numbersix

zaphod the doubled headed HP Kayak is alive and well and currently living on the work bench. had to ditch the Mach64 cards after they refused to play with xfree86 4. found two matrox milleniums instead that do the job nicely. after that the rest was a breeze, xf86cfg is fantastic after having gotten used to the old utils, very impressed. still not quite figured out if it is possible to drag windows from one monitor to the other. shame the machine won't be mine after all that, which makes me think about upgrading r2d2 to xfree86 4, and adding a second card to it. the current one is built into the mboard, which may prove problematic.

really must build a front end for this log, typing raw html is fun for a while, but the novelty soon wares off....

by jove, i think i have a dagrab / bladeenc command line to rip a whole CD into mp3 files, AND using CDDB :

$ dagrab -C -d /dev/acd0a -a -e 'bladeenc %s @NUM_@AUT_@TRK.mp3'

to add your own fonts in bsd:
$ mkdir <fontdirectory>
$ cp <font> <fontdirectory>
$ mkfontdir <fontdirectory>
$ xset +fp <fontdirectory>
additional mkfontdir may be needed as fonts are added to the directory. the xset command is probably best put in your .xinitrc. now all those blackbox themes will look even better with their fonts working properly.

to mount an iso image in FreeBSD:

# vnconfig /dev/vn0c ./image.iso
# mount -t cd9660 /dev/vn0c /cdrom

and then to unmount:

# umount /cdrom
# vnconfig -u /dev/vn0c

from the ever useful FreeBSD Diary

if like me you are NOT a fan of anti-aliased fonts, you will be pleased to know that Mozilla can be built without them. In the FreeBSD port, just have a look at XFT in the Makefile, though I'm sure the Linux makefile has similar options. and apart from looking better it seems a damn site faster too.

basic steps to getting dual head display to work with a dual head Matrox G450 and X:

- install X and make sure it works with a single monitor
- grab the 'Linux' drivers from the Matrox site - http://www.matrox.com/mga/support/drivers/files/lnx_21.cfm- unpack them, and replace your existing mga*.o files with these new ones
- grab this example XF86Config file - http://www.numbersix.net/stuff/XF86Config.dual. If you're used to XF86Config most of this will be fairly self explanitory
- Note the xinerama line to make it one big desktop rather than two seperate ones.

That should be it. This was done on FreeBSD 5.0, but the same should work for Linux. Even works with Gnome :) Now I have to fix these weird fonts Mozilla insists on using.

FreeBSD discovery of the day #1 - tip. now I can connect my FBSD box to the set top box on my desk. one more dagger thrust into the heart of my windows machine! (actually that may be a bit overly dramatic, but you get the idea). tips for tip - if you want to use it as non root you need to put yourself in the dialer group. I also added a new tag to /etc/remote specifically for the STB. works a treat.

FreeBSD discovery of the day #2 - how to reset the mouse daemon after you've unplugged the thing thinking it was the serial cable mentioned above.

kill -HUP (pid_of_moused)

spent time today beating an HP Kayak into submission re a FreeBSD install. after much faffing with cables and half-inching of memory i finally got the thing to boot in a vaguely happy sort of way. then installed FreeBSD 4.3 via FTP from the dutch mirror, and rebooted... all i got was 'missing operating sysytem'. eventually after reading much fbsd documentation i found out that the bios had been set for DOS type large disk, which means (i think) that fbsd gets incorrect geometry information. anyhoo, i changed this, and am now re-installing. a number of other discoveries, the Custom option on the installation screen is quite nice, allows more flexibility than the standard one. also fbsd seems to have detected that there are two graphics cards in there which is part of the way to a double headed system. just need to get Xfree86 4 to play nicely. calling it zaphod for obvious reasons :)

message to self, don't attempt to build vnc (or anything else come to that) twice, in parallel on the same box thinking you're actually doing it on two different boxes. the results can be very spooky indeed.

