Evilcoder.org

Since somewhat more then a week ago I decided to give a burst of energy back to the FreeBSD Dutch Documentation project again by making the current translations up to date and submitting them towards the main project. As you could have seen there were a lot of commits because of this lately, and I also setup a personal p4 workspace for this so that I can better maintain the documentation at hand…

Roughly said that I did more then an entire chapter in the last few days since the backlog is so huge, it seems like entire translations at one go, but it seems to be worth the effort.

Dennis also hooked up and decided to translate the Virtualization chapter, which will be included in perforce first and then will be imported into the official tree (after ripping out any possible error).

I also commited work in progress for the mail chapter and advanced-networking chapter (Benno van den Berg, thanks!), they need a little TLC (Tender, Love and Care) before they can be in, but if they do not give any real problems I might as well import partial revisions after making sure they maintain the high quality level of the FreeBSD Project.

That said, the rest of my projects are still ongoing and I keep being busy as usual, more updates probably to follow!

written by Remko

Today I upgraded Dartagnan from 6-STABLE (yes not a 6.3-prerelease ;-)) to 7.0-BETA3, all looks good as far as I can see all services are up and running and no strange messages in my logfiles.

So, another one eats his own dogfood!

written by Remko

Today I got a special delivery from the post-office, the sender was “Lucas”. For people that are not that aware of the FreeBSD developers (or BSD developers better said), Michael Lucas is one of those developers, and writer of several books, amongst them “The Absolute FreeBSD” and now “The Absolute FreeBSD 2nd edition”.

Some time ago Michael started with his 2nd edition of The Absolute FreeBSD, and he sought for reviewers and people that wanted to proofread his work. I was one of them and I read the files with great enthusiasm. Something different then I do normally (working on PR’s, secteam, bugmeister, doc team member, VuXML etc) so great to do for a change.

The package contained this second edition of The Absolute FreeBSD, signed by Michael himself I feel honored, because that was not the initial goal the goal was to learn about the book, give practical tips or tell about differences that I saw, and now I also got a signed copy of his book

While reading through the first pages (Yeah ofcourse you look through them if you worked on it :-)) and yeah my name was in the introduction

From experience this is a really great book, if you want to learn about FreeBSD and seek for a good and readable book, please buy this book! You can find more information on the internet ofcourse, one of the links being:

http://www.absolutefreebsd.com

Michael; thanks for the book! It will surely help other people gaining good knowledge!

written by Remko

Jikes, indeed that was the thing I thought this morning. I decided to move out my old shares and copy over all the data (270GB) to my workstation temporary and move over the RAID-5 volume to ZFS (backed by a Highpoint ATA454, yeah cheap-ass stuff, if someone has an idea on an affordable real-hardware raid5 device which supports SATA300, please comment on the post :-)).

The raid5 volume consists for 4×300GB, normally resulting in 1.2TB storage, with the raid5 solution we have redundancy and gain around 900GB of data storage available.

But OK i am loosing track: I did the 270GB in around 6.5hours, roughly 40GB per hour, copy actions did around 13MB/s over the network (peaking at 30% of the GBIT link that is used between the servers) and all went without a glitch.

Since I dont have a binary backed driver at the moment, freebsd recognizes the raid array as ar0, resulting in the following:

[remko@guardian /home]$ zpool status
pool: data
state: ONLINE
scrub: none requested
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
data ONLINE 0 0 0
ar0 ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors

Currently the following is available;
[remko@guardian /home]$ zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
data 133G 741G 25K /data

ofcourse somewhat more but that’s my private data et all thus no need to be verbose on that.
This configuration might not be as fancy as others have (multi TB arrays ;-)) but perhaps the future can arrange me the SATA300 controller backed with 4 or more 500GB disks

Currently the data is being copied back, around 200GB had already been copied since the setup; and no creepy things had been found, peaks are again around the 13MB/s which is quite good imo.

I am not very sure whether the attached data is going to help a bit but:

kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.hits: 416906
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.misses: 13678
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.demand_data_hits: 229801
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.demand_data_misses: 249
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.demand_metadata_hits: 173607
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.demand_metadata_misses: 11696
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.prefetch_data_hits: 12366
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.prefetch_data_misses: 0
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.prefetch_metadata_hits: 1132
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.prefetch_metadata_misses: 1733
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.mru_hits: 173761
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.mru_ghost_hits: 5799
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.mfu_hits: 229653
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.mfu_ghost_hits: 2088
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.deleted: 1635502
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.recycle_miss: 920453
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.mutex_miss: 21
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.evict_skip: 189460
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.hash_elements: 13992
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.hash_elements_max: 29668
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.hash_collisions: 336691
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.hash_chains: 2217
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.hash_chain_max: 6
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.p: 295031867
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.c: 295499774
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.c_min: 16777216
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.c_max: 314572800
kstat.zfs.misc.arcstats.size: 295506432

there it is. Well onward in perhaps writing something for VuXML, a topic on which we still need (continues) help!

written by Remko

OK no updates for a few days, that had several reasons ;-).

