Denny's Blog

Find OpenBSD folks on Google Plus

2011-08-22T01:05:00.003-05:00

Easy way to find OpenBSD folks on Google Plus at
Google+ Search
Pimp your Google Plus pic at
+me

Blogging From My Cell

2011-07-12T02:27:00.002-05:00

If I can get used to blogging from my cell phone it sure would help
me out. I know everyone is doing it now, but it's rough on this phone.

No More Website

2011-07-12T01:21:00.002-05:00

Got to squat on a friend's domain for quite a while which I used
for showing people new to OpenBSD how to get everyday things
done. I called it Polarwave's Tips & Tricks for Newbies. Saved
all the material and may eventually put it back up somewhere new,
but for now this blog will have to do. Some of the material was out
date as is a lot of the older entries here. Originally I started this blog
not so much as a tutorial site but more as an ongoing journal of my
experiences with OpenBSD. In the process I hope others got some
help from it.

Lynx and URL Shortening

2011-07-10T22:06:00.003-05:00

I use tmux and normally have 8 virtual terminals running inside
my xterm. Found out I didn't have to run a GUI browser with js
to be able to shorten links. URL Generator does a real nice job
of it from inside lynx. This way I can run lynx in one virtual
terminal and TTYtter inside another and copy my shortened
links over. That is if I do not wish to use Twitter's built-in URL
shortening service which works great in TTYtter. You type

/short http://somewebaddress.com

and it's darned near instantaneous. But there are other times I
can use the URL Generator too, like in mutt in a different terminal,
composing a message and wishing to put in a shortened URL.

Midnight Commander

2011-01-26T20:56:00.006-06:00

Got around to try using mc(1) (Midnight Commander)
for ftp and ssh file operations. Didn’t have any problem
with ssh, but I couldn’t get anything going with ftp except
errors, especially:

ftpfs: invalid value for ai_flags

Read the man page and the Makefile, searched some of
the OpenBSD mailing lists, and came up with:

Midnight Commander error on 4.7:

Here’s a snippet from that link:

I’m not a good C coder, so I just did some basic
research and replaced line 703 in ftpfs.c:
old: “hints.ai_flags = AI_ADDRCONFIG;”.
new: “hints.ai_flags = 1;”

Now it works as expected.

I didn’t have any idea how to do the above, but figured
it was time I learned, so first I used pkg_delete(1) to
uninstall mc(1). I knew when you build a port it will
download the port file and extract all its files in
subdirectories under /usr/ports. I found the file I
needed, ftpfs.c, under:

/data2/mktemp/obj/mc-4.7.0.6p0/mc-4.7.0.6/lib/vfs/mc-vfs

That’s because of limited space on my main drive and
fixing that problem by creating /etc/mk.conf and adding:

WRKOBJDIR=/data2/mktemp/obj
DISTDIR=/data2/mktemp/distfiles
PACKAGE_REPOSITORY=/data2/mktemp/packages

I edited ftpfs.c as described above, deleted the installed
package, changed directory into /usr/ports/misc/mc,
and did:

sudo make -D –with-vfs -D –with-samba \
-D –with-screen=slang -D –with-subshell \
-D –enable-charset

I don’t know if there is a way to tie all those together
without all the extra -D’s, and comments are welcome,
but I was tired at that point of all the searching to fix the
problem, so I did it the long way and it worked. Then I
did make install, then opened mc and this time ftp worked.
Mission accomplished! :-)

GoogleCL Wordwrap Test

2011-01-09T18:14:00.004-06:00

Was wondering how to create lengthy posts for Blogger from the command line with GoogleCL since I know the sentences will wrap and eventually I'll encounter the command line character limit. I keep remembering the figure 255. Not sure if that still holds true or not.

The above paragraph was done from the command line with googlecl.
I used the following command:

google blogger post --tags "googlecl, wordwrap, character limit" \
--title "GoogleCL Wordwrap Test" ~/path/file

I read at Google code googlecl that --src is required which I took to
mean the path to the file that was being used for the post. When I tried
it, though, I got an error and it didn't post. I removed --src from the
command line and it worked, the entry posted. So, I still have some
things to learn. :-)

2011 OpenBSD Puffy Desktop Calendar

2011-01-09T00:22:00.010-06:00

Made an OpenBSD Puffy desktop calendar wallpaper for myself.
It’s 406×700 pixels. You can put it on a black background or
copy and paste it into a plain black image of your own making
the size of your desktop. Took Puffy from a snapshot of the
OpenBSD ftp login screen and pasted it into the calendar image.
The characters and Puffy are kind of subdued terminal green color.

GoogleCL on OpenBSD

2011-01-08T00:27:00.010-06:00

Installed googlecl on OpenBSD 4.8 tonight. Looked at the port's
Makefile and didn't see anything special, so I just installed the
package. First time you run googlecl it creates its config file in
~/.googlecl. When you run it there will be a long outputted
string and it'll tell you before you hit enter you will need to
okay access. You do that through the browser while in your
Google account in:

My Account
Change authorized websites

The catch is, I had to open my browser to do that, and it made no
difference to googlecl. Each time after okaying it in my account
settings in my browser googlecl still errored out. I added the
following to the config file to fix it:

auth_browser = /usr/local/bin/seamonkey

This time when I hit enter it opened a new tab in my browser and
everything worked. After it was working I tried doing a listing of
my docs and it worked. Next I ran some commands that accessed
contacts, blogger, and calendar, and got all of them okayed in my
account settings. Still a lot to learn, but it's working okay now.
Just a matter of reading up more on it online and playing around
with it. Incidentally, I uploaded this post with googlecl. Didn't
format quite like I wanted and I had to do some editing from my
browser, but not bad first time out.

End of the Year Hodge-Podge

2010-12-24T22:22:00.008-06:00

Put off upgrading way too long. As to how long, I’m embarrassed
to say. Previously I could pretty much get things how I wanted
in a couple of days, even after doing a new install and getting
all my old stuff back in. This time it took a couple of weeks to
really get where I wanted to be with the system. Not keeping up
with changes can bite one in the butt.

I’ve got a Linksys WRT54G-TM router running DD-WRT v24-sp2
firmware. Got an account at Hurricane Electric and if you
have got IPv6 working already, http://ipv6.he.net/. Also
have an account at DynDNS.com for when my ISP changes the
IP address on my cable modem and a hostname that synchronizes
with it so I can reach home when I’m traveling. I setup a
VPN too, and am now able to surf through it no matter where
I’m connected at. Good for for instance, we go to B&N a lot
and they’ve got free Wifi. I connect to them, then activate
the the connection to my home VPN. Works great so far. Just
wish I’d figure out how to get IPv6 to work on the it. The
router does DHCP for my LAN and I’ve got it set to give the
same IP address to each box each time. Makes things easier
on me moving and copying files around the LAN. Ran into a
problem with my browser on a lot of IPv6 sites, where they’d
revert to IPv4 or not load at all. I had missed the option
mentioned in the man page ‘family inet6 inet4′ which sets
the preference to IPv6 as it’s first. When you use DHCP to
assign addresses, each time a box boots and starts the network,
/etc/resolv.conf gets overwritten. If you have some settings
you want in it like I did, you get around the overwrite
problem by putting the options in /etc/resolv.conf.tail and
then they show up in resolv.conf okay. Also had added some
stuff to /etc/pf.conf so icmp would be passed, as they’re
required for IPv6 to work right on my tunnel.

#Under the macros section:
icmp_types=”{ echoreq, echorep, unreach }”

#Under the rules section:
pass inet proto icmp all icmp-type $icmp_types
pass inet6 proto icmp6

***********************************************************

Fiddled around with tmux quite a bit, trying to get it configured
the way I need it. Hadn’t used it in a while and had forgotten quite
a bit. My setup is not real complicated, I just had problems with
how I was calling the program. Here’s my .tmux.conf:

# Default global options.
set status-bg yellow
set status-fg black
set default-command “exec /bin/ksh -l”
set -g status-right ‘%a %m/%d/%y %H:%M’
set -g status-interval 5
set bell-action current
set history-limit 2000

# Prefix key.
unbind C-b
set -g prefix C-s

# Keys to switch session.
bind q switch -t0
bind Q switch -t0
bind w switch -t1
bind W switch -t1
bind -r C-n next-window
bind -r C-p previous-window
bind ‘”‘ choose-window

# Other key bindings.
bind i list-windows
bind I list-windows
bind ‘-’ split-window -dv
bind ‘|’ split-window -dh
bind “‘” new-window
bind < resize-pane -L 1
bind > resize-pane -R 1
bind _ resize-pane -D 1
bind u resize-pane -U 1

# Session Initialization

# First Session.

new -d -s0 -nmain1

neww -d -nmutt
neww -d -nwork1
splitw -v -p 50 -t 2
splitw -h -p 50 -t 2
neww -d -nwork2
splitw -h -p 50 -t 3
neww -d -nnet
selectw -t 0

# Second Sesson.

new -d -s1 -nmain2
neww -d -nshell1
splitw -v -p 50 -t1
neww -d -nshell2
splitw -v -p 50 -t2
neww -d -nshell3
splitw -v -p 50 -t3
selectw -t 0

Lot of split panes and stuff there I probably don’t need,
but I needed to know how to do it, so I just did some
experimenting with it. Put a few aliases in ~/.kshrc:

alias tm0=’tmux attach-session -t 0′
alias tm1=’tmux attach-session -t 1′
alias tmk=’tmux kill-server’

***********************************************************

Side note while I’m thinking of it. Never had the occasion
to pipe anything to vim before. Started wondering how to
do it. Here’s how:

$ cat file.txt | vim -

***********************************************************

I built the gimp, sane-frontends, and sane-backends the other
day. I expected to have an ‘Acquire’ choice in the gimp menu
but it wasn’t there. Then my buddy in the local LUG reminded
me to install xsane. The gimp no longer has the ARG to build
it with mmx, but I had to put some extra switches on the make
command when I built

$ cd /usr/ports/graphics/sane-frontends/
sudo env FLAVOR=”gimp” make install

$ cd ../sane-backends/
sudo make -D --with-gphoto install

$ cd ../xsane/
sudo env FLAVOR=”gimp” make install

***********************************************************

Got tired of the nag on the console about clamav being out of
date. I had installed the package for 4.8 release, 0.96.1 which
was causing the nag. Uninstalled latest version, 0.96.4 and
built it. Seemed like it took a lot longer than it did with
previous versions, but it built and installed okay. That
version didn’t last long. Uninstalled it, then built 0.96.5
on 20101214. Built and installed okay. Just a pain in the butt
with the clamav uid and gid thing. Old version used _clamav.
Last few versions want clamav. You can change it using the
following to avoid the error when running ./configure:

sudo ./configure –with-group=_clamav –with-user=_clamav

***********************************************************

Have never used irc extensively but taught myself enough to
know how to configure and get around in irssi. Installed silc
which is supposed to be more secure than regular irc and is
built around irssi. Including some notes here on how I was
able to connect to a silc server over tor:

1) If you haven't done so already, install tor and socat 2) Start /usr/local/bin/tor which defaults to port 9050

*Side Note on tor*
To run it all the time you can start it in /etc/rc.local at
boot time:

fi

if [ -x /usr/local/bin/tor ]; then
echo -n ‘ starting tor’;
/usr/local/bin/tor
fi

3) Now run this command as root or with sudo:
socat TCP4-LISTEN:706,bind=localhost,range=127.0.0.1/32,fork \
SOCKS4A:127.0.0.1:silc.silcnet.org:706,socksport=9050 > socat_log.$$ 2>&1 &

4) Start silc

5) After entering password and silc is running:
/connect 127.0.0.1 706

A bit slower than a regular connection but much more secure
since your real IP address isn’t visible.

PKG_PATH Tweaking

2010-10-10T13:28:00.003-05:00

Saw these on the mailing list a few weeks back.
First example is a bit long and drawn out but it works:

PKG_PATH=ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/`uname -a | \
cut -d” ” -f 3`/packages/`uname -a |cut -d” ” -f 5`/

Second method is a bit neater:
PKG_PATH=ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/`uname -r`/packages/`arch -s`/

Create an alias in called pkg_find:

alias pkg_find=”echo ls | ftp -a $PKG_PATH |sed ‘s/.*\ //g’ |grep -i ”

Then, from the command prompt, do

$ pkg_find somepkg

and you’ll get the full package name.

Free OpenBSD Shell Account Provider, Unix Shells

2010-05-08T00:18:00.007-05:00

Found out about this site the other day. Nice folks, great site.
Here's a snippet from their manifesto:

Devio.us came about one afternoon while brainstorming
new possible projects. While other shell providers do
exist, most of them lack a clear goal, or are ran by an
inexperienced group of people. The servers are either
unstable, insecure or the hardware is just plain bad.
Realizing this sad state of of affairs, we set out to
create devio.us. While Kayla set out to design the site,
the rest of the team started working on writing all the
user administration utilities, automating tasks and
setting up the environment. Shortly thereafter, the
project was launched.

Lots of FAQ's and help on the site. Check out the forums at

Free Unix Shell Accounts - Devio.us Forums

or join in on the chat at irc.freenode.net #devious

bsdtalk 188 - Dru Lavigne

2010-05-07T23:40:00.004-05:00

Interview with Dru Lavigne. We talk about her new book, The Definitive Guide to PC-BSD,
and also the upcoming BSD Professional Certification.

Main Site for bsdtalk
Interview mp3 link
Interview ogg link

Duck Duck Go

2010-05-07T23:24:00.004-05:00

Not sure how long Duck Duck Go has been around but I
found out about it tonight after I saw a link to it on IRC.
You want to check it out and read what all it's got, go to:

About Duck Duck Go

bsdtalk180- OpenBSD Enthusiast Girish Venkatachalam

2009-12-01T10:09:00.004-06:00

Interview with my programmer OpenBSD bud Girish Venkatachalam.

Main Site for bsdtalk
Interview mp3 link
Interview ogg link

Absolute Minimal OpenBSD USB Image

2009-11-24T16:13:00.004-06:00

My friend Girish Venkatachalam has added another
OpenBSD USB bootable image, a very minimal 1GB
version without X and without a single package,
just the base install.

Absolute Minimal Version

Enjoy!

Cksum

2009-11-22T08:43:00.004-06:00

Create Fingerprints Using Cksum

cksum(1) is a very important utility since it
can figure out the fingerprint/message digests
using several key algorithms employed in
cryptography.

     1. cksum
     2. md4
     3. md5
     4. rmd160
     5. sha1
     6. sha256
     7. sha384
     8. sha512
     9. sum
    10. sysvsum

sha512 is the best algorithm to use since
it gives the longest output and there is
very little chance of collision.

I think this article is not going to make
much sense without explaining the rationale
and the math behind the idea of cryptographic
hashes of message digests.

The basic goal is quite easy to state and
understand. The idea of a message digest is
to create a fixed length "fingerprint" from
any input data of any length, be it 2 bytes
or 2 Terabytes. This is done in a such a way
that the output varies significantly for
slight changes in input data.

All that is fine and dandy but the most
important aspect of the checksum algorithm
is its ability to avoid collisions.
Collisions are input values for which the
checksum algorithm produces the same output.
This can be quite dangerous and defeats the
very purpose of having a checksum in the
first place.

But mathematically speaking, nature enforces
a limit to the probability or possibilty of
collisions. But in practice this works quite
well as long as your output sample space is
quite big. Which is the case with sha512
digests. MD4 is broken. Don't use it. MD5 is
weak too.

The importance of cryptographic hashing comes
from many angles. First thing is that it is key
to generating digital signatures. A signature
is a private key encrypted message digest of
the input message. Simple and straight.

Then you have something called HMAC or hashed
message authentication code where a secret key
is used for generating message digests.
Normally message digests do not employ any
secret information. It is completely open.
Anyone can generate cryptographic hashes since
the algorithm is well known, there are no keys
and given the input, the output is fixed.

This is alright when we want to detect accidental
changes or integrity of file transfers. But this
does not protect us from malicious tampering. For
that we normally encrypt the hash with a secret key.
Or append it with the message and encrypt it. That
way we can detect tampering.

However HMAC is different. In this method,
the cryptographic hash is protected with a
secret key and only if you possess the secret
key you can generate the hash.

