. [...]

  With this patch, Evolution (without the patches to and a glib I added to pkgsrc a few days ago) loads in under 2 seconds (5 seconds with initial disk thrashing). ''

• The NetBSD Logo is available in many variants, but a new variant was submitted via www@ these days by "Tim" - which is actually plain HTML, no image:

  ⚑ NetBSD Powered!

• SafeNet's ProtectDrive is ``a full disk encryption solution that encrypts the entire hard drive of laptops, workstations and servers, as well as USB flash drives, to protect data in the case of the theft or loss of a hardware device.''

  How do you implement such preboot authentication and harddisk encryption software, esp. if you want to provide thinks like LDAP integration for the user/key handling and two-factor authentication? Little is known, but rumors say the 32bit version of the software is based on NetBSD, as is backed by this worker bio info: ``Duties: Working on pre-boot restricted environment with loads before operation system and implemented on NetBSD. Ported and optimized the KDrive X server to NetBSD. Developed and implemented user secure authentication interface with smart card support.

  Environment and tools : NetBSD (3.0), C/C++, FLTK''

• A german-language introduction of pkgsrc on OpenSolaris was given by Michael 'kvedulv' Moll at the Munich OpenSolaris User Group back in march. Slides and a video are available.

• Running NetBSD on an Oracle Sun Fire X4140 Server? Check out this posting by Ignatios Souvatzis for the full dmesg pr0n of this machine with 12 CPU cores and 32GB RAM!

• Are you still looking for a nice small ARM-based board to start hacking on NetBSD/arm? The http://www.friendlyarm.net/products/mini2440 may be a good start, esp. after Paul Fleischer is reaching completion of NetBSD support for the board. Citing from his mail to port-arm:

  ``I have now fairly good (i.e., it works for me) support for the MINI2440 on NetBSD with support for the following:
  - S3C2440 UART
  - DM9000 (MAC+PHY)
  - S3C2440 SD Controller
  - S3C2440 DMA Controller
  - S3C2440 IIS Controller
  - FriendlyArm 3,5" LCD Display
  - S3C2440 USB Host Controller (OHCI)
  - S3C2440 Touch Screen
  - UDA1341TS audio codec
  
  Currently, support for three things on the S3C2440 are missing:
  - S3C2440 NAND Controller
  - S3C2440 USB Device Controller
  - S3C2440 RTC
  
  I've also created a stage2 bootloader for use with u-boot, which ensures that the value of bootargs is passed to the NetBSD kernel. At this point I have only tested the code with the 64Mb version of the FriendlyArm MINI2440.

  All the code is available in a Git repository[1] and is based on the netbsd-5 code base. Progress can be followed on my webpage[2]. ''

• While talking about NetBSD on cool hardware: How about NetBSD/hpcarm on WILLCOM | W-ZERO3 (WS004SH) mobile devices? Here is a screenshot of Ebihara-san's WS011SH with CCW screen, and there is also a video "booting NetBSD/hpcarm on WILLCOM | W-ZERO3(WS004SH)" posted on YouTube:

  For more details, see Izumi Tsutsui's posting on port-hpcarm.

• People owning a Marvell PCMCIA WiFi card can how have a look at the malo(4) driver. If you use this on a gumstix ARM board, have a look as some fiddling with drvctl(8) is needed to get the card recognized properly.

• Speaking about Gumstix, KIYOHARA Takashi has declared the porting effort as finished. Support for the baex, connex, verdex and verdex-pro modules is available, as is support for the support modules.

• Staying in the "embedded" corner, KIYOHARA Takashi has announced that Plathome's OpenBlockS600 (AMCC 405EX) can now boot NetBSD via NFS. See the posting for dmesg output. The OpenBlockS600 comes with a AMCC 405EX PowerPC CPU, two GigE ethernet ports and a bunch of other goodies for a price of about $600US.

• Coming from hardware to software, pkgsrc-2009Q4 was released some time ago, and of course binary packages are available for a number of platforms: 5.0/macppc, 4.0.1/sparc and 5.0.1/sparc, 4.0.1/i386, 5.0.1/i386 and the same for 4.0.1/amd64 5.0.1/amd64. Also, binaries of pkgsrc-2009Q3 are available for 5.0/shark.

• Google's Summer of Code was a big success for NetBSD and all of the Open Source community, and it seems there will be one again this summer.

  Preparations are in an early stage, but there are already a FAQ and a timeline as well as the Program Terms of Service. From the NetBSD side, we're always happy for project suggestions (please use our mailing lists for discussions), and in NetBSD, we are currently working on out projects page. If you plan to submit a proposal for a project with NetBSD, please see our project application/proposal form If you plan to submit a proposal for a project with NetBSD, please see our Project Application/Proposal HowTo.

• Getting back to the NetBSD code, a number of interesting changes were made in the previous weeks. The first to mention is that David Young has continued is work on the new shutdown order for device drivers: ``cgd, dk, dm, md, raid, and vnd gracefully detach from the device tree during shutdown. I believe that ccd is the only virtual disk that does not detach.'' This allows having arbitrary stack of file systems, and still have them unconfigured properly in the right order on system shutdown.

