As I have been asked several times why we use moinmoin for the FreeBSD Developers Wiki and the answer is mainly “historical reasons” I decided to write the history up so I can just point people at it :-).
The history, as I recall it, can now be found on the WikiHistory wiki page.
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.
When I started the “sky” project (the new jail based www.FreeBSD.org) I never expected how much magic was involved, or how long it would take to set up a new www.FreeBSD.org from scratch, so that’s why the project has been going slow for a while.
Over the last month or so the current www.FreeBSD.org has had severe hardware problems which caused it to crash often. That is of course rather annoying but the positive thing is that it has given me motivation for finishing up the setup on sky. Now that EuroBSDCon 2007 is over I will also have more time to do other FreeBSD stuff again.
I am currently at the FreeBSD Developers summit and I’m mainly working on sky. It’s been a while since I messed with it so just upgrading ports etc. in the jails has taken some time, but I’m not done yet – so stay tuned for more updates.
Oh, and if www.FreeBSD.org is down, try wwwfe.FreeBSD.org which is the main FreeBSD website running on sky.FreeBSD.org.
I finally got tired at looking at the hostname “wikitest”, so I decided to move the FreeBSD wiki to sky.FreeBSD.org. This also means that the wiki can now be fully “official” and has been renamed to wiki.FreeBSD.org. I took the opportunity to familiarize myself some more with how a moinmoin installation works so I did spend a good part of a weekend doing the migration but now there are fewer direct hacks in the wiki and I actually somewhat knows where the files are. The small downside to moving the wiki, and the main reason I haven’t done this before, is that I have a bit less freedom configuring the jails on sky since I now have to be a bit careful not to accidentally break the wiki. The move actually happened over a week ago, I just didn’t get around to writing about it before.
The current FreeBSD.org “monitoring system” consists of running “ruptime | grep down” from cron every hour. This is actually very effective compared to the simplicity, but it doesn’t catch e.g. when squid on www.FreeBSD.org die due to the disk being being full. To better detect this kind of errors I have I have been working on setting up Nagios for FreeBSD.org to be able to find out quickly when stuff crash. The configuration of the Nagios installation still isn’t complete, but at least it does warn me about major outages now. Thanks to the Nagios install by Erwin Lansing I also get mails if the FreeBSD Nagios crash so that part is also covered.
In unrelated news FreeBSD 4.X is no longer supported by the FreeBSD Security Team, so that is very nice that we finally could drop the support since FreeBSD 4.x has diverted quite a lot from FreeBSD 5/6/7 by now (or rather the other way around). It was getting increasingly difficult backporting fixes etc. for Security Advisories. RIP FreeBSD 4.
I haven’t written an update for the status on sky.FreeBSD.org (the next www.FreeBSD.org) for a while and that’s unfortunately since there isn’t much news. “Things” have a tendency to get in the way… That said, some progress has been made, e.g. I think all CGI scripts except man.cgi have been updated to work with perl 5.8, so that’s one less issue which has to be dealt with.
If anybody is wondering which things I’m talking about that is taking my time it’s e.g. FreeBSD-SA-06:19.openssl, FreeBSD-SA-06:20.bind, and FreeBSD-SA-06:21.gzip which took some of my time in the last couple of weeks (not that I was the only one working on them – far from – but I handle a part of them).
FreeBSD-SA-06:20.bind was a particularly cooperative advisory. It was mainly written by philip@, remko@, and myself with language fixes by cperciva@ and brueffer@. And of cause the thanks to both philip@ and remko@ for that is prodding them to write more. The thanks to brueffer@ was another advisory for him to proofread.
And when you, the reader, find all the typo’s and grammar errors in this blog post you know why I never write an advisory entirely by myself – somebody always need to check my Danglish :-).
My vacation has ended (a few weeks ago now), so progress on sky has slowed down due to less “FreeBSD time” in general and even less time for sky setup since various other things has used up most “FreeBSD time”.
I’m currently trying to setup some of the backend magic required by the CGI scripts. For some scripts that is quite a lot of things that need to be setup behind the scenes, so this takes some time.
It also turned out that nobody has tried to run many of the CGI scripts on Perl 5.8, so it also takes some time to get the minor nits fixed for things changed since Perl 5.0.
So, overall things are progressing with sky, but it will take some time before it’s all done.
On Tuesday I’m giving a presentation at AAUUG in Aarhus about “The FreeBSD Security Officer function” and on Saturday I’m giving the same presentation at BSD-DK in Copenhagen. Since I haven’t made a presentation of this type before I’m a bit excited about how that’s going to turn out… I hope people will find it interesting… time will tell :-).
I was recently at BSDCan 2006 which is a great yearly BSD conference in Ottawa, Canada organized by Dan Langille. There were several Yahoo! employees attending which made me think a bit more about why I was using Google as my primary search engine when they run that other operating system, and Yahoo run FreeBSD (and support FreeBSD in various ways).
So, when I got home I decided to find out how to get Opera 8.54 to use Yahoo search in the little permanent search box. It turned out to be rather simple (at least with my quick hack). Opera keeps the search engine configuration in .opera/search.ini and in the default version installed on my system has Google is the first entry and Opera Web as nr. 2. I never use Opera Web so I decided to simply remove Opera Web, bump Google to be the second search engine and add an entry for Yahoo! as the first search engine.
I have been running with Yahoo! search for a bit more than a week now and it hasn’t really made a big difference, in that I still find what I’m searching for, so I have no current plans to switch back.
Before editing any config files remember to make a backup of the files, just in case….
So, to do the same in your Opera just open .opera/search.ini in your favorite editor (which obviously should be Emacs), delete the [Search Engine 2] section, change the Google entry [Search Engine 1] header into [Search Engine 2], and then finally add the new [Search Engine 1] section as shown below.
[Search Engine 1]
Name=&Yahoo
URL=http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%s&ei=UTF-8
Query=
Key=y
Is post=0
Has endseparator=0
Encoding=utf-8
Search Type=0
Verbtext=17063
Position=-2
Nameid=0
Well, so here we are.
flz has been poking people for some time to got some blogs which could be part of the FreeBSD planet, but I never gotten around to setting one up. This is mainly because my homepage is static HTML so I can’t (/won’t) just use most of the standard blog software on my site. Anyway, flz now set up this blog so I thought I might as well register and try it out.
Time will show if I find something useful to say here. In case you are really bored and wonder who I am you can take a look at my homepage.
Today is a public holiday in Denmark and tomorrow is “mandatory” vacation from work, so with a bit of luck it will mean that over the next days I will get around to some of the things on my FreeBSD TODO list. This includes preparing for the new www.FreeBSD.org system, writing a FreeBSD Security Advisory, perhaps even working a bit on getting the wiki upgraded to a less ancient version (looks like flz is going to help with that). I might even make a post or two to this blog, time will tell.