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.

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.

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…

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.

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

• 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.

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.

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.

Yesterday I installed Tag List, a plugin that displays and allows navigation to the various tags in the currently edited file(s). It seems to work very well, and supports most languages, thanks to Exuberant ctags.

The screenshot below shows it in action editing some Python source.

459×530 pixels 58.7 kB

Until quite recently, Xgl was only supported on machines that could use the proprietary ATI or NVidia X drivers, which excluded me, as my laptop has an Intel 915DM display subsystem (one of those horrible shared memory systems). This has since changed and the 915DM is now supported. Rather fortuitously, today Jonathan kindly passed along a copy of the latest Gentoo-based Kororaa Xgl Live CD 0.2. When I booted it on my laptop, I was very impressed with what I saw – the performance was good (much better than, for example, the composite extension of X.org 6.9, as I’m using currently) and the eye candy certainly is purrty

Some early articles I’ve read:

• Colm MacCárthaigh
• Robert Milkowski

I’d be very curious to see how an enterprise application like SAP ERP or a database like DB2 perform on the T2000. While not applications that one may traditionally associate with a highly threaded, multi-core CPU, I’m sure they’d see similar performance boosts to those seen by web applications. Certainly, any SAP-based application server, with its virtualization of the operating system processes into work processes, would benefit. It’s just a pity the competition and trial offer aren’t available in South Africa.

Something that pleases me about this – it shows Sun’s continued commitment to the SPARC architecture. With their punting of Opteron-based servers of late, I was beginning to fear for the continued survival of what is probably my favourite CPU family.

One slight potential fly in the ointment is that all my NetBSD source trees are stored on my source server and mounted read-only via NFS on the systems that need it. To build XFree86 with a read-only source tree requires a little trickery, but the procedure is nicely explained in the Building XFree86 from a Source Distribution guide (see page 3 onwards). The idea is to create a shadow tree containing symlinks to all the files in the original tree and using that to build instead of the original tree. It’s quick to set up and works very well.

Now to get a decent PCI video card…

• Digital AlphaServer XFree86 Code
• Tested Good Video cards

It seems like a lot of commodity PCI video cards Just Work(tm) with XFree86 in Alpha systems, but just for safety’s sake I think I’ll stick with one of the known good cards. PCI Radeon 7000s can apparently be had for R300 (about $45) from a local computer reseller – I’ll go and check them out tomorrow and probably pick one up. Getting the card locally will probably cost the same as eBaying one, but it’ll certainly be a lot quicker.

Another change I made today was to enable certificate-based relaying. It’s the perfect answer for those who need to relay mail for users with dynamic IPs in scenarios where a password-based solution isn’t ideal (for example, when the relay needs to authenticate another MTA rather than a user). There are quite a few guides describing how to setup certificate based relaying, but Petri T. Koistinen’s one is one of the better ones. Small tip – make sure to use the correct CA certificate (the one actually used to sign the client certificate), otherwise relaying won’t work and postfix will spit out errors like the following:
postfix/smtpd[32477]: verify error:num=20:unable to get local issuer certificate
postfix/smtpd[32477]: verify error:num=27:certificate not trusted
postfix/smtpd[32477]: verify error:num=21:unable to verify the first certificate