Too Many Blogs and Sites
I have really let this blog get behind ever since I was given a sub-domain
to post my write ups on OpenBSD. It’s at:
Polarwave’s OpenBSD Tips & Tricks for Newbies
I can’t see much point in duplicating content, so I’m going to have pursue
a different tack on this blog. Now I’m going off to water my plants and think
about just what I’m going to put up here now. 
Long, long break!
Been away a long time. Finally managed to update my original blog at:
polarwave.blogspot.com
but only with info about my new web site at:
http://polarwave.openbsd101.com
Polarwave’s OpenBSD Tips & Tricks for Newbies which is pretty effectively what I just did here. 
Not too many tips up there yet, but the site is built and functioning. Got my perl plain text hit counter working, registered with Google to use their API for live feeds to my site and have quite a few feeds coming in now including Dru Lavigne’s from http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/unix/bsd/archives/ and Will Blackman’s BSDTalk. Also created a fun page with some tips on using fortune files for other things besides for when you’re logging into a terminal. Uploaded about 15 home made fortune files for folks to play with.
Mount Partitions to Restore Backups
I’ve been asking myself what do I do if a partition gets corrupted? Yeah, I do dumps regularly to another disk, but when you boot from an OpenBSD install cd there’s no matching /dev/wd1d there. There are no devices with wd1, only wd0. There’s MAKEDEV but it says that the operation isn’t permitted when I type ./MAKEDEV wd1d. What’s going on here? I don’t have to worry about being root, this is an installation cd. Actually I’ve shelled out of the install routine. Let’s do ls -l and see what we get. I’ll be darned, MAKEDEV is not executable. chmod +x MAKEDEV and that solves that problem.
Once again, I type ./MAKEDEV wd1d and hit enter. This time there’s no error message. Another quick ls -l shows all kinds of wd1 listings now including wd1d. Now I mount -r /dev/wd1d /mnt and no error message. Let’s see what mount shows. Cool, wd1d is mounted. I do a ls -l on it and sure enough, there’s my /data partition on the hard drive where all the dumps are stored.
Now if a partition gets corrupted, all I have to do is boot up on the cd, make the device, run newfs on the corrupted partition, mount the partition with the backups on it as shown above, mount the newly formatted partition in write mode, change directory into it and restore the appropriate dump. Life is good!
Someone may say you don’t need the cd to boot from, you just boot the bsd.rd kernel, and that’s okay, that is if your / partition isn’t the corrupted one. Also, remember, restore is in /sbin. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using the cd to work from. That is, unless you didn’t install off a cd and don’t have one. I think it’s a good idea to keep one one hand.
This is probably kindergarden stuff for most of the guys on the OpenBSD mailing list, but for me it’s like when the apple hit old Isaac on the head! It’s a revelation! I’m putting this up here in hopes someday some poor newbie having the same problem googles around and finds it. That’d be cool.
Everytime I do a fresh install of OpenBSD, I create a wd1a partition on a 2nd hard drive the same size as my root partition on the primary hard drive and label it altroot. In root’s crontab, right below my env settings SHELL, PATH, and HOME, I enter ROOTBACKUP=1. That way, every day the system will backup /root to /altroot. Alternately, you can edit /etc/daily.local and enter the same ROOTBACKUP=1 line.
In either case, you also have to remember to enter the partition info in /etc/fstab. The format is a little different too, than the format the others partitions use: /dev/wd1a /altroot ffs xx 0 0
All Hail the Supreme Nerd God!
Yes, that’s me! By some fluke of fate, I scored even higher
than my most revered BSD Guru, Dru Lavigne! Blind, outhouse luck
is what I say! Here’s my reward:
More will follow. Long time since the my last entry, the interim
being fraught with computer rescues for others, system rebuilds
for myself, experimentation with Fedora Linux, a new (newer than
any of my old boxes) computer given to me for testing new stuff,
hardware crashes, and so on. Been an interesting time for sure!
YouTube – Installing OpenBSD in 5 minutes
I thought this was a fitting link for my blog. Pretty
cool video!
February Update
January was a busy month. I had put off updating OpenBSD too
long and finally got around to it towards the latter part of
of the month. Read the upgrade faq at:
Doesn’t help when you don’t pay attention to detail, which is
what I was guilty of. I left out a few important steps that you
always have to do. Since I figured I should probably start over
from scratch and had a good backup (what, you don’t backup?),
I downloaded a snapshot and installed it. Everything went fine
and about a week later, I tried it again just to see if I was
just plain lucky the first time. Once again, rock solid OpenBSD
came through. Since then, I’ve gotten into a lot of cd burning
since my significant other got me involved in replicating some
Vietnamese Buddhist cd’s to be donated to the temple. I put the
original cd in and ran:
cdparanoia -B
to copy all the tracks into the directory I was in. Then:
sudo cdrecord -v speed=12 driveropts=burnfree /dev/rcd0c -audio -pad *wav
The hard part was using the labeling program on the windows box.
Reason being, I wanted to get the Vietnamese words along with the
diacritics right on the label. I tried several Vietnamese keyboard
programs, and then found out I could insert special symbols right
from the fonts with the labeling program. After that, print the
labels and put them on the cd’s. Done! Also did quite a bit of
playing around with ffmpeg and grip. There are still licensing
issues with flash, so I decided to give gnash a try. It does okay
on simple and older flash stuff, but tends to choke and dump core
on other newer and either more complicated or poorly put together
flash files. It’s still in development, so that’s to be expected.
