Articles by peter

I decided it was time to clean up my home network, so I blew the dust off a 12 year old compaq, and downloadedOpenBSD 4.1, wrote it to a CD, and installed it, along with a couple of NICs. All was good, I then looked at the patches that I would have to install and realized that I would have to compile them. This made me a little sad, as there was no way the old compaq could manage it.

So, with the wonders of NFS, I mounted /usr/src and /usr/obj from my linux machine to the openbsd one, and I downloaded the sources. I then downloaded the trial version of VMware Fusion and intstalled it on my macbook. I started VMware and installed OpenBSD on it. You know where I am going with this, right? Yep, I NFS mounted /usr/src and /usr/obj in the VMware image on my macbook and built the updates there, when it was all done, I installed on the compaq. In case you’re wondering why I did not simply install VMware server on the linux machine, I’ll tell you. The macbook has 4 times the RAM and twice as many cores as the linux machine, it is only deficient in disk space (which the linux box has in abundance).

Which gave me an OpenBSD firewall and router. Yay! Of course, that was not enough. I have used dyndns.org for a while, and have been happy enough with it. I also subscribe to a lot of mailing lists, and finally, this year, decided to use fetchmail, dovecot and a custom Python script to deal with the mailing list subscriptions.

So, all mailing lists (and stuff marked as possible spam) ends up going through fetchmail and onto my linux box, where it gets sorted into IMAP mailboxes. All very neat and tidy, but it does mean that, in order to check my mailing list mail, I have to connect to the linux machine on port 143. This means setting up ssh tunnels when I am not at home. It is not hard, but is a bit of a pain just to check list email.

Between that, and IPv6 being in the news a little lately, I decided to get an IPv6 subnet. I went to go6.net and got a /48 subnet. I installed their client on the OpenBSD router, and viola, it “just worked”, IPv6 autoconf gave all the machines behind the router IPv addresses. Yay 2!

That’s not all! Can’t have IPv6 without reverse DNS working, right? So, a quick google turned up freedns.afraid.org, and I used their services to add AAAA records for a number of my computers! Now, I can reach individual machines while away from home without having to use ssh tunnels! Or can I? Well, no, actually, because I set the OpenBSD Packet Filter to block most incoming traffic, including IPv6. Oh well

Then, being a little obsessed, I decided to make everthing on the local network resolvable. So I started named, and made a zone file for the internal network, so now, as well as the entries in /etc/host, I can rely on my nameserver to resolve names of the half dozen or so comupters running in the house… Of course, I could remember the IP addresses for them anyway, so you might wonder what the point is.

Having done all that, I also wonder what the point is. There was not really a necessity to do any of it. The $20 netgear router was working okay. As far as my wife can tell the internal network has not changed (she never has, and probably never will, consciously connect from one internal machine to another, so the whole nameserver thing is pretty meaningless for her), and access to the “internet” is the same as it ever was.

It looks like I set up a pretty home network, but, perhaps wasted my time Oh, well, I learned stuff, right?

So, yesterday, despite the rain, my wife and I left Jessica at her Grandma’s and drove to the Border crossing at Emerson. Since it was such awful weather we decided not to go to Grand Forks for lunch, just to go to the border, turn around and come back (stopping at Canadian immigration to get all the necessary stamps, of course).

So, we got to the checkpoint for U.S. immigration and the guy asks “What is the purpose of your visit?”, so I reply, “I just want to do a U-turn and go back to Canada so I can become a permanent resident.”. As expected, we had to park the car and go into the office. Guy takes my passport, sits at his desk, asks if I’ve ever done this before, and proceeds to give me a piece of paper saying that I have been refused entry into the United States. I thought that was a bit odd until he explained that it was easier (and $6 cheaper for me) than giving me a visa waiver. I don’t know why he asked me if I’d ever done it before, it seems like the kind of thing most people only ever do once.

So, without having officially entered the U.S., we turned around and went back to Canada. The immigration people in Canada did not ask any questions, simply entered all my details into their computer and told me to sign a form, warning “If you write outside the green box, the whole process is cancelled and you have to reapply.” Well, the first time took 9 months and cost a couple of thousand dollars, so I was a little nervous signing my name, but luckily did not slip. The signature does not much resemble how I normally sign my name, of course, but that does not matter, does it?

Now I am a permanent resident, the drive in the rain along the very straight highway through the very flat plains was the easiest part of the whole experience, I do wonder if I am supposed to check the box that says “Have you ever been refused entry into the United States” next time I enter the U.S though.