• Another major change that went into NetBSD recently is that terminfo was imported into NetBSD-current. Terminfo replaces termcap, but provides a backward compatible termcap interface. This move follows discussion from last summer, and docs by The Open Group (the people who make things like the POSIX standard and the Single Unix Specification), which indicates that the termcap specification will be withdrawn in the future.

• Moving from userland inside the kernel, David Holland has proceeded with work to unhook LFS from UFS. Historically, the Log structured File System was written after the Berkeley Fast File System. With the idea of sharing the core "Unix File System" code for both file systems, this resulted in a strong relationship between LFS and FFS, which was/is not always the best for the advantage and stability of either one: ``sharing ufs between both ffs and lfs has made all three entities (but particularly lfs) gross. ffs and lfs are not similar enough structurally for this sharing to really be a good design.''

• Another major addition to the NetBSD kernel was made recently by Darren Hunt: ``Courtesy of CoyotePoint Systems, I've been working on a port of DTrace [...] to NetBSD for i386.'' Citing Wikipedia, ``DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework created by Sun Microsystems for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time. Originally developed for Solaris, it has since been released under the free Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) and has been ported to several other Unix-like systems.

  DTrace can be used to get a global overview of a running system, such as the amount of memory, CPU time, filesystem and network resources used by the active processes. It can also provide much more fine-grained information, such as a log of the arguments with which a specific function is being called, or a list of the processes accessing a specific file. ''

  The code is available in NetBSD-current. I haven't looked into this yet, but I'm looking forward of reports and blog postings if the wikipedia command line examples work.

  (I think like with ZFS, Dtrace could use a hand with documenting the NetBSD side of things. Any takers?)

• The last kernel change to mention is related to security: mapping the address 0 from userland was disabled. This issue went through the press late last year, and it this is now addressed in NetBSD, too. Those that still beed to map address 0 can do so via the USER_VA0_DISABLED_DEFAULT kernel option or the vm.user_va0_disable sysctl.

• So much about about the NetBSD code for now. Of course having all those fine features added screams for an immediate (*cough*) release, which brings me to the fact that NetBSD 5.0.2 has been released: `` NetBSD 5.0.2 is the second critical/security update of the NetBSD 5.0 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical for security or stability reasons.

  Please note that all fixes in critical/security updates (i.e., NetBSD 5.0.1, 5.0.2, etc.) are cumulative, so the latest update contains all such fixes since the corresponding minor release. These fixes will also appear in future minor releases (i.e., NetBSD 5.1, 5.2, etc.), together with other less-critical fixes and feature enhancements. ''

• There's a hackathon going this weekend (Feb 20/21 2010)
• Volunteers are wanted to setup & man a NetBSD booth at FrOSCamp 2010 Zurich, Switzerland, on Sep 17/18 2010
• pkgsrcCon 2010 will be held in Basel, Switzerland, from May 28ths to 30ths 2010.

For a quick start, run "git clone git://avalon.dragonflybsd.org/pkgsrc.git". See Matt Dillon's mail for a bit more information.

[Tags: git, pkgsrc]

• BSD-related radio-show "bsdtalk" has published an interview with NetBSD's Andrew Doran in its March 2009 issue. Besides covering Andrews work, the upcoming NetBSD 5.0 release is also discussed. Available as mp3 and ogg.

• Cross-compiling pkgsrc packages is a long-standing dream, and it's yet waiting for someone to do it. For the time being, Jared McNeill has come up with an HowTo on how to build 32bit packages on amd64 (and probably other 64bit systems).

• Jared McNeill's been hacking on more stuff recently, and one thing includes changes to the framebuffer console support on x86 (i.e. both i386 and amd64). In short, the recent changes are just a stop on the way to move the splashscreen code and esp. image data from the kernel to userland. I.e. that you can put something like

   menu=Boot NetBSD:vesa 1280x800;splash /logo.bmp;boot netbsd 

  into your /boot.conf in the future. But we'll see a separate announcement when that part is done. Let's stay tuned! :)

• Martti Kumparinen has tackled generating a UFS file system on a "large" (~5.5TB) disk. As the process is not straight forward, he has posted a howto that may help in the future. Any takers for adding comments and integrating this into The NetBSD Guide? :)

• Manpages are a major component of every Unix system. If you have ever tried to write such a manpage, you 'll have learned that they are in a funny text-based format similar to LaTeX and HTML, with its own processor - *roff. There are several *roff implementations, and the one used in NetBSD currently is the GNU implementation. To provide an alternative here is good for both removing GPL'd code from the NetBSD codebase, and also because groff is written in C++, which is slow to compile, and - well - requires a C++ compiler.

  A change for that situation may arise eventually, as Kristaps Dzonsons has been working on a groff replacement to format Unix manpages recently. See his posting and his homepage for further information.

• I've talked about Xen support for PCI passthrough recently, and Manuel Bouyer has finished his work to get full support for passing in access to specific PCI devices from the Xen Dom0 to DomUs. See his posting to port-xen for more details!

• Staying at Xen for a moment, David Brownlee has written instructions on Installing Windows XP in Xen under NetBSD. Just in case anyone needs to run a legacy system... :)

• The NetBSD operating system supports many different hardware and CPU platforms. For a specific platform, binaries are compiled with a specific compiler, and there is a set of binaries for each platform. This results in a rather big number of different sets of binaries - currently about 50. A different approach with historic precedence is to have one binary work on may hardware platforms, so-called "fat" binaries.