HMAC is widely used in TLS or SSL web security.
We have already seen many applications for
message digests or cryptographic hashes.

There is one important detail however. All
the public key cryptosystems in particular
the most widely used RSA algorithm relies
on cryptographic hashes in a interesting way.

RSA is a little complicated to explain in
this article but my idea is to illustrate
that cryptographic hashes have a much bigger
role to play than simple integrity checking.

Cryptographic hash functions are also known
as one way hash functions. Which is to say
that the function is not reversible. There
is no inverse of the function. You can only
get an output from input, never the other
way round.

RSA is nothing but a one way hash function
of the input data with a key. RSA relies on
the prime number factorization problem. So
the idea here is that you can multiply two
prime numbers trivially but you cannot divide
them. You can of course but not without a
significant computational overhead.

Now that we have seen enough theory, let us
get to the practical side and figure out how
it can help us in real life. After all math
has a great real life significance.

$ cksum /etc/passwd
3171604895 3646 /etc/passwd

$ cksum -a sha512 /etc/passwd
SHA512 (/etc/passwd) =
b4d6a742cada5305686832f1037b60f79b56fe6dfdf99
04e6070295e74c2341535db26b731e27e04a73f0cb70b
b589d31b8e9e18e207a8aae5aa81d06ea29f5a
(above cksum output line wrapped)

$ cksum -a sha256 /etc/passwd
SHA256 (/etc/passwd) =
fd2626c043a288c0a25bdc9772af4b19e001c890e9317
0a4de40043a9516e94a
(above cksum output line wrapped)

$ cksum -a rmd160 /etc/passwd
RMD160 (/etc/passwd) =
70455b60aad955b556aa4052af017ecf61bfe5a1

$ cksum -a md5 /etc/passwd
MD5 (/etc/passwd) =
e7818836fe36fa1fde1ab6198ee2da77

$ cksum -a sha1 /etc/passwd
SHA1 (/etc/passwd) =
9c80fdd62b69909a705c64fe79b6294d778ffef6

You can avoid the above mentioned issue of
collisions with the cksum(1) utility since
you have access to several state of the art
checksum algorithms from one command/utility.
So if you are paranoid kindly compare the sha1
and sha256 sums of the same file at both sides
after transfer. That way you can avoid issues
with collision.

openssl(1) also comes built in with access to
several checksum algorithms and so can sha1 and
md5 commands help under OpenBSD. But cksum has
an advantage of supporting many algorithms. Moreover
all these utilities come with base OpenBSD. There
is never a need to install any specific package.
In other words you are guaranteed to find them,
on any OpenBSD box!

Note on Authorship:
This article was contributed by Girish Venkatachalam
who is also a co-author on Denny's OpenBSD Newbies Blog.

Interfacing the Medical TranscriptionFoot Pedal With Mplayer

2009-11-17T05:27:00.009-06:00

Those of you who are hearing mplayer for the first
time should certainly see this article.

It is the best multimedia application out there and
it is written in pure C. It is amazing stuff. A grand
old project with an amazing cornucopia of features.

Those of you who have not heard of the footpedal
do not need to worry. It is a footrest with three
buttons which you can press with the toe.
Here is a picture.

It connects via the 9 pin serial connector to the
serial port of the computer. Before we get to the
technical details we do need to know something
about the medical transcription industry.

Every technical problem needs a business goal to
meet. Sometimes it is not very obvious as in the
case of academic UNIX tools, but without having
an appreciation of the real purpose of the project,
one cannot do well in business. Technical solutions
do not exist in isolation.

Medical transcription is the process of converting
a doctor's voice recordings into English text. The
doctor would have spoken at varying speeds and
with different accents. A medical transcriptionist
has the job of translating his spoken words into
the written word.

I am sure you can imagine that this is no easy task.
The transcriptionist has to listen to the dictation
multiple times at various speeds to figure out what
on earth the doctor is trying to say.

His/her fingers are typing the message in the audio,
and you wish to be able to rewind, pause/play and
fast forward the recording with the foot. That is
where a footpedal comes in. You can't use the mouse
or keyboard for this since the hands are busy typing
out text.

While the hand is typing the foot will be interacting
with the audio player to help the transcriptionist to
accurately translate the dictation into English text.

The footpedal is a passive device with no power and
no moving parts. There are 3 switches as you can see
above. The left pedal is connected to the DSR pin(8),
the middle pedal is connected to the CTS pin(6), and
the right pedal is connected to the DCD pin(1).

I figured this out using a perl script given here.


use Device::Modem;

  my $modem = new Device::Modem( port => '/dev/tty00' );

        /*
         if( $modem->connect( baudrate => 9600 ) ) {
             print "connected!\n";
         } else {
             print "sorry, no connection with serial port!\n";
         }
        */

        my %sig = $modem->status();
        for ('CTS','DSR','RLSD')
        {
                if($_ =~ /RLSD/) {
                        print "Signal DCD is: ", ($sig{$_} > 0 ? 'on'
: 'off'), "\n";
                } else {
                        print "Signal $_  is: ", ($sig{$_} > 0 ? 'on'
: 'off'), "\n";
                }
        }

The next thing to do was figure out a way to do this
in C. That was the hard part but I got there. Check
out the code in this page to interface with the serial
port on Windows and OpenBSD to recognize the pedal
presses.

Okay now we are halfway through. We can recognize
the pedal presses. But how to interface with the
audio player?

Before that we have an even more important question
to tackle.

Which player should we use?

I started working on audacity but quickly realized that
it does not have the rewind and forward feature. Plus
I realized that most audio players don't have this at all.
Except of course mplayer. But before that I considered
and rejected sox and vlc.

I looked at the mplayer input.c file, the way it interfaced
with the joystick and LIRC remote control. I know I could
copy the semantics and match it with key presses. I did the
project first on OpenBSD and then got it working under
Windows. It was a great project, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

All the code in beautiful syntax highlighted fashion with
black background is here

However the work is not over yet. You need to recognize
the pedal presses with more care. Right now it is too
sensitive so to speak. It has to have some back pressure
and hysteresis. I need to understand the needs of the
medical transcriptionist better. I shall finish this
project and add these details later. At the moment, I
can say that the project is nearly over.

LiveUSB Image With OpenBSD

2009-11-14T02:35:00.006-06:00

My programmer friend in India who is also a co-author on my
other blog has created two usb OpenBSD bootable images.
There is a 1Gb image and a 2Gb image. The instructions
and download links are at:

LiveUSB image with OpenBSD

Cheers!

Addendum:
There are 3 images now.

1. Minimal version for 1GB without X
2. Lite version for 1 GB with X
3. Full version for 2 GB

Small Conky Calendar

2009-11-10T00:45:00.005-06:00

I”m not a perl programmer and I’m sure my chances of having
come up with this on my own would be right up there with the
classic example about the monkeys with typewriters creating
the encyclopedia! :-) I got it off this mailing list:

freebsd-questions@freebsd.org

cal | perl -pe ’s/^/ /;s/$/ /;s/ ‘”$(date “+%e”)”‘ /\['"$(date "+%e")"']/’

I plugged it into the bottom of my .conkyrc file like so:

${color green}${execi 360 cal | perl -pe ’s/^/ /;s/$/ /;s/ ‘”$(date “+%e”)”‘ /\[ '"$(date "+%e")"']/’} ${color}

BTW, the above perl lines are wrapped, both the first which
is from the command line, and the second, which is the entire
line in .conkyrc. It shows the current day enclosed in brackets
in order to highlight it. Nice touch.

Cheers!

Taking Desktop Screenshots

2009-11-08T23:47:00.003-06:00

I was Googling around the other night looking for graphics
help and ran across this site where I learned about some
X stuff I didn’t even know was there on my box:

Useful Things You Can Do with FVWM

Example of dumping the root screen using xwd, part
of the X Window System included with OpenBSD:
xwd -root -out file

Example of displaying the dumped image with xwud,
again part of the X Window System:
xwud -in file

Example of dumping the root screen & outputting it to
jpg format using xwdtopnm and pnmtopng, both
included in the netpbm port/package:

xwd -root |xwdtopnm |pnmtopng > file.jpg

Example of converting an existing screenshot taken with
xwd, using xwdtopnm and pnmtopng:

xwdtopnm < file | pnmtopng > file.png
xwdtopnm < file | pnmtojpeg > file.jpg

Example converting a screenshot taken with xwd with
convert, part of the ImageMagick port/package:

convert file file.png
convert file file.jpg

Cheers!

Celebrate Freedom Nov 9 – Anniversary of the fall of the ‘Wall’

2009-11-08T23:41:00.000-06:00

Nov 9, 1989. That’s the day the damnable Berlin Wall came down!
Celebrate freedom around the world today! Thanks, ‘Dutch’, I will
never forget your words:

“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Cheers!

Conky Update

2009-11-08T23:09:00.004-06:00

Added some information at the end of Conky System Statistics
on a new way to stop one version of Conky from a script that runs
from a cronjob and start a new version, again from a script run
from a cronjob. Hope if anyone used the old way they didn't have
the same problem I did. If so, sorry. The current way has been
working without issue for several days now.

Cheers!

Tweeting From the Command Line

2009-11-01T22:37:00.014-06:00

Recently ran across an article Tweeting from the command line,
so I thought I’d give it a try. Didn’t have a Twitter account,
so that was the first step, creating one. Go to Twitter and
create your account.
After that, you need to copy the script and put in your username
and password and make the script executable. I placed my script
in ~/bin and did a chmod 700 ~/bin/tweet.sh so the script
is only executable, readable, and writable by me. Here’s the script:

#!/bin/sh

tweet="${@}"

user="username"

pass="sekret"

if [ $(echo "${tweet}" | wc -c) -gt 140 ]; then

echo "FATAL: The tweet is longer than 140 characters!"

exit 1

fi

curl -k -u ${user}:${pass} -d status="${tweet}"
https://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml >/dev/null 2>&1
if [ "$?" == "0" ]; then

echo "Successful tweet!"

fi

The full instructions are at the link listed above at
the beginning of this blog entry. It mentions escaping
special characters such as "?" and "!" for one thing,
and that’s important. I read the other night where you
can’t edit a "Tweet", only delete it, going on to explain
that anyone following you would not be in sync with your
Tweets if you deleted an entry and then entered a new
version of it. I erroneously thought, also, that to Retweet
meant doing a Tweet over, but it's actually more like
passing on what someone else has already Tweeted.
Obviously I've still got a lot to learn about Twitter, but
the script above should get my fellow CLI geeks going. ;)

Cheers!

Addendum:
TTYtter for Perl: More Tweeting from the command line

TTYtter: an interactive console text-based command-line Twitter client and Perl platform

Just a follow up on Tweeting from the command line.
Cool setup. ANSI Graphics, too. Check it out.

Cheers!

ClamAv Update on OpenBSD Box

2009-10-31T22:44:00.035-05:00

Updated my ClamAv today from version 0.95.2 to 0.95.3
and luckily read the warning about needing to patch it
on the download page at:

Clam AntiVirus

There’s a link there to download the diff. I downloaded
everything, then ran gpg against the file and signature
file to verify:

gpg –verify clamav-0.95.3.tar.gz.sig clamav-0.95.3.tar.gz

gpg: Signature made Wed Oct 28 10:59:38 2009 CDT using DSA key ID 985A444B
gpg: Good signature from “Tomasz Kojm ”
gpg: aka “Tomasz Kojm ”
gpg: aka “Tomasz Kojm ”
gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature!
gpg: There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner.
Primary key fingerprint: 0DCA 5A08 407D 5288 279D B434 5482 2DC8 985A 444B

After that, cd /usr/ports/mystuff/ and do:

sudo tar xzvf /path/to/clamav-0.95.3.tar.gz

Next, I needed to uninstall the old version, but first I
had to stop the daemon running:
ps auxw grep clamd
sudo kill PID#

Then:

cd clamav-0.95.2
sudo ./configure
sudo make uninstall

There’s a warning in the docs about old librairies
and file versions on your system:

Caveats:

1) Make sure that you haven’t got old libraries (libclamav.so)
lying around your filesystem. You can verify it using:

$ ldd `which freshclam`
/usr/local/bin/freshclam:
Start          End            Type Open Ref GrpRef Name
1c000000 3c011000 exe     1           0       0              /usr/local/bin/freshclam
0470f000 24744000   rlib     0           1       0              /usr/local/lib/libclamav.so.6.5
022d7000 222db000 rlib    0           2       0              /usr/local/lib/libbz2.so.10.4
07d8b000 27d93000 rlib    0           2       0              /usr/lib/libz.so.4.1
0cd94000 2cd9d000 rlib    0           1       0              /usr/lib/libpthread.so.11.0
0c104000 2c13a000   rlib     0           1       0              /usr/lib/libc.so.48.0
05e7e000 05e7e000   rtld    0           1       0              /usr/libexec/ld.so

With my previous version of Clamav I had the file
/usr/local/lib/libclamav.so.6.4 but the uninstall
removed it okay.

More warnings:

2) Also make sure there is only one version of ClamAv
     on your system.

3) whereis freshclam

4) whereis clamscan

In case anything went wrong I saved my old configuration
files in /usr/local/etc renaming them. Then:

cd /usr/ports/mystuff/clamav-0.95.3/
cp /path/to/patch-0.95.3-bug1737.diff .
sudo patch -p1

After everything built and installed successfully, all that
was left to do was go back into /usr/local/etc and configure
clamd.conf and freshclam.conf, then restart the daemon:

sudo /usr/local/sbin/clamd

I want to stress like always that it pays to read
documentation. Where you want your TemporaryDirectory,
where you want your LocalSocket and DatabaseDirectory
and so on. Same goes for your freshclam settings.
READ THE DOCS!

If you’re going to go through all the above to have
Clamav on your system, then you’re probably going
to want to start it when your system boots. I’ve got
the following in /etc/rc.local:

if [ -x /bin/mkdir ]; then
/bin/mkdir /tmp/clamd && chown clamav:clamav /tmp/clamd
fi

if [ -x /usr/local/sbin/clamd ]; then
/usr/local/sbin/clamd
fi

I do the above mkdir along with the ownership thing
since my sytem cleans out /tmp on reboot. It’s set in
/etc/rc.conf.local:

clear_tmp_enable=”YES”     # clear /tmp on reboot

Cheers!

Tracking Network Usage With a Shell Script

2009-10-31T22:25:00.005-05:00

Every morning the daily output is waiting there for
me in my email. Part of the normal output under Ipkts
and Opkts shows what went through the interface:

Ipkts Opkts
2999812 2509494

I don’t reboot very often but when I do, it seems the system
zeros this out and it starts all over again. I put together
a script that runs periodically from a cronjob:

#!/bin/sh
# Filename: netusage.sh

cd $HOME/bin
if grep ‘daily output’ $HOME/Mail/root/new/*; then
cat `grep -l ‘daily output’ ~/Mail/root/new/*` | \
grep xl0 |tail -1 |awk ‘{print $5}’ > ibytes.out
cat `grep -l ‘daily output’ ~/Mail/root/new/*` | \
grep xl0 |tail -1 |awk ‘{print $7}’ > obytes.out

else
echo “No daily output yet” > /dev/null 2>&1
fi
cd

At the end of the month I run another script to total
the network usage:

#!/bin/sh
# Filename: netusemonthly.sh
cd $HOME/bin
date > `date +”%Y%m%d”`_endofmonthnetuse.log
echo “” >> `date +”%Y%m%d”`_endofmonthnetuse.log
echo “Monthly Ibytes” >> `date +”%Y%m%d”`_endofmonthnetuse.log
cat *ibytes.out |awk ‘{ SUM += $1 } END { print SUM }’ >> \
`date +”%Y%m%d”`_endofmonthnetuse.log
echo “” >> `date +”%Y%m%d”`_endofmonthnetuse.log
echo “Monthly Obytes” >> \
`date +”%Y%m%d”`_endofmonthnetuse.log
cat *obytes.out |awk ‘{ SUM += $1 } END { print SUM }’ >> \
`date +”%Y%m%d”`_endofmonthnetuse.log
mv -f *ibytes.out *obytes.out rebytes/
mv -f *endofmonthnetuse.log rebytes/
cd

The file names I used probably look ludicrous and they are all
completely arbitrary. If you try this out you can use whatever
file names and paths suit your needs. The whole thing was done
just to learn more about scripting, awk, and so forth. Also, to keep
the numbers right after a reboot, I added the following to
/etc/rc.shutdown:

netstat -ivn |head -8 |tail -1 |awk ‘{print $5}’ > \
/home/useracct/bin/`date +”%Y%m%d%H:%M:%S”`_reboot_ibytes.out
netstat -ivn |head -8 |tail -1 |awk ‘{print $7}’ > \
/home/useracct/bin/`date +”%Y%m%d%H:%M:%S”`_reboot_obytes.out
chown useracct:useracct /home/useracct/bin/*reboot_*bytes*

Like I said, this was all done just for learning purposes.
Maybe you can find a way to use some variation of the idea
on your own system.

