Lists all of the journal entries for the day.

Thu, 24 Aug 2006

12:26 AM - PPP Buffer overflow, rdate

Adam patched the ppp(4) buffer overflow also found in FreeBSD today.  Its recommended to update to the latest sources to receive the patch.  If you are using the last x86 iso, please remember that the password format has changed to blowfish and we've switched to OpenNTPD/rdate.  OpenSSH was also updated to the latest version recently.  Another words its a bit of a jump. 

I've found some problems with soft updates today as well.  Large amounts of disk io on raid volumes can cause soft updates to consume all available memory and crash in some cases.  Its not always consistant, but does happen.  If you experience this problem, disable soft updates on the volume.   I'm experimenting with several kernel patches right now that may help a bit with this and other problems.  I do not think these patches will completely fix soft updates. 

There have also been some problems found in ufs recently where deadlock can occur with snapshots. 

If these recent kernel patches work out, i'll do a new iso release soon.  This might be the beginning of some serious kernel changes.  When I started this project, I was mostly concerned with userland changes up front.  I was hoping that I could avoid major kernel changes until after a 1.0 release.  It appears that is no longer the case. 

For anyone tracking FreeBSD, the PPP patch coinsides with FreeBSD-SA-06:18ppp. 

I'm now building leapseconds files in /usr/share/zoneinfo/right to work with rdate's -c flag.  This was commited yesterday. 

The new website project is coming along.  I didn't get much opportunity to work on it today with all the other issues popping up.  We have someone working on a new logo for us and I've made a new temporary logo that will go with the new theme.  I've decided to drop the current color scheme even though its somewhat unique among the other BSDs. 

For those of you who don't know, MidnightBSD was named after my cat.  He loves to sit on computers.  The butterfly never made sense with the name and was just something I could throw together in illustrator. 

On the desktop environment front, fvwm-crystal looks like its going to be our temporary window manager for sure.  WindowMaker.info appears to be down and the freshmeat page is also disabled.  I don't want to track a dead WM.  Regardless of our final choice, I have every intention of including GNUstep with our distro.  There isn't much US interest, but there is a great deal of interest in europe. 

On a final note, my kernel just built so its testing time.

location: Home

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1:03 AM - Hardware upgrade

The site was down earlier today for a hardware upgrade.  Additional ram was added to the cvs/web server.  This should solve some of the problem we've been having lately.  Its still recommened you download midnightbsd from the isc server.

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10:42 PM - em driver patch

I've been running on the em driver code since about 3am.  So far so good.  I'm still not happy with the network performance though.  Further investigation is needed.

I am in the process of setting up a second server to help distribute the load.  There has been some stability problems with my current amd box.   I'm debating about moving cvs over to it.  If so, i'll setup a new third level domain cvs.midnightbsd.org to simplify things.  That system has a via vge gigabit NIC.  I'd like to test the driver and compare its performance to the em's. 

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