So, I applied for permanent residency in Canada in August 2006 or so, they asked for my passport in November of that year, I sent it to them in December and asked for it back again in March, as my work visa for Japan was expiring and we had nothing else to do but move to Canada.

I sent them back my passport at the beginning of April and, again, asked for it to be returned yesterday. They replied today:

“This refers to your fax enquiry dated May 22nd about your application for permanent residence in Canada. Your immigration visa was issued on May 22nd and forwarded to your address in Winnipeg on May 23rd by DHL (collect), air waybill # XXXXXXXXXX Please note that the validity of your immigration visa will expire on June 15th. This means that you must re-enter Canada from the USA or any other country with this visa on or before this date in order to be landed as an immigrant. ”

So, looks like I get to drive to the border, do a U turn at America and come back again :-).

WWDC is Apple’s developer conference. In recent years it has been held at the Moscone center in San Francisco. It is being held there this year also, from June 11th to the 15th.

I have been to it twice before, in 2004 and last year. This year, I was lucky enough to again recieve an invitation to the event, so will be in San Francisco from June 10th to the 16th. The invitation includes a conference pass, but no hotels or flights. Luckily again, this year, having moved to Canada, and having flown a lot in recent years, I can get to San Francisco on airline points (well, ok, I have to buy $69 worth of points and pay $75 in taxes etc.). So really, I only have to cover hotels and expenses, which shouldn’t be too much.

I am looking forward to meeting Ben Byer, Ben Reed and others that I have only ever communicated with electronically, and, of course, meeting others that I have met at previous WWDCs.

Way back in December 2005, a message was posted to Apple’s darwin-dev list asking for help porting x.org 7.x to Mac OS X. I was on holidays at the time and, having some free time, albeit temporarily, volunteered.

By June 2006, we had a working copy, working in the sense that it all built and started up. not working in the sense of actually, well, working. I could launch an xterm, and it would start with completely black windows and, if I recall correctly, no working mouse or keyboard. It was kind of hard to keep up with a fast-develping upstream source when I could only devote a day or two at odd intervals. The source would refuse to build even though that module had built for me the month before and so on. It was a pain.

Kevin Van Vechten (Apple BSD Group manager) put Ben Byer on the job last fall and things really started moving. Apple fixed the major issues, the black windows, non-functional mice and keyboards, even the terrible startup times and then pushed the source changes upstream. The announcement was greeted with great fanfare and celebration. Okay, there seems to have been no reaction whatever, a tad disappointing.

There are some questions of library compatibility, the newer x.org libraries have a higher compatibility_version than the older Apple X11 libraries. This means that programs linked to the older libraries can still run with the newer ones, but that programs linked to the new libraries can not run if you remove the new X and reinstall Apple’s X11 from tiger. Should not be a problem for most people. If you go against all reccommendations and have DYLD_* environment variables set, you’re on your own. Anyway the issue got me to hack this up last night. A library version number editor. It was a fun hack, I strongly advise that you never use it though, there is a better way!

I’m working full time hours for The Written Word, Inc. since last week. Of course, I’m remote, so I have to get up in the morning and get myself into the home office, then work for 8 hours or more. Getting up and into the office is not so hard, but I have been getting out of bed a bit too late, starting work at 9am is not early enough, should be at it by 8 if I want to finish at a reasonable time.

Another problem is of course, slacking. I can not report time spent reading slashdot or RangerRick’s Blog or time spend reading/responding to personal mail or slacking on irc as hours worked. Well, I could, I suppose, but I’m a bit too honest to do that. So got to give up on those persuits until evening

Tomorrow, will try and start at 8:30! Wish me luck.

Update: Well, did a little better, made it for 8:45.

Well, we made it. Jessica “graduated” on the 26th of March in the morning. Then we quickly packed away the rest of our belongings to have the house empty for 3pm. At 3, the water, gas and electricity people came to turn off their services and collect money, then the real estate guy came and inspected. It seems that the week of cleaning was worth it, we should get some of our deposit back.

Then to an airport hotel where Walter met us, and then next day he took us to Winnipeg, he’s a good guy, came all the way to Japan for one day so that he could take us to Canada on his airline buddy pass. Saved us a bundle.

Now, furniture is purchased and we’ve moved in to the new house. Got to wait a couple of weeks for cable TV, so we’re stuck with one channel that we can get with the indoor antenna. Jessica is not too happy about that