Cheers!

Saving Tips From Mailing Lists

2009-10-31T21:59:00.006-05:00

Besides my constant experimentation towards always
learning more about OpenBSD, one of my other means
of accumulating tips is from the mailing lists I
subscribe to. I put together a script to save messages
from the misc@openbsd mailing list. It finds all the
messages in thread in my mutt subdirectory under Mail
and concatenates all of them to a text file. It’s
interactive and it asks you for a search pattern,
where to search, and where to save the output to.
Here’s what it looks like:

#!/bin/sh
# Filename: obsd2tips.sh – save mailing list problem
# questions and resolutions to my BSD tips folder

echo “Enter your search pattern: ”
read r

echo “Enter your search path: ”
read R

echo “Enter file to save to: ”
read i

cat `grep -l “$r” $HOME/$R/*` | \
sed ‘/Return-Path/,/X-Virus-Checker-Version/d’ >> \
$HOME/bsd/$i.txt

The stuff like Return-Path and X-Virus-Checker-Version
are stuff in my header I don’t want in the saved tip.
If it was just a single message I could strip the entire
header with a sed command, but it doesn’t work when there
is more than one message in the thread. It gets even more
complicated on the script I use to do the same thing with
my freebsd-questions mailing list threads. Here’s that
script and you will see the difference:

#!/bin/sh
# Filename: fbsd2tips.sh – save mailing list problem
# questions and resolutions to my BSD tips folder

echo “Enter your search pattern: ”
read r

echo “Enter your search path: ”
read R

echo “Enter file to save to: ”
read i

cat `grep -l “$r” $HOME/$R/*` | \
sed ‘/Return-Path/,/X-Virus-Checker-Version/d’ | \
sed ‘/freebsd-questions/d’ |sed ‘/unsubscribe/d’ >> \
$HOME/bsd/$i.txt

Depending on your MUA you will have to adjust your
filtering. I’ve been using mutt for years and do not
have any intention of switching to anything else. So,
if you’re using mutt, it will be easy to implement
for you. If you’re using some other MUA YMMV. ;)

Cheers!

Sat Oct 31 14:35:33 CDT 2009
Addendum:

Made the script a bit more interactive and helpful.
Thanks go to my friend Girish for helping me on it,
too. Here’s the new script for searching through my
misc@openbsd mail threads:

#!/bin/sh
# Filename: obsd2tips.sh – save mailing list problem
# resolutions to my BSD tips folder
found=”N”
while [ "$found" = "N" ]; do
echo “Enter your search pattern: ”
read r

echo “Enter your search path: ”
read R

echo “Enter file to save to: ”
read i

if grep $r $HOME/$R/* > /dev/null 2>&1 ;
then
cat `grep -l “$r” $HOME/$R/*` | \
sed ‘/Return-Path/,/X-Virus-Checker-Version/d’ >> \
$HOME/bsd/$i.txt
# XXX finish the program!
found=”foo”
else
echo “Can’t find it! Check your search pattern and path.”
# Rerun the search with new pattern and/or path
found=”N”
fi
done

I’d also like to add something at the end of the script where,
even after it finds what I’m looking for and writes it out to my
tips file, it will still come up and ask me if I’d like to enter
a new search. Anyone have a suggestion, please leave a comment.

Cheers!

Find and Kill Process

2009-10-18T04:38:00.003-05:00

I had used the following to find an instance of conky and
kill it in order to start a different conky configuration:

ps -U useracct |grep justweather |head -1 | \
cut -c 1-5 |sed -e ’s/[\ ]//g;/^$/d’ > jwpid.out
kill -9 `cat jwpid.out`

That’s unnecessarily complicated compared to this simpler way:

ps -U useracct |grep justweather.conkyrc | awk ‘{print $1}’ | \
xargs kill -15

Keeping Up With Security Patching

2009-10-15T23:27:00.023-05:00

Put together a script that uses lynx(1) and sed(1) to download
and parse to a nice output the latest OpenBSD security and
reliability notifications.

#!/bin/sh
# Filename: undead.sh

cd $HOME/bin/
echo "" > errata.out
echo - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - \
>> errata.out
echo "" >> errata.out

echo "Undeadly.org" >> errata.out
echo "" >> errata.out

lynx -dump http://undeadly.org/ ¦sed -n '/OpenBSD Errata/,$p, ¦ \
sed '/OpenBSD Resources/q' ¦ sed -n -e :a -e '1,3!{P;N;D;};N;ba' ¦ \
sed 's/^[ \t]*//' >> errata.out

echo "" >> errata.out
echo - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - \
>> errata.out
echo "" >> errata.out

echo "OpenBSD Errata" >> errata.out
echo "" >> errata.out

lynx -dump http://www.openbsd.org/errata44.html ¦ \
sed -n '/OpenBSD\ FAQ/,$p' ¦ \
sed '1d ' ¦sed '/References/,$d' ¦sed '$d' >> errata.out

echo "" >> errata.out
echo - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - \
>> errata.out
echo "" >> errata.out

cat errata.out ¦mail -s "OpenBSD Daily Errata" dennyboy

cd

You can always subscribe to security-announce@openbsd.org
but, sometimes, despite good intentions, things fall through the
cracks. In the end, at least IMHO, security is the responsibility of
the system admin, whether he's overseeing a server room full of
blade servers or if he's just a home user running one box.

Cheers!

Your Favourite BSD Tips & Tricks?

2009-08-24T22:25:00.003-05:00

Following from Dru Lavigne's blog:
A Year in the Life of a BSD Guru

Your Favourite BSD Tips & Tricks?: "BSD Mag has asked me to write another Tips & Tricks column for the upcoming 1/2010 issue of the magazine."

Passive Aggressive Spam Filtering

2009-08-23T22:31:00.001-05:00

Passive Aggressive Spam Filtering: "

Using OpenBSD and spamd for spam filtering and grey-listing is very old news but there are a few situations where it becomes politically and technically challenging to run in production. Here was a simple yet (and in no way the best method) of using PF and some friends on the internet to help 'slow the flow' of offal from the Internet into your mail server.

OpenBSD 4.6 Pre-Orders Online!

2009-08-23T22:25:00.001-05:00

OpenBSD 4.6 Pre-Orders Online!: "

Pre-orders are now being accepted for OpenBSD 4.6, scheduled for release on October 1st, 2009.

The developers bring us an amazing amount of cool new stuff (PF now enabled by default, a new privilege-separated SMTP daemon, routing domain support and lots more).

Of course, t-shirts and posters are available too. Order your set NOW!

BSD load demystified

2009-08-23T22:06:00.001-05:00

BSD load demystified: "

Ariane van der Steldt (ariane@) posted a reply to the OpenBSD misc mailing list last month that offered some valuable insight into how load is calculated in the BSD kernel. This is a topic that comes up routinely but remains largely misunderstood by the average user.

Read on for Ariane's explanation and comparison to Linux load...

SecPuffy:): OpenBSD tips and tricks - adding swap on the fly

2009-08-23T00:24:00.001-05:00

SecPuffy:): OpenBSD tips and tricks - adding swap on the fly

Spam control with OpenBSD greylisting

2009-08-10T21:17:00.007-05:00

New link for my friend in Tamil Nadu. He's renamed
his antispam product to SpamCheetah. He has been a
good friend over the years, helped me numerous times
with OpenBSD and other projects, and definitely knows
what he's doing. So if you're in need of an antispam
solution, he's definitely the guy to see! The link is
in the title but here it is again just to be safe:

SpamCheetah - Main Site
SpamCheetah - On SourceForge

Youtube videos about the product:
OpenBSD Tarpit
SpamCheetah's Web Interface

There is both a commercial version with full tech-support and
the free downloadable open source version.

Youtube Without Flash

2009-05-16T17:24:00.014-05:00

Check it out:

HQTube for Greasemonkey

Youtube live streaming without flash, gnash, etc. Yes, it works,
at least so far in Seamonkey for me. Haven't tried it yet with
Firefox but, going from past experience, Firefox is easier to
work with than Seamonkey and better supported in regards
to add-on's, but I choose Seamonkey because it's just faster.
At least it always has been for me.

Audio is working great, no stuttering or distortion, and video
streaming over my broadband connection is good, no jerkiness
or distortion there either.

Before doing anything else, if you don't have them installed
already, install the mplayer and mplayerplug-in packages.

Whether you're using Firefox or Seamonkey, you'll need to
install Greasemonkey. For Firefox, check out:

Greasespot

If you're using Seamonkey, you'll have to install xsidebar.
You can get it at:

xSidebar :: Seamonkey Add-ons

Then you can get the Seamonkey modified Greasemonkey
version at:

mozdev.org - xsidebar: modifiedmisc: Greasemonkey

Here's what's in my ~/.mplayer/mplayerplug-in.conf:

vo=gl
cachesize=512
cache-percent=5
profile=plugin

Here's what's in my ~/.mplayer/config:

[plugin]
autosync=0
mc=0
correct-pts=yes

Those are straight out of the installation instructions for the
HQTube for Greasemonkey script. So far I haven't had
to change that or add anything else.

Caveat:
Right now the script only works with Youtube.

Sun Nov 1 02:13:41 CST 2009
Addendum:

Had to stop using HQTube. Started getting error messages saying
it was no longer compatible and needed upgrading. Unfortunately,
I couldn't find an upgrade. So, I did some searching and ran across
the following:

Free Youtube! for Greasemonkey

So far it's not working too badly in this old Seamonkey version I'm
running. Lazy old me, I haven't upgraded yet to OpenBSD 4.6 but it
is going to happen shortly. Already received my shiny new CD set! ;)
Only problem with Free Youtube! I've had so far is it doesn't want to
play the videos on the BSD Conference part of Youtube. Wouldn't you know
it? They seem to be laid out differently than regular Youtube videos.
Hopefully after I upgrade I'll get that going too.
Had to uninstall HQTube. Started getting error messages that

Customizing Seamonkey's Toolbar

2008-11-14T02:21:00.001-06:00

How to Customize the SeaMonkey Toolbar | eHow.com

I thought this had some pretty good tips in it
for Seamonkey, which is my favorite browser.
Much faster than Firefox, at least in my browsing
experiences.

SSH & Samba Write-up

2008-07-09T17:42:00.008-05:00

I solved a windows network connectivity problem I was
having when I was using a socks 5 proxy through an ssh
tunnel to my OpenBSD box for safer browsing. I'd leave
the windows box running but not use it, sometimes for
hours, and more often than not, overnight. When I'd try
to get anywhere with the browser I no could. I still had
connectivity with the OpenBSD box, but that was it. I put
in a batch file that cleans up the local area connection
on the windows box and run it from windows scheduler
every 6 hours and it solved the problem. The addendum,
batch file, and link to the network article that helped me
are at the bottom of my original write-up at:

SSH & Samba

Fluxbox Article

2008-07-04T02:31:00.003-05:00

I've got a new write up on switching desktop wallpaper in
fluxbox automatically on a scheduled basis by using a script
and a cronjob to call it. I also made some additions to my
.kshrc file exporting some values into the environment for
when I login to the system that can be tested against and
also tell fluxbox which one of my wallpaper files to load
when it's starting.

Fluxbox Desktop

Recent Web Site Updates

2008-05-31T17:06:00.012-05:00

I finally got a couple of pages up I'd been wanting to
despite a bunch of interruptions. One is on installing
and configuring Conky to display system info on your
desktop. It also shows how to pull in other information
like weather reports and some system info that I couldn't
get with Conky's regular functions, due to either my own
misunderstanding of the instructions, or else something in
my chipset that's incompatible with the program. Probably
some of both.

ADDENDUM: 2008-06-06
Pertaining to Conky above, I've added some info to the page
that shows how I'm now getting stock market data to display.

ADDENDUM: 2008-06-13
Again, pertaining to Conky above, added some info on how I
kludged together a script to filter out my daily Accuweather
forecast email message, format it and scp it from that box to
the box I'm using conky on to be displayed below the current
conditions feed I get from NOAA's weather site.

The other write up is on creating a file to be used as a
persistent table for OpenBSD's PF packet filter firewall,
how to automatically concatenate IP addresses of would
be intruders to the file using scripts that run on a schedule
from a cronjob, and then flush the one table that does the
collecting and reload the persistent file back into its own
table. This makes it truly persistent, since rebooting has no
effect. You don't have to start back all over again with loads
of intrusion attempts in your logs.The pages are at:

Conky
PF with a Cumlative Table

ADDENDUM: 2008-07-04
Again I've added some more to the conky article above.
This addition describes how I run 2 instances of conky
and change one of them depending on the time of day and
the day of the week, since one configuration uses stock
market data and weather, while the other for the times
when the market is closed just displays the weather.
The change is accomplished using 2 short shell scripts
and 2 cronjobs. The last part of the entry shows how I
clean stale values from the environment in case I close
X but don't log out of the system, and then restart X.
From the value that gets exported from .xinitrc conky
determines which configuration file to use by comparing
that value with a small text file containing appropriate
times to load the file with stock market data. If it's
after hours or on the weekend when X restarts, it loads
just the weather version of conky on the one side of the
screen. The other conky running on the right side of the
screen doesn't change. It always shows system information.

4.3 Upgrade & New Pages on Web Site

2008-05-06T03:50:00.004-05:00

4.3 OpenBSD is out and I've got one box upgraded so far. Had a
couple of problems which you can read about at:

Denny’s OpenBSD Newbies blog

Should be clear to see they were my fault. :-)

I also put up a couple of new pages under the tips & tricks section.
One on using colors in xterm and one on quick remote printing over ssh.

Xterm and Color

Quick Printing Over SSH

New Page on Web Site

2008-04-16T13:02:00.009-05:00

Added a new page on my web site pertaining to using external
mailto links in Firefox with older text email programs like
mutt and pine. You can read it at:

Firefox and External Mailto Links

Only a couple of weeks until OpenBSD 4.3 is released! Yay! Time to do the upgrade dance. Only thing I hate doing is messing with
nut on my one box. Took me a long time to figure it out. Even
after I thought I had it right, turned out I didn't and I had to do
some more reading and work on it. I've put off upgrading from
4.1 to 4.2, partly because of the libexpat issue, but mostly from
laziness and taking advantage of of the OpenBSD development
team's kindness in providing security patches back 2 release
versions. I'd say that last reason probably makes up 90% of my
reason for being an upgrade laggard. :-)

I've had good success in getting pf and ssh working well with
my windows box and also with pure-ftpd. I especially love
the bruteforce rule capabilities!

That's it for now. Stay safe, stay secure. Use OpenBSD. That'll
take care of most of your security right there!

Three New Pages on Web Site

2008-03-24T02:56:00.004-05:00

I've added three new pages to my website at:

Mutt & GPG Keys
Simple Homemade Scheduler
Pure-FTPd

Web Site Update

2008-02-23T08:34:00.010-06:00

Finally made good my threat and added a new page on using
SSH, Samba, and Cygwin on Windows to forward ports for secure
browsing, file management, and so forth, from Windows boxen
to OpenBSD boxen. Includes a howto on generating passwordless
SSH RSA keys which is what I believe is safer than typing in
cleartext passwords. Page is at:

SSH & Samba

I also added a link to a site where you can pick up binary updates
for OpenBSD. When I checked it there were currently 3 available,
4.0, 4.1 and 4.2. Here's the link again:

Binary Updates for OpenBSD

My Web Site Server Error Messages

2008-02-06T04:07:00.000-06:00

I ran into the familiar "Forbidden You don't have permission thing"
myself the other day when I was testing links for typos. All I can
say is, there must've been a server problem at the time. As soon
as I got the message about it happening to someone else, I tested
the links again from this blog and they're all working. So that's
why I say it must've been a server problem. If anyone experiences
this again, please leave me a comment. I certainly want it to be
accessible to to all visitors.