well there's a thing, had to reboot my FreeBSD box thismorning after the webcollage screensaver broke it quite badly. been noticing problems with it since i started using it, temporary disk space filling. not sure why it needs so much, seems as though all it needs to do is blit images to the screen, what does it need all that disk space for? it's written in perl, so next project after finishing the publishing interface to this log is to take a look at either fixing it, or writing my own version. such a nice screen saver module too, sorta like the screen saver version of surfbot.

got the HP9600 cd writer working with FreeBSD, a breeze. decided on an adaptec 2906 SCSI card to drive it. the only potential problem was that the packaging said mac all over it, though after a quick email to adaptec i discovered the card is the same for either machine, hooray for PCI! also nice to see FreeBSD mentioned on the adaptec support site, all be it listed as a linux distro :( mentioned as much in the support followup email, hoping they come to their senses. mkisofs and cdrecord worked fine off the bat, excellent documentation as usual on the fbsd site.

very useful way of using perl as a replacement for sed when sed just doesn't cut it - eg
cat blah | perl -p -i -e 's/foo/bar/g'
perl -pe 's/,/-/; s/,/ /; s/,/ /; s/,/ /; s/,/./g;' infile > outfile

ahah! % toggles between parentheses in vi.

freebsd - ppp kept timing out when there was no traffic, most annoying. 'set idle 0' stops this.

FreeBSD is so cool, to install kde :
% export PACKAGESITE="http://freebsd.kde.org/2.2.2/Latest/
% pkg_add -r kde

updating ports collection :
cvsup /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile -h cvsup2.de.freebsd.org
portversion
portupgrade {port}

to send attachments from the command line -
uuencode (filename) (filename) | mailx (address)

many, many thanks to 'Silby' for his help to fix a little problem with FreeBSD and a badly behaved firewall. if you ever have delay problems with 0 sized TCP windows coming from a GNAT firewall, make the following change to your tcp_timer.h file:

define TCPTV_PERSMIN ( hz/5)

instead of:

define TCPTV_PERSMIN ( 5*hz)

this will reduce the hardcoded delay FreeBSD will make before re-transmitting the packet.

i really, really must fix this blog system to handle > and < properly

to re-read rc.conf after making changes, from console:

# shutdown now
(Note: without -r or -h)
# return
# exit

from here

to ensure NIS doesn't start automatically on a Solaris machine, rename /usr/lib/netsvc/yp/ypbind to something like /usr/lib/netsvc/yp/ypbind.orig. why isn't there an rc script to stop/start/disable it?

example of adding static routes to BSD in rc.conf :

static_routes='inside'
route_inside='10.10.10.0 172.10.1.1'

eBoy - i love this stuff

George Roy Hill, director of, amongst other things, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and The Sting died on Dec 27th 2002. I should try and see Slaughterhouse-Five.

FreeBSD is for people who love UNIX, Linux is for people who hate Microsoft.

this entry is testimony to the fact that FreeBSD 5.0 RELEASE is at least stable enough to get Gnome going and Mozilla. Just about to have a go at Evolution.

TheRegister are running a very interesting piece on the problems Al Jazeera are having with their English web site. Again we see double standards at work, the very people who are spouting freedom of speech are doing their utmost to twist that to mean freedom of speech as long as we agree with it. Even if Al Jazeera were peddling lies and untruths (which I do not see is the case), does anyone have the right to stop them doing it?

Found this excellent site a while back comparing Sky Scrapers around the world. The illustrations are wonderful. Now Jeff Russell has done the same thing with space ships, an equally impressive site. Thanks to my bro for the link.

Interesting interview over at OS News with the FreeBSD core team and one of the lead programmers. good to see a long interview for once, instead of those single page things. ta to /. for the link.

Managed to get my Palm m505 networked through my FreeBSD machine, neat. PalmVNC works but a whole desktop in colour over the serial link is sloooooow. Networking details here.

