PhxBUG - Phoenix BSD User Group

On July 27th, Stefan Sperling (stsp@) added support for the multi-byte characters in the OpenBSD libc. Thanks to the work of the people involved in its development, the OpenBSD C library now supports the Unicode character encoding scheme UTF-8. Read on for the full commit message, some words from Stefan about what needs to be tested and how to do so:

In all of my interviews at c2k10, there were many things that kept coming up over and over again. One of those things was the release of 2.7 in June of 2000 and 2.8 in November. It was a period when many of the developers, tedu@ included, started to use OpenBSD. There is a reason for these two releases being so popular and a tipping point, so to speak, that attracted many thereafter.

Read on to find out more about tedu@ and learn what this attraction was all about:

With almost two days of hacking under their belts, everyone was instructed to make their way to Bob Beck's (beck@) house for the traditional BBQ event and Swedish beer hurling festivities. The food was fantastic and the camaraderie undeniable.

Read on to find out more about the famous Annual OpenBSD BBQ and a lot more:

Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) has tagged 4.8-BETA (see here and here). Snapshots should be available soon for testing, check the mirrors for availability. Read below for the full commit messages:

(click to see names) Different people get into OpenBSD in different ways and for different reasons. I can give you my own experiences and opinions, but as such, they will fail to be universal or even be correct for anyone but myself. Unlike most undeadly articles, the following will be light on technical details, but hopefully you will find it useful.

As Theo told me over a decade ago, "The project is code," but my opinion has always been slightly different. I intentionally fail to draw a distinction between the code itself, the people contributing it, the friendships between them, and the fun of coding. In a formal sense I know I'm wrong and Theo is right. The code stands on its own. The greatest diff in the world should be committed on its technical merits alone. The trouble is, without other people willing to look at it, test it and vet the ideas, its technical merit may never be known and it may never make it into the tree. The lone genius programmer working in isolation and doing everything himself is a myth. When contributing in a group setting like OpenBSD, getting improvements committed is much easier when you know both the process and the people.

To understand OpenBSD development and why the hackathons are so important, the first thing you need to realize is the OpenBSD developers really care about building the very best operating system possible. You could call the OpenBSD hackathons amazingly successful just by the cold metric of increased volume of source code commits, but you would be missing the more fundamental reasons why OpenBSD hackathons are so vitally important. The hackathons are a chance for like-minded friends to have fun spending a week concentrating and collaborating on something all of them care about.

Tadpole UltraSPARC This is the continuation and conclusion of the previous [c2k10] article of the same title on portable systems and test environments.

Bob Beck (beck@) said, "We're actually a hiking club with a software development problem," so you can hopefully grasp how important it is to have reasonably portable systems. The down-side of most developers using reasonably portable and reasonably powerful systems is the lack of diversity. The majority of the laptops used by developers are either 32-bit or 64-bit x86 systems (i386 or amd64 respectively). Just because OpenBSD will run on a monstrous VAX and said VAX will be very useful for finding bugs unseen on other platforms, it doesn't mean you'll want to carry one around with you. Diversity of supported platforms and constantly doing native builds on them makes OpenBSD more robust.

Porting the entire OpenBSD operating system to a new platform would be a lot of fun but requires a great deal of skill and a significant amount of time. Even if you're seeking FUN, you may not have time and skill to do a full OS port, so most people would want to pick one of the already supported platforms. If you pick the right system, there will still be plenty of FUN to be had in adding or improving support for some of the unsupported or under-supported parts. Depending on your personal requirements and how much FUN you want to have with it, you always have a number of great choices available within the realm of supported platforms.

The staggering volume of hardware the developers bring to hackathons sometimes causes delays, raised eyebrows or pointed questions when going through customs on international flights. The customs officers are usually wondering, "What kind of person needs five laptops and a suitcase full of parts and peripherals on a vacation?"

Some of the systems hauled to hackathons are generally non-portable, large servers, or smaller embedded systems, but the majority of systems are various types of laptops, each with their own unique challenges and headaches. One of the most frequently asked questions is, "What is a good laptop for running OpenBSD?" Although there have been countless opinions voiced in the mailing list archives, there will never be a "correct" opinion. Requirements and preferences will always vary from person to person and situation to situation, so defining your personal requirements and preferences is a good first step. There is the obvious question of, "What do you plan to do with it?" but defining your own preferences and requirements involves a lot more questions where the answers are often trade-offs.

Development on the mandoc(1) manual formatter is moving fast these days. Currently, mandoc was hacked on during two hackathon in less than two months. From May 13 to May 17, 2010, Kristaps Dzonsons (bsd.lv and OpenBSD), Joerg Sonnenberger (NetBSD) and Ingo Schwarze (OpenBSD) met at the BEC.de site in Elmenhorst near Rostock, Germany for a mini-hackathon (m2k10) dedicated exclusively on mandoc. Ingo was again focusing on mandoc during the yearly OpenBSD general hackathon (c2k10) and Kristaps was strongly supporting him remotely.

The mandoc utility is a lightweight, portable mdoc(7) and man(7) formatter written in C, started by Kristaps in 2008, so far supporting ASCII, HTML and simple PostScript output. Kristaps has committed to develop PostScript output during the current GSOC.

OpenBSD -current has recently switched over to pre-format the base system manuals with mandoc instead of groff during the system build. The current plan is to release OpenBSD 4.8 built with mandoc this autumn and to remove groff from the base system by the OpenBSD 4.9 release next spring. The NetBSD, FreeBSD and Dragonfly trees also include mandoc, and NetBSD is planning to eventually switch over the tree to mandoc just like OpenBSD did.