Updates

2008-02-04T01:34:00.000-06:00

I updated my blog entry of Saturday, September 01, 2007 titled
"More Multimedia" pertaining to some things I found recently
to help when you get errors using mplex to recombine *.m2v and
and *ac3 files together again for final mpeg output. Includes a link
to the article at:

http://polarwave.openbsd101.com/dvd.html

Web Site Updates

2008-01-24T21:24:00.001-06:00

I've put up some new stuff on the web site.

New feeds at Feeds Page
New entry on Blog about Samba and Firefox over SSH.

Recent Web Site Update

2008-01-07T02:28:00.000-06:00

I was reading an article by Dru Lavigne at:

Hack #51. Get the Most Out of FTP

I used the info on .netrc along with a script I put together to
login anonymously automatically, get a directory listing of the
packages and diff it against a earlier existing directory listing
in my home directory to see if any packages had been updated.
It was fun as I went along, learing more about scripting and
command line ftp.
More Packages

New Updates on Web Site

2008-01-02T02:56:00.000-06:00

Added some pages to the new web site. There's help there on
vim, mutt, getting help on OpenBSD mailing lists, NTPD, dump
and restore, working with packages, and a page on scripting
help and .profile aliases to keep from opening the same program
twice.
Polarwave's Tips & Tricks

New Subdomain

2007-12-19T04:43:00.000-06:00

Well, it's not my own domain, but a subdomain serves the purpose
and was a very nice gesture of the owner of the domain. I've begun
putting up tips and tricks for newbies there for OpenBSD. Going to
be some work and will take time, but time I got. Now money, that's
another story. :-) Site is at:
http://polarwave.openbsd101.com

Maintenance Scripts

2007-09-17T10:33:00.000-05:00

These probably aren't the most professional system maintenance
scripts ever written, but they get the job done. The first one,
logroll.sh, does just what it says. It rolls over my procmail
and getmail logs, saving them with the date appended and starts
a new log like so:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Script to rotate ~/.procmail/.procmail-log and
# ~/.getmail/log every week so they don't start to
# take on huge proportions.
#
cp ~/.procmail/.procmail-log \
~/.procmail/`date +"%Y%m%d"`.procmail-log.txt
#
echo > ~/.procmail/.procmail-log
#
cp ~/.getmail/log ~/.getmail/`date +"%Y%m%d"`.log.txt
echo > ~/.getmail/log

There's a harder way which I tried first, not thinking, where
the log is copied with the date appended, then delete the log,
then recreate with touch, then chmod to 0600. Lot of work and
unnecessary. All you have to do is copy it with the date and
then echo nothing into it like 'echo >'. Still the same file
as before, just nothing in it, starting over fresh.

The next one is for root, to backup changes in /etc and /var/db
without having to do a dump, just using rsync:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Weelky rsync changes in /etc/ & /var/db to /data2/backups
#
/usr/local/bin/rsync -arvvgt /etc/ /data2/backups/etc && \
/usr/local/bin/rsync -arvvgt /var/db/ /data2/backups/db/

The double 'vv' is for very verbose to give lots of info.

The last script's comments make it pretty self explanatory.
Just a way to keep track of what you've installed lately.

#!/bin/sh
#
# Script lists /var/db/pkg & outputs it to a file with
# the date appended. Then it diffs it against the previous
# list from the week before & outputs the differences to a
# separate file with the date appended. Then it takes the
# most recent list wth date appended & copies/overwrites
# the previous weeks listing to be current.
#
cd /data2/backups
ls -al /var/db/pkg > `date +"%Y%m%d"`pkgs.txt
diff pkgs.inst.list.txt `date +"%Y%m%d"`pkgs.txt > \
`date +"%Y%m%d"`chgs.txt

mv pkgs.inst.list.txt `date +"%Y%m%d"`previous.week.pkgs.txt
cp `date +"%Y%m%d"`pkgs.txt pkgs.inst.list.txt

CUPS Printing Problems

2007-09-16T13:19:00.000-05:00

Been a rough week and a half. For a long time now I just
used OpenBSD to print mostly plaintext documentation to
a windows shared printer. Now I'd like to be able to print
other stuff too. Graphics, web pages, etc. I installed cups,
samba, and pnm2ppa which built okay on my system but it's
not included in the ports and packages. I downloaded it
from http://www.superbhosting.net/sourceforge.php and built
it on my OpenBSD 4.1 box. I already had foomatic-rip and
foomatic-gwrapper in /usr/local/bin so I renamed them to
stop any confusion, since cups installs foomatic-rip when
you install it cups. I finally figured out how to print to
my windows shared printer with it, but that was just the
tip of the iceberg. I couldn't stop the shearing problem
no matter what I tried when I'd try to print a web page.
And, it was running off the bottom of the page despite the
fact I had it set for letter, not a4 mode. I finally went
into firefox's page setup, unchecked the box that says to
fit to page, and manually set it to 75 percent, and told
it to print images and colors. Also, when you configure
cups from the browser interface at localhost:631 under the
printer options section, I told it to use the ordered mode
under the dithering algorithm instead of Floyd Steinberg
which promises higher quality, and set the bidirectional
printing to on for faster speed, although it says without
it you'll get better quality. Now I'm still getting some
shearing on some letters, but not too much. When I print
just a text web page like at the rfc web site, it comes
out pretty good. I'll have to learn how to do more stuff
with it from the command line. Maybe I can tweak it some
more. I downloaded a new HP-DeskJet_722C-pnm2ppa.ppd for
pnm2ppa to use for my 722C printer. The cupsd daemon man
page says the default is to run in the background as a
daemon, so all I added this to /etc/rc.local:

if [ -x /usr/local/sbin/cupsd ]; then
/usr/local/sbin/cupsd
fi

And, to run samba as a daemon, I added:

if [ -x /usr/local/libexec/smbd ]; then
/usr/local/libexec/smbd -D
fi

if [ -x /usr/local/libexec/nmbd ]; then
/usr/local/libexec/nmbd -D
fi

That did the trick. They start up fine on boot. Anyone
reading this who has some experience with the shearing
problem with cups, foomatic-rip, and pnm2ppa, please
share it if you have time. That's it for today.

More Multimedia

2007-09-01T02:12:00.000-05:00

DVD Ripping and Burning Tips

I usually use 1 of 2 methods for finding out
what's on a dvd. First, I run

lsdvd

to see how many titles and chapters are on the dvd,
and I look for the main title. More often than not,
it's the first one, but not always. Good example was
one I ran across that had five 24 minute episodes and
then one large file with all 5 in it. When I played
the dvd with mplayer, I saw on the menu you could
choose each individual episode, or you could choose
the menu listing 'play all'. The combined file was
too large for a single-layer dvd, but I could rip each
individual episode and put 3 on one dvd and the other
2 on a 2nd dvd. Here's how I did it, starting with
episode 1:

mplayer dvd://1 -dumpaudio -dumpfile episode1.ac3
mplayer dvd://1 -dumpvideo -dumpfile episode1.m2v
mplex -f 8 -o episode1.vob episode1.ac3 episode1.m2v

So, in the above scenario, title one was just one episode,
not the main movie file with all the episodes in it.

The other program I use to check the dvd is streamanalyze,
part of the streamdvd package, which includes lsdvd, at
least in the OpenBSD version of it. Do this:

streamanalyze -i /dev/rcd0c -t 1
(assuming title 1 is the main title)

That'll show you what's in title 1. File formats look like:

Videostream id's always start with '0xen' where n is the
track number. In most cases a video dvd contains only one
video stream '0xe0' but multiangle videos might contain
more video streams.

Audiostream id's always start with '0x8n' where n is the
track number. Most video dvd's contain multiple audiostreams
in different languages, director comments, etc. There's a
special case for mpeg audiostreams that are pretty rare for
find. If you have a dvd containing mpeg audiostreams and want
to select one of them, use '0xcn' as an identifier where n is
the tracknumber (also special, counting starts from 1).

Subpicturestream id's always start with '0x2n' where n is
the track number. Most video DVDs contain multiple subpicture
streams in different languages.

The above info on streamanalyze and streamdvd can be found
in readme files installed with the programs. On my OpenBSD
box, the readme are in:

/usr/local/share/doc/streamdvd/README.streamanalyze
/usr/local/share/doc/streamdvd/README.streamdvd

* NOTE *
You can use streamdvd to rip and shrink a dvd movie, but be
forewarned, YMMV! I did okay with it on smaller movies, and
even on shrinking some larger ones, but when it came to
extracting particular streams rather than just everything, the
program choked up on me more often than not. It may have
something to do with the way it interfaces with dvdauthor:

dvdauthor -t -o /path/to/save -f 'streamdvd -i /dev/rcd0c \
nbsp&;nbsp&;nbsp&;nbsp&;-t 1-s 0xe0,0x80,0x20 -c 1-9 |'

That's a good example. It's trying to get title 1, the main
video, the first audio, and the first subtitle, chapters 1
through 9. That's what the docs say. But, it always seems to
run into problems. That's why I turned to mplayer in the first
place.

Before leaving this section, tcprobe deserves mention. It's
part of transcode but can be used independently for medium
and print information. The command

tcprobe -i foo.avi
will print interesting information about the avi file itself
and its video audio content. It has some interesting switches
you can tack ontothe command. As always in the 'nix' world, try

man 1 tcprobe. Yep, READ THE FINE MANUAL! ;)

Before doing any ripping, if you see the main title is really a
whopper, like 8GB or so, you can rip the movie in 2 parts with
mplayer. Let's say

lsdvd reports there are 24 chapters in the main title. To split
the dvd:

mplayer dvd://1 -chapter 1-12 -dumpstream -dumpfile movie1st.vob
mplayer dvd://1 -chapter 13-24 -dumpstream -dumpfile movie2nd.vob
But, if you see your movie will fit on a single-layer dvd, or
that it looks close anyway, just do this:

mplayer dvd://# -dumpstream -dumpfile movie.vob

To play the movie with english subtitles, do this:

mplayer -sid 0 movie.vob

If your movie won't fit on a single-layer dvd, but it doesn't
look too awfully big, after you've ripped it, do the following:

Extract audio:
tcextract -i movie.vob -t vob -x ac3 -a 0 > audio.ac3

Extract video:
tcextract -i movie.vob -t vob -x mpeg2 > movie.m2v

If you need subtitles use spububmux from dvdauthor and ifo_dump
from libdvdread-utils. Check for color palette:

ifo_dump /dev/rcd0c 1 |grep Color |sed 's/Color ..: \
00//' > palette.yuv

Generate picture PNG in format 4.12
spuunmux -s 1 -p palette.yuv movie.vob
This command generates PNG files and command file sub.xml
Calculate the exact shrinkage factor with this formula:
requant_factor = (video_size / (4700000000 - audio_size)) * 1.04
* NOTE: This worked perfectly for me first time out. YMMV *

Now use the factor derived from the formula above to
shrink the video:

tcrequant -i movie.m2v -o new.m2v -f (shrinkage factor)

*NOTE*
From everything I've read on shrinking, you shouldn't
go larger than a 1.5 factor. It degrades the quality too
much. If after running the formula above you find the
factor exceeds 1.5, you should probably split the movie.

Now recombine new.m2v with the audio file audio.ac3:
mplex -f 8 -o new.mpg new.m2v audio.ac3

*UPDATE*
There's a newer version of this article up on my web site
with additional information about how to handle mplex errors.
I think it comes about because of the newer copy protection.
I know when I first added this article to my blog, I wasn't
having those sort of problems with mplex. I could be wrong,
though. Feel free to leave a comment. When you get to the page,
search for "Nasty DVD's". Article is here:

DVD's - Analyze Rip Burn

At this point, you can insert subtitles.
spumux sub.xml < new.mpg > new.vob

Now that you've got your movie ripped and/or shrunk, you
setup the dvd file structure with dvdauthor. First, create
dvd.xml and name it whatever you want. Just be sure to have
an .xml extension

<dvdauthor>
<vmgm />
<titleset>
<titles>
<pgc>
<vob file="new.vob" />
</pgc>
</titles>
</titleset>
</dvdauthor>

Pass the xml file to dvdauthor for authoring:
dvdauthor -o /path/you/saved/to -x dvd.xml

Dvdauthor creates 2 subdirectories below where you're at,
AUDIO_TS & VIDEO_TS. Let's say you're in /data/dvdfiles.

* NOTE *
I don't know if I can stress the value of dvd rewritables
enough! Catch some on sale and get them. They'll save you
coasters and frisbees, for sure. I got some half-priced
recently by watching the Sunday ads. Of course, you can
take your changes on eBay. I haven't run into hardly any
problems in three years. 'X' Those are crossed fingers. ;)
Anyway, here's some info on rewritables:

To blank a dvd-rw that already has been written to, and
really wipe everything off of it, do:

dvd+rw-format -blank=full /dev/rcd0c

That does a full blanking. This will take about one hour
on 1x media. A fast blanking can be done by:

dvd+rw-format -blank /dev/rcd0c

On to the burning.

To create an image to burn, do this:

mkisofs -dvd-video -udf -o new.iso /data/dvdfiles/

To burn the image, do this:

growisofs -Z /dev/rcd0c=new.iso

To skip the last 2 steps & burn directly to dvd, do this:

growisofs -dvd-compat -dvd-video -udf -Z /dev/rcd0c \
/data/dvdfiles
(Assuming /dev/rcd0c is your burning device and
/data/dvdfiles is theoutput directory of dvdauthor)

or, for the directory containing AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS:

growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/rcd0c -dvd-video .

(and don't forget the . on the end)

* NOTE on burning devices *
On other 'nix' type systems, your burning device might be and
probably is something other than /dev/rcd0c but I'm writing as
an OpenBSD user, and that's what my device is.

gopher://sdf.lonestar.org/00/users/dancer68/multimedia/
dvdripping.txt.txt
(the double extension's NOT a typo)

As a side note, here's an alternative to streaming with vlc using
nc or netcat:

On your streaming client, type this first:

$ nc -l 1234 | mplayer -cache 8192 -

Then walk to your streaming server and push the file
down the network's throat.

Filename is just an example.

$ cat Aerosmith-Amazing.mpg | nc 192.168.1.5 1234

If the streaming client IP is 192.168.1.5...

That is all. It works. Really cool. :)

If you're on the client end, you could still use vlc to do
the same thing I just outlined with vlc to save the stream.

Some links that helped me:

http://www.brandonhutchinson.com/Burning_Video_DVDs_
in_Linux.html

http://www.ericdugas.com/howtos/ripDVDWithMplayer/
ripDVDWithMplayer.php

http://www.dizwell.com/prod/node/47

http://forum.freespire.org/archive/index.php/t-2978.html

http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/answers/Applications_GUI_
Multimedia/DVD9_to_DVD5_guide

http://wiki.videolan.org/index.php/VLC_command-line_help

http://digg.com/software/How_to_Rip_DVDs_with_VLC

Drive Free Space Script

2007-08-19T02:34:00.000-05:00

I originally got this script from:

http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:aIS0abHfbL4J:
techrepublic.com.com/i/tr/downloads/home/
milton_ingram_scripts.pdf+milton_ingram_scripts
&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&lr=lang_en&client=firefox-a

That's in html for convenience. There's also a pdf file:

http://techrepublic.com.com/i/tr/downloads/
home/milton_ingram_scripts.pdf

I changed it around a little. My way reads in gigabytes and I
dressed up the right side under 'Mounted on' to align left to
make it neater and look like the regular output of df.
You'll have to play around with the heading spacing on
Filesystem, Total, Used, and so forth. I'm no good at
html and besides, the formatting of this template on
my blog wouldn't allow the lines to appear as they do
in the script anyway. For instance, the ==== lines have
29 cut off the end to make it fit here. Any questions, I
can always send the script to anyone interested. I just
liked it since it helps me keep track of how much free
space I have.

