MidnightBSD Developer Journal

I wrote a script to generate man pages as HTML documents yesterday.  The output is available on the website.  At some point, we'll add a search feature but looking for a good man page generator is not fun.  There are 86MB of man pages available now (for current). 

Yesterday, ctriv and I got the build cluster back up at EMU.  It sounds like we won't be able to keep it much longer, but it's certainly a help to us.  

We would like to find some users willing to donate some computing time to do magus runs in the future as we need to replace the cluster.  Users should be familiar with building the system and able to provide hardware running current. The nodes must have internet access with http, ftp, ssh and mysql port access.

The system can use a virtual machine as well physical hardware.  We need i386, amd64 and sparc64 boxes. 

Last night, I updated the mksh port to R37c.  Users are encouraged to test it out and report any issues with it.  I'd like to bring it into current.

ctriv@ updated the version of Midori and webkit in our mports system the other day.  If you have difficulty building it, be sure to update your version of bash 4.  (it requires a very recent version with a fix he just committed recently)  Also be sure to update libsoup.

Midori is now a useful web browser and it runs natively unlike many of the others in our ports tree.  It's recommended that you try the browser which includes history, tabs, plugins, user scripts, "page holder" like in safari, and many other features.  Anyone familiar with safari on the mac (or windows) might find this browser to be quite friendly. 

I finally got around to putting up the release notes for MidnightBSD 0.2.1-RELEASE.  They were mailed to the mailing list and scattered about.  This should make it easier for users interested in details.

I also put the 0.1 release notes back up 

First, I just committed a security update for sudo for 0.2.1 users.  It's strongly recommended that you get that update.  CURRENT has been updated for a bit and nothing bad has happened.  That's always good.

In the last few days, I've updated mksh, bind, pnpinfo, libarchive, bsdtar, bsdcpio (new and replacing pax for cpio), and tcpdump in CURRENT.  

There was a recent security advisory with openssl but i don't think it affects us.  I'll investigate the possibility of bringing in a newer version for 0.3-RELEASE. 

ctriv has been working on connecting perl 5.10 to the build. That means perl will be included with 0.3-RELEASE (not a port, but part of the os).  We discussed this for some time and it made sense for our project.  It might not be 100% correct with mports.  Please report any problems with mports on current or 0.2 after the changes we've been making.

mports now uses rmd160 in addition to sha256 and md5 hashes for distinfo files.  We decided a little extra verification was a good thing especially since all three hashes have some known defects.  Exploiting three makes it a bit harder. This was also already in the md5 utility driver so we didn't need to do anything but edit a few lines in bsd.mports.mk and then start updating ports.  I did archivers and accesibility last night.  Others will come over time.  You may see some messages when installing ports about missing checksums.  That is ok.

While I was at it, I removed some checks for ancient port structures still used by NetBSD.  I didn't see a point to slowing down mports any more.  We want it to be quick and to make up for the extra hash algorithm a bit.

I've investigated the possibility of using mksh as /bin/sh again.  One problem we have is that FreeBSD's version of ash contains some extensions like setvar and ! that mksh does not understand.

The bsdcpio transition might go well or it might not.  Please report bugs and remember that GNU cpio is available in mports as gcpio.  We hope to get some ports off gcpio soon.  Our pax is ancient and didn't understand a lot of the gnu extensions.  The installer uses it too so further testing will be needed. Unlike freebsd, we don't have a use gnu cpio option in the build.  Their ancient version has some security holes and we removed it long ago. (before 0.2)

Quick update:  I've managed to sneak in some ports work tonight and a bit over the weekend.  There are still some X ports to update, but I've fixed several. Today I got xterm updated. I'm attempting to create an llvm port now.  It builds ok, but has a very annoying makefile. 

I think it's time we made a wish list for 0.3 before we get any farther toward it.  

I'm in the process of migrating to a newer version of X.org.  (7.4)  About half of the libraries are updated now.  It might be best if users waited on switching.

ctriv has been working on putting Perl 5.10 in src.  We've always had it as a port, but as we needed some scripting language (besides shell) for tasks and most ports depend on perl, it made sense to bring it in.  This will most likely be included with 0.3+.  

I updated our wesnoth port in games yesterday.  We've also had many other ports updated including MySQL 5.0.77, 5.1.32, 6.0.9; Postgres 8.3 (new), PHP 5.2.9, Pidgin 2.5.5, Dovecot 1.1.11, phpMyAdmin, squirrelmail,  ...

Many of these updates are security related.  If you know of a port that is out of date and contains a security bug, please report it to us.  We need to get the ports system caught up.  I am aware of Opera. 

Lastly, there have been some minor issues with sudo recently.  It is recommended that users switch to the port version on 0.2.1 and remove the base sudo from their systems until I can get a patch out.  sudo in current has already been updated.

