Automatic binary updates for OpenBSD

April 2, 2013 by Leave a Comment

One of the things i always thought holding OpenBSD back from attracting a larger user base is its lack of a simple way to upgrade the system – i am talking binary updates or moving to a new release. Learn about bluesnapper on his blog, a tool that helps with binary updates on OpenBSD, written by Ted Unangst.

I have no idea how i did not know about this tool or effort; i see so many people asking binary upgrades that i think there is a pretty big demand and truly hope this gets developed further. Reading the linked article above leaves me a little uncertain as to what the future is for that project. Anyways – now I’m off to learn more about bluesnapper so that in the next article i can outline using it step by step and what kind of issues where there on the way.

Filed Under: Administration Tagged With:

Awesome mini wireless keyboard and mouse

January 15, 2013 by 8 Comments
Mini Keyboard

I came across this great little device while doing some Christmas shopping in the local computer mall and fell in love immediately. Basically a tiny (the smallest I’ve seen so far anyways), yet fully featured wireless keyboard and mouse that is a must for any sysadmin bag and also works great with your home media center. Read more for the pros and cons.

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Filed Under: Useful Stuff Tagged With:

Upgrading FreeBSD 9.0 to 9.1 using freebsd-update

December 31, 2012 by 9 Comments

Here a quick outline of upgrading FreeBSD from 9.0 to 9.1 on a Soekris 4801 i had installed just two days ago to be a small encrypted fileserver.

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Filed Under: Administration Tagged With: ,

FreeBSD 9.1 released

December 31, 2012 by 1 Comment

A huge thanks to the FreeBSD team for releasing FreeBSD 9.1 – bringing us a lot of improvements such as a ton of new drivers (new INTEL GPU driver), a new C+11 stack, a stable version of the tmpfs filesystem, improvements to zfs, performance improvements on certain CPU, and much much more. Feels like a delayed Christmas gift.

Read the Release Notes for more details

As a side note: The FreeBSD Foundation has reached their funding Goal for 2013 – which i think is great news. The proverbial finger to all the nonbelievers: Not only did they reach the Goal, they exceeded it by at least 20% last time i checked. So much for relevance…thank you very much.

Filed Under: News Tagged With:

Lettuce shoots dog

December 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Lettuce shoots dog

I couldn’t help but notice while walking Metro in the South China Mall – and i think we all should have a bit of RL fun once in a while, hope you enjoy the share.

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Filed Under: Humour

Building a captive portal with OpenBSD

December 10, 2012 by 3 Comments

There aren’t (m)any lightweight captive portal solutions out there for us, except a few clumsy heavy or badly maintained projects together with heir professional counterparts in routers better than home-grade. Captive portals are cool and useful, read on how to build one, including video demo.

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Filed Under: Networking Tagged With: , ,

FreeBSD fundraising – donate now!

December 6, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Why not spend some of this years Christmas profits on your most favorite OS? FreeBSD calls for donations, every dollar counts! While free to use FreeBSD is certainly not free to develop: Investments need to be made into hardware and developers may need to be paid! Head over to http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/ and make your donation to show your support and help out the project. Your donations enable people that care about FreeBSD to keep improving it and keep working on it.

If you want to know where your money is going, here is a non-exhaustive list from what happened last year:

  • Funding development projects to improve FreeBSD, including: Capsicum Application Sandboxing, Growing UFS Filesystems Online, the NAND Flash File System, IPv6 Performance Analysis and Improvements, Distributed Security Audit Logging, and porting FreeBSD to the Efika ARM platform.
  • Educating the public and promoting FreeBSD. We produced a high-quality FreeBSD 9 brochure and visited companies to help facilitate collaboration efforts with the Project.
  • Sponsoring BSD conferences and summits in Europe, Japan, Canada, and the US.
  • Protecting FreeBSD IP and providing legal support to the Project.
  • Purchasing hardware to build and improve FreeBSD project infrastructure.

If you donated, you are awesome!

Filed Under: News

awstats workaround for custom delimiter tab methodurl bug

December 5, 2012 by 2 Comments

For some sites i am using the venerable awstats to keep track of web site statistics; and came across a problem today:

If your apache LogFormat is using a \t (tab) to separate fields you may notice how awstats does not parse %methodurl correctly – instead it looks like your two top pages are called HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1. Read more for a workaround.

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Filed Under: Software Tagged With: ,

A wireless trap using OpenBSD – reloaded

December 4, 2012 by 2 Comments

Build a OpenBSD wireless access point that redirects any client request for any website to a website of your own design. With a little imagination you could adapt this technique for more nefarious purposes – but that is not something we endorse here. Something more applicable to our kind may be to use this technique to do basic DNS based filtering, ad-blocking or something along those lines.

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Filed Under: Networking Tagged With: , , ,

A simple console wireless network manager for OpenBSD

December 3, 2012 by 1 Comment

Maybe some will enjoy this simple console based wireless network manager i use on my OpenBSD Box to connect to the different wireless networks i come across during the week. 4NU558BUVMKY

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Filed Under: The Shell, Tips & Tricks Tagged With: ,
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