#!/bin/ksh
# Generate a readable disk free listing
# MWI 0310
#
echo "======================================= "
echo "File System Report in GB :" `date`
echo "======================================= "
echo "Filesystem Total Used Avail Capacity Mounted on "
echo "======================================= "
df -k | sort -k6 |awk '$1!="swap" && $1!="Filesystem" \
{tt+=$2;tu+=$3;tr+=$4;printf "%-9s %10.2f %10.2f %10.2f %9s \
%-13s\n", $1, $2/1048576, $3/1048576, $4/1048576, $5, $6} \
END{printf "\nTotal GB %10.2f %10.2f %10.2f\n", tt/1048576, \
tu/1048576, tr/1048576 }'
echo "======================================= "

Multimedia on OpenBSD

2007-08-17T12:57:00.000-05:00

Been a while since a posting. Been trying to learn how to
rip and burn dvds. When the content is equal or smaller
than single-layer size, 4.7GB, it's been a breeze, using
dvdbackup. But, a marjority of dvd content is larger than
that. In that case, I've mostly used streamanalyze, lsdvd
and tcprobe to look into the dvd structure; streamdvd and
dvdauthor to rip and then restructure the content to be
burned. For burning, I've been using growisofs. There have
been instances where nothing worked for me. I could rip the
dvd but not just the one title with just its chapters and
audio, so I never even got to the point where I could shrink
it to fit on a single-layer. Streamdvd choked on the dvd's
structure, sometimes dumping its core.

I've had good luck with radio programs. I love to listen
to several that come on late at night, but if I have to get
up early, that's out. So, I have a small program I call from
a cronjob in a script with the url of the program. It takes
an integer after it for the number of minutes it should run
mplayer, streaming in the audio and dumping it to mp3. Here's
the code for it. Just compile it with gcc. Name the outfile
whatever you want.

------------------

#include
#include
#include
#include
#include
#include

extern char *__progname;

/* This program self destructs after a specified time */
int main(int argc, char **argv) {

int ret;
long minutes;
struct timeval t, t2;
pid_t child;
if (argc < 3) {
printf("Usage: %s \n",
__progname);
exit(128);
/* NOT REACHED */
}

if ( (child = fork()) != 0) {
/* I am the parent process */
minutes = strtol(argv[1], NULL, 10);
sleep(60 * minutes);

/* I am done! */
kill(child, SIGINT);
exit(0);

} else {
/* I am the child */
execv("/usr/local/bin/mplayer", argv + 1);

exit(0);
}
}

------------------

Here's an example script to call from a cron job
to record your radio program, assuming you named
the compiled output of the above code to streamdump.
And, make sure it's in your path, like mine is ~/
or somewhere like /usr/local/bin.

------------------

#!/bin/sh
#
# script called from a cronjob to save an audiocast
~/streamdump 120 -dumpstream mms://adressofstream \
-dumpfile /data/xxx/mp3/show/`date +"%Y%m%d"`xxx.mp3
#

Streamdump runs mplayer 120 minutes, dumps the stream
into the dumpfile switch which saves the output to a
directory in mp3 format. the `date +"%Y%m%d"` adds the
date on the frontend of xxx.mp3 to make your shows
easier to keep track of. In the url, it may be something
other than mms like http or whatever. You'll have to find
that out from where you're streaming from.

------------------

That's it from the coast for right now. Have to get
started trying a different print setup on my bsd boxes.
I've always been lazy before, being setup to just print
text via a network shared printer on my windows box.
Anything graphic I did directly from the windows box.
I have a Deskjet 722C printer. It was part of a short-
lived series of printers HP put out. The only driver
I've ever had that works with it has been:

HP-DeskJet_722C-pnm2ppa.ppd

Got that from linuxprinting.org a long while back.
Here's what my /etc/printcap has looked like up until
now:

# $OpenBSD: printcap,v 1.4 2003/03/28 21:32:30 jmc Exp $
lp|windows line printer:\
:rp=HPDeskJet:\
:rm=dancer:\
:af=/etc/foomatic/HP-DeskJet_722C-pnm2ppa.ppd:\
:if=/usr/local/bin/foomatic-rip:\
:sd=/var/spool/output:\
:mx#0:\
:sh

But, I can't print from firefox or the gimp like this.
So, I'm going to try installing apsfilter and see how
it goes. I once read an old nix hand's opinion of bsd
printing, describing it as a convoluted zen-like
experience. ;) That's pretty much been my experience!

The Joys of Procmail

2007-07-13T22:03:00.001-05:00

Procmail, possibly from the root word proctology. ;) Had one heck of a time setting it up with mutt and getmail but it's a done deal, up and running finally. I'm putting in the configuration below. Possibly someone having the problems I did will be googling and find it. We can only hope. I want to stress the importance, too, of the order in which the below values are placed. Pay attention to that when you're creating your own configuration. And do not put anything in you don't need. Also, VERBOSE=off stopped a good amount of the problems I was having when I'd run getmail and it'd call procmail. Procmail choked on the output. Once verbose was turned off, things got immediately better.

VERBOSE=off
PMDIR=$HOME/.procmail
LOGFILE=$PMDIR/.procmail-log
MAILDIR=$HOME/Mail
DEFAULT=$MAILDIR/inbox
LOCKFILE=$HOME/.lockmail
COMSAT=no
PER=(mypersonal@gmail\.com|mypersonal@linux\.org)
FBSDQUESTIONS=(owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd\.org)
FBSDSTABLE=(owner-freebsd-stable@freebsd\.org)
FBSDCVSALL=(owner-cvs-all@freebsd\.org)
OBSDALL=(owner-misc@openbsd\.org)
OBSDSEC=(owner-security-annouce@openbsd\.org)

:0
*$ ^From:.*$PER
per/

:0
*$ ^From:.*$FBSDQUESTIONS
fbsd/

:0
*$ ^From:.*$FBSDSTABLE
fbsd/

:0
*$ ^From:.*$FBSDCVSALL
fbsd/

:0
*$ ^From:.*$OBSDALL
obsd/

:0
*$ ^From:.*$OBSDSEC
obsdsec/

I have lots of individual entries below the section listed, but for brevity's sake, that's all I'm putting in for now. You'll have to read the "fine" manual to see other ways to filter. There are lots and it can get really complicated. Here's how I have getmail setup:

[options]
verbose = 0
read_all = false
delete = true
message_log = ~/.getmail/log

[retriever]
type = SimplePOP3Retriever
server = myispmailserver
username = myusername
password = mypassword

[destination]
#type = Maildir
#path = /home/dennyboy/Mail/
type = MDA_external
path = /usr/local/bin/procmail
unixfrom = true

Setting up .muttrc is a real joy too. ;) I'll have to recount that some other time. It goes without saying there's a lot of reading. It pays to to read the instructions. People in the mailing lists are notoriously recalcitrant about helping you if they think you haven't really tried on your own, especially when it comes to reading the man pages and installed docs. Rightfully so, too. I worked on this mess, on and off, for over a week. I finally did ask on the openbsd misc mailing list, but just like when you were back in grade school doing your math for the teacher, you need to "show your work". I got a really good answer and after a little editing with vim, I finally had everything working in a short time.

OpenBSD 4.1 Install

2007-06-15T03:14:00.000-05:00

Finally some time to do it! I recently acquired an old Dell 2.2 Celeron. At the time I got it, it had Windows XP on it, along with AOL and only 384M of ram. And, it hadn't been defragged in who knows how long. Slower than molasses! I yanked the hard drive, used a special usb to ata adapter line to back everything up to dvd for the people who gave me the box, put the hard drive back along with a new 160G second hard drive, added a Diamond Stealth 256M video card with an extra pci mounted fan to keep it cool, and fianlly added memory for a total of 1.5G. Tried running Fedora 6 on it for a while and it was real nice, but I just couldn't stay away from OpenBSD. Got my new cd's, installed 4.1, configured X, actually built java 1.5 without mishap, and added most of my favorite programs. Still have to finish setting mutt and getmail up. I promised a friend I would try to wean myself off old reliable pine and fetchmail. Also trying to get started on C programming since that's the backbone of bsd. Also applied all the latest patches. I still have to hook my old Epson scanner up and install the sane-backends and frontends along with the gimp and xsane. Hopefully that'll go off without a hitch like the rest has. Nice to be able to rebuild my kernel in about 15 minutes as opposed to before on my old PIII 800 where it takes about about 35 to 40 minutes. I shared a lot of good articles off my Google Reader, so check them out.

Mount Partitions to Restore Backups

2007-06-01T02:34:00.000-05:00

I've been asking myself what do I do if a partition gets corrupted? Yeah, I do dumps regularly to another disk, but when you boot from an OpenBSD install cd there's no matching /dev/wd1d there. There are no devices with wd1, only wd0. There's MAKEDEV but it says that the operation isn't permitted when I type ./MAKEDEV wd1d. What's going on here? I don't have to worry about being root, this is an installation cd. Actually I've shelled out of the install routine. Let's do ls -l and see what we get. I'll be darned, MAKEDEV is not executable. chmod +x MAKEDEV and that solves that problem.

Once again, I type ./MAKEDEV wd1d and hit enter. This time there's no error message. Another quick ls -l shows all kinds of wd1 listings now including wd1d. Now I mount -r /dev/wd1d /mnt and no error message. Let's see what mount shows. Cool, wd1d is mounted. I do a ls -l on it and sure enough, there's my /data partition on the hard drive where all the dumps are stored.

Now if a partition gets corrupted, all I have to do is boot up on the cd, make the device, run newfs on the corrupted partition, mount the partition with the backups on it as shown above, mount the newly formatted partition in write mode, change directory into it and restore the appropriate dump. Life is good!

Someone may say you don't need the cd to boot from, you just boot the bsd.rd kernel, and that's okay, that is if your / partition isn't the corrupted one. Also, remember, restore is in /sbin. I don't think there's anything wrong with using the cd to work from. That is, unless you didn't install off a cd and don't have one. I think it's a good idea to keep one one hand.

This is probably kindergarden stuff for most of the guys on the OpenBSD mailing list, but for me it's like when the apple hit old Isaac on the head! It's a revelation! ;) I'm putting this up here in hopes someday some poor newbie having the same problem googles around and finds it. That'd be cool.

Everytime I do a fresh install of OpenBSD, I create a wd1a partition on a 2nd hard drive the same size as my root partition on the primary hard drive and label it altroot. In root's crontab, right below my env settings SHELL, PATH, and HOME, I enter ROOTBACKUP=1. That way, every day the system will backup /root to /altroot. Alternately, you can edit /etc/daily.local and enter the same ROOTBACKUP=1 line.

In either case, you also have to remember to enter the partition info in /etc/fstab. The format is a little different too, than the format the others partitions use: /dev/wd1a /altroot ffs xx 0 0

All Hail the Supreme Nerd God!

2007-03-23T13:48:00.000-05:00

Yes, that's me! ;) By some fluke of fate, I scored even higher than my most revered BSD Guru, Dru Lavigne! Blind, outhouse luck is what I say! ;) Here's my reward:

More will follow. Long time since the my last entry, the interim being fraught with computer rescues for others, system rebuilds for myself, experimentation with Fedora Linux, a new (newer than any of my old boxes) computer given to me for testing new stuff, hardware crashes, and so on. Been an interesting time for sure!

YouTube - Installing OpenBSD in 5 minutes

2007-02-03T04:11:00.000-06:00

I thought this was a fitting link for my blog. Pretty
cool video!

YouTube - Installing OpenBSD in 5 minutes

February Update

2007-02-02T18:43:00.000-06:00

January was a busy month. I had put off updating OpenBSD too
long and finally got around to it towards the latter part of
of the month. Read the upgrade faq at:

OpenBSD Upgrade Guide

Doesn't help when you don't pay attention to detail, which is
what I was guilty of. I left out a few important steps that you
always have to do. Since I figured I should probably start over
from scratch and had a good backup (what, you don't backup?),
I downloaded a snapshot and installed it. Everything went fine
and about a week later, I tried it again just to see if I was
just plain lucky the first time. Once again, rock solid OpenBSD
came through. Since then, I've gotten into a lot of cd burning
since my significant other got me involved in replicating some
Vietnamese Buddhist cd's to be donated to the temple. I put the
original cd in and ran:

cdparanoia -B

to copy all the tracks into the directory I was in. Then:

sudo cdrecord -v speed=12 driveropts=burnfree /dev/rcd0c -audio -pad *wav

The hard part was using the labeling program on the windows box.
Reason being, I wanted to get the Vietnamese words along with the
diacritics right on the label. I tried several Vietnamese keyboard
programs, and then found out I could insert special symbols right
from the fonts with the labeling program. After that, print the
labels and put them on the cd's. Done! Also did quite a bit of
playing around with ffmpeg and grip. There are still licensing
issues with flash, so I decided to give gnash a try. It does okay
on simple and older flash stuff, but tends to choke and dump core
on other newer and either more complicated or poorly put together
flash files. It's still in development, so that's to be expected.
Been using gvim a lot and loving it. Great editor!
I've recently put up some stuff on my gopherspace; helpfiles, etc.
For those running IE, you have to go through a proxy, and any html
files will have to viewed by choosing view source or saving it to
disk. Hey, if you're diehard windows, you can always install cgywin!

My Gopherspace

For others running Firefox, Seamonkey, Netscape, Lynx, etc., go to:

My Gopherspace

There are lots of other things I've been trying, but as usual, I'm
up burning the midnight oil and have other projects early in the
morning, so that's it for now.

Geek Awareness

2006-11-30T00:32:00.000-06:00

I've been sitting here after midnight, doing what seems, upon
reflection, geeky things. I've been listening to jazz, reading
some social comment stuff, studying the Lyx introduction
and tutorial since I'm interested in doing some publishing,
running an ssh mission over to an XP box to see if certain
files were installed in Cygwin like what I'm using on this
OpenBSD box, using Snownews to read RSS feeds from
various OpenSource projects around the Web , especially
from Dru Lavigne's Blog , accessing it with Lynx , my
text-based browser, registered at the LXF (Linux Format)
web site and retrieved my new password once again using
SSH to login to my Unix shell account and use Pine to
read my email at SDF , and so on.

I remember back in the early 90's when I was just starting
out with computers and trying to get everything I could free,
since money is always an item to consider when you're still
raising a family. Now, with all the resources listed above,
I'm slowly but surely weaning myself away from Microsoft ,
not because I don't like the system or the people developing
and selling it, but once again due to the expense of keeping
up with it, as opposed to relying almost solely on opensource
to get my computing done. But hey, maybe one of these days
I'll have more money again and invest in a brand new shiny
Vista cd or dvd set! Keyword here is "MAYBE". ;)

Keeping Up with Packages

2006-11-25T20:25:00.000-06:00

I like to follow the OpenBSD advice that it's better
to install their binary packages, rather than build
programs from ports, unless there's a particular need
not covered by a package. That being said, I wanted
an easy way to keep abreast of package updates and
additions without subscribing to any more mail lists
than I already have, so I kludged up a script to run
from a cronjob every morning. Then I could check it
when I was up and about. Some folks read the paper.
Not me. ;) The script runs something like this:

----------------------------------------------------
#!/bin/sh
# just a script to update my package index file
# without a bunch of typing! ;)
#
wget ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/3.9/packages/i386/
index.txt && mv index.txt index.`date +"%Y%m%d%H%M%S"`.txt
#
----------------------------------------------------

Wget fetches the file index.txt, and then uses mv with
the date function to create a unique file that can be
diffed against older versions. Simple but effective.
Too bad the funnies don't come with it. ;)

Cygin Login Errors from OpenBSD Box

2006-11-17T14:38:00.000-06:00

Updated Cygwin on my XP box. Thought because it stopped
several times before finishing and having to choose a
different server, that that had something to do with it.
Apparently not. Searched the Cygwin mailing list archives
and found the following:

Fixing /etc/profile

You just copy C:\cygwin\etc\defaults\etc\profile over
C:\cygwin\etc\profile and restart cygwin. After that,
everything goes back to normal. Just another day in puter
paradise. Speaking of which, I'm always bragging about
how I never have to reboot OpenBSD all the time like I
do "Winblows". ;) Sitting here this morning, reading
the news in Firefox on the OpenBSD box, and BOOM, down
she went! I've read all sorts of problems and responses
in the OpenBSD mailing lists with spontaneous reboots,
and nobody wants to think their hardware's crapping out,
but in my experience, that's almost always what's caused
it on any of my boxes. Case in point: Same box, last year
maybe, or earlier this year, everytime I'd drag a large
file across from XP to some dir on the OpenBSD box, it'd
reboot. Upon careful examination of the mobo, turned out
to be some leaking capacitors. Changed out the mobo and,
while I was at it, put in a new power supply too. It sure
didn't last very long. All boxes here are hooked into UPS's,
which is a prerequisite around this area. The power company
is always dropping power off, especially since Katrina came
to see us in 2005. I guess it's a moot point, though. I've
always had good luck with power supplies, but I guess I
just got a bad apple out of the barrel last time.