  Gregory McGarry has posted suggestions on how to modify NetBSD's toolchain to produce fat binaries. An interesting concept which would solve a number of problems (think: support, updates, pkgsrc!)

• Qt is a user-interface library found in widespread use in the Unix/Linux world. It's not exactly small, and its prerequirement of the X Window System doesn't it make a #1 choice for embedded systems at the first look. A Qt variant - Qt/Embedded - can be ran without X, though, and which thus avoids all the configuration and hardware support trouble of X in one go.

  On NetBSD, Qt/Embedded could talk to the wscons driver directly, and Valeriy 'uwe' Ushakov has posted about his work on patches to adopt Qt/Embedded to wscons. Who's first to post some screenshots?

At this moment, there are 3 hardware versions of BlackMouse: i586, i686 and for x86_64.''

I think at this time I'll stick to my BSD distribution with BSD kernel. :-)

[Tags: blackmouse, linux, pkgsrc]

• In preparation of the NetBSD 5.0 release, a lot of documentation updates were made, esp. in the release notes. Also, many manual pages were added to the system, documenting existing userland tools, library, system and internal interfaces.

• Following some re-organization of binary packages on ftp.NetBSD.org some time ago, the official URLs are now:
  • ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/{MACHINE}/{VERSION}/All
  • ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/current-packages/NetBSD/{MACHINE}/{VERSION}/All
  Both should have the same results, the latter is more safe on mirrors that don't carry /pub/pkgsrc. Adjust your PKG_PATHs!

• Syntax for /etc/rc.conf's ifconfig_xxN variables and /etc/ifconfig.xxN was changed to also allow line breaks via ';'s. This allows something like ifconfig_wi0="ssid 'my network'; dhcp"

• Martin Schuette's work on syslogNG from Google Summer of Code 2008 is now available in NetBSD's syslog

• X.org integration is advancing in big steps. It's on by default on a number of platforms (including alpha, i386, macppc, shark, sparc and sparc64), and instead of using the (now obsolete) MKXORG build variable it can be build with "build.sh -x".

• Old-style LKMs are dead, welcome to the new module framework! (XXX Documentation???) In the process, more and more kernel subsystems are being changed to be loadable as a module, e.g. POSIX AIO and semaphores, File System Snapshots, emulations, exec formats, coredump, NFS client and server, http and data accept filters, ppp compressors, and others.

  Hooks into UVM have been added to unload unused kernel modules if memory is scarce.

• MAKEVERBOSE now has two new levels, 3 and 4. The complete list is now:
  • 0 Minimal output ("quiet")
  • 1 Describe what is occurring
  • 2 Describe what is occurring and echo the actual command
  • 3 Ignore the effect of the "@" prefix in make commands
  • 4 Trace shell commands using the shell's -x flag
  The default remains MAKEVERBOSE=2, you can also set this via build.sh's -N switch.

• A POSIX conformant tabs(1) utility was added

• The haad-dm branch was merged to NetBSD-current. This adds Logical Volumen Management (LVM) functionality to the base NetBSD system. It uses Linux LVM2 tools and our BSD licensed device-mapper driver.

• The wrstuden-revivesa branch was merged into NetBSD-current, bringing Scheduler Activation based threading back to NetBSD, and giving NetBSD 5.0 and up both SA and 1:1 threads.

• Support for the ARM-based Cortina Systems SL3516 eval board was added to NetBSD/evbarm

• patch(1) got a major overhaul, based on DragonflyBSD and OpenBSD. There's better detection of double applied patches, rejected diffs remain in unified diff format, and and less limitation e.g. on line length.

• pxeboot now understands boot.cfg

• Boot CD ISO creation has been greatly overhauled, accomodating changes in boot.cfg, and moving away from a ramdisk-based system to using a file system on the cd-rom, which helps reduce RAM usage. Also, the GENERIC kernel can be used there.

• makefs(8)'s ISO-9660 (cdrom) support was enhanced to write RISC OS data. This allows to make bootable CDs for acorn{26,32} directly, without copying the bootloader to a native file system.

• The christos-time_t branch has been merged into NetBSD-current. This gives 64bit time_t and dev_t types (no more year 2038-problem!!!).

  Many related places like timeval and timespec were adjusted, kernel and userland APIs were touched, and shared library major versions (including libc) were bumped for this fairly exhaustive change.

  See src/UPDATING's entry on 20090110 for the full update path!

• New/updated drivers:
  • jme(4) for JMicron Technologies JME250 Gigabit Ethernet and JME260 Fast Ethernet PCI Express controllers
  • u3g(4) provides better support for 3G datacards than ugensa
  • dbcool(4) for dbCool(tm) family of Thermal Monitor and Fan Controller
  • ataraid(4) now supports Intel MatrixRAID and JMicron RAID
  • bwi(4) for Broadcom BCM4302 wlan controllers, otherwise known as Airport Extreme
  • alipm(4) for the Acer Labs M7101 Power Manage- ment controller
  • admtemp(4) for the Analog Devices ADM1021, Analog Devices ADM1023, Analog Devices ADM1032, Genesys Logic GL523SM, Global Mixed-mode Technology G781, Maxim 1617, and Xeon embedded temperature sensors
  • ipw(4),iwi(4),wpi(4),iwn(4): We ship the firmware now, but users have to accept the Intel license manually by setting sysctls like hw.ipw.accept_eula=1. The latter is also offered by sysinst.
  • nsp(4) adds support for the NSP2000 cryptographic processor which does crypto, hashing and arbitrary precision arithmetics in hardware, and which hooks into the opencrypto(9) interface.
  • pseye(4) makes the Sony Playstation Eye USB webcam usable with the new video(4) framework
  • ath(4) now uses the recently-released source-based version of the Atheros HAL, no more binary blob!

