unencrypted.org
a little truthier

Well, we can thank Jason Dixon for arming us with another blog software package. Thankfully, his is sane enough to be written in perl and designed specifically for the OpenBSD base chroot httpd (using mod_perl). It's the very platform I am using now. Migration from wordpress was simple; directions can be found on the Blogsum Wiki. I encourage everyone who is sick and tired of dealing with overly complex blog software to give it a shot. It'll keep you sane.

Problem 1

After a few months of failing with my Pantech UM175 EVDO modem, I finally got it together and took at cnd then added that product code to umsm; committed, but linked for reference, pantech.diff.This allowed the Pantech UM175 to be detected as a umsm* rather than a umodem* and I was able to properly run CHAT scripts against it.

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You might know the pain of not being able to use the flash player. For me that pain is very real. I had to use a python script called youtube-dl to pull the .flv off youtube and then play that with mplayer. Honestly, downloading that is really annoying. The whole point is to stream this stuff, not download it. Fast-forward a while, I'm still bitching about this when a friend metions that a cool plugin for firefox would scrape the youtube video's watch url and play that with the mplayer plugin. That got me googling again and I found a very handy greasemonkey script that does just that. Its called HQTube. This little bad boy allows me, a lowley OpenBSD user with no flash, to see the many many video's I've been missing, EUREKA!

Ok ok, so there are some caveats here. You can't use this with embedded youtube videos. That functionality could be added but it'll need to not autostart and only do a quick check of loaded pages. Actually, that's the only issue. Enjoy the goodness!

So I messed up my new laptop, a Lenovo T400, with OpenBSD on it and I had a chance to go through the two other big players in the BSD world, NetBSD and FreeBSD. As a practice, I only run current from a project. I firmly believe you shouldn't commit to a kernel tree something that's not really working. My only exception is Linux, mainly because they don't agree with my commit philosophy. Ok enough blabbing:

FreeBSD: FAIL; I couldn't get 8.0-Current to correctly write a disklabel. This was due to the fact that the dev nodes for any disk device aside from partition a didn't exist. That made the rest of the install a moot point. I think the installer was a bit more complex that I'd like, but I could deal with that. This is about the fourth time I have not been able to successfully install FreeBSD on common hardware. I don't really understand what's the problem and I'm going to be really lazy about it since OpenBSD does just work.

NetBSD: FAIL, but slightly less than FreeBSD. I was able to get through the installer, which is pretty ugly. Adding an ftp site seemed to be next to impossible so I had to install all the sets from a cd. Once past that, I went through the usual deal of setting up the system for first boot; I ok everything and reboot... that's when the magic happened. There must be a small amount of embedded memory or something that the kernel thinks is embedded memory on the T400 because it just won't boot. I've tried a few times now. I dropped into single user mode to see what's and I get no where. Exiting that mode, I try to start X and the Intel drivers crash. I finally give up and go reboot. However, the system can't even reboot. Some issues about shut down hooks. Whatever, I quit.

Now, I know the developers work hard to make these systems as simple and robust as possible. I know that on head code, stuff happens. I know there are probably fixes for all these issues, but I don't care. I'm kinda pissed nothing worked and I never got a chance to actually try the systems because they both have some interesting features I'd like to look at. Now, I'm pulling the latest OpenBSD to fix my laptop and go on with my life. Maybe I'll give them a shot again in a few months.

I think I have finally figured out why all public transportation is so slow. Clearly, the powers that be want us to have some free time to ponder the mysteries of the the universe. Now that might be all fine and dandy, but in this tech'd out age it's really not that simple. You're really just stuck away from your desk, computer or other obligatory electronic device. The miniaturization craze has helped matters, but that just means working on a smaller device not a better one. In reponse to the hell that are mini-keyboards, I've grabbed a wireless connect card from Verizon. It lets me connect with my real computer pretty much anywhere. This is really an awesome tool. I'll let time be the judge as to the wisdom of being always connected, but at least now I can think less and do more on the train or bus.

That bastard saw his shadow. I don't know what I'm going to do with another 6 weeks of winter. We don't need more bad news! I say we hang the jerk.

Since I have moved my server needs from CentOS 5 to OpenBSD, I am having to deal with the complexitites of not allowing the package installer to set everything up for me. While this has been the case for quite sometime with most software, I always let yum deal with the inital Apache and MySQL setups; I would never trust it for Postgres! So basically, you got the LAMP stack without any work.

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There are only two days left until I head down to Washingon, D.C. for the DCBSDCON. This conference should be really cool. I'm looking forward to the speakers and seeing all the people I mostly know as screennames. Talks will cover backups, performance, SMP, security, monitoring, networking and rumor has it a revival of "bsd is dying" . All in all, sounds like pretty good time. I'm pretty sure there will be audio and video of the conference available on line, so if you can't make it be sure to check out one of the many feeds. I'll be packing my own video/still camera as well.

Well, after fighting with wordpress for a few hour, I've finally got my new server setup. It seems the best way to move a wordpress install is to back up your wp-content dir, dump your db and allow the wp scripts to regenerate your wp-config.php. For the life of me, I couldn't find what was missing with just taring the whole dir and moving it. Oh well...

Now I'm rocking an OpenBSD VPS with rootbsd.net. They were super helpful with the install and through a serial connection I was able to do my own install from bsd.rd. Otherwise, the server instance is pretty basic. I decided to go for 1G of ram this time, probably a wise choice. My sites load much faster and I plan to messing with the db configs a little bit to improve load time further. Altogether a pretty slick setup.

Geez! After being up for a week, I'm moving to a new server. I've done what I can to optimize, but considering there are miscompiled kernels readily available to customers, I'm sure I don't want to stick around and figure this out. It really seems like a networking issue. I am not shocked an all linux shop couldn't get the networking right. I'm moving to rootbsd.net, so I'll be following this up with a review. Laters linux!