OpenBSD - Create & Burn ISO's

2006-11-16T13:39:00.000-06:00

This is a subject that confused me early on, so I thought it might help someone to gather some common facts and links in one spot.

After you've got your sources in place, in my case
/data/user/openbsd4.0/i386
you can create your iso image. Here's what I did:

cd /data/user/openbsd4.0/
mkisofs \
-v \
-r \
-T \
-J \
-V "OpenBSD-4.0-Release" \
-b i386/cdrom40.fs \
-c boot.catalog \
-o /data/user/OpenBSD-4.0-Release.iso \
-A "OpenBSD 4.0 Release" \
.

Don't forget that last dot. It'll befuddle you
and kick your butt if you do!

Now you're ready to burn the iso image to a cd.
I like to use a cd rewritable the first time just
in case I screw things up, so I don't waste a cd.
This is what I did:

sudo cdrecord blank=fast dev=/dev/cd0c:0,0,0
(your hardware configuration may differ)
sudo cdrecord -v dev=/dev/rcd0c /data/user/OpenBSD-4.0-Release.iso

My cd is setup in /etc/fstab. Yours might not be.
Here's how mine is setup:

/dev/cd0a /mntcd1 cd9660 ro,noauto 0 0

I mounted it like so to check if everything got burned right:

sudo mount /mntcd1

Everything checked out, so the cd's ready to boot from
and start the upgrade process. In case you don't have
your cd in /etc/fstab, using my hardware config as an
example, I could mount it like so:

sudo mount -r -t cd9660 /dev/cd0a /mntcd1
or
sudo mount_cd9660 /dev/cd0a /mntcd1

Here are some links you can check out:

How to make a bootable OpenBSD CD
OpenBSD Upgrade Guide
OpenBSD 4.0 Installation Guide

As a last thought, I know there were a lot of sudo's
in my examples. Setting up individually permitted tasks
in /etc/sudoers can be a chore. As an alternative, root
can choose to allow everyone in the wheel group to do just
about anything by changing the following:

# Uncomment to allow people in group wheel to run all commands
# %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL
(Uncomment means to remove the leading #)

And, if root really wants to live dangerously:

# Same thing without a password
# %wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

Always check your man pages. Everyone hates to be told
"RTFM you damned lazy troll newbie" or something to that
effect. ;) In the preceding example, you could read up on:
"man sudo" or "man sudoers"
Hope the preceding helps someone out along the way.
Please leave a comment if I've screwed something up here.
I have been known to do that on occasion. ;) And, please
leave a comment if it helped you. It's encouraging, from
time to time. That's it for today.

Veterans Day

2006-11-13T02:27:00.000-06:00

To all Americans, and especially to fellow vets, have a safe and happy Veterans Day. For once, this post has nothing to do with OpenBSD. Just been doing a lot of thinking, especially since the election results and Mr Rumsfeld's unceremonious removal. I know he could've been a little more flexible, but I remember too, what it seems a lot have either forgotten or never knew to begin with; not only are we at war, but we've been in it for one hell of a long time now, way way before Desert Storm. I guess Mr Rumsfeld's answer to a question from the audience after his speech in Kansas is mostly what finally set me off. The guy had asked him about how to get the average American to show more of an "investment" in the war. How could you get Joe Dokes who comes home from work, showers, eats, watches American Idol, then goes to bed, more involved, committed, interested, more something! (I injected some into that last). Mr Rumsfeld talked about how he remembered the rationing of WWII, the sacrifices those who stayed at home made, buying bonds, showing support for the troops, doing without some things for the war effort, and so forth. I remember my folks talking about it. I was born in 1947, but everything stayed pretty fresh in everyone's mind for quite some time after the war. The guy had also mentioned how we are basically not even inconvenienced by the war, for the most part. It's mostly just the men and women who are over there putting their butts on the line every day, and their families, who are bearing the brunt. Now I'm reading the news online, saying they want to cut back on the troops there. Wow, there's a great idea! First they say we didn't send enough over there to do the job, and now they want to leave even less! Why don't we really cut back and see if we can match the debacle of Dien Bien Phu? Let's just let them be surrounded and overrun! What a great strategy! Either we fight, or we get our guys and gals the hell out of there! We tell the Iraqis we freed them and helped them setup a democratic government, and it's time for them to to get off the pot and do the deed! We're not going to stay there and be police for them while they carry on their age old infighting. I've heard so many people run down President Bush, Mr Rumsfeld, and all the rest over the war. Are we supposed to wait until they hit us here again, right in our own backyard? I'd lots rather see the enemy get the hell kicked out of them over there in their own frontyard! I always thought and said so, to my family and friends, that President Bush made a good military decision and a bad political one, when he set everything in motion. You choose the the killing ground yourself, you don't wait for the enemy to do it. Then you draw them out, engage them, and kill them. Oh my God, how politically incorrect I am! Sorry folks, that's war. My generation had great teachers, the VC and NVA. I hate to quote from a certain movie, but hey, it holds true. They did draw first blood! Whether you're Republican, Democrat, or whatever, those are our kids over there fighting those animals. And yep, they are animals! They don't qualify to be included in humanity. People who hide inside and set ambushes from, the very mosques they accuse us of descecrating. People who saw innocent victims' heads off on the internet. They hate us, they are out to destroy us, it's been going on for a hell of a long time, and they're not going to go away. We can't wish them away! Get used to it! Chamberlain tried placating Hitler. Peace in our time, right? Didn't work, did it? I can't quote it word for word, but everyone surely must've heard the old adage, "he who fails to learn from history's mistakes is bound to repeat them". Like Forrest Gump, that's all I have to say about that! Really, the only thing left to say is, God bless our folks over there in harm's way, and God bless the good old USA!

Gopher

2006-11-11T02:25:00.000-06:00

Here's some old time stuff I've been messing around with.
Back in the early days when Al Gore had first invented
the internet (chortle guffaw), everyone used to use telnet
and host gopher pages to share info. I set mine up on my
Unix shell account at:

Dancer68's Gopherspace

Lynx handles gopher fine, and so does Firefox and Opera
on this OpenBSD 3.9 box, but I can't swear for all other
browsers. You'll just have to try it out and see. If you
can't see it with your browser, try this:

Dancer68 via Floodgap Gopher Proxy

OpenBSD Firefox Install Problem

2006-11-11T01:18:00.000-06:00

Thought this might help someone out who's running OpenBSD.
I first tried pkg_add -ui for updating in interactive mode.
Chose the next version of Firefox. Wouldn't do it. Here's
what it said:

Can't install mozilla-firefox-1.5.0.7 because of conflicts
(.libs-mozilla-firefox-1.5.0.5)

Here's the link where I read up on how to fix this problem:

Neohapis OpenBSD Archives

Should've ran 'script' before hand. Did a pkg_delete, but it
wouldn't remove some directories /usr/local/mozilla-firefox/
extensions and components. Did it manually. Ran Pkg_add for
next firefox version and got the same error message again.
Ran pkg_delete .libs-mozilla-firefox-1.5.0.5 and that fixed the
problem. Originally posted this from my Diigo account and also
bookmarked there, too, but had to go into my Blogger account
and edit it. Haven't figured out all the bells and whistles in
Diigo yet.

Dancer68's Bookmarks on Diigo

Final note: Yes, I'm lazy by nature. I keep my OpenBSD complete
source tree on a separate drive, but that's no work. It gets
updated every night with a cronjob. And no, I haven't updated to
OpenBSD 4.0 yet, but am looking forward to it, when time allows,
especially to see if my scanner will work better with The Gimp
and xscanimage. To my credit, all patches are up to date, backups
are recent, and, if I hadn't have been a dummy and rebooted when I
first had the problem with Firefox, my uptime would've been right
at 30 days now. Live and learn.

Security Patch & New Programs

2006-09-06T20:32:00.000-05:00

Always keep up with your patches, boys and girls. Maybe you're not into running current, you have packages installed instead of ports to follow the project's advice and to keep things more simple, and you hate the thought of maybe having to uninstall all your 3rd party stuff and rebuild userland and your kernel too often. Well, you still need to keep up with vulnerabilities that are discovered and patched! Here, for instance, is the url for OpenBSD errata along with the url for the latest patch.

OpenBSD Security Page
009: SECURITY FIX: September 2, 2006

Added a couple of nifty programs today; Xpdf for reading portable document format files, and Xchm, for accessing windows compiled helpfiles. So far, no problem at all. Nice and solid. Here's a screenshot:

More Desktp and Scanner Fun

2006-08-30T23:41:00.000-05:00

I guess, unless I want to run OpenBSD current, which I don't, or if I can figure out how to get the os to pickup correctly on my Epson scanner, I'll never be able to use it again, at least directly, with The Gimp. I can use

xscanimage epson:/dev/uscanner

and it works fine in XWindows, but at the terminal, scanimage just doesn't find the scanner. It shows up fine in dmesg, and I can use sane-find-scanner and it finds it, though the info for it like manufacturer, etc., is lacking with usual advice about adding the info to the kernel or using libusb. Guess I should count my blessings it works at all. Insert smiley. Ha!
Also have been having a lot of problems with Firefox crashing, but it's a lot more stable if I disable all the extensions. I hate doing that, especially for the Wizz News Reader and a few others, but it's not worth much if it's always crashing. Opera does fine, as long as I don't mess with news feeds. It chokes immediately and does a core dump if I load news feeds. So, I went back to an old friend, Snownews. It works great from the terminal, and the only drawback is it won't load some of the php or atom feeds. For the most part, though, it works fine. Took another shot of the desktop with The Gimp and am putting it in here. If anyone reads about some of these problems and has anything to add that might help, please leave a comment.

Laptop Adventures

2006-07-16T12:16:00.000-05:00

I've got an old Toshiba 4015CDT PII 266 that I haven't used much for quite a while now. Used to use it for a secure email station. Recently installed OpenBSD 3.9 on it (no Xwindows) and everything looked great. Then I got to reading dmesg closer and saw where I had the old problem as a long time ago: WARNING: can't reserve area for I/O APIC WARNING: can't reserve area for Local APIC I googled around and actually found an old post of mine asking help on the issue. Only at the time, I was looking to resolve an Intel Memory Managent issue and had already resolved the APIC issue. Went into config, disabled pcibios0, saved the kernel, rebooted, all was well. Also, and it should be noted that I'm only an end user and not a programmer or developer, the code must've changed since my 3.3 days to resolve the memory management issue. No errors in dmesg. So, after rebuilding the kernel, although I had only updated my /usr/src to the patch branch, I figured I'd experiment with building userland and see how the old laptop did. Went to bed, got up, everything finished. But, /usr was full. Oops! ;) Had to do some housecleaning before I could even install the mergemaster package. Finally got /etc merged okay. From now on, I'll only apply errata patches due to limited disk space, and only rebuild the kernel when the patch needs it, not userland. Lesson learned. Although, to my credit, I didn't panic. I had seen the same thing in messages in the OpenBSD misc mailing list before and fortunately knew how to handle it. There was a time, when I was still a really new "Newbie", when I would've reinstalled everything. So, if any "Newbies" read this, make sure you have enough disk space to what you want to do before you do it! ;) To all the BSD's credit, there is a builtin safety margin to keep you from overfilling any of your partitions. It'll show full before it actually is totally full. That's when you really need to pay attention. I'll always consider myself in "Newbie" status, mostly due to what I already stated, that I'm not a programmer. Maybe in time. I've hacked a few makefiles to get them to work, and written some scripts in FreeBSD for cronjobs to do some automated tasks, but that's about it.

Talk the SNMP Talk

2006-07-10T05:18:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure if it'll apply to what I want to do, or to be more
exact, if it's not a needless excercise, considering you could
just have a cronjob that pings your ISP on a regular basis and
logs it. Not that it'd hold up, if you were to go to the ISP and
demand a prorate for the month due to their excessive down
time. That dog ain't gonna hunt, at least with most of them.
They will, all probability, tell you they do not guarantee 100%
or even close to it, uptime. Maybe for a commercial account,
but not for a home user. Be that as it may, I thought it would
be a good learning experiment. There are links on the page
to other subsequent followup articles.

ONLamp.com -- Talk the SNMP Talk

Converting FAT32 to NTFS

2006-07-10T04:49:00.000-05:00

I started into this not expecting what I was about to encounter.
I was wanting to convert an external usb 2.0 160G Seagate hd
from fat32 to ntfs. Downloading Bootitng, putting it on a floppy,
rebooting, and doing the realigning went quickly. Rebooted to XP
and the fun started. I told it to do a full defrag of the drive
and it took all night and all day. When I ran convert, it had
file errors it couldn't fix, probably from one of many of good
old "Windoze" lockups and reboots. Checked the drive, fixed the
errors, and finally was able to convert it to ntfs. I have cygwin
on the box with accounts and directories for all the users on the
LAN, each of which has a cronjob that uses rsync to backup the users
home directory to the XP box nightly. I wanted an environment
where owneship is pretty much followed, the same way it is on
all the OpenBSD boxes. It's done now, and my butt is dragging
as usually does after fooling around with a multios environment.
But hey, it works! ;)

Converting FAT32 to NTFS in Windows XP

OpenBSD Desktop

2006-07-10T00:39:00.000-05:00

Who says you can't do desktop with OpenBSD? Of course,
this took several months to accomplish. Long nights of
sweating buckshot on the keyboard, reading books and
mailing list archives, googling, asking questions and
being told to RTFM. ;) But, things aren't too bad at
this point. Got sound with xmms and mp3blaster playing
all my oldies. I can make my own iso images and burn cds.
I can print across my LAN to either one of my other
printers. I got BitTorrent working and regularly download
BSD and Linux iso images. Know how to update my source
code and my system, along with how to tweak my kernel.
All users have automated nightly backups to external
storage using rsync in cronjobs. The list goes on.
Happy OpenBSD camper at this point! ;)

Weeks Following 3.9 Upgrade

2006-07-03T02:40:00.000-05:00

Probably one of the most productive periods I've spent in the
last few years, the last few weeks since I upgraded OpenBSD to
3.9 on my number one work box, and also on my old HP Netserver.
I had run FreeBSD on it for a long time, and then when I went
to upgrade from 5.4 to 5.5 I ran into all sorts of problems.
OpenBSD, on the other hand, went in flawlessly. As a plus, I
didn't have to rebuild the kernel like I would've had to, had
I succeeded in installing FreeBSD. I loaded the bsd.mp kernel
and it took off fine and has ran fine since. All I had to do
was do a config on it to make up for CDT and keep the operating
system and the hardware clock in sync. With 3.9 I was able to
finally get the sane-frontends installed and can scan fine now
with my Epson using The Gimp. Only thing I haven't been able to
do is scan from another box on the local area network. I have
tried over and over with every kind of switch and configuration
I can think of, to get the xsane program to do it from the Cygwin
bash shell on the windows box, but I guess that dog ain't gonna
hunt. I also tried from the othe obsd box to do it, but no luck
there either. On the plus side, my OpenBSD box can do everything
now that that my windows box does. That's been my goal for now,
for a very long time. It just took some free time to devote to
learning enough to be able to accomplish it. I can burn cd's and
create iso images, have users do automated nightly backups over
the local area network using ssh, rsync and cron, scp files back
and forth easily taking advantage of rsa keys with ssh along with
authorized_keys files, use ICQ through an ncurses program MICQ. I
have done dumps and, more importantly, restores successfully.
Learned that when I did a typo one day, deleting something from
the usr dir. That was before the upgrade, but it's stuck with me,
especially the need to backup regularly.

