Hooray! Gábor Páli is now a translator doc committer. He has translated the whole FreeBSD Handbook to Hungarian. The review of the document is pending at the moment.
Monthly Archive for April, 2008
For a long time I didn’t wrote something in my blog. This happens from time to time to a lot of people I think… 
Ok, so some interesting news on the FreeBSD front: I’m porting NMM (version 1.0.0).Back in the days when I was writting my diploma thesis, those people where working on it already. I always wanted to port it, as it was cool to see it in action (one system picked up a football match and distributed it to a lot of PCs in the local subnet (AFAIR multicast) and even handhelds in real-time (with automatic downsizing to the output device), and was also distributing it to the Uni-Aula (AFAIR TCP stream)). The box was not powerful at all, and you where able to do a lot of processing on any machine in the network, while the client didn’t know where which processing happened. They also present it for several years on the CEBIT in Germany. They have videos showing it in action. You can do a lot more cool things with this. Think about a network aware multimedia center. You can have your movies / MP3s / whatever on several machines in your network, and the output is displayed on a not so powerful machine without any trace in the GUI that there are other machines involved. And if you want to play around, you can even see/hear the same stuff synchronized at the same time in multiple rooms and even on your handheld device.
This is scheduled to be used in the new KDE multimedia infrastructure, and even in some Bang&Olufsen products.
So far it compiles after a little bit of patching, but there are some strange things to solve before I can even try to use it. I posted a message to the development forum, let’s wait and see what they have to tell.
And on a related area, I also got a Wiimote (Wii remote controller) working in FreeBSD. I think this will be a nice mouse replacement for a multimedia center. I have a discussion on the FreeBSD bluetooth mailinglist regarding this.
After some time, I have managed to write a new article.
It is based on the fact that we have moved some of our servers to the server hosting company located at Germany, that doesn’t officially support FreeBSD. They actually allow their customers to install FreeBSD over the remote console, but that costs some money.
However, thanks to Martin Matuska, we have found a way to install FreeBSD on our boxes without the need of the remote console. The idea is somehow based on the depinguinator project, but works with the latest versions of FreeBSD.
Please read the whole article at http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/remote-install/ to get the idea.
A month or so before EuroBSDCon 2007 conference the FreeBSD.org systems at Yahoo! had gotten IPv6 connectivity with the main web server and mail servers being accessible via IPv6. The FreeBSD wiki was still IPv4 only as was (and still is) is running in a jail.
At the conference I talked to Bjoern A. Zeeb (AKA bz@) about the issue with IPv4 only jails and he was interested in making a patch so FreeBSD jails could support IPv6 and the FreeBSD wiki could be accessible via IPv6.
I should poke Bjoern regularly about making the patch, which I failed miserably at, but he got work done on the patch anyway. A few weeks ago he sent me the IPv6 jail patch for me to try out. Since life should be interesting I didn’t try it on a test server, but on the production web server sky which hosts the FreeBSD wiki and more. Just in case there were any problems I made sure I was around to recover things in case the system blew up, but none of that happened. In fact, since I installed the patch on sky a week ago there haven’t been any problems (that I know of at least). Granted there aren’t much IPv6 traffic, but the IPv4 part have been under its normal load.
So far the main FreeBSD.org DNS record for the wiki has not been updated to include the AAAA records, so people will use IPv6 if they have it, but that expected to come soon. For now people can try out the wiki using IPv6 by accessing http://v6.wiki.nitro.dk/. It has a slight (100%) likeness with the IPv4 wiki, but… IPv6!
For people interested in the patch the work is being done in the FreeBSD Perforce repository at //depot/user/bz/jail/…. I am sure Bjoern will post appropriate public patch when he think it is ready. Credit should also go to Pawel Jakub Dawidek (AKA pjd@) who made the multi IP(v4) jail patch which Bjoern based his patch on. Thanks to Bjoern and Pawel for the work making this possible!
Now I just need to actually get around to setting up IPv6 at home, so I can actually try out the IPv6 wiki myself in anything other than lynx from other hosts… any year now.
That's how long, to the day, I have been a FreeBSD committer.
Ten years seems like a long time when you write it down on paper, or say it out loud, or try to imagine who and where you will be in ten years' time; but when I think back on my time as a FreeBSD committer, it's hard to believe it's really been that long.
The strangest part is seeing younger (or rather, more recently anointed) committers defer to me. I'm not the old tenured professor! I'm not the sage on the mountain! Look at phk, he's the old fart, not me! I'm still a rookie! I practically haven't done anything for the project! I mean, apart from libfetch, and pseudofs, and the PAM stack, and OpenSSH, and the Tinderbox, and stints as Bugmeister and Security Officer, and...
This is where my train of thoughts derails, when I realize how much I've actually done (although I don't even come close to people like phk, jhb, or rwatson), and oh shit, it's actually been ten years!
Update: when I told my wife about this, her immediate reaction was “and they say men can't commit to anything...”
