diary of a kernel hacker

New laptop, and binary blob support thanks Project Evil!

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 17:49:32 GMT

OK, I didn't get much at the pawn shop for all the gear, in particular, no one saw much value in the Sun's. But, I did get a nice new shiny, if cheap, laptop!

The first problem I noticed was that the wireless card wasn't working. Thankfully, ethernet worked, but being tethered just isn't my thing. I know in the past I've harped on binary blobs and encouraged activism measures, not supporting uncooperative hardware vendors and so on, but desparate times call for desparate measures. After all, sometimes you just want do some couch surfing without involving a television! That's a good enough justification, isn't it?

At any rate, I've gone ahead and added FreeBSD's ndisulator to the base OpenBSD install. Sure I've said bad things about ndiswrapper, but wpaul's Project Evil is BSD licensed, therefore it must be OK. At the least, Bill certainly has done his share to get ethernet vendors to open up in the past, so this is probably part of an ultimate strategy somewhere and not just because he needed to use wireless at work on his OS of choice. Anyway, I'm sure him calling it Project Evil isn't reflective of anything bad.

OH COOL! I can turn WPA-2 on my access point now that this windows driver supports it! I don't even remember why I needed it, particularly with the improved ipsec tools, and now OpenSSH layer 2 tunneling, but whatever more features is more better!

OpenSSH REMOTE?!?!?!

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 17:20:25 GMT

DAMNIT, second remote in 8 years?! How is this possible? I'm going to have the head of Mathieu Sauvé-Frankel (msf@) for his involvement in this!

This can't go on - I have to keep the project going, no matter what the cost!

I am hearby announcing that OpenBSD is going x86 only!

I am selling off all of my hardware and will trade it in for a cheap laptop to make sure that we go on, fixing bugs, with or without donations even if I end up on the street mooching free wifi to keep things running.

uh oh... OpenBSD is dying!

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 01:35:32 GMT

Maybe I had one drink too many, or more appropriately - I think I had less in the rainy day fund than I thought. I'm tapped out!

Crap, until further notice this means I need to get a 9-5 job, OpenBSD production is going to be on hold until someone comes up with enough funds! This is terrible!

FTP releases to be delayed until next CD set released

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 01:31:08 GMT

This lack of beer money situation needs to be stopped. I can't dip into the rainy day savings for that, and I don't even want to think about putting an end to the hackathons. Or worse yet, hackathons without enough money for beer!! This calls for action!

I gave Bob a call to let him know that we won't be making 3.9 available for ftp until the 4.0 CD's are out. He suggested we just block connections from IBM, Sun, Apple, etc. He knows just as well as I how ineffective that would be so it didn't take much convincing. I sure hope this will help.

In the meantime, maybe I could dip into that rainy day money for just one drink.

Trickle of donations

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 01:27:18 GMT

I checked the post. A donation came in, I know that every bit counts, and today I've been sending out thank you emails to those who have donated as positive reinforcement. That said, it's hard not to look a gift horse in the mouth when you see a check for $5 CDN. For that expense, I think I like it better when people just buy me a beer at a conference. Right about now, I could certainly use a beer at least with so little money coming in, I don't think I can keep things up much longer.

Publicity, rss and animated GIF's.

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 01:22:23 GMT

I turned my attention to undeadly for a moment. I know there's no such thing as bad press, the increase in ftp downloads proves we keep gaining in popularity - but another interview that asks me the same questions I've answered 20 times before can't be that exciting for people, can it? Well those pieces may get OpenBSD out to new readers on the sites they're posted on at least. As far as the existing readers of undeadly, the rest of the site seems pretty dead, we need more action - some good hooks, someone get these editors some journalism experience! I do like those developer blogs though, at least there's some original content. But seriously, maybe deadly.org was better left in peace on April 1st, 2004.

Damnit, how do you Add a Story to undeadly? Livejournal is way easier. Plus, undeadly doesn't have any animated puffy icons.

Well, neither does my LJ, but the cat's pretty cute dontcha think?

mailing lists - the bane of my existence.

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 01:14:53 GMT

Having ripped out GCC was a bit of a pain, I'm sure there's a lot of breakage in the tree - but that's not a problem, is it? Anyway, I decided to catch up on email.

I blazed through cvs@ to see if there's anything I've overlooked amidst my changes. Looks like some good work on ipsecctl. Not much on ports@ or ports-cvs@. Pretty much all the architecture specific lists are nothing but spam. Even tech@ is mostly dead today. I take a deep breath, grit my teeth, and turn to misc@. On second thought, my CAPS LOCK key could use a rest; I don't even want to deal with that right now.

What to do? The sendmail patches announced on security-announce@, though announced a little late, our sane defaults make this a non issue for the most part, but man am I sick of dealing with sendmail! Screw it - I think it's time to get rid of that dog, and replace things with qmail. I know in the past I didn't like how it crammed things in /var, and djb's "license" (i.e. rant) doesn't suit us at all, but at least it's not as bad as postfix's license - or as bug ridden as exim (yech!).

Getting rid of GCC - begone GPL!

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 01:06:32 GMT

After this morning's excitement I grabbed some breakfast and thought of what I wanted to do for the day before checking on email. There was an interloper on icb the other day who reminded me to take a look at kencc. Of course we would love to get rid of GPL code, and gcc is our biggest dependency. I know in the past I'd mentioned admiration for this compiler (originally written for Plan9), it's small, supports various architectures, and well is written by someone who better damned well know C better than just about anyone else. It's under an MIT license now, so we would get that benefit without dealing with TenDRA. However, migrating from gcc will be quite a chore. Their CVS looks untouched since last year, this will be a pain to even get into a form from which to work. Enough daydreaming, I'd better get cracking!

Problem with CVS?!

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 01:00:38 GMT

My day started in a panic when my cell phone began ringing at 5 a.m. with alerts from cvs.openbsd.org.

Thankfully, it was a false alarm.

The new sensorsd.conf file I created obviously needs some threshold tuning, so that I won't get woken up when the cpu temperature goes up just because someone commits a new port. Still, it was good to see the sensor framework improvements working properly.

Still, since I was already on the machine, I figured I'd make the switch to OpenCVS. What the hey?