Today the Port management team released the FreeBSD Ports Tree. The Tree is still in a Slush state (no sweeping changes) like the Documentation Tree has, but the tagging for the release is done. Currently the cluster is building the required packages that will be accompanied on the -RELEASE distributions. The next major things is the build of the -RELEASE-CANDIDATE’s which could start any moment ( I am not aware of the most recent planning for them, I will post more info when I know them)
On September 20, 2008, In Weblog, by Remko
So, after being ill for almost a week, and that continuing down the drain, I slowly start to feel better. My stomach was sore for more then a week, and I am periodically getting stalked by headaches which aren’t a real pleasure. But slowly they appear to be slowing down and putting me back into shape again. I started translating again and wrote some scripts that I needed to write for JR-Hosting, so progress is upcoming again. In the future night and tommorrow where possible I will continue scripting, translating and finding a few low hanging fruits for FreeBSD so that I can show that I am still alive. I am a regular slacker lately and that’s not something I actually like. So… lets get this ball rolling again!
Hurray!On September 18, 2008, In Weblog, by Remko
After more then 4 years of intensive work for me and others, today the day had come to turn off Redqueen, some people also know the machine as galain. For more then a year it was the webserver for JR-Hosting, which was replaced somewhere this year. The machine functioned
as my private webserver in the years before, servicing a multitude of domains, hosted several thousand files and did some intensive work for
the FreeBSD Project. The machine has to be turned off because hosting had been taken over by another set of machines in Germany, which are
cheaper to host and rent, in comparison to the current services of We-Dare.
We-Dare always was a very good and well organized company that had major uptimes with low latencies. A must have for a provider. Sadly that also meant rather expensive hosting, which is why the machines are replaced with machines in Germany. Costing the same, better machines and more bandwidth… easy choices at that moment 
Redqueen’s last uptime was 243 days and 12 hours. It’s last half year was mostly spend playing an internal OSPF server, without delivering external services, which is why the uptime achieved could be this high (else it would have meant possible hacks). For a complete overview
of the hardware and devices, see the page about Redqueen.
After a long time I am pleased to announce a new FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Project update. René Ladan has been working very hard on finishing his translation and updating the handbook, while I am struggling with the PPP and Slip chapter. It’s at 62% currently and is the last chapter to be finished before we have an entire translation available. Once that’s in play, René and I can hopefully keep the situation under control and see for further translations that we can do. We have a range of articles that we are interested in into translating, as well as the webpages which have some initial work from Siebrand Mazeland.
Personally I am looking into the Checkpoint article so that it it is up to date again (I am working with the materials quite often) and I am willing to see how we can add a Juniper article (or merge the two) so that we have some big players into the documentation base again.
Ofcourse I have several PR’s still open to improve the PPP and SLIP chapter, mostly with regard to the console setup and things like that. While translating I found several areas that need improvement (it’s a mess wrt. style, but that’s a different topic)
I hope that the next message will be that I finished the translation of the final chapter so that I can help René with translating the updates that still need work. Some chapters are really hard to improve after they had major improvements
Thanks René!
Today Erwin Lansing froze the FreeBSD Ports tree in preparation for the 6.4 and 7.1 releases. That basically means that no one can commit to the ports tree without prior approval from the Ports Management team.
The freeze is done to give the machines in the build cluster the time to build packages for both releases, which can be included on the CD’s and uploaded to the various FTP-mirrors so that you (The end user) can use them when you install the versions.
Certain people will get a blanket from the Ports Management team, so that they can improve the current ports and document Security Vulnerabilities where needed, and ofcourse update the packages if that is required.
Stay Tuned
Tonight I spend most of my time waiting. Waiting for the installation of a “standalone” tinderbox on the Sparc64 platform. The basic idea that I currently have is to see whether it would work at all. So currently the box installed MySQL, perl, php, apache and some more things that are required for the Tinderbox. It only forgot to install the mod_php info so I am rebuilding that at the moment.
When that completes I will test whether it actually does something usefull, and I already found Ion-Mihai to see whether we can setup a QAT for sparc64.
There is one limitation for now. It will only run during daytime. I appreciate my sleep
This weekend I didn’t invest as much time as I wanted for FreeBSD and the like. I was recreating my ZFS partitions. Why? They worked fine right? Yes they did. Though they were controlled by a highpoint controller, offering a pseudo raid setup (software). Ed Schouten recently told me (something I already knew but started me thinking) that ar0 is uncapable of supporting raid-5 in the first place. So my raid configuration might not have been a raid configuration after all.
This made me feel like: do my periodic backup on DVD (backing up this much data is interesting on DVD, I can tell you that ) and I copied over all data to my workstation (which almost has the same storage capabilities, only that’s just two disks, not doing redundancy at all), and burned the beasts on DVD (still am actually).
I destroyed my old ZFS pool (just a disk ‘ar0′) and in the highpoint controller bios I disabled Raid-5 and restarted with just 4 disks. I recreated my ZFS storage with “zfs create raidz data ad14 ad15 ad16 ad17“ which fired up the storage area again. After that I started copying back the data. I copied almost 500GB this weekend already and its still going (and will be for the rest of the night I think). I liked the idea of having my data backupped on my workstation as well, so I’ll probably rsync the storage area every period of time. Probably during the day when I am not home at all, so that the gig’s of data can flow over the wire without doing harm (gbit network). At least its saves a little and I can turn down my machines where needed.
I will also restart my /storage/nfs folders so that I might be able to have my ultrasparc (donated by Robert Blacquiere) do much nicer things again by using networking storage (only fastethernet here (100mbit) but that doesn’t kill the pleasure ).
So yes not much activity for FreeBSD itself; but laying the foundation to be able to do something like that more again (ultrasparc tindy perhaps?)….
On September 7, 2008, In Weblog, by Remko
Now the header might seem a bit misleading, but it’s exactly what I did the last few hours. I had setup one of my domains to point to google’s mailservices, google doc services, google calendar services etc. I had never tried this before, some people swear of it (in the positive sense) and some people just hate it. I kinda like it. I am not sure whether I would like my mail flowing through their devices, but I like the shared calendar functionality, I like the Google Docs (A LOT) because it integrates spreadsheets and documents in an online version, which does not cost a fortune to buy, you can just use it. I like that. I hate spending a fortune just to be able to send documents all over to various people in a native format. This might be a realistic competitor for The Office Tool’s from Microsoft at some point (lets hope so!).
So, I like it, and I’ll keep on testing with it etc. If someone (I must know you ofcourse) wants to see something and wants to have a test account from my domain, poke me, I’ll sign you up if I feel like it )
