FreeBSD 6.4 EoL
As of yesterday, FreeBSD 6.4, and with it the entire 6.x branch, has
reached its End-of-Life. It's time to upgrade (or maybe upgrayedd, for a
double dose of something-or-other).
So herein lies the problems. Months (years?) ago, I attempted to upgrade
tak to FreeBSD 7.2. I plugged in a SATA disk into my workstation,
installed the OS, reconfigured all the daemons, services, and
functionalities tak has running, copied over a snapshot of all the data,
and then edited the fstab to match the device names as they'd exist on
tak.
I removed the IDE root disk and installed the new SATA disk and tak and
watched the kernel fail to find the root disk. Or the other SATA disk in
tak.
Based on the bug reports in the FreeBSD Gnats system, and various
conversations in the mailing list, it seems Asus, who made the
motherboard in tak, used a slightly non-standard SATA implementation on
this particular board. Between the 6.x and 7.x line, some work had been
done on the SATA drivers in FreeBSD and mad them more
standards-compliant (a good thing). This, however, broke SATA on this
Asus board.
Tak is about 6 years old now, and other than some over heating issues,
serves its purpose well. So do upgrade to FreeBSD 8.x on an IDE disk and
replace the other SATA disk with another ATA disk, or do I build a new,
lower-power, higher-performance system?
If anyone actually reads this, feel free to use the new comments feature
to give me feedback. I think it's working.
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Gmail and mutt
I like mutt. Of all the mail clients I've used over the years, it
sucks the least. It works well with my mail server.
Despite having my own domain and mail server, I still use gmail for
certain things; things I don't mind being retained for 3 years after I
delete them, or more specifically, things I want retained for 3 years
after I delete them.
I don't like the gmail web interface. I find checking my gmail to be
annoying because of this. I remembered gmail offering POP and IMAP.
I figured I could use that to get my gmail. Shouldn't be too hard right?
A quick search of Mr. Yahoo and Mr. Google gave me two good starting
points: Lifehacker.com
and MattCutts.com.
I read the sites and the getmail man page and figured out what I needed
to do. First I enabled IMAP for my gmail account. Next, I created the
.getmail directory in my home directory then created a getmailrc file
there. I want all gmail mail to be delivered to a specific mbox file
without going through my normal mail delivery channels. The contents of
the getmailrc file are quite simple:
[retriever]
type = SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever
server = imap.gmail.com
username = username@gmail.com
password = usernamespasswordgoeshere
mailboxes = ("inbox",)
[destination]
type = Mboxrd
path = /usr/home/mforde/Mail/GMAIL
The retriever section defines how getmail will retrieve the mail. In
this case it uses IMAP over SSL to connect to imap.gmail.com. The
mailboxes setting can be used to specify only certain gmail labels to
retrieve, but I want anything in the inbox.
The destination section tells getmail what to do with the mail once it
has grabbed it from gmail. This configuration dumps it into an mbox file
I've named GMAIL.
I chose IMAP over POP because of the slightly-less-than-documented
"feature" of gmail only allowing 99 messages at a time over POP.
So to get the initial batch of 7000+ emails, I ran
> getmail -vvv -l
to get verbose output and to leave messages on the gmail server. When
that was done I pointed mutt at the GMAIL mbox and like magic, there was
my gmail, organized nicely in my terminal.
Now, I want to check to get the latest mail fairly often, and I don't
want to download messages already copied over. To accomplish this, I
added a crontab to run every 10 minutes and invoke
getmail -l -n -q
This tells getmail to leave copies on the server, only get new messages
it hasn't already retrieved, and be quiet about it.
This has worked out well for me. If you're interested in setting up
something like this, I highly recommend reading the article at matcutts.com.
That article also links to several sample getmailrc files.
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BSD v. GPL
Jason Dixon gave a talk at this year's NYCBSDCon entitled "BSD v. GPL
(a.k.a. not the sequel to "BSD is Dying")." It's a humorous look at the
differences between the licenses and their supporters. Despite the
humor, he made some good points.
You can find a copy of the presentation at The Dixon Group
website.
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Mailman
The other night I installed mailman on my server. I integrated it into the
apache configuration and restarted that. The mailman web interface became
available as expected.
I used the web interface to subscribe to the one list I had set up and I
received an email asking me to confirm my subscription. I went to the
included link, and all seemed to be good.
