Centroid.EU Blog

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.

Random Hackepedia

The RH for this week is ctime.

Equinox in a few days

Well it's here again, twice a year and this is the second time. Yes it's the Equinox. To be precise it's on September 23rd, at 3:09 UTC. It also marks the first day of autumn in the northern hemisphere. The southern hemisphere moves into spring.

Wildcarddnsd recurses!

Update: whoops it has a bug, that causes a flood on a set of nameservers, I'll have to fix that. I hope noone is testing this just yet.

Random Hackepedia

The RH for this week is Syscall.

Pre-ordered OpenBSD 4.8

Well, I just pre-ordered OpenBSD 4.8 , for the maximum in Internet security. I bought it from OpenBSD Europe and with shipping, shipping insurance and paypal fees this cost 49.86 euros. Much better than the cost of Solaris these days. With every newer release OpenBSD releases a song. You can listen to it here.

The inside of uranus.centroid.eu

It's my pride and joy. This (avi, 7MB) is uranus.centroid.eu. That's how it looked like on the first day I got it. I use the video to look inside it to know what slots the RAM is located, the vidcard is located and see what sort of expansion I can put into it. Right now it's changed a little. It has a second SSD card for the OS and I also put a PCI NIC in there for expansion of network stuff. There is also a chance that I'll be getting pluto, my parents old computer, I'll be networking that to uranus then. Also worth mentioning is that I recently found out that I don't get lockups if I turn off Hyperthreading, but I just can't live without Hyperthreading so I turned Speedstep off and it became just as stable.

PS: Yes this is really uranus2 but the old uranus was renamed neptun (no e, for german version of neptune) and my parents have it now. The next computer will likely be named saturn and then jupiter, mars, earth, venus, mercury, sun.