We were down for about 2 days after a lame hack on our webserver.  One of our cgi programs was a bit old and someone happened to find it via google.  I did a fresh os install, removed the offending program and have been auditing various other aspects of the server.  Hopefully we'll get everything going again soon. I used the opportunity to replace the hard drive for the os with a newer one.  

For the time being, anonymous cvs is off on stargazer.  You can use our pserver mirror on ds9.midnightbsd.org  (username anonymous)  We also have cvsupd down for now.  The wiki will be restored soon. ipv6 access should be restored as of yesterday afternoon.

For current users (0.3), you can now use the linux_base-f8 port.  This uses fedora 8 libraries which run on the newer 2.6.16 kernel emulation.  However, you must make a few changes to your system to do so.  These are listed in the pkg-message file at the bottom for that port.

In short, you must set the linuxolator to use 2.6.16 os version via sysctl and set a flag in make.conf so that the ports system knows to use the fedora 8 libraries with other linux ports.

Further, if you update current you will not receive annoying errors (129 and 128) while running certain linux apps.  If your kernel is older than late today, it will do so.

http://twit.tv/floss56 

Today, I'm helping to setup a mirror for our ISOs.  The address is http://kitty.midnightbsd.org/ftp/

The i386 ISOs are posted and the amd64 stuff is rsyncing now.

I updated the Apache 2.2 port yesterday to 2.2.11. This week I'm working on a new Live DVD image based on 0.2.1.   

I created a new MidnightBSD group on LinkedIn  for developers and users.

Over the weekend, I made a number of changes to rc.d.  In particular, networking and file system mounting scripts were altered.  Please report problems if they are encountered.

On the upside, more of the ZFS stuff is in place.  

Yesterday, I added bwi(4) to MidnightBSD.  It's still quite experimental, but it's working with my LINKSYS pccard.  In fact, there are problems using it with ndis in CURRENT, but it works with bwi(4).  

In case you're curious, I use WPA and have wpa_supplicant kicking in on boot.  So far, I've only tested it with very light usage (ssh).  It's probably not as stable as in DragonFly or OpenBSD.   

The Huawei E220 modem has been added to usbdevs and ubsa(4).  There are still some configuration headaches. 

See http://iswandi.blogs.yarsi.ac.id/2008/09/18/huawei-e220-under-freebsd/

A security issue was recently corrected in the kernel on 0.1.1, 0.2 and current (0.3) MidnightBSD.  Be sure to update your system.  For 0.2.1, this is 0.2.1-RELEASE-p4.

Users of current should also consider updating their src tree if they have not recently.  Most recently, env was fixed.  

I updated the time zone files today (2008i) to account for things like the added leap second, and various international changes that have occurred since March 2008.   

There was a bug in imake on current that ctriv@ corrected today.  This in combination with one of the xorg config files ports caused some problems in current.  Users of current should update their ports tree and rebuild these ports.

As of this weekend, MidnightBSD i386 and AMD64 are building with GENERIC kernel.  Several kernel modules still need work as well as some bugs ironed out.  Users who attempted to build MidnightBSD earlier this weekend may have it a snap while rebooting.  If you get an error about a missing libutil.so.7, please copy the file from /usr/lib or /usr/obj ... to /lib in single user mode.  You can use the mount, ls etc commands from /rescue to do so.  

I noticed an odd bug with mports on CURRENT, but it might be a localized problem.  Packages are not picked up even though their built and placed in /usr/mports/Packages/<archhere>/All

Assume many ports are broken on CURRENT until further notice.  We'll probably do a magus run in the next few weeks to determine the exact problems.   

I've been running CURRENT on my desktop for a few days.  So far, the results are promising.  There are many things to do.  I've had luck on amd64, but i386 is still broken. (progress is being made)  I have not tested sparc64 due to the length of time required to build it.  I will begin testing it after we get intel based stuff working properly.  

You can follow the progress on http://tinderbox.midnightbsd.org/  That process does a more exhaustive LINT kernel test which is not going well on all three architectures.  GENERIC is working on amd64.   

I built a live cd from the amd64 build on my desktop and tested it on two intel macs.  The first was an iMac (early 2008) which booted, and dhclient was started manually with success.  I was able to ssh to other systems, etc.  The wireless card is not supported (broadcom), but the msk(4) works fine.  The SATA and IDE controllers were detected properly, but I have not yet done a hard drive install to verify it's working well.  The second system was a Mac Pro (2 Ghz, 5GB ram, Pioneer SATA optical drive).  This system did not boot completely.  The video worked unlike 0.2.1 release including display on both LCDs (dual head)  It froze around GPT_LABEL i think.  I suspect it's having trouble with the sata optical drive.  The SMP kernel seemed ok as all the cores "launched".  

We have a new mirror for MidnightBSD.  Currently, the mirror is rsyncing so not all files are up yet.  We've posted it on the download page, in mports sites.mk (so it's a backup for files), and in the metalink file for 0.2.1-release.

Special thanks to Secution