unsigned long geek = random();

Last week my proxy server, a Sun Ultra 2 running NetBSD 3.0_STABLE, started powering itself off. Every time I powered the machine on again, after about an hour (just after resynchronising the RAID), it would power off again. There were no messages on the serial console, which was rather puzzling.

Some judicious Googling suggested that it could be a heat problem, so on the weekend I stripped the machine down and cleaned it out. It was full of dust – a thick layer on the power supply and over the CPUs’ heat sinks. After the cleanout, the machine has been rock solid – I’ve rebuilt a lot of pkgsrc packages and put it under a fair load and it hasn’t skipped a beat.

Saw this mail on the FreeBSD alpha list a few days ago – unfortunately it seems as if support for the Alpha architecture will be phased out with FreeBSD 7.0.

From John Baldwin:
Alpha was the first non-x86 port that was added to FreeBSD, and as such it has greatly aided the efforts to keep FreeBSD from being too i386-centric. However, recently the Alpha port has not had any active development or maintenance.
...
After considering all of this, it is time to part with Alpha for 7.0 and beyond. At this time it is still planned to provide 6.x releases for FreeBSD/alpha. The code will still be around in CVS history if someone suddenly shows up and fixes a bunch of bugs and/or the architecture is revived. ...

I certainly hope someone steps up to take care of FreeBSD/alpha, as it would be sad to see it consigned to the history books. I’ve never used FreeBSD/alpha seriously (my Alphas run NetBSD), but the more choice there is available in the open source arena the better.

If you’re in and around South Africa this coming week, there are a few open source events to check out:

• LinuxWorld, taking place at the Sandton Convention Centre, Johannesburg, May 16-19
• John “maddog” Hall will be talking at UWC (in Cape Town) on May 15. Topic is FOSS Integration & Interoperability & Freedom in the Digital Age and it starts at 11:00 in the library auditorium.

I’ve just uploaded the slides from Cherry G. Mathew’s talk on porting NetBSD to IA-64 to the CLUG wiki. You can find them under the entry for his talk (direct link).

For those who couldn’t make it, Cherry gave a very interesting overview of the Itanium architecture as well as an insight into the challenges of porting an operating system to a new platform. It’s a pity that CLUG don’t have audio recordings of the talks like NYCBUG do – I’ve suggested it to the committee, so perhaps they’ll be able to put talks online sometime in the near future.

Tomorrow night (May 9), Cherry G. Mathew will be giving a talk at the Cape Linux User Group on his efforts in porting NetBSD to Itanium (aka IA-64).

If you’re in the area, you should try and make it – it should be a good talk (and Cherry has come all the way from India to give it!).

I see that Sun were offering a reward for the porting of Linux to their CoolThreads-based systems (a reward I’m sure has been claimed now that David S. Miller has Linux booting multi-user on such systems). Come on Sun – why not offer the same reward for porting NetBSD to CoolThreads? After all, SunOS releases prior to 5.x were based on BSD and Sun has made past donations to The NetBSD Foundation.

Today I had to rebuild Mozilla Firefox due to the release of 1.5.0.2. Unfortunately, due to my choice of platform (NetBSD/alpha), I have to build my own binary from scratch and can’t just do a delta binary update. The build timings on a 500Mhz EV56 AlphaServer 800:
real 608m54.243s
user 507m15.788s
sys 77m30.249s


Yes, it took 10 hours to build a web browser…

For a while I’ve been intending to encode my CD collection into a lossless format – I’m sick and tired of having to re-encode my already encoded CDs because the format the files are in isn’t supported by a particular device or because the lossy bitrate I used was too low. My plan is to store all my CDs in FLAC format and then transcode as and when needed (heck, it can even be done on the fly).

Today I set up abcde, my favourite encoding tool, on majestic, my AlphaServer 800, running NetBSD 3.0. Once pkgsrc had finished installing everything, I configured abcde and fired it up to try and encode my first CD.

Unfortunately, it started spitting out errors, claiming that the CD didn’t contain any audio. I then ran cdparanoia -vsQ to try and see what cdparanoia thought of the drive. After checking the drive, it spat out the following:
Unable to find any suitable command set from probe;
drive probably not CDDA capable.


How odd – most drives manufactured in the last 10 years support CDDA (the drive in question is a DEC RRD47, a 32x SCSI drive, in this case manufactured by Toshiba). After some Googling, I found the following cdda2wav commit message:
added the DEC RRD47 drive as not mmc/readCD capable


Oh great. Of all the CD-ROM drives in the universe, I have to get one that can’t do CDDA. This is annoying – I really hate opening majestic’s case, so I think I’ll go with an external drive until I’m forced to open it. More on this tomorrow…

PS: The CD I tried was Metallica’s S&M. Perhaps Lars Ulrich or the RIAA had their hand in this…