Lately I've been listening to BSD podcasts from a really cool weg
site, bsdtalk.blogspot.com and have learned quite a bit from them.
Listened to Dru Lavigne the other night and started salivating,
thinking of how cool it'd be to get to go to FreeBSD bootcamp in
Ottawa. Better get back to work first and get some money coming
in for that. :-) I'm also trying to learn more about blogging. I
feel like I'm back in school, carrying one heck of a course load.
I'm able to pick up my blog in my Wizz RSS reader in Firefox, and
I've registered with Performancing. Got that extension installed
in Firefox, too. That's where I'm creating this latest entry right
now. If it comes out screwed up, don't blame it on Blogger, Firefox
or Performancing. I'm sure it'll be caused from my own ignorance of
how they all interoperate.

Emacs Tips: Windows and Buffers

2006-06-09T03:52:00.000-05:00

Linux.com | Emacs tips: Windows and buffers

I mostly use Vi, but I'm eventually going to try get more
proficient with Emacs, too. So, saved this for myself and
whomever else is interested.

Top 10 Tips Dealing With Vi Editor

2006-06-09T03:50:00.000-05:00

Top 10 vi Tips

This is my baby. :-) Saved this for myself and whomever else is
interested. Emacs is great, but Vi is what I first learned on.

OpenBSD 3.9 Upgrade

2006-06-09T02:20:00.000-05:00

3.9 upgrade went pretty good, considering after I'd used pkg_delete to get rid of all installed ports and packages, I forgot to get rid of all the installed directories where all were installed at, /usr/local/. I didn't realize it until I after the upgrade was done and I was installing the newer versions of everything I needed. SpamAssassin is where the "file collisions" started. It was a mess! Looking back, and considering how quickly OpenBSD packages install, I probably should've redone the pkg_delete thing, but I'm hard-headed. Anyway, got it all done and tonight I did a few image scans. Had to use xscanimage. The Gimp couldn't acquire the image. Have to figure it out as I go along, I suppose. Later Addendum: Figured out what conf files to configure. Now The Gimp is acquiring fine.

Long Time Since Last Post

2006-06-04T03:58:00.000-05:00

Yep, busy as heck. Lots of personal issues as usual.
Finally got my OpenBSD 3.9 cds and my new wireframe
daemon t-shirt. So busy, haven't had time to update
my system. And now, FreeBSD is out with version 5.5
which, as I understand it, will be the last in the
5-STABLE branch. I'd like to try 6.1 but I'm not too
sure how well it'd run on my old HP Netserver. 5.4
cadillacs on it, considering how old the hardware is.
As I'm writing this, I've got my latest backups on the
OpenBSD box tarred/gzipped and I'm running rsync to
update the mirrored backups here on the windoze box.
Working great. Had a hell of a time teaching myself
the ins and outs of rsync, but I've got it doing all I
need it to do, now. It probably is childs play for old
"nix" hands, but I have trouble finding time around here
to keep on learning all I need to know to run these
systems proficiently. I added another account from the
FreeBSD box here on the windoze box and ran into some
issues with my cygwin stuff, but it's ironed out now,
too. I've got cronjobs setup on both BSD boxes for the
users to be able to do backups across the LAN with rysnc
for their home directories, mail, and so forth. I've got
a new Seagate USB 2.0 160G external harddrive on this
windoze box now, and it's sure nice to have room for a
change to do the backups that have to be done. Found
out one day, after hosing my usr partition on my OpenBSD
box just how nice backups are. I had never done a restore
before and wasn't too sure I could pull it off, but it worked
like a champ. I had just done a full dump a few hours before,
lucky for me.

Got my hands on an old DEC Prioris dual-processor box that
got abandoned by the yacht club in Gulfport, and picked up
a serial cable to be able to run it without a keyboard or
monitor, but haven't gotten around to doing all the setup
yet. Now I've got OpenBSD 3.8 on it, and it ran okay, but
I had a kernel panic on it when I tried booting it with
the mp kernel. I haven't had a chance to go back and
reproduce it yet so I can run a trace on it and try to see
if it can be debugged. Not really sure if the cpus are
supported for smp in OpenBSD. I'll have to investigate
that before I fool around with the mp stuff again. Might
have to do some hard wiring, bios work, and kernel tweaking
if it is supported. Time will tell.

I got an old Epson scanner off of eBay and it works great
on the windoze box, and I got the sane backends to build
on the OpenBSD box, but not the frontends. I tried hacking
some stuff, but to no avail. Got a lot of help from the
port maintainer, but he finally got too busy to help any
further. It's supposed to be fully supported now, in the
new 3.9 release, so I'll need to get off my duff and get
it installed so I can try it again. X is working great on
it with the old voodoo card. I need to get some speakers
on it so I can fool around with the sound and some music.
Creating iso images, writing cds, erasing rewritables,
and so forth is a snap on it. Got foomatic stuff on both
BSD boxes and am able to print everything I need to over
here on the windoze box on the old HP Deskjet. Also can
print from here to the old Star dot-matrix printer on the
FreeBSD box, and also to it from the OpenBSD box. I want
to get to the point where, if this windoze box craps out,
I won't be pressured to hurry up and fix it or replace it.
Trying to get weaned as soon as possible. I know, almost
for sure, that I'm not going to be able to afford the
hardware I'll need to run Vista when the final version is
released. Not that I'd want to spend that much money anyway,
on a MS product, though, in retrospect, I can say that XP
has been darned reliable. I probably would've never gotten
involved in computers, as much as I have, it weren't for
Microsoft. It's just all the damned security issues that
worry me. Which brings to mind another project I want to
start, getting pf setup on the OpenBSD box, spamassassin,
and maybe clamd to protect the box as much as possible.
I've already got some basic pf stuff down, but now nearly
as much as I need do have. Well, as can probably be seen
from the timestamp on this post, this is about the only
time I really get anymore to do much on my blog. And with
that in mind, my old butt needs to hit the rack for a while.
Hope it's not so long until I can get on here again.

Finally, another update

2006-03-22T09:11:00.000-06:00

Been too busy working my job, contending with family matters, and trying to hack my way through FreeBSD and OpenBSD, all the while making them work together harmoniously with my XP box. My biggest headache lately has been trying to print to my HP DeskJet 722C on my XP box from the two BSD boxes. Tried all kinds of stuff like apsfilter, cups, and so forth. Now I've got a rather simple setup on both BSD boxes for printcap. I'm using foomatic-rip and ghostscript, along with pnm2ppa.ppd, the printer file from linuxprinting.org for my DeskJet printer. It was pretty open and above board on the FreeBSD box, since foomatic-rip is by itself in the ports tree. But, in OpenBSD, it's underneath /print/cups/files, and it took me a while to snap to all I needed to do was copy it to /usr/local/bin along with pnm2ppa.ppd, and then setup /etc/printcap. Ghostscript was already in place due to another ports needed dependencies. Been applying security patches lately, too, on both BSD boxes, rather than going through all the rebuilding song and dance. That's due to the fact that both OS's are coming out with a new release shortly. I've already preordered my OpenBSD cd's, and need to get off my duff (and wallet) and due the same for FreeBSD. I highly encourage anyone who reads this blog and is interested in running either operating system to order cd's. You can ftp the FreeBSD iso's, and with OpenBSD, you can d/l all the files and create your own iso's and burn them, but it doesn't help the ongoing expenses for the developers. Most of them work regular jobs and do their coding voluntarily, using their own personal time. That's pretty strong commitment, and I think it deserves some real support. Here's a good example of how you can learn either system, along with NetBSD too, even if you've always been a windoze addict like myself, just by reading the man pages and accompanying docs, and not being afraid of sweating over the keyboard a little and experimenting. Right now, on my OpenBSD system, which is running on a PIII box with 256MB of ram and two IDE h/d's, I can surf the net in Xwindows using either Firefox or Opera or, in text mode, Lynx. I do email, I'm learning how to setup spam control and firewall security. I can create my own iso images from source and burn them to cd's. I can print to my old Star 2410NX dot- matrix printer on my FreeBSD HP Netserver or to my HP DeskJet 722C on my XP box. The only hurdle I still have to get over is getting a scanner to work on the OpenBSD box. It's a PIII and has USB ports, which the old Netserver doesn't, so it's the natural choice. I've got an old HP ScanJet 3400C, but it seems to have crapped out during Hurricane Katrina, probably due to all the moisture in the house while we were gone for the evacuation. So, I've been nosing around the Sane Project site and eBay, trying to make a choice. The whole point of this ongoing exercise in opensource is to finally, once and for all, drop out of the Bill Gates financial support team. I have nothing against him or Microsoft. But, I'd rather run a system that's pretty damned secure from jump and is opensource, than pay an arm and a leg for a system that's constantly riddled with vulnerabilities. And, find myself waitiing for weeks and sometimes, even months, for a patch, when both OpenBSD and FreeBSD developers are constantly monitoring and testing their code for insecurities, and are always up front and honest when they find them, and are quick to fix them and get them up on the net for users. Okay, I am now climbing down from my soapbox. 'Nuff said on that issue. Until next time, happy hacking!

Long Time No Blog

2005-12-28T10:03:00.000-06:00

What an exciting time! :-) Not really. Started new job. Not usually fun, especially around the holidays. As usual, I've run into conflicts on one of my BSD boxes between perl modules and ports. I tried deleting some modules, went too far, and couldn't get back into the CPAN shell. Really buggered it up. I had done a full dump of /usr several days before, but had never done a restore before. After some experimenting, did the following: 1) Rebooted into single-user mode 2) Remounted / in rw mode, since it said it had to write some stuff there. Now I don't think so, but it's not important. It may have been referring to restoresymtable which gets written to the root of the directory you're doing a restore in, which, in this case, was /usr. This morning, after rebuilding the kernel and while rebuilding userland, I remembered to delete the file, which the man page says you should do. 3) Mounted the /usr slice rw in /mnt and ran newfs on it. 4) Mounted /data2 slice which held the dump backup. 5) Cd into /usr and ran restore rf /data2/backups/usr. Miracuously, everything worked out fine! Later, I ran a perl script that lists all installed modules and removed several, and then reinstalled them from /usr/ports. Still having some problems, though. Couldn't do a make install on SpamAssassin. It looked on a bunch of servers before finally finding the source code, but then it said the checksum was bad. I'll have to experiment with it some more later. Below is some of the perl stuff I found to help me out: http://www.cpan.org/misc/cpan-faq.html#How_delete_Perl_modules How do I remove installed Perl modules? By using the ExtUtils::Installed and ExtUtils::Packlist modules that come with Perl as in the example below. There is also a more elaborate example in the ExtUtils::Packlist man page. #!/usr/local/bin/perl -w use ExtUtils::Packlist; use ExtUtils::Installed; $ARGV[0] or die "Usage: $0 Module::Name\n"; my $mod = $ARGV[0]; my $inst = ExtUtils::Installed->new(); foreach my $item (sort($inst->files($mod))) { print "removing $item\n"; unlink $item; } my $packfile = $inst->packlist($mod)->packlist_file(); print "removing $packfile\n"; unlink $packfile; How do I find out what modules are already installed on my system? * perldoc perllocal Each time a module is installed on your system, it appends information like the following to a file called perllocal.pod which can be found in /usr/local/lib/perl5/version number/architecture/ or something akin to that. The path for your specific installation is in your @INC which you can divine with perl -V. =head2 Wed May 12 13:42:53 1999: C L =over 4 =item * C =item * C =item * C =item * C =back Each entry includes the Module name, date and time it was installed, where it was installed, linktype [ static or dynamic ], version and executables, if any, included with the module. * Use the ExtUtils::Installed module ExtUtils::Installed provides a standard way to find out what core and module files have been installed. It uses the information stored in .packlist files created during installation to provide this information. In addition it provides facilities to classify the installed files and to extract directory information from the .packlist files. #!/usr/local/bin/perl use ExtUtils::Installed; my $instmod = ExtUtils::Installed->new(); foreach my $module ($instmod->modules()) { my $version = $instmod->version($module) || "???"; print "$module -- $version\n"; } produces the following list of modules and their version Apache::DBI -- 0.87 Apache::DBILogConfig -- 0.01 Apache::DBILogger -- 0.93 AppConfig -- 1.52 Archive::Tar -- 0.22 BerkeleyDB -- 0.06 CGI -- 2.74 CPAN -- 1.59 CPAN::WAIT -- 0.27 Catalog -- 1.00 Compress::Zlib -- 1.11 Config::IniFiles -- 2.14 Convert::BER -- 1.26 Coy -- ??? Crypt::Rot13 -- 0.04 Crypt::SSLeay -- 0.16 DBI -- 1.14 [.....]

Recent BSD Endeavors

2005-10-11T20:33:00.000-05:00

Really weird! Started rebuilding everything last night on the OpenBSD box and on the old Netserver with FreeBSD on it. Finished up today when I got up. Had to get some sleep after starting the new job last night. Everything went okay on the OpenBSD box, but I had to reboot the old Netserver to be able to do make kernel install on it. Kept hanging up. I had to temporarily comment out the NFS imports off the Obsd box before I rebooted. I could've umounted them, but wanted to do a clean boot and see what happened. After that, okay. Did the usual mergemaster song and dance on both okay, too. Was a little scared on the Obsd box. It's not as simple and you have to let it do a makedev, too. Anyways, both are back up and running fine. Installed portsnap on the Fbsd box the other night and really like it, so far. No problems yet with it. portsnap fetch portsnap update cd /usr/ports && make fetchindex portsdb -u portaudit -Fda portversion -l "<" portupgrade -arR Last one only needed if portversion comes up with something that's outdated. Saw today that one of the new fortune ports shows broken. No big deal.

Build the System from Source - Building X

2005-09-25T20:04:00.000-05:00

Here's an excerpt from the OpenBSD docs, pertaining to my earlier post: X uses a different build process than the rest of the OpenBSD tree, as it is based on imake, rather than the standard make(1) process. One consequence of this is there is no "obj" directory, generated binaries end up being intermixed with the source code, which can cause problems (or at least, excessive output) with cvs(1). A solution to this problem is to use lndir(1) to make a "shadow directory" consisting of symbolic links to the actual source directory for the XF4 tree. i386 only: XF86Setup, used to configure XF3 servers on the i386 platform (and ONLY the i386 platform) requires the "tcl" and "tk" packages be installed before building X (found in the ports tree at /usr/ports/lang/tcl/8.4/ and /usr/ports/x11/tk/8.4/. Installing the "tk" package will install "tcl" as a dependency). As usual, installing a package is much faster than installing these applications from source. Failing to install these packages before building X is somewhat frustrating, as the system will work for some time before erroring out. To compile X using the "shadow directory" of /usr/Xbld, use the following steps, compiling and installing new binaries into the proper directories, follow these steps: # rm -rf /usr/Xbld # mkdir -p /usr/Xbld # cd /usr/Xbld # lndir ../XF4 [...lots of output...] # make build [...lots of output...]"

Read the fine print!

2005-09-25T19:49:00.000-05:00

Yep, it pays to do that even when you're not buying something, like when you're supposed to be reading the docs, but you're just casually scanning through, hitting the high spots, and then doing something like "make build". You know, something small and inconsequential. :-) Been working with OpenBSD on an extra computer I got back from my son, since coming back from the hurricane Katrina evacuation. Didn't realize how much I'd forgotten. As for the allusion to fine print, it had to do with XF4, building the xwindows stuff, after I had done a cvsup to get all new source, ports, docs & so forth. Built the new kernel. No problem. Did all the necessary prework and then built all the userland stuff. No problem. Did the after work stuff like httpd docs, mergemaster, & so on. No problem. Then I did the prework stuff you're supposed to do before you mess with XF4, but I failed to read the part about tk-8.4.7 and tcl-8.4.7p1 needing to be installed, or the XF4 build would fail, which it did. So, remember kiddies, READ THE FINE PRINT!