• Jared McNeill has introduced pulseaudio to pkgsrc, which is a huge boost, giving pkgsrc the benefits of one of the best audio systems
• our GNOME packages have been updated by Thomas Klausner, and much work has been done on the HAL layer within GNOME by Jared McNeill. We also now have improved zeroconf support through the avahi package - our thanks to Adam Hoka for that.
• more packages have been moved to install into a staging directory, thanks to Joerg Sonnenberger
• improved support for AIX, again, from Joerg Sonnenberger
• many, many packages have been updated to newer versions, to take advantage of fixes and improved functionality. [...]
• other notable changes include
  • Kouichirou Hiratsuka has added Openoffice 3 to pkgsrc
  • Stoned Elipot and Havard Eidnes have made it their personal goal to incorporate all the CPAN packages into pkgsrc. They have recently been joined in their quest by Ulrich Habel.
  • the vlc package continues to be updated, again by Jared McNeill - it is now at version 0.9.8a
  • we bid a fond thanks, and farewell, to some old favourites, such as python 1.5, nail, bidwatcher, jssi, jsdk20, grail, and zope-2.5
  • the perl package has been upgraded to version 5.10 - a side effect of this is that binary packages of perl modules made with perl-5.8 and earlier versions are incompatible with perl-5.10
  • the addition of some interesting, pertinent, and shiny packages such as parpd, openoffice3, twitux, consolekit, policykit, hal, sslproxy, diffuse, gstfs, openresolv, and pulseaudio and related packages. ''

Read the full text with many more details and data in the release announcement!

[Tags: pkgsrc, releases]

There is no precompiled bootstrap kit available for Solaris 10/x86, only one for some beta version of Solaris 11/x86. Trying that lead to problems finding the right symbols at runtime and whatnot, and did not score success. Likewise, installing the precompiled binary packages that are available for 11/x86 are expected not to work. (I'll get back to that in a second ;)

As using precompiled binaries wasn't an option, compiling myself was the only way. Compiling with pkgsrc requires a C compiler, and pkgsrc. The C compiler was installed with Solaris 10/x86, I only had to find it in /usr/sfw.

For getting pkgsrc, I'd have preferred to use (anon)cvs, but Solaris doesn't ship a binary for that. So, grabbing a recent pkgsrc tarball, extracting it (all as non-root - I do not want to mess up the system by accident!), things went mostly smooth. To make sure I really have the latest pkgsrc, I grabbed the cvs binary package for Solaris 11/x86, untarred it, and used the binary in there to do a "cvs update". Successfully, I should add.

Next step: boot strap pkgsrc. For future upgrades, I may want to add other versions of pkgsrc-compiled software, so I'll add simple versioning and put things into $HOME/pkg1 for now. Bootstrapping this with the latest pkgsrc was easy:

% set pkgbase=$HOME/pkg1
% sh bootstrap/bootstrap \
?        --prefix=${pkgbase} \
?        --pkgdbdir=${pkgbase}/var/db/pkg \
?        --varbase ${pkgbase}/var \
?        --ignore-user-check 

	set pkgbase=$HOME/pkg1
	set path=($pkgbase/bin $pkgbase/sbin $path)
	rehash

	alias make      bmake
	alias pi        pkg_info

% pkg_info
bootstrap-mk-files-20080808 *.mk files for the bootstrap bmake utility
pdksh-5.2.14nb3     Free clone of the AT&T Korn shell
bmake-20080215nb1   Portable (autoconf) version of NetBSD 'make' utility
nawk-20050424nb3    Brian Kernighan's pattern-directed scanning and processing language
nbsed-20040821nb1   NetBSD-current's sed(1)
tnftp-20070806      The enhanced FTP client in NetBSD
pax-20080110        POSIX standard archiver with many extensions
pkg_install-20081013 Package management and administration tools for pkgsrc
digest-20080510     Message digest wrapper utility 

% cd .../pkgsrc/misc/figlet
% make package
% pkg_info -e figlet
figlet-2.2.2
% figlet pkgsrc rocks
       _                                       _        
 _ __ | | ____ _ ___ _ __ ___   _ __ ___   ___| | _____ 
| '_ \| |/ / _` / __| '__/ __| | '__/ _ \ / __| |/ / __|
| |_) |   < (_| \__ \ | | (__  | | | (_) | (__|   <\__ \
| .__/|_|\_\__, |___/_|  \___| |_|  \___/ \___|_|\_\___/
|_|        |___/                                        

Those two test packages indicate that integral parts of pkgsrc and its integration into the system work, and I consider it worth as a base for further platform tests. (Last time I used pkgsrc on Solaris, it gave me a sweet Firefox binary :)

[Tags: pkgsrc, solaris]

• mipsel - cobalt: 1506 packages
• mipseb - sgimips: 344 packages (just recently started)
• arm - shark: 939 packages
• m68k - amiga: 1316 packages

Havard has also uploaded bulk build results from NetBSD 4.0/alpha and pkgsrc-2008Q2. A total of 6.7GB of packages were uploaded, for a total of 6270 packages. The packages can be found on ftp.NetBSD.org as well.