If you're unfamiliar with mandoc, you may enjoy reading the previous undeadly article on the topic, otherwise read on for more technical details of the on-going work. Read more...

The New York City BSD Conference (NYCBSDCon) is the main technical conference on the US East Coast for the BSD community to get together to share and gain knowledge, to network with like-minded people, and to have fun. This event is organized by members of the New York City *BSD Users Group (NYC*BUG). Read more...

Will Backman is still going strong, having almost 200 blogposts on *BSD. Almost always interesting, we like the ones on OpenBSD most of course.

In his latest posting, he talks to Henning Brauer and Peter Hansteen about the recent changes to PF and the second edition of The book of PF, expected in August, which covers these changes.

The 20 minute long interview can be found as an mp3 (10MB) or an Ogg Vorbis (12MB).

Undeadly reader Alexander Peslyak (a.k.a. "Solar Designer") writes in with a note about his passwdqc password/passphrase strength checking and policy enforcement toolkit. Due to copious slacking by the undeadly editors, we're a bit late in getting this posted.

In April, I released version 1.2.0 of passwdqc. This version specifically improves support for OpenBSD, allowing for the pwqcheck program to be specified in OpenBSD's /etc/login.conf and invoked by the passwd(1) program. Previously, this was only supported via "unofficial" rework of older pam_passwdqc code by Damien Miller (djm@). Now it became official - immediately providing all improvements found in current and future versions of passwdqc (since OpenBSD support is to stay). Some recent improvements include fine-tuning of the checks on thousands of real-world cracked vs. presumed-strong passwords, support for 8-bit characters in passphrase words, and extra entropy encoded into randomly-generated passphrases. Not so recent improvements include separation of the "core" code into libpasswdqc, introduction of command-line programs (usable from scripts and now also by OpenBSD) and extra options to them, and making the PAM module optional (indeed, it's not built on OpenBSD, but is useful to have the same password policy elsewhere).

The OpenBSD developers always want particular pieces of hardware so they can add support for it to the operating system and maintain the project infrastructure. Unless you happen to be able to read minds, often the reason why some particular piece of hardware is wanted may not make very much sense to you, and you may not understand how important the wanted hardware is to the advancement of OpenBSD.

The recent request for HP laptops by Marco Peereboom (marco@) is a classic example of understatement. The further development of Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI - including related AML, ASPM and similar) requires having access to enough systems from a vendor to work around the bugs in their implementations. Having proper ACPI support for HP laptops is very important and such work will improve our ACPI implementation in general for all systems.

There has been a huge uptick of ACPI failures on HP laptops. In order to be able to fix this we need to play with one or two. A donation in time for the c2k10 would be greatly appreciated. We need to have the machine(s) in hand by the 25th or so.

Two models come to mind: HP ProBook 4510s & HP EliteBook 8530w.

Please contact me privately if you want to help getting this fixed.

Also if you experience issues with an HP laptop send me the aml (acpidump -o hp_mymodel) and dmesg. I want know what models are currently failing and with what failure.

If there is any way you can help out, please contact Marco.

If you are a smart OpenBSD user and follow the suggestion from the FAQ to use packages, then you've probably set your PKG_PATH, and already witnessed the joy of pkg_add and friends. While watching the magic of the OpenBSD packges system, you may have wondered, "Where do all these packages come from?"

The literal answer is Theo's basement where the ports build machines for the project live.

The super secret but far more informative answer is little known tool called dpb (Distributed Ports Build), combined with a number of great people running groups of machines to find and fix as many ports build problems as possible. This is how the ports build machines in Theo's basement are kept running, and running well. As an regular end user or even system admin managing tons of OpenBSD machines, you may have never had the need to do complete builds of the ports tree, or even heard of dbp, let alone know about the recent work being done to improve it (dpb3). Marc Espie (espie@) was kind enough to tell us about his work on improving dpb and how it helps to improve the entire ports tree.

Undeadly reader Ted Walther writes in with a story about how he set up qemu for live testing:

I have a server at a colocation site that hosts various company software. A new hire came in and I wanted him to get some practice at configuring Apache, DNS, and various things like that. Instead of buying a new computer, I decided to use qemu to emulate a computer on the colocated server. I wanted the emulated computer to be accessible to the internet at large, just as a regular server with static IP is. Here is how I did it. Read more...

Back in November, Martin Hedenfalk posted to the tech@ mailinglist with an announcement for his ldap daemon. A few months have passed in which Martin has improved his code and then imported it into base, connecting it to the build only a few days later.

Undeadly spoke with Martin (martinh@ now) about ldapd(8) and plans for the future. Please read on for the interview: Read more...

Thanks to Will Backman of BSDTalk fame for sending the link to fosslc.org where the videos from the BSDCan-2010 talks are embedded from blip.tv. It took a bit of doing to "unembed" the videos so folks running OpenBSD can just download the files in the format of their choice directly from blip.tv. Just in case you need it, there's a greasemonkey script called "Free Youtube" which can help to solve some, but not all, of the blip.tv flash nonsense.

Unfortunately, not all the talks were recorded, particularly henning@'s talk on secure coding in OpenBSD. Although many of the talks are specific to other flavors of BSD, all of them are listed for the sake of completeness.

If you've ever opened up a raw man page in a text editor, somewhere in the back of your mind you heard the words of Arthur C. Clarke, "Any significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," or the words of Larry Niven, "Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology." Either way, you knew you had a lot to learn.

The recent and upcoming mandoc (via mdocml) changes are significant improvements to how manual pages are handled in OpenBSD. This important work not only improves build times, but also improves rendering and flexibility. Kristaps Dzonsons and Ingo Schwarze (schwarze@) were kind enough to tell us about the ongoing work.