unsigned long geek = random();

As part of my mail server rebuild (to be discussed in a future series of posts), I’ve been upgrading some of my mail system configuration files. One of them is fetchmail.conf, the configuration file for fetchmail, which I use to fetch mail from my mail server. It required a few changes after the upgrade to version 6.3.8 and a few changes in my environment.

A snippet from my updated configuration file:

        username user1 with password "pass1" is user1 here ssl fetchall
                sslfingerprint "BA:34:74:B6:7F:EF:A7:88:7C:7A:D1:8B:79:C5:10:D9"
                sslcertpath /etc/openssl/certs
                smtphost mail.relay.co.za
        username user2 with password "pass2" is user2 here ssl fetchall
                sslfingerprint "BA:34:74:B6:7F:EF:A7:88:7C:7A:D1:8B:79:C5:10:D9"
                sslcertpath /etc/openssl/certs
                smtphost mail.relay.co.za

Now, why on earth does one have to specify an SSL fingerprint, certificate path and mail server for each user? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have a global default and individual overrides where necessary? Chalk this up as another reason why I should move to getmail. Yes, I know I could add the functionality myself, but I really do need to move away from using an abomination before God to fetch my mail.

Note to self: this is the second “sucks” post in two days. Must remember to be more positive.

Spanning Sync is finally out of beta and release 1.0 is available. They’ve adopted both an annual ($25) and once-off pricing model ($65).

In the few days I’ve been using it, I’ve been very impressed with the product. If you’re still fighting with synchronising calendars between devices, sharing calendars with others, etc. give it a try – the combination of Spanning Sync and Google Calendar seems to be a winner.

Over the years I’ve tried various approaches to try and synchronise calendars between the various electronic devices I use – laptop, home workstation, mobile phone and PDA. None of the approaches have been ideal because they’ve either required me to use applications I don’t want to (Outlook, for example) or they’ve required me to change the way I work.

The ideal solution would be for me to be able to maintain my appointments and tasks in whichever calendar is easiest to use at the time – typically my mobile phone’s calendar when I’m in meetings, Google Calendar when I’m at my desk and have access to the web and iCal when I’m at home. Anything I maintain in one calendar must be visible in the others.

Yesterday I finally got around to giving the combination of Google Calendar, iCal and Spanning Sync a try. My impressions so far? Definitely favourable. I’ve setup calendars in Google Calendar to match my iCal configuration, but I’ve also had to create iCal calendars for each of the public calendars I access in Google (see the screenshot below). Once that’s done, it’s a matter of synchronising Google Calendar and iCal using Spanning Sync and iCal and my mobile phone using iSync. Heck, if a Unix geek can do it, anyone can

Next step is to setup a calendar to share with my family so that we’re all aware of family events, school activities, etc. After that I’ll have to get them to actually use it…

Yes, it’s true – I’ve switched to a Mac running OS X as my primary home workstation. For the past few years I’ve been running NetBSD on sparc64 systems, but felt that it was time for a change. Something in particular that’s really annoyed me is that Firefox still isn’t stable on 64-bit big-endian platforms – I had to resort to running it on a NetBSD/alpha system and displaying it locally.

It’s still early days, but I’m impressed with how everything Just Works under OS X. It’s not quite a traditional Unix system (NeXT always was a bit different, NetInfo for example), but a Mach kernel, a mostly-FreeBSD userland and a pretty GUI is good enough for me Of course, I’m still keeping my Ultra 60 running NetBSD as my second head – just need to get Synergy configured so that I can talk to both machines with a single keyboard and mouse.

Yesterday I finally got around to adding a second head and setting up Xinerama on my dual Creator3D Sun Ultra 60 running NetBSD/sparc64 -current (4.99.4). Setup was fairly straighforward – I started with a fresh XF86Config generated by X -configure and added the necessary stanzas for the second video card and monitor.

The only slight problem I had was a missing fb1 node in /dev, with the result that XFree86 didn’t even find the second card. After much hair-pulling, I realised what the problem was and ran MAKEDEV std_sparc64 in /dev to fix it. The reason for the missing device node was that my machine had been upgraded from 3.1 to -current and I had neglected to update /dev during the upgrade. Oh well, all’s well that ends well

Dual Creator3Ds are only supported by 4.0 and later – if you try and boot 3.1 and earlier on a machine with a pair of them, you may find your console “disappearing” when the second card is initalised. To get around that, remove the second card, upgrade and then reinstall the card.

Some useful resources:

• My working XF86Config
• The Sun Frame Buffer FAQ
• A guide to setting Sun frame buffer resolution

Update: fixed the broken link to my XF86Config

On Sunday I finally managed to get OpenSolaris installed on my “spare” Sun Ultra 2. Finally for a number of reasons:

• It took me a while to get the machine back together again with a working disk and the correct RAM. 200-pin DSIMMs are not the easiest things to add and remove.
• I have a distinct shortage of decent sized 1″ SCA disks. I eventually found a 7,200rpm 9GiB Western Digital drive that used to be in my AlphaServer 800 and used that.
• I needed to update the PROM to boot a 64-bit kernel, which took some time as I had to hunt down a hard disk with Solaris already installed in order to boot the PROM updater.
• Solaris is not quick to install using a 12x CD-ROM drive (the fastest I had at hand – didn’t feel like digging in the parts bin outside for a faster one).
• Slicing the disk incorrectly is not a Good Thing – the first install failed after /usr ran out of space.

After all that:
[1] mj@skunkworks:~$ uname -a
SunOS skunkworks 5.11 snv_52 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2


Not the fastest machine (single 300Mhz UltraSPARC-II CPU, 512MiB RAM), but it runs well.

On Saturday I got two Sun UltraSPARC systems from a friend, in exchange for my unused SGI O2. Although the O2 was a great little machine, I hadn’t used it for about a year and SGI’s poor support for IRIX (ie no easy way for me to get patches) meant it would probably have languished in my pile of unused systems for a while longer.

The two systems I got were an Ultra 10, 333Mhz, 256MiB, 9GiB IDE, Creator3D and an Ultra 2, 300Mhz, 256MiB, Creator3D and no disks. I’ve already stripped my Ultra 5 and put its RAM, SCSI controller, disk and USB 2.0 card into the Ultra 10 and it seems noticeably faster – probably a combination of the Creator3D and the extra cache on the 333Mhz CPU (2MiB vs the 256KiB on the Ultra 5’s 360Mhz).

The Ultra 10 is running NetBSD-current (4.99.1) and once Solaris 10 Update 3 has been released, I’ll be installing it on the Ultra 2.

Spotted today that sgi have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It’s sad that the once great maker of high-end graphics workstations has been reduced to this, but I can’t help but feel the writing was on the wall once they diverted from their core competency with products like the Windows NT-based Visual Workstation series. The purchase and later sale of Cray also suggested that they didn’t know where their focus was.

This doesn’t have to be the end – perhaps it’s the end of the beginning and sgi will re-emerge a better and more focused company. Either way, I think it’s the end of IRIX – if sgi do survive, I think they’ll focus primarily in Linux-based systems, and abandon MIPS and IRIX to the history books.