Happy pkg_add'ing!

[Tags: packages, pkgsrc]

With some investigation, GNOME used pkgsrc's fontconfig goo, which doesn't include any fonts - which is about what it displays. To fix, /usr/pkg/etc/fontconfig/fonts.conf can be adjusted to also look in /usr/X11R6 (which I still have from my NetBSD 4.0 installation) and /usr/X11R7 (thanks to MKXORG=yes):

--- /usr/pkg/etc/fontconfig/fonts.conf.orig	2008-09-10 18:05:47.000000000 +0200
+++ /usr/pkg/etc/fontconfig/fonts.conf
@@ -23,6 +23,8 @@
 
 <!-- Font directory list -->
 
+	<dir>/usr/X11R7/lib/X11/fonts</dir>
+	<dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts</dir>
 	<dir>/usr/pkg/lib/X11/fonts</dir>
 	<dir>/usr/pkg/share/ghostscript/fonts</dir>
 	<dir>~/.fonts</dir> 

P.S.: This also fixes fonts on firefox. Yai!

[Tags: gnome, pkgsrc, xorg]

1. audit-packages and download-vulnerability-list are now part of the NetBSD base system, there's no longer a need to install them via pkgsrc. I haven't found any hooks to run them automatically every night, but that can be done easily via cron(8). The commands in question are:

        # download-vulnerability-list
        # audit-packages 

2. Per-user-tmp: Currently, /tmp is shared by all users. In order to avoid name clashes (example: I use /tmp/foo for temporar data as both root and "normal" user), the /tmp directory can be made to be unique for each user now, much the same way as this is done e.g. on Mac Os X. To do so, set

   	per_user_tmp=yes 

   in /etc/rc.conf and reboot. In effect, /tmp is unique for each user then. The implementation is done via magic symlinks:

           # cd /tmp
           # pwd
           /private/tmp/0
           # ls -l /tmp
           lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  18 Jul 13 22:41 /tmp -> /private/tmp/@ruid 

3. httpd: NetBSD now ships with a web server in base. Seriously, I have no idea why this is, but it can be enabled by removing the comment signs of the 'httpd' service in /etc/inetd.conf, and by populating /var/www. After that access by both IPv4 and IPv6 is possible.

4. dhcpcd: NetBSD has shipped with ISC's DHCP client so far, which uses quite a bit or memory. As a supplement, Roy Marples' dhcpcd has been added to the base system. In order to use it for interface xx0, put

        ifconfig_xx0="dhcp" 

   into your /etc/rc.conf file (replacing the old "dhclient=yes" setting).

   On a test system, both dhclient and dhcpcd had ps(1) display a VSZ (virtual size in Kbyte) of ~770, but while dhclient had a RSS (real memory / resident set size, in Kbyte) of 1068, dhcpcd only had a RSS of 548, i.e. the new DHCP client daemon uses about half as much RAM as the ISC dhclient.

5. /boot.cfg: Last, NetBSD's second stage bootloader can now load a configuration file on the i386 and amd64 platforms. Assuming the bootloader was updated after the upgrade ("cp /usr/mdec/boot /boot"), the config file /boot.cfg is used to print the boot menu and offer appripriate actions:

        # cat /boot.cfg
        menu=Boot normally:boot netbsd
        menu=Boot single user:boot netbsd -s
        menu=Disable ACPI:boot netbsd -2
        menu=Disable ACPI and SMP:boot netbsd -12
        menu=Drop to boot prompt:prompt
        default=1
        timeout=5 

• a new ruby gems framework, from Stoned Elipot and Johnny Lam
• many more packages have been moved to install into a staging directory - the DESTDIR work that Joerg Sonnenberger has done almost singlehandedly
• many, many packages have been updated to newer versions, to take advantage of fixes and improved functionality. The following versions of packages are included in the pkgsrc-2008Q2 release:
  apache-2.2.9 firefox-2.0.0.16 and firefox-3.0.1 gnome-2.20.2 kde-3.5.9 mysql-5.0.51 openoffice-2.4.1 opera-9.27 postgresql-8.3.3 python-2.5.2 ruby-1.8.7.22 samba-3.0.30 seamonkey-1.1.11 wireshark-1.0.2 zope-3.3.1
• other changes include
  • Jared Mcneill has re-worked the compiz window manager packages
  • the new ruby gems framework is easy to use, scalable, and very effective
  • Eric Gillespie has updated the subversion package to 1.5.0, and reworked part of the additional language support
  • thanks to Jared Mcneill, David Holland and Reinoud Zandijk, wine-1.0 works well on NetBSD
  • the addition of some interesting, pertinent, and shiny packages such as acroread8, bind95, blame, boxbackup (client and server), compiz-fusion, drupal6, firefox3, fltk2, freeradius2, ftmenu, gambc, gvfs, java-subversion, mediatomb, mono-tools, mowgli, msel, mtftpd, odt2text, pkg_leaves, qrencode, ruby-snmp, smbldap-tools, stegtunnel, torrentzip, unbound, and xsel. ''

• wscons: Expansion for wstablet in NetBSD
  Student: Jason W. Beaudoin

  To support tables for the wscons console driver, a number of changes to the wscons API have been proposed in the student's status report. While there are a number of similarities with the wsmouse interface, there are also a number of differences that need to be worked around, e.g. absolute vs. relative coordinates. Many of the proposed changes are implemented, and we're looking forward to complete this project successfully within time.

