Evilcoder.org

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

Jikes! I upgraded my fileserver from 6-STABLE to 7-CURRENT. Everything still works fine The only thing that stopped working is my Highpoint controller; which does not yet support 7-CURRENT (hey, highpoint people, please look into this :-)). FreeBSD happily sees this as a raid array though and uses ar0 to get to the data, which means all my data is still accessible etc.Ofcourse to prove this, my dmesg below for my fileserver, and indeed I now have two important machines running on FreeBSD CURRENT, my soekris firewall (5501) and my fileserver. The reason I can do this is because the system is fairly stable already! and has a bulk of superinteresting features like ZFS and better TCP stuff. So please try this at home!

written by Remko

As most of you might have noticed I had been slacking again lately for FreeBSD work. Problem for me is that I need to find a serious way to handle my groups, they aren't too many, but I have a problem giving groups Priorities, because I want to be active in all my regions and not in just one

I think I figured out a way how to handle that now, in front of me is  a little note that devides my time each day, for Secteam, Source committer team, bugmeister team, doc team and doc-nl team. These days will be processed and delt with in a work week (monday till friday) so that I have dedicated time available for those regions. Whenever time permits or inactivity occurs in one of the specified days, I can always do something else (perl coding, maintaining one of the other groups, etc.) I think and feel this will work now that I have visited EuroBSDcon again, this inspired me to do a lot as I used to do :-), now bear with me and give me ideas if you think I should do better at some front!

written by Remko

Well, After fiddling around for a little I managed to get my new Soekris 5501 up and running this weekend; I am not  using it production wise yet (I need to move my adsl-router to bridged mode and uplink the Soekris to the adsl-router), but it is running which some default packages now.

It's a really new phase for me to have disks mounted ro instead of rw (well at work we have a lot of firewalls which are mounted ro, but that is an entire different setting for me :-)) so I needed to watch around a bit to mount partions rw every now and then (to finalize the rc.conf etc).

I used TinyBSD to do the initial installation after some patches from Richard Arends [ which are pending Release Engineering Team approval btw; see my queue for the patches and information ].

I needed to adopt /boot/loader.conf and insert console="comconsole,vidconsole" in that, because otherwise I would not see anything after the regular boot. I also enabled the /etc/ttys part for ttyd0 so that I can actually use a serial line to logon. Sadly that is now running at 9600bps while the rest of the serial part is running much faster, so i need to adjust that a bit more. Another thing that I found out is that you should not use an AMD64 machine to produce the binaries for the Soekris [i386 device], because that does not work, or at least I could not get it to work, even with TARGET_ARCH=i386 set (some compiler issues that told me to bugger off :-)). But VMware to the rescue and I now have a fully loaded Soekris. See the DMESG below for the standard detection of things [ with the TinyBSD build ofcourse ]:

written by Remko

So I asked Warner to review some (minor)  new patches that extend the functionality of if_fxp and if_re, patches were written by others and I didn't see any problems with them. Currently working on low hanging fruit, but also working on importing the new tz2007 stuff, adding new sierra wireless drivers (written by the submitter of the ticket) , and backlog patches from the GNATS db. These things are not the hardest thing to do, just take some time and a source committer that is willing to process them (I am one of them now).

Anyway; going to fix a few more patches for Warner after test building them on sledge (an AMD64 system running on -current so that I can test the patches more easily then on my 6-stable branches at home).

Continue reading »

written by Remko

A couple of updates on my work on FreeBSD...

Yes it had been some time since I last wrote a blog entry at all, but here we are again.  Fresh after EuroBSDCon and slowly starting to get things straight after I started a new job and needing to cope with some new time management thingy (my life became much much more full then it used to be, nothing wrong with that, now trying to manage that the best I can).

One of the talks on EuroBSDCon went about bugbusting et all, some coworkers of mine (Snow B.V.) joined in and followed the discussion closely. I think that resulted in that they are also willing to look at some open PR's and try to help solving them (by either asking feedback or something else). Which is a good thing in my believing.

Mark in the bugbusting session also mentioned that I had been working on i386 a lot recently and he noticed that the kernel category is still very crowded. So I started working on those issues as well, doing basically the same for kern as I did for i386.. removing all old and ancient/stale tickets. The process of doing that is relatively simple: "Ask for feedback, either obtain it and try to incorporate it into the ticket, or if nothing happends, close the ticket with mentioning that whoever can bring-in feedback is welcome to do so so that we can really solve this issue.

Some point in time Mark and Florent and myself will be doing a little 'get together' thingy to discuss how we best can workout the details of bugbusting. We three (Mark on top) are the most active ones doing bugs etc and I figure we can best come up with something to mitigate the huge incoming flow (read: useless flow of user questions that really belong on the mailinglists; user questions are not for problem tickets and are likely not being resolved at all while the chances are much higher on the mailinglists).

I also restarted working on some www@ items and I am almost done with syncing my security messages so I hope that I can join in there again as well (my life levels up a little though it remains busy to say the least).

Ah well, that's it for now

Continue reading »

written by Remko

OK, I did not write much in the FreeBSD section lately and might not have been very visual in the scene as well.  Though I did not sit still at all! I helped out a few people generating proper VuXML entries; I am doing some internal projects (Proof of Concepts) with some Version Control System(s), not only for FreeBSD but also for my own knowledge of the advantages and disadvantages, also merging the current GNATS database to Bugzilla and perhaps Trac (if that works out) to see various Problem Reporting engines at work that are not as ancient as GNATS (GNATS currently show's its age in the FreeBSD tree imo).

Why am I doing all this? Well I have been hunting a 'few' i386 PR's in the last period of time (bugmagnet ;)) and noticed we should change something and had some initial talks with Mark Linimon about this (I believe we are on one line wrt how to handle PR's etc), and If things permit we can continue to do a little discussion at EuroBSDCon (With Ceri Davis, Mark and myself) to see how we can hunt down the huge backlog and how we might proceed with the current tools.  Shaun and Alex are both working on some nice frontend web/cli tools that can aid us in our current system.

I also did a couple of VuXML entries again; and should do some more, I should merge the latest two advisories that the Security Team created (I worked on one of the two advisories and that was really cool to do, as well as the contacts with other people and so on).

I will continue to do this work for a little of time (slowing down on doc and www for a little just to see how I can handle everything the best as possible, I don't want to stop working on them, just need to see the best way to handle it).

But most of my work will continue after my holiday which starts sunday! till oct 1st

Continue reading »

written by Remko