Note to self more than anything - sendmail under Solaris comes configured by default to relay mail to mailhost.mydomain.com which is useful as that's usually what you want. FreeBSD on the otherhand doesn't, and tries to send the mail directly. If this isn't what you want, for instance if the machine doesn't have a direct internet connection, you need to configure the DS macro in /etc/mail/sendmail.cf thus :

DSrelay.domain.com

From here

So there you go.

Interesting article in the Independent the other day about TVR being bought by a 24 year old russian oligarch. I never knew that TVR actually stood for TreVoR, after the original founder of the British car company Trevor Wilkinson. Never again will I be able to oogle a TVR Tuscan and take it quite so seriously.

Some instructions on how to change the screen resolution / colour depth on a Sun machine - http://www.unixgods.org/~tilo/sun_resolution.html

Adium is a very cool messenger client for OSX. It takes the OSX interface to the max, very slick.

BBC radio widget, I might yet be a convert to what otherwise looks like a bit of a gimmick.

Interesting article(by Ralf S. Engelschall no less) on GEOM, a FreeBSD software RAID mechanism. Looking forward to trying this on my new server.

For some reason it seems very difficult to get Samba mounts to work from FreeBSD's fstab. I think I've got the (a?) magic formula:

<fstab>
//bob@sambaserver/share        /the/local/mount/point  smbfs   rw,noauto,-I=10.11.12.13      0 0
</fstab>

where:

bob = username
sambaserver = netbios server name
share = share name
10.11.12.13 = IP address of sambaserver

and

<.nsmbrc>
[SAMBASERVER:BOB]
password=bobspassword
</.nsmbrc>

Put .nsmbrc in root's home directory and make sure it isn't readable by anyone else. The bit in square brakets needs to be in capitals.

I've been vaguely looking for this for a while now, a way on FreeBSD to restart a given network interface. /etc/netif restart. Nice.

Been trying to compile Thunderbird on my FreeBSD 6.1 desktop, but I got the following error:

nsSmtpProtocol.cpp: In member function `void nsSmtpProtocol::AppendHelloArgument(nsACString_internal&)':
nsSmtpProtocol.cpp:370: error: `PR_SI_HOSTNAME_UNTRUNCATED' undeclared (first use this function)
nsSmtpProtocol.cpp:370: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once for each function it appears in.)
nsSmtpProtocol.cpp: In member function `PRInt32 nsSmtpProtocol::SendDataResponse()':
nsSmtpProtocol.cpp:1402: warning: unused variable 'rv'
nsSmtpProtocol.cpp: In member function `PRInt32 nsSmtpProtocol::SendMessageResponse()':
nsSmtpProtocol.cpp:1480: warning: unused variable 'rv'
gmake[4]: *** [nsSmtpProtocol.o] Error 1
gmake[4]: Leaving directory `/usr/ports/mail/thunderbird/work/mozilla/mailnews/compose/src'
gmake[3]: *** [libs] Error 2
gmake[3]: Leaving directory `/usr/ports/mail/thunderbird/work/mozilla/mailnews/compose'
gmake[2]: *** [libs] Error 2
gmake[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/ports/mail/thunderbird/work/mozilla/mailnews'
gmake[1]: *** [tier_99] Error 2
gmake[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/ports/mail/thunderbird/work/mozilla'
gmake: *** [default] Error 2
*** Error code 2
 
Stop in /usr/ports/mail/thunderbird.
*** Error code 1
 
Stop in /usr/ports/mail/thunderbird.
** Command failed [exit code 1]: /usr/bin/script -qa /tmp/portupgrade58903.0 make PORT_UPGRADE=yes
** Fix the problem and try again.
** Listing the failed packages (*:skipped / !:failed)
        ! mail/thunderbird (thunderbird-1.5.0.10)       (compiler error)
--->  Packages processed: 0 done, 0 ignored, 0 skipped and 1 failed

After hunting around a bit I found the problem to be with an other installed package, nspr - Netscape Portable Runtime. I had version nspr-4.6.1, upgrading to nspr-4.6.6 seems to have done the trick.