  Status report, project page, project proposal

• subfiles: Subfile Support for NetBSD
  Student: Adam Burkepile

  Subfile allow to associate data with a regular file, just like regular allow to associate data with a directory. New internal data structures were defined to identify subfiles within the file system, and tools like newfs and dumpfs were adjusted. An API is being designed to access subfiles, and work to realize the assorted functions is being approached.

  Status report part 1 / 2, project page, project proposal

• hurdt: Hurd translators
  Student: Marek Dopiera

  Translators are programs which provide filesystems in user space functionality. This is provided via NetBSD's RUMP interface, and additional system calls and file system operations have been defined to activate the server processes when access to such a "translator" is made. Currently, the translators are only implemented in NetBSD's ext2 file system, as this allows testing of interaction with Hurd - Hurd's support for FFS seems non-working, unfortunately. The project's under busy development, and we're looking forward to see the final results.

  Status report, project page, project proposal

• lvm: Write and improve NetBSD LVM driver
  Student: Adam Hamsik

  This project implements the Linux LVM API (libdevmapper) on NetBSD, to allow using Linux' lvm2tools for logical volume management. The project's making excellent progress, there is an ISO image (see URL in status report) as well as a qemu image available for testing, and latest reports show that linear volumes can be configured and mounted already.

  Status report, project page, project proposal

• uvc: Add support for UVC devices (USB web-cams)
  Student: Patrick Mahoney

  A kernel driver was developed to read data from webcams using a custom API, work to implement the video2linux API is under way. Current challenges lie in NetBSD's USB stack, which lacks support for isochronous transfers, which is used by many (but not all) webcams. The project has made excellent progress so far, and we're positive that the project will be a success.

  Status report, project page, project proposal

• dvb: DVB drivers and kernel framework
  Student: Jeremy Morse

  This project implements a driver for Digital Video Broadcasting to supplement bktr(4)'s TV card support. So far, a driver and an API to transport data from the kernel to userland was implemented, matching LinuxTV. The project's making good progress, even due to conflicts with the academic schedule.

  Status report, project page, project proposal

• install-tool: Customizable install tool for NetBSD
  Student: Zachary Wegner

  NetBSD's current installer, sysinst, is being split into frontend and backend parts, with a configuration file building the interface between the two parts. Untangling the current mix of user interaction and install operation are ongoing, with challenges like request of install media (think floppy #42) and network configuration. Also, a parser for the configuration file was written, and work not started yet is the frontend creating the configuration file for the backend.

  Status report, project page, project proposal

• fs-utils: File system access utilities
  Student: Ysmal Arnaud

  This project is using NetBSD's RUMP and the ukfs library to access a file system image from userland. So far, makefs(1) can generate a file system image, and it can now be manipulated as well. Both a "file system console" as shell to operate on the image as well as separate tools for single operations have been designed. Many of the "normal" userland tools' functionality like ls(1), cp(1) and rm(1) were implemented. This project has made excellent progress so far, see the status report and project page.

  Status report, project page, project proposal

• cwrapper: pkgsrc: rewrite wrapper framework in C
  Student: Amitai Schlair

  The student was distracted by travel obligations for some time, but work has started in pkgsrc now. Current work includes a set of ATF tests to cover the usage of the existing pkgsrc wrapper framework and a design plan for the new wrapper implementation. The actual wrapper implementation remains to be written, and we're looking forward to see the it happen, including integration into pkgsrc plus benchmarks on the increase in speed.

  Status report, project page, project proposal

• atfify: Converting remaining regression tests to the Automatic Testing Framework
  Student: Lukasz Strzygowski

  The Automated Testing Framework was added to NetBSD as a result of last year's Summer of Code. This year, all the remaining regression tests from src/regress are being converted to ATF. Test suites for tools (awk, grep, make, ...) and libraries (libm, libpthread, ...) were converted so far. Tests for libc are currently being converted, and kernel tests are next. We're looking forward to get all of src/regress changed to ATF!

  Status report, project page, project proposal

• ext3: Implement Ext3 file system support
  Student: Rus-Rebreanu Alin-Florin

  This project intends to implement journaling in the file system by reusing Wasbi's wapbl code. Unfortunately, little has happend to reach this goal (to say the least), and the student got AWOL. Interested parties are welcome to try out ext2fuse (which also does ext3, despite the name) for now.

