Polarwave’s BSD Adventures

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.

Talk about! I keep getting this when I boot:

unknown: PNP0303 can’t assign resources (port)
unknown: PNP0f13 can’t assign resources (irq)
unknown: PNP0501 can’t assign resources (port)
unknown: PNP0700 can’t assign resources (port)
unknown: PNP0401 can’t assign resources (port)

(There a left and right brackets around the
PNP errors, but I can’t put it in here, since
it gets interpreted as html tags when the page
is parsed).

Did a lot of Googling, and read where you no
longer can compile in support for the problem.
So, I kept fooling around with pci, irq, and
port settings in the bios. Eventually, I went
to far, to say the least. Machine flat would
not boot. Had to shut down, disconnect power,
remove and reseat the cmos battery, reset all
my bios settings, save and reboot. Still have
the error messages in dmesg, but at least I’m
back up and running.

Hallelujah! That about sums up the way I feel.
I’ve never gotten X to look so good before. I
thought the install had been broken last night
when it stopped towards the end. Did a massive
clean up after all the installing. Tried Window
Maker today after running the X configuration
utility. Took several tries and doing some guess
work as to the video, but it’s running now and
looks great. Hope the Thunderbird email program
and Enigmail for encryption go as well tonight.

Okay, found out my last post on using Gpg
and Pine leaves out some things that I’ve
since had to work out. Here’s what I did.
In Pine, go to Setup, then Config. Go down
until you see default-composer-hdrs. Enter

X-GPG-PUBLIC_KEY: http://wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net
X-GPG-FINGERPRINT: your id fingerprint here

Go further down to display filters. Enter

_LEADING(“—–BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE”)_ /usr/local/bin/gpg –decrypt
_LEADING(“—–BEGIN PGP MESSAGE”)_ /usr/local/bin/gpg –decrypt

Go on down to sending filters. Enter

/usr/local/bin/gpg -sae (this 1st one for encryption)
/usr/local/bin/gpg –clearsign (this one for signing)

There’s only one person I send anything encrypted
to, so the following work around isn’t too much of
a bother. Guess it could get worse if I had to start
encrypting a message to a whole bunch of recipients.
Anyway, when I address the message, I first put in
the intended recipient, then myself to be carbon
copied. When I send the message, I choose the first
gpg filter which encrypts and signs, type in my
password when it asks, and then gpg asks me for
recipient(s). First I type in the intended one and
hit enter. Then I type in myself and hit enter.
Then enter one more time on a blank line. Message
is sent to us both, he can read it, I can read the
copy in my sent messaages folder, and all’s well.
I’m using FreeBSD 3.7 Release, GPG 1.4.1 and
Pine 4.62, so if anyone else knows of a better
way to do the above with installing a bunch of
God awful scripts and so forth, in other words,
just some settings I can change, & you read this,
please let me know!

Had a terrible time getting Pine and GPG
to work together on the HP Netserver with
freebsd. Here are the program versions:

FreeBSD – 5.4 Release
Gnupg – 1.4.1
Pine – 4.62

Probably mentionedd it before. I’m still
running an old version of OpenBSD (3.3)
on my old laptop. GPG is on there with
Pine and works great and was easy to set
up. This new version was easy, once I’d
messed with it most of all day Sunday.
Okay, here’s the setup in Pine:

display-filters
(1st filter, all on one line)
“_LEADING(—–BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE)_” /usr/local/bin/gpg -decrypt

(2nd filter, all on one line)
“_LEADING(—–BEGIN PGP MESSAGE)_” /usr/local/bin/gpg -decrypt

sending-filters
(1st filter, all on one line)
/usr/local/bin/gpg -eas -r youremail@youremailprovider
(2nd filter, all on one line)
/usr/local/bin/gpg –clearsign

On the 1st sending filter, be sure to put
your email address. That’s where I had so
much trouble, trying to figure out why I
could send an encrypted message to someone
on my keyring and they could read it, but
I couldn’t read the same sent message in
my box.

Been playing with the system a lot today.
Installed portupgrade on it, read up on
ports at Oreillynet. Lots of good stuff
there, especially from Dru Lavigne. Only
problem in the last 24 hours was when I
ran a cvsup for the ports tree. Left it
running when I went to bed, since it’s
a long process sometimes. When I got up,
system was froze up. Had to cold boot it,
and naturally it bitched when booting as
to the system not being unmounted properly.
Wasn’t too damned much I could do about
that!
On a windows security note, finally found
a damned key logger on my winbox. Gone
now, but it’s worrisome. Found a really
good security site with lots of free stuff
at http://www.sysinternals.com and d/l a
lot of freebies. The most interesting one
was rootkit revealer. Previously, rootkits
were mostly, from what I understand, found
on unix type systems. Now they’re making
there way into the windows world. Oh joy!
As if there’s not always enough security
stuff to worry about!

Addendum (following a.m.)
Whew! I remember reading how long it can
take to install Gentoo, especially if you
are really a geek and build it from one of
the first stages. I started installing
windowmaker and then firefox last night.
Got up this a.m. and it’s still going hot
and heavy. Ran df on /usr last night and
got 15% used. Ran it just now and it’s at
28%. I think that particular partition is
about 8 or 9GB. This is kind of like when
you install MS stuff. Eeooouuuhhhh!!!

What a chore! Thought I had both cpu’s working
properly on the HP Netserver, only to find out
tonight the 2nd one wasn’t. Turned out to be a
controller seating problem on the mobo. Got
that ironed out now, I hope.
Installed FreeBSD 5.4 Release on it, installed
some ports I needed, rebuilt the kernel for
SMP support, and it’s working okay so far. Now
I’m installing Xorg and later Fluxbox for the
desktop. I’m sure there are some things I left
out, like certain compile arguments, but it’s
just for experimentation right now, anyway.
Also added an extra 9GB h/d for storage and
backup. Ran sysinstall and used fdisk and
disklabel. That went okay, too. Hope the xorg
and fluxbox install goes as well.

Been fiddling around with torrent files the last
couple of nights. Ran into NAT problems and fixed
them finally tonight. Had to go into the router
config and forward port 6881 calls to the box I’m
using Azureus on, using both TCP and UDP. Enabled
UPnP in Azureus. Had to allow the program access
in the machines firewall config, and fiddle with
the max u/l number and kb’s. It’s working ok now.
Got interested in it, since a lot of distros out
there aren’t in iso format. You can ftp the whole
directory of all the files and create your own iso,
but in some cases, you’re not going to get all the
other cd’s you might need, like with packages and
ports. Or, you can get the .torrent files and d/l
everything, no sweat, into iso’s. Debian’s a good
case in point, the one I’m getting right now.

Burned the latest FreesBIE cd tonight and used it as
live cd. Before I booted it, I disabled Plug & Play
in the BIOS. Got it up and running, no sweat. Chose
Fluxbox for the GUI. I like it better than most. It’s
more low overhead than the others and does everything
I want it to. Sound worked fine. Network was no sweat
setting from the terminal with ifconfig, route, and
echo for the nameserver. Used smbclient to print to
the old winbox on the lan. Still have to get the usb
Sandisk mounted, but it’s late. I’ll fool around with
it tomorrow night.