I had a few days off in the weekend and made up with a lot of
ongoing FreeBSD work that was still pending, so some people
are happy now again, which is always something nice to see

Beyond that I also relaxed a lot, and tried to do various things
in between that also needed work and attention, and that worked
out very well actually.

Today was my day off and I went to the city with Denise and we
shopped around a bit, ate something and then headed over to pick
up our kid at his school ; he was surprised to see me because
normally he knows when I come around, but this time we didn’t
tell him

His reactions where very cute and nice so that melted me away

We (Denise, Luca and myself) went to their house where Luca played
a little game and I surveyed one of the machines there to be able
to get the machine back online again, I think I have enough information
to do so during the weekend; so lets see what we can do to make it
happen.

Today was a nice day, after last weeks troubles etc, it was a good
thing for a change, thanks Luca and Denise for that!

written by Remko

Today I had a useful and productive day! I committed several older drivers that I still had pending MFC, I requested MFC allowance for several manual page updates and some typo fixes, in addition I wrote some (very trivial and simple) code myself in the C language. Mark Linimon reported a patch for if_vr(4) recently and I tried a different approach to keep the code clean (I simply added the identity tag to the .h file of if_vr and logically OR’ed it within the code. That sounds very trivial but it’s more C code then I worked with recently myself (mostly I review patches on the bugs lists and process them if they are OK in my believing, but I mostly dont have to write things myself).

Reason that I wrote the part myself is that the patch from Mark didn’t apply very well, I think the markup got whacked on the lists somehow, so this might be the best idea. I actually have to admit that I had great fun in doing the trivial thing and rebuilding to see that it didn’t break anything

Mark had been asked to test this so lets wait for his reply now

Now heading to my buddy to help with his new house!

written by Remko

Since a little my entire blog is running on wordpress. I still need to convert loads of entries between the old Joomla installation and this new Wordpress installation. Reason for this is that the markup got wacked up with the migration tool I have used. Sadly that’s the pain part for most (cms!) software around, you cannot normally migrate the stuff between eachother, understandable because everything is opensource and developed in spare time of people, but ofcourse it would be very neat to have

Another thing is that my RSS Subscribers should know and see; my rss feeds changed, so if you actively followed my RSS feeds, please resubscribe using the new RSS feeds, for every category you can acces it’s own RSS Feed, or you can use the global one which follows everything (as far as I know).

And finally; if you have ideas or suggestions about the blog, please do not hesitate to comment on the entry(/ies) where needed so that I can really make a good blog again

written by Remko

OK Ken Smith already made it public in the CVS entries already, but FreeBSD 7.0 BETA-1 is available (my own machine: FreeBSD guardian.elvandar.org 7.0-BETA1 FreeBSD 7.0-BETA1 #9: Tue Oct 23 14:10:01 CEST 2007 root@guardian.elvandar.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GUARDIAN amd64) and you should really test this the soon you can.. the sooner the better, we count on you all to get a very good major release again. A lot of shiny new features as well as much improved stability had been added to the system which you really want to test

In the mean time 6.3 preparations are also started which is a much improved version of 6.2-RELEASE (ofcourse), but the cool things are in 7.0mmkay?

update: 27/10: You can find the ISO files required for testing here

written by Remko

So as people might have noticed; I did some active things in the FreeBSD region again, special emphasis on VuXML. I did some entries again and showed that I am still here I am also challenging people to work ‘against’ me in this case, please overtake me in the amount of entries; the FreeBSD-Security will surely improve because of that and that means our users are more aware of security issues, have a better chance at running secure applications [ or at least, fixing known issues, the unknown ones are always upcoming ].So far nobody really could get near except for Martin Wilke, who is doing a lot of entries as well; but not that near yet (come on Martin!).Next week [ and perhaps this weekend ] I will do some more entries and outrank nectar@ and after that ofcourse the biggest committer for this simon@ :)Let the challenge begin, and improve the FreeBSD Security!  Continue reading »

written by Remko

Recently I posted some news about EuroBSDcon, but the planet aggregator choked on Python 2.5 so the idea behind it was lost :(You can read about it here , and especially dont forget Tom Scholten’s wiki page  where he placed a few mindmaps of talks he visited, they could be very helpful for you!  Continue reading »

written by Remko