Centroid.EU Blog

Got OpenBSD 4.8 in the Mail

Well, I got the OpenBSD 4.8 CD's in the mail today. I'm very happy about this. I'll be building dione.centroid.eu with this soon.

I made an install video (like I do every release) you can watch it here.

My dream, triple redundancy

I made this picture with xearth and it shows the VPS's I have except in singapore. I'd like to have a VPS in Singapore too but it's expensive last I checked (something like 50 singaporean dollars which is like over 20 euros a month). If centroid.eu ever makes money I'll consider the singaporean VPS and balance traffic globally in such a manner that ASIA-Pacific traffic goes to Singapore, EMEA traffic goes to proteus which is in France and Americas traffic goes to goldflipper.net which is in Panama.

Random Hackepedia

The RH for this week is Tail.

Multiculturalism dead? Is melting pot better?

This past weekend german Chancellor Angela Merkel declared multiculturalism dead in Germany, and the key word for strive is now "Integration". This means people who immigrated to Germany have to learn the german language foremost and try to fit the norm. To me it just means giving up. In the model of culture, multiculturalism is the hardest to sustain. Just like in the model of politics democracy is weaker than a dictatorship. But we don't want to go there because dictatorships are politically incorrect, yet, they are easy to have. Just like the melting pot. I don't know how long Germany had multiculturalism. It was even the first time I heard of it this weekend, meaning it barely touched the population. But I'm pretty sure that the so- called multiculturalism will have left a minute trace of positive in the fabric of culture. Something that Angela Merkel and her exceedingly right shifting party will.. or may never get. The harder a civilization tries to uphold the weak, different, and minority the stronger it is in its roots, and the more likeable it is in the end.

Downtime Wednesday/Thursday

On the night of Wednesday at 11PM CEST until 8AM Thursday morning CEST, proteus the main solarscale.de/centroid.eu server will be down. So there might be a service interruption in reading this blog (oops). Proteus is moving to Strasbourg, France from Frankfurt, Germany. The details on Europes greenest data center where this is moving are found here. I'm gonna see if I can move the DNS balancing to the Panama VPS for the time being (I just hope I don't forget to undo it after the move).

PS: The maintenance went fine.

Oct 20 23:13:06 proteus exiting on signal 15
Oct 21 05:50:23 proteus syslogd 1.4.1: restart.

Observing Alpha Persei

Unfortunately I wasn't able to make a picture of this but I'll just put an xephem screenshot out. I observed Alpha Persei aka Mirfak at NEE (60 degrees azimuth) at an altitude of about 30 degrees tonight at 9:44PM. I couldn't help but notice that the star was flickering but that could have been our atmosphere at work.

Perhaps you noticed it too, I'm waiting for Capella to rise beyond the hill that's in the way, btw.

PS: it turned out I made a mistake with the degrees altitude, the star was actually Capella , but I located Alpha Persei after that as well (at 50 degrees altitude). That means I saw Capella flickering instead of Mirfak.

Random Hackepedia

We haven't had a random hackepedia in a while, and today I want to do something a bit different. It's the not-so random hackepedia. I've been working on a C Primer at Hackepedia over the last few months and want to show you the Primer. Just click on the link, I hope you can make something of it.

Happy Anniversary FSF!

Well slashdot made me aware of this. Yesterday the FSF turned 25. I think I even donated some duckets to them in the past too because I remember I got a note from FSF Europe thanking me or something. I'm not living in some fantasy world, currently, and reality is that OpenBSD which is my favourite OS still uses the GNU compiler, gcc, and debugger, gdb as well as gas, objdump and other utilities from the FSF. I use gdb and gcc quite often in my development of open source software and so I gotta say thanks again! Perhaps I'll make a donation in the future again.

Wildcarddnsd now over 10,000 lines of C code

Well, I've been anticipating this for a few weeks now. Wildcarddnsd grew to over 10,000 lines of C code. It's not all my C code though. I added some outside code (code re-use) with the recursion stuff. There is the arc4random() code from OpenSSH and the checksumming code from tcpdump, both licensed with a BSD license so it's compatible to wildcarddnsd's BSD license.

# wc -l *.[ch]
     440 additional.c
     161 bsd-arc4random.c
     180 db.h
     168 dns.h
      40 endian.h
      73 include.h
    2565 main.c
    1236 parse.c
    2288 recurse.c
     255 region.c
    2444 reply.c
     183 wildcard.c
   10033 total

Wildcardnsd will likely grow beyond this as there needs to be new code put in place to make CNAME linking possible (as well as CNAME loop detection). To make domains such as www.yahoo.com or wildcarddns.cvs.sourceforge.net work.

Possible solution to lock-ups? Turn HT off.

Ok so uranus.centroid.eu is a computer with the following specs:

• Cooler Master Powersupply GX 650Watts
• Corsair xms3 8GB DDR3 (4x2GB) RAM
• Intel X25-m Sata Solid-State-Drive 160 GB (vmware drive)
• Intel X25-m Sata Solid-State-Drive 80 GB (system drive)
• ASUS P6T SE Motherboard
• Intel Core i7-930 2.80 Ghz 8MB 4.8GT CPU
• MSI N250GTS Twin Frozr 1G 1GB DDR3 VGA card
• LG BH10LS30 Blu-ray Disc Rewriter

pjp@uranus:~$ uname -a
Linux uranus 2.6.32-24-generic #43-Ubuntu SMP Thu Sep 16 14:58:24 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Operating systems that run on this VMware Workstation are:

• Microsoft Windows 7 Home Edition
• Linux (OpenSuse 10.3 and Ubuntu)
• OpenBSD 4.7 (main desktop/vm)
• NetBSD 5.0.1
• FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE
• Solaris 10 (currently off)
• DragonflyBSD (currently off)
• FreeBSD 9.0-CURRENT (currently off)

Occasionally I look at BIOS updates for the motherboard but as of last month I had the highest version available.

I use the system for programming, system administration support (with vmware this is easy) and everyday tasks. I don't game, this is not a gamer system for me. I do use iTunes as I had a brief Mac OS X history.