  Project page, project proposal

• packet-classes: Create an in-kernel API for "packet classes"
  Student: Anish Babu

  Nothing has happened in this project as well. I hear about communication problems, and it remains to see if things move forward here. :-(

  Project page, project proposal

• teredo: Implementation of RFC4380 (Teredo) in NetBSD
  Student: Arnaud Lacombe

  The project aims at creating a Teredo client, server and relay via a kernel pseudo device and assorted userland tools. The project is currently still in the analysis and design phase, which will give it little time for completion -- as for other students, this is due to a clash with the academic schedule of the student. We're holding up hopes that the set goals can be met at least partially.

  Project page, project proposal

• syslogd: Improve syslogd
  Student: Martin Schütte

  The project aims at implementing the upcoming IETF standards for syslog transport over TLS (instead of UDP), a more formal format of the messages themselv for easier automatic parsing, and signing of messages to assert authentication, integrity and correct sequencing of syslog messages. The first part of this is already working, the second part is development. We're looking forward to see this project succeed, as it will be of benefit not only to NetBSD.

  Project page, project proposal

Update: Fixed a typo (thanks tron!), got an update on the ext3 project, and added a link to the status report of the cwrapper project, which I've missed (sorry!).

[Tags: atf, dvb, ext3, google-soc, hurd, lvm, pkgsrc, rump, subfile, sysinst, syslog, teredo, ukfs, usb, uvc, wscons, wstablet]

As expected, after the release of Slackware Linux 12.1, Voltalinux 2.1 (code name 'Livorno') is out. It benefits from the many new features in Slackware: HTTP and FTP install, new kernel, installation on LVM and RAID, etc. Also includes the benefits of the new features found in the NetBSD's pkgsrc port system, such as upgraded packages and a better management system. As usual, Voltalinux comes with more then 150 packages (compiled with the pkgsrc port system) intended for server use, including Postfix, Exim, Dovecot, ClamAV, Pure-FTPd, Bftpd, Squid, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Bind, MaraDNS, etc."''

For more information, see the Voltalinux 2.1 announcement and the Voltalinux homepage.

[Tags: linux, pkgsrc, slackware, voltalinux]

The system comes with a wrapper for running the various commands:

• dp install foobar to install a package and its dependencies
• dp options foobar to learn about the options that can be passed to the USE environment variable
• dp upgrade foobar to upgrade na installed package by recompiling
• dp replace foobar to replace a single package, without touching dependencies.
• dp remove foobar deinstall a package and all its dependencies
• dp info foobar to print information
• ...

In an attempt to solve those problems, and offer other features, Joerg Sonnenberger has worked on the "pbulk" system for some optimizations. The system is still in development, and documentation is somewhat spread over several places, which makes it not a first-hand replacement for the first system.

Due to this, Aleksey Cheusov has adapted pbulk and improved it into distbb, a tool for distributed bulk builds.

Aleksey compares his system to the other ones in a separate mail. Key items are the use of many separate tools for processing bits, with the core in /bin/sh and awk. A major point for forking pbulk was also the easier maintenance for Aleksey as his own project, with less communication overhead for coordination with the pbulk author.

I guess we'll see what system is the better one. For me, I'll define the winner as the system that gives me binary packages for a NetBSD release for all platforms that NetBSD supports.

[Tags: pkgsrc]

Download the CD images from here: draco-0.3.0.iso (232MB, MD5), draco-desktop-2007Q4.iso (596MB, MD5).''

[Tags: draco, linux, pkgsrc]

• Database backend has moved from MySQL to PostgreSQL
• A more accurate database schema
• Support for branches
• CVS commits
• Search function has been improved
• Watch list feature is improved, you can now upload your `pkg_info` and for example have a watch list per server
• Word watch: Add custom words to look for in the cvs commits, and get notified when a match is found
• Support for virtual categories

On a side note, it also seems that one or more people got quite some pkgsrc karma and possibly a new mail address in the process. :)

[Tags: hackathon, pkgsrc]

The contents:

• Developer Roland Illig about pkglint and the pkgsrc documentation
• Developer Ulrich Habel about pkgsrc on Solaris
• Developer Thomas Klausner about pkgsrc-wip and the updating of packages
• Getting started with pkgsrc: about pkgsrc-wip and pkgsrc Hackathons
• A talk with pkgsrc user Aleksey Cheusov
• Towards an userfriendly Ports system: the MidnightBSD mports
• Simplified package management on GoboLinux
• The Zero Install system

• Introduction
• Release engineering, Sendmail, and kauth
• PaX, fileassoc, and Veriexec
• Linux compat, XFree86, pkgsrc, proplib, and Xen
• Filesystems
• iSCSI and optical disc support
• Bluetooth, mobile devices, agr
• Google Summer of Code
• Hackathons and funding

Make options.mk files for packages that don`t already use them, and improve support for options if the package uses them but more options could be added.''

See Adam's posting for more information, and see also the Wiki page for this 7th hackathon.

[Tags: hackathon, pkgsrc]

More Information:

• ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/hubertf/netbsd-4.0RC3-i386pkg.README
• ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/hubertf/netbsd-4.0RC3-i386pkg.iso
• ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/hubertf/netbsd-4.0RC3-i386pkg.md5

The underlying definition of "essential" here is that for setting up a PC with NetBSD for basic desktop operation, plus some toys. :-)

Updated: I've updated the CD on 2007-11-02 to include 'man' and 'misc' install sets, and also epdfview (and dependencies) as package.