Been using gvim a lot and loving it. Great editor!
I’ve recently put up some stuff on my gopherspace; helpfiles, etc.
For those running IE, you have to go through a proxy, and any html
files will have to viewed by choosing view source or saving it to
disk. Hey, if you’re diehard windows, you can always install cgywin!
For others running Firefox, Seamonkey, Netscape, Lynx, etc., go to:
There are lots of other things I’ve been trying, but as usual, I’m
up burning the midnight oil and have other projects early in the
morning, so that’s it for now.
Geek Awareness
I’ve been sitting here after midnight, doing what seems, upon
reflection, geeky things. I’ve been listening to jazz, reading
some social comment stuff, studying the Lyx introduction
and tutorial since I’m interested in doing some publishing,
running an ssh mission over to an XP box to see if certain
files were installed in Cygwin like what I’m using on this
OpenBSD box, using Snownews to read RSS feeds from
various OpenSource projects around the Web , especially
from Dru Lavigne’s Blog , accessing it with Lynx , my
text-based browser, registered at the LXF (Linux Format)
web site and retrieved my new password once again using
SSH to login to my Unix shell account and use Pine to
read my email at SDF , and so on.
I remember back in the early 90’s when I was just starting
out with computers and trying to get everything I could free,
since money is always an item to consider when you’re still
raising a family. Now, with all the resources listed above,
I’m slowly but surely weaning myself away from Microsoft ,
not because I don’t like the system or the people developing
and selling it, but once again due to the expense of keeping
up with it, as opposed to relying almost solely on opensource
to get my computing done. But hey, maybe one of these days
I’ll have more money again and invest in a brand new shiny
Vista cd or dvd set! Keyword here is “MAYBE”.
Cygwin Login
Updated Cygwin on my XP box. Thought because it stopped several
times before finishing and having to choose a different server, that it
had something to do with it. Apparently not. Searched the Cygwin
mailing list archives and found the following:
You just copy C:\cygwin\etc\defaults\etc\profile over C:\cygwin\etc\profile
and restart cygwin. After that, everything goes back to normal. Just another
day in puter paradise. Speaking of which, I’m always bragging about how I
never have to reboot OpenBSD all the time like I do “Windoze”. Sitting here
this morning, reading the news in Firefox on the OpenBSD box, and BOOM,
down she went! I’ve read all sorts of problems and responses in the OpenBSD
mailing lists with spontaneous reboots, and nobody wants to think their hardware’s
crapping out, but in my experience, that’s almost always what’s caused it on any
of my boxes. Case in point: Same box, last year maybe, or earlier this year, everytime
I’d drag a large file across from XP to some dir on the OpenBSD box, it’d reboot.
Upon careful examination of the mobo, turned out to be some leaking capacitors.
Changed out the mobo and, while I was at it, put in a new power supply too. It sure
didn’t last very long. All boxes here are hooked into UPS’s, which is a prerequisite
around this area. The power company is always dropping power off, especially since
Katrina came to see us in 2005. I guess it’s a moot point, though. I’ve always had
good luck with power supplies, but I guess I just got a bad apple out of the barrel
last time.
Experimenting for Newbies
I thought it might help newbies to write about a learning strategy
I’ve usedsince I started out trying to learn the BSD’s. I’ve got this
old PIII 800 I’m working on running OpenBSD, an ancient PII 300
dual-processor HP Netserver running OpenBSD, a Toshiba Satellite
4015 (another relic) running OpenBSD, and a PIII 667 home-built
box running XP. I installed cygwin on the XP box, setup a vanilla
bash prompt so neither FreeBSD or OpenBSD, which has a different
term code and didn’t like the flashy default bash prompt in cygwin.
I also setup Microsoft Services for Unix Administration on the XP
box. I setup ficticious users on all the different boxes, and then I
taught myself how to do automated cronjob rsync backups across
the LAN, setup LAN file shares on on the XP box and NFS on the
BSD boxes, taught myself about ssh and scp along with authorized
keyfiles to eliminate typing passwords, and setup cvsup in root’s
crontab to keep all sources up to date. Forgot to mention a friend
gave me a very ancient Prioris P90 box given to him after Hurricane
Katrina, setup an IDE drive and 5 1GB scsi drives in it left over from
the storm and still working, installed OpenBSD 3.8 on it, set termcap
for serial port usage, hooked up a null modem cable bought locally,
and taught myself how to control it remotely from this box. While I was
out of town, I was told it wasn’t working properly, and was able to ssh
into this box and work on the ailing box from 700 miles away. All I
need to do, I guess, is set up the NIC for wake-on-lan and I could
even wake it up from somewhere else.
Whole point of this tirade is that you can use a bunch of old hardware
as your classroom. All of these boxes I have would be laughed at by
someone using the hot hardware that’s coming out these days, but
they have been a great help at relatively very low costs.
Just a thought!
NFS and Windows Services for Unix
Tried several 3rd party NFS clients to be able to
access my home folders on the FreeBSD Netserver,
without much luck. Downloaded MS Windows Services
for Unix, set it up, had a hell of time with the
the settings, but it’s up and running finally.
Kind of flaky on copying some files back and forth,
but maybe with some tweaking, it’ll all iron out ok.
NFS was tricky to set up on the FreeBSD box, but I
got a lot of help off the internet, especially at
Oreilly’s web site. As always, Dru Lavigne’s site
was helpful, too. Next project will be getting my
old laptop still running OpenBSD 3.3 to mount the
exported folders from the FreeBSD box.
