Polarwave’s BSD Adventures

Found an interesting bug tonight while using
scp to send files from cygwin on my PIII windoze
box to my laptop running OpenBSD 3.3. Really
messed up the keyboard for me on the laptop!
Couldn’t change to lower case for nothing! Was
able to ssh there, login as user, su to root, and
then reboot. That got rid of the problem, but I’d
like to try to find out how to avoid the problem
in the future. Anyone reads this entry, let me
know if you know anything about the problem
and how to fix or avoid it.

Ordered some adapters for my Seagate Barracuda
drives. They’re made to install in an array & lack external
power ports, for one thing. Bought a 4 pack of adapters
on eBay, put one extra harddrive inside an empty 5 1/4
bay, set the scsi pinouts on it, hooked up the power and
scsi cable, booted, and everything worked perfectly. That
means I’ll have 9GB of extra storage, independent of the
17GB RAID 5 array, to use as a backup, eliminating the
need for a tape drive. I still have an old tape drive with
a 6 tape changer, but where the cable adapter changes
from scsi 1 to scsi 2, it won’t fit between the back of the
hot swappable drive array where the extra connections
are, and the power supply. Guess that’ll be the next thing
I search for on eBay. Anyway, about ready to start the
OpenBSD install. Just need to do a little more reading up.
Still running OpenBSD on my old Toshiba too, and feelng
sorry for all my windoze friends with their virus problems.
That said seriously, too, not being a typical windoze
basher.

Got my old HP LCII server running, netraid card installed
and mostly configured, and all 3 scsi drives setup as a
RAID 5 array. Trying to get the scsi cd setup so I can boot
from it.

Looks like my first attempt went okay, so I’m going
to enter some really great book titles I have that
have to do with BSD. Here’s the list:

BSD Hacks: 100 Industrial Strength Tips & Tools
by Dru Lavigne

FreeBSD: An Open-Source Operating System for
Your Personal Computer by Annelise Anderson

Absolute OpenBSD by Michael W. Lucas

Absolute BSD by Michael W. Lucas (this one may
confuse some folks, since its title is so close to
the one directly above, but this book primarily
concerns FreeBSD rather than OpenBSD)

The Complete FreeBSD: Documentation from
the Source – Fourth Edition by Greg Lehey

FreeBSD Unleashed by Michael Urban and
Brian Tiemann published by Sams

Building Firewalls with OpenBSD and PF 2nd ed.
by Jacek Artymiak

The OpenBSD PF Packet Filter Book
edited by Jeremy C. Reed

Starting a public blog on the Internet concerning my
continued interests in opensource operating systems,
especially OpenBSD and FreeBSD. Hosted my own
domain website, www.bubbha.com , for about a year
and a half on my home computer, running FreeBSD
and Apache server. Redirected all url calls through
my account at www.mydomain.com to my router on
my home network. Worked great! Then I got lazy
and busy too, and let a friend host it for me.
Now I’m going to be busy again, trying to get all my
stuff setup on an old surplus HP LCII server . Going
to put OpenBSD 3.3 on it and start learning again.
Always interested in any input I can get from other
BSD users, newbies included, since I had a lot of
trouble in the beginning finding a friendly ear and
some support while I was learning BSD basics. Up
until that time, I had been an unrepentant windoze
point and clicker like so many others.