BSD Update

2005-07-04T00:08:00.000-05:00

Wow, it's been over a month since I posted on here! Been really busy, day and night, working on the old Netserver, adding ports, learning port maintenance, picking up all kinds of tips on Dru Lavigne's blog at Oreilly, recompiling kernels, doing complete src upgrade rebuilds, even tried creating a src repository, but ran into some problems. I also tried using cvsup on my xp box, but it was a lot of work for nothing. Always had problems with corrupted mac messages when running cvsup. Read a lot on it and the main problem is, ssh having to be patched to run on anything but OpenBSD. At least that's what I gleaned from it. It even has problems sometimes on FreeBSD, but it always links back up and starts d/l again after a time-out. Windows wouldn't do that. I've even got some "invisible" files left behind in my home dir in cygwin on the xp box from cvsup. Can't delete them, either. What a trip! Took my son's old PIII 800 box and setup PC-BSD on it. Tried Ubuntu first, but ran into big time problems with setting up Xwindows, so I just blew that one off. Had a really nice desktop, but I never could get it out of 480x640 mode. When I did, it all went to hell. Only problems I ran into with PC-BSD was with the menu editor. I got my one account so screwed up, I just wiped it out and recreated it. Too used to working at the terminal, typing everything in. Never have had great luck with X in nix or bsd's.

NFS and Windows Services for Unix

2005-05-23T05:02:00.000-05:00

Tried several 3rd party NFS clients to be able to access my home folders on the FreeBSD Netserver, without much luck. Downloaded MS Windows Services for Unix, set it up, had a hell of time with the the settings, but it's up and running finally. Kind of flaky on copying some files back and forth, but maybe with some tweaking, it'll all iron out ok. NFS was tricky to set up on the FreeBSD box, but I got a lot of help off the internet, especially at Oreilly's web site. As always, Dru Lavigne's site was helpful, too. Next project will be getting my old laptop still running OpenBSD 3.3 to mount the exported folders from the FreeBSD box.

CMOS Mess

2005-05-20T01:41:00.000-05:00

Talk about! I keep getting this when I boot: unknown: PNP0303 can't assign resources (port) unknown: PNP0f13 can't assign resources (irq) unknown: PNP0501 can't assign resources (port) unknown: PNP0700 can't assign resources (port) unknown: PNP0401 can't assign resources (port) (There a left and right brackets around the PNP errors, but I can't put it in here, since it gets interpreted as html tags when the page is parsed). Did a lot of Googling, and read where you no longer can compile in support for the problem. So, I kept fooling around with pci, irq, and port settings in the bios. Eventually, I went to far, to say the least. Machine flat would not boot. Had to shut down, disconnect power, remove and reseat the cmos battery, reset all my bios settings, save and reboot. Still have the error messages in dmesg, but at least I'm back up and running.

XWindows on FreeBSD 5.4

2005-05-18T21:42:00.000-05:00

Hallelujah! That about sums up the way I feel. I've never gotten X to look so good before. I thought the install had been broken last night when it stopped towards the end. Did a massive clean up after all the installing. Tried Window Maker today after running the X configuration utility. Took several tries and doing some guess work as to the video, but it's running now and looks great. Hope the Thunderbird email program and Enigmail for encryption go as well tonight.

Pine and Gpg Update

2005-05-17T18:54:00.000-05:00

Okay, found out my last post on using Gpg and Pine leaves out some things that I've since had to work out. Here's what I did. In Pine, go to Setup, then Config. Go down until you see default-composer-hdrs. Enter X-GPG-PUBLIC_KEY: http://wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net X-GPG-FINGERPRINT: your id fingerprint here Go further down to display filters. Enter _LEADING("-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE")_ /usr/local/bin/gpg --decrypt _LEADING("-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE")_ /usr/local/bin/gpg --decrypt Go on down to sending filters. Enter /usr/local/bin/gpg -sae (this 1st one for encryption) /usr/local/bin/gpg --clearsign (this one for signing) There's only one person I send anything encrypted to, so the following work around isn't too much of a bother. Guess it could get worse if I had to start encrypting a message to a whole bunch of recipients. Anyway, when I address the message, I first put in the intended recipient, then myself to be carbon copied. When I send the message, I choose the first gpg filter which encrypts and signs, type in my password when it asks, and then gpg asks me for recipient(s). First I type in the intended one and hit enter. Then I type in myself and hit enter. Then enter one more time on a blank line. Message is sent to us both, he can read it, I can read the copy in my sent messaages folder, and all's well. I'm using FreeBSD 3.7 Release, GPG 1.4.1 and Pine 4.62, so if anyone else knows of a better way to do the above with installing a bunch of God awful scripts and so forth, in other words, just some settings I can change, & you read this, please let me know!

Pine and Gpg on FreeBSD 5.4

2005-05-15T22:29:00.000-05:00

Had a terrible time getting Pine and GPG to work together on the HP Netserver with freebsd. Here are the program versions:

FreeBSD - 5.4 Release
Gnupg - 1.4.1
Pine - 4.62

Probably mentionedd it before. I'm still running an old version of OpenBSD (3.3) on my old laptop. GPG is on there with Pine and works great and was easy to set up. This new version was easy, once I'd messed with it most of all day Sunday. :-) Okay, here's the setup in Pine:

display-filters
(1st filter, all on one line)
"_LEADING(-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE)_" /usr/local/bin/gpg -decrypt

(2nd filter, all on one line)
"_LEADING(-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE)_" /usr/local/bin/gpg -decrypt

sending-filters
(1st filter, all on one line)
/usr/local/bin/gpg -eas -r youremail@youremailprovider
(2nd filter, all on one line)
/usr/local/bin/gpg --clearsign

On the 1st sending filter, be sure to put your email address. That's where I had so much trouble, trying to figure out why I could send an encrypted message to someone on my keyring and they could read it, but I couldn't read the same sent message in my box.

FreeBSD HP NetServer Continued

2005-05-15T00:52:00.000-05:00

Been playing with the system a lot today. Installed portupgrade on it, read up on ports at Oreillynet. Lots of good stuff there, especially from Dru Lavigne. Only problem in the last 24 hours was when I ran a cvsup for the ports tree. Left it running when I went to bed, since it's a long process sometimes. When I got up, system was froze up. Had to cold boot it, and naturally it bitched when booting as to the system not being unmounted properly. Wasn't too damned much I could do about that! On a windows security note, finally found a damned key logger on my winbox. Gone now, but it's worrisome. Found a really good security site with lots of free stuff at http://www.sysinternals.com and d/l a lot of freebies. The most interesting one was rootkit revealer. Previously, rootkits were mostly, from what I understand, found on unix type systems. Now they're making there way into the windows world. Oh joy! As if there's not always enough security stuff to worry about! Addendum (following a.m.) Whew! I remember reading how long it can take to install Gentoo, especially if you are really a geek and build it from one of the first stages. :-) I started installing windowmaker and then firefox last night. Got up this a.m. and it's still going hot and heavy. Ran df on /usr last night and got 15% used. Ran it just now and it's at 28%. I think that particular partition is about 8 or 9GB. This is kind of like when you install MS stuff. Eeooouuuhhhh!!!

FreeBSD on HP LC II NetServer

2005-05-13T03:24:00.000-05:00

What a chore! Thought I had both cpu's working properly on the HP Netserver, only to find out tonight the 2nd one wasn't. Turned out to be a controller seating problem on the mobo. Got that ironed out now, I hope. Installed FreeBSD 5.4 Release on it, installed some ports I needed, rebuilt the kernel for SMP support, and it's working okay so far. Now I'm installing Xorg and later Fluxbox for the desktop. I'm sure there are some things I left out, like certain compile arguments, but it's just for experimentation right now, anyway. Also added an extra 9GB h/d for storage and backup. Ran sysinstall and used fdisk and disklabel. That went okay, too. Hope the xorg and fluxbox install goes as well.

Downloading with Torrent

2005-05-09T01:09:00.000-05:00

Been fiddling around with torrent files the last couple of nights. Ran into NAT problems and fixed them finally tonight. Had to go into the router config and forward port 6881 calls to the box I'm using Azureus on, using both TCP and UDP. Enabled UPnP in Azureus. Had to allow the program access in the machines firewall config, and fiddle with the max u/l number and kb's. It's working ok now. Got interested in it, since a lot of distros out there aren't in iso format. You can ftp the whole directory of all the files and create your own iso, but in some cases, you're not going to get all the other cd's you might need, like with packages and ports. Or, you can get the .torrent files and d/l everything, no sweat, into iso's. Debian's a good case in point, the one I'm getting right now.

FreesBIE

2005-05-06T23:58:00.000-05:00

Burned the latest FreesBIE cd tonight and used it as live cd. Before I booted it, I disabled Plug & Play in the BIOS. Got it up and running, no sweat. Chose Fluxbox for the GUI. I like it better than most. It's more low overhead than the others and does everything I want it to. Sound worked fine. Network was no sweat setting from the terminal with ifconfig, route, and echo for the nameserver. Used smbclient to print to the old winbox on the lan. Still have to get the usb Sandisk mounted, but it's late. I'll fool around with it tomorrow night.

Google Web Accelerator

2005-05-06T13:12:00.000-05:00

Thought this was an interesting to check out and keep up with as it progresses in the news. Has to do with Googles new web accelerator. http://fantomaster.com/fantomNews/archives/2005 /05/05/fantomtiphow-to-block-google%e2%80%99s-web -accelerator/ I didn't like the idea to begin with. Just didn't seem like a smart, safe or secure thing to do.

FreeBSD LiveCD

2005-05-05T23:53:00.000-05:00

Been way too long since I worked with any BSD! Downloaded LiveBSD-5_3-KDE-3_3-BETA1.iso from www.livebsd.com. Wanted to try it out without having to install on a h/d. Went fine up until I wanted to get out on the Internet. I kept on trying echo "nameserver xx.xxx.x.xxx" but didn't remember to end it with >> /etc/resolv.conf. Works a lot better when you do! Anyway, I highly recommend the distro for those who want to play around with FreeBSD & learn some about it and don't want to do a h/d install. Also tried out Dragonfly's latest livecd, Damned Small Linux, and Slax. All of them were fun and worked great.

Back Online

2005-05-03T12:11:00.000-05:00

Back online, finally, after financial difficulties, back on the Internet! Just downloaded the current OpenBSD files and created an ISO. 'Bout time to update my old laptop. Way overdue! Funny how you fall back on old friends to keep your sanity when things are going badly. Reread most of all my favorite Steinbeck books over the last few months and am currently rereading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for probably the 3rd or 4th time.

Assembly Language

2004-06-14T00:54:00.000-05:00

Found some good links to assembly language programming tools, books, tutorials & IDE's tonight: http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/ http://radasm.visualassembler.com/

OpenBSD Patching

2004-05-27T01:21:00.000-05:00

Applied patch couple of nights ago to my "aging" OpenBSD 3.3 system on my Toshiba laptop. Everything went okay! Following is the patch itself, & then some info on the into the nature of the vulnerability: ------------------------------------------------------------ Apply by doing: cd /usr/src patch -p0 < 022_cvs.patch And then rebuild and install cvs: cd gnu/usr.bin/cvs make -f Makefile.bsd-wrapper obj make -f Makefile.bsd-wrapper make -f Makefile.bsd-wrapper install Index: gnu/usr.bin/cvs/src/client.c =========================================================== RCS file: /cvs/src/gnu/usr.bin/cvs/src/client.c,v retrieving revision 1.10 retrieving revision 1.10.4.1 diff -u -p -r1.10 -r1.10.4.1 --- gnu/usr.bin/cvs/src/client.c 6 Jul 2002 04:41:29 -0000 1.10 +++ gnu/usr.bin/cvs/src/client.c 1 May 2004 00:17:34 -0000 1.10.4.1 @@ -1003,6 +1003,20 @@ call_in_directory (pathname, func, data) char *rdirp; int reposdirname_absolute; + /* + * For security reasons, if PATHNAME is absolute or attempts to + * ascend outside of the current sandbox, we abort. The server should not + * send us anything but relative paths which remain inside the sandbox + * here. Anything less means a trojan CVS server could create and edit + * arbitrary files on the client. + */ + if (isabsolute (pathname) || pathname_levels (pathname) > 0) + { + error (0, 0, + "Server attempted to update a file via an invalid pathname:"); + error (1, 0, "`%s'.", pathname); + } + reposname = NULL; read_line (&reposname); assert (reposname != NULL); Index: gnu/usr.bin/cvs/src/modules.c =========================================================== RCS file: /cvs/src/gnu/usr.bin/cvs/src/modules.c,v retrieving revision 1.1.1.14 retrieving revision 1.1.1.14.8.2 diff -u -p -r1.1.1.14 -r1.1.1.14.8.2 --- gnu/usr.bin/cvs/src/modules.c 28 Sep 2001 22:45:38 -0000 1.1.1.14 +++ gnu/usr.bin/cvs/src/modules.c 1 May 2004 00:17:35 -0000 1.1.1.14.8.2 @@ -159,6 +159,24 @@ do_module (db, mname, m_type, msg, callb } #endif + /* Don't process absolute directories. Anything else could be a security + * problem. Before this check was put in place: + * + * $ cvs -d:fork:/cvsroot co /foo + * cvs server: warning: cannot make directory CVS in /: Permission denied + * cvs [server aborted]: cannot make directory /foo: Permission denied + * $ + */ + if (isabsolute (mname)) + error (1, 0, "Absolute module reference invalid: `%s'", mname); + + /* Similarly for directories that attempt to step above the root of the + * repository. + */ + if (pathname_levels (mname) > 0) + error (1, 0, "up-level in module reference (`..') invalid: `%s'.", + mname); + /* if this is a directory to ignore, add it to that list */ if (mname[0] == '!' && mname[1] != '\0') { ============================================================ ------------------------------------------------------------ Info on cvs vulnerability from: http://www.securitytracker.com/alerts/2004/May/1010074.html SecurityTracker Alert ID: 1010074 CVE Reference: CAN-2004-0405 (Links to External Site) Date: May 5 2004 Impact: Disclosure of user information Fix Available: Yes Vendor Confirmed: Yes Version(s): 1.11.15 Description: A vulnerability was reported in CVS. A remote authenticated user may be able to view arbitrary RCS files on the server. It is reported that a remote authenticated user can invoke a piped checkout of paths above $CVSROOT to view the contents of RCS archive files anywhere on a CVS server. This flaw can reportedly be triggered using relative pathnames containing the '../' directory traversal strings. Debian credited Derek Robert Price with discovering this flaw. Impact: A remote authenticated user can view RCS files located anywhere on the target system. Solution: OpenBSD has issued the following patches: ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/patches/3.5/common/002_cvs.patch ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/patches/3.4/comm on/017_cvs.patch ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/patches/3.3/common/022_cvs.patch Vendor URL: www.cvshome.org/ (Links to External Site) Cause: Access control error, Input validation error Underlying OS: UNIX (OpenBSD) Underlying OS Comments: 3.3, 3.4, 3.5 Reported By: Otto Moerbeek Message History: This archive entry is a follow-up to the message listed below. Apr 19 2004 CVS Server Piped Checkout Input Validation Flaw Discloses RCS Files to Remote Authenticated Users

ISO Making Batchfile

2004-05-11T07:56:00.000-05:00

Here's the batch file I use to create OpenBSD ISO's from the snapshots I download: cd c:cd c:\openbsd c:\cdrtools\mkisofs -v -r -T -l -L -J -V "OpenBSD3.5-current" -b 3.5/i386/cdrom35.fs -c boot.catalog -o c:/openbsd/snapshot/iso/OpenBSD3.5-current.iso -A "OpenBSD 3.5-current Install"

OpenBSD Patching

2004-03-19T03:15:00.000-06:00

Applied 2 more patches to my OpenBSD 3.3 system on my Toshiba 4015CDT laptop, 020_isakmpd2.patch & 021_openssl.patch 020_isakmpd2.patch: Defects in the payload validation and processing functions of isakmpd(8) have been discovered. An attacker could send malformed ISAKMP messages and cause isakmpd to crash or to loop endlessly. This patch fixes these problems and removes some memory leaks. 021_openssl.patch: A missing check for a NULL-pointer dereference has been found in ssl(3). A remote attacker can use the bug to cause an OpenSSL application to crash; this may lead to a denial of service.