Another person joined the list successfully, then sent an email to the list.
This email never arrived in her inbox. She told me about it, and I checked
only to find I did not have a copy either. I sent a mail to the list and
promptly received a message saying that [listname] was not a valid recipient
at the domain.
That's when I realized I had forgotten to tell the mail server (postfix) about
mailman. I had told apache about mailman, and mailman about postfix, but not
postfix about mailman.
I used mailman to create an alias database for its single list, then updated
postfix's configuration to use that as one of its alias maps. All seems to be
working now.
In conclusion, I learned two things. One is always test your configuration
before telling people it's ready. The other is, "I'm an idiot."
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FreeBSD 7 SATA Weirdness
Over the weekend I installed the x86-64 build of FreeBSD 7 on my
workstation, dib. I haven't had time yet to configure everything to my
liking yet, but almost everything works.
The one really annoying issue centers around a SATA DVD burner. When
this device is attached to the primary SATA controller (ICH7), the
system refuses to boot from the hard drive. It reports that no system
disk has been found. I've tried all of the SATA settings options in the
BIOS and none work.
If I connect the SATA burner to the secondary Marvell "RAID" controller
the system boots from the hard drive without issue. In Windows, this
requires another driver (which for some reason installed a copy of
apache along with it). Under FreeBSD 7; however, this second controller
seems to be currently unsupported, leaving me with only the IDE burner
available.
I may spend the $20 and get another IDE burner and just forget about the
SATA issue, but I really would like to know what the problem is. If any
one has any idea why the system would fail to boot from a SATA hard
drive when a SATA optical drive is attached, please email me and give me
some insight into this issue.
Maybe the Unix category wasn't the best for this. I spent more time
discussing the hardware/BIOS weirdness than the installation or
configuration of FreeBSD7. In fact, FreeBSD 7 isn't a very good title
for this either. I'm going to change that.
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chdir(2)
So today at work another developer many years my senior, with many more years
experience than I, came to me with a Unixy problem.
"When I have a program, how can I have it so the current working directory
for all processes it starts isn't the one that it started in?"
"chdir."
"No, I want so that if this process starts something like ls, when ls stats
'dot' I want 'dot' to be the directory that process wants it to be, not the
directory that process was started from."
After about 15 minutes of me suggesting chdir while he said that's not what
he wanted but then describing chdir, I finally wrote something along the lines
of the following
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
int
main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
system("/bin/pwd");
system("/bin/ls");
chdir("/tmp");
system("/bin/pwd");
system("/bin/ls");
chdir("/etc");
system("/bin/pwd");
system("/bin/ls");
chdir("/");
system("/bin/pwd");
system("/bin/ls");
return 0;
}
I compiled that, ran it, showed him the output. He said, "Yeah, that's
what I want to do."
I showed him the code.
"chdir does that?"
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Alpha
Due to the power failure, there was the loss of several hours of work.
Last night I installed FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE on an old DEC AlphaStation
200 I have. I had started building a new, smaller kernel for it around
23:30 last night. It had not completed by the time of the power outage.
I have restarted that build.
Any one reading this would reasonably ask, "Why are you not as
confused/angry/annoyed with a compile that was not finished in 7 hours
as you were about one that took 3 hours?"
The answer is simple. This AlphaStation is powered by a 100MHz DEC Alpha
EV4 CPU and has 64MB of RAM. To the best of my knowledge, DEC made this
machine around 1994 or 1995. I expected the build to take a long time;
the machine is around a dozen years old.
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How long does it take to build a linux kernel?
It has been a number of years since I built a linux kernel. Slackware
9.1 was the last GNU/Linux distro I used before switching back to BSD.
Tonight I put together a machine from some old parts (1.2GHz celeron
with 256KB cache, 256MB RAM, 20GB hard drive) and installed Slackware
12.
I customized a kernel configuration and attempted to build it. I don't
remember the 2.4 kernel taking as long to build as this 2.6 kernel. It
took nearly two hours. Granted, this machine is fairly old, but 2 hours?
After I complete the tasks for which I needed this setup, I'm going to
install an older Slackware with the 2.4 kernel and build that. I may
also install FreeBSD and NetBSD and build their kernels. I'd like to get
an idea how long it takes to compile other kernels on this rig.
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