[Tags: pkgsrc]

Besides talking bit about pkgsrc, in general, Mark did a number of interviews:

• Alistair Crooks about the history, present state and future of pkgsrc
• Hubert Feyrer: The history, failures and prospects of pkgsrc
• Jordan K. Hubbard: The invention of the FreeBSD Ports system, its drawbacks and the merits of MacPorts
• Erwin Lansing about the FreeBSD Ports
• Marc Espie: Comparison of pkgsrc and the OpenBSD Ports system
• Christoph Badura: Problems and drawbacks of the pkgsrc system
• Joerg Sonnenberger about pkgsrc on DragonFly BSD and his pkgsrc development projects
• James K. Lowden: The pkgjam project

Recommended reading!

[Tags: Articles, pkgsrc]

This branch celebrates the tenth anniversary of pkgsrc, and we would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the people who have made pkgsrc the most portable packaging system in the world - to all of the users, developers and supporters a very large "Thank you" from all of us.''

See the announcement for more information of the branch's hilights, and where to get it.

[Tags: pkgsrc]

Ulrich Habel's article "Der Daemon und die Sonne" talks about pkgsrc on Solaris. He describes how to bootstrap the environment using a precompiled binary bootstrap that was made available as Solaris package, then continues on how to use pkg_add and other tools for using precompiled binaries that are available via www.sunpkg.de.

Dr. Heiko Herrman's article "Daemonic Tux: Linux mit pkgsrc" describes the situation where he gets to a new workplace that has Linux on the desktop, but that calls for some software maintenance. Instead of hunting down the system administrator, pkgsrc can be used to install everything pkgsrc offers into his home directory, and without root privileges. The article gives details on how to bootstrap pkgsrc by compiling, then explains how to compile packages via pkgsrc and gives some hints on pkgsrc's internals.

The articles cannot be read online, information about the magazine and how to get it can be found at www.cul.de.

[Tags: Articles, linux, pkgsrc, solaris]

• bootprops: As an update of turning knobs on the NetBSD kernel without recompiling, Jared has issued Patch #3 and Patch #4 with lots of feedback, and he went on to work on boot properties in his own SVN now, see his blog entry.

• pkgsrc logo: It seems I've started yet another discussion about a pkgsrc logo. Given that people ask on and off about an official logo (e.g. for pkgsrcCon t-shirts), I think it would be nice to have. Entries so far are Chris Wareham's entry, and a cute idea (in varying colors and several different shapes, and readability plus an ASCII and a Java-enabled online version X-) by Thomas Bieg.

  Looking at this from someone that raised and left pkgsrc, and who's doing public relations these days, I'm looking forward to see an official pick by the people managing pkgsrc this time!

• Chaos Singularity (cosin): Hernani Marques Madeira ran a NetBSD booth with many presentations at swiss Chaos Singularity, and he also wrote a lengthy (german-language) report and sent a link to pictures.

• Automatic TCP socket buffer sizing: Mindaugas has ported automatic TCP socket buffer sizing from FreeBSD, and is looking for testers. This code should render some benefit while reducing the need for manual tuning in highspeed network scenarios.

• Package security auditing now part of package tools: Originally, audit-packages was a script that matched every entry in a file against all installed packages to indicate known security problems. After some intermediate speedups, this was finally integrated into the package tools package, "pkg_install" now - see the link for more details. Kudos to Adrian Portelli from the pkgsrc-security team!

Update: Thomas Bieg has made a webpage that documents the progress of his logo suggestion.

[Tags: bootprops, Events, logos, networking, pkgsrc, Security]

• Quentin Garnier: Using virtualisation and pkgsrc in heterogeneous networks (ODP)
• Amitai Schlair: Packaging djbware (HTML)
• Christoph Badura: From the trenches: experiences from a user's point of view (ODP)
• Amitai Schlair: Platform status update Mac OS X (HTML)
• Roland Illig: Platform status update Solaris (HTML)
• Roland Illig: Platform status update Irix (HTML)
• Lubomir Sedlacik: pkgsrc Release Engineering: the work behind the scenes (HTML)
• Joerg Sonnenberger: Another year of pkgsrc: News since last pkgrscCon (HTML)
• Joerg Sonnenberger: Reorganising tools, buildlink and build phases (HTML)
• David Maxwell: Building development code from pkgsrc (HTML)
• James K. Lowden: pkgjam: Moving away from the One True Tree (HTML)
• Roland Illig: Unprivileged builds (HTML)

There's also another interesting part that hints that pkgsrc could gain more users by persuing that user community: ``It happens that pkgsrc is running a little behind and still has 0.63 as its basis. I will try to get a more recent version in pkgsrc (in particular because new code is more likely to contain error, ego notwithstanding), but from looking at the scan, it's clear many of these bugs remain in the current codebase.''

[Tags: Advocacy, coverity, pkgsrc]

% cvs rlog -r1.1 pkgsrc/mk/bsd.pkg.mk
...
revision 1.1
date: 1997/08/20 10:21:06;  author: agc;  state: Exp; 

Anyone throwing a party? :)

[Tags: pkgsrc]

Update: Florian Heigl also posted some interesting details on how to work around a number of bugs.

[Tags: hpux, pkgsrc]

• 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''.