from:"Polytropon"

On Sun, 26 May 2013 16:09:06 +0700, Erich Dollansky wrote:
 Hi,
 
 On Sun, 26 May 2013 01:58:32 -0700 (PDT)
 M. V. bored_to_deat...@yahoo.com wrote:
 
  I have a 24/7 network server/gateway with FreeBSD-8.2 on a SSD drive.
  it's partitioned as normal (/ , /tmp, /var , /usr and swap) for a
  long time now. But recently I heard from a FreeBSD expert that I
  shouldn't have swap partition for my server, and having swap
  partition could make my server unstable. this was so strange for me,
  and I searched a lot but couldn't find a reason for this claim.
  
 because it is a false claim. I never ever have had any system with
 working hard, that gave a problem because of the swap space.

I think the problem here is that he's using a SSD.
As soon as the swap partition is being in heavy use,
which means it receives many writes, this may lead
to the SSD wearing out, decreasing its lifetime.

Swap space usually does not make a system unstable.
Sometimes, the opposite is true. :-)

So if you're using a SSD, you can apply certain
optimizations to increase its lifetime so it can be
in use for several years (running 24/7). Here are
some suggestions -- check if they are useful in your
specific case!

# newfs -m 0 -i 16384 -b 16384 -f 2048 -U /dev/ada0a

This assumes that you don't have created any
slices, just one bootable partition covering the
whole disk (therefor ada0a).

Create a swapfile like this:

# /bin/rm -f /swapfile.tmp
# /bin/dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile.tmp bs=16m seek=1k count=0
# /sbin/mdconfig -a -t vnode -u 0 -f /swapfile.tmp || /bin/sh
# /bin/chflags nodump /swapfile.tmp
# /bin/rm -f /swapfile.tmp
# /sbin/swapctl -a /dev/md0

This makes the system use a disk-backed dynamic
swap file. If the swap won't be used, no space will
be occupied or reserved on the SSD.

You can also think about changing stuff you won't
need to store on the SSD, maybe some content of /tmp
or /var. You can also put those into a memory disk.

The SSD rule is: Minimize writes if you can. This is
a _general_ rule and does not correspond to swap only!





-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: Case sensitive usernames and sendmail - mystic voodoo

On Sun, 26 May 2013 18:44:41 -0600, Modulok wrote:
 I know usernames are case-sensitive, I thought emails were
 too.

If I remember e-mail basics correctly: No. They're not.
For example, f...@example.com, f...@example.com and f...@example.com
and all upper/lowercase variations are the same as f...@example.com.
For sending mail within a system and across systems, names
in the passwd file have to be in conjunction with the
respective mail queues for the users. Even foo and Foo
can coexist (as soon as they have a different UID, reflecting
the fact that two distinguishable users are intended), but
regarding mail... that sounds problematic.



 Without fighting an epic battle with with the sendmail configs, is
 there a simple way to make this work?

Use lowercase usernames only. Make it a convention.
Verify it.



 The obvious answer is probably, usernames should be lowercase! and for
 new users I'll enforce that policy. For existing users however, who may
 already have lots of case-sensitive usernames in various config files,
 etc this isn't a real option.

That's true, but didn't this approach get you in trouble earlier?



 By just altering their usernames I'm
 afraid I'd break the whole damn universe.

This is quite possible. As you mentioned correctly, usernames
with uppercase letters may already appear in config files.
You _could_ check for each user below his $HOME for any
appearing in a file and replace this, but that could cause
trouble if something is stored in a Registry-like binary file.
Regarding /etc/passwd, the home directory _may_ be a different
name than the username, so those _pathnames_ in files should
not require a change. But files mentioning _usernames_ will
probably cause problems.



 How can I enable mail for
 them?

Maybe it's possible to use /etc/mail/aliases?



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: Case sensitive usernames and sendmail - mystic voodoo

On Sun, 26 May 2013 18:36:41 -0700, Michael Sierchio wrote:
 On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 6:17 PM, Polytropon free...@edvax.de wrote:
 
  On Sun, 26 May 2013 18:44:41 -0600, Modulok wrote:
   I know usernames are case-sensitive, I thought emails were
   too.
 
  If I remember e-mail basics correctly: No. They're not.
  For example, f...@example.com, f...@example.com and f...@example.com
  and all upper/lowercase variations are the same as f...@example.com.
 
 
 You remember incorrectly ;-)

I checked again - and yes, it seems that my memory about
the valid definition has changed to what is reality today,
i. e. sendmail rewriting uppercase to lowercase prior to
further processing.



 The local part of an address (before the @ sign) is case-sensitive (with
 the exception of postmas...@example.com)

So it depends on how sendmail is configured that it does
not matter today.



 Everything to the right of the @ is indeed case insensitive, but everything
 to the left might be case sensitive, depending on local policy.  This means
 you must preserve the case of everything to the left of the @ sign.

According to the link provided by Erich Dollansky, FreeBSD's
default sendmail.cf setting of

Mlocal,   P=/usr/libexec/mail.local, F=lsDFMAw5

needs to be added the u option to the F= parameter to preserve
the uppercase letters in the the left side (username) of the
address. Maybe this additiion is required in other cf files
containing Mlocal settings too? Of course it would be nice if
there was a corresponding setting for the mc files which the
cf files are usually generated from...



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: Case sensitive usernames and sendmail - mystic voodoo

On Sun, 26 May 2013 21:31:09 -0600, Modulok wrote:
  Everything to the right of the @ is indeed case insensitive, but
  everything
  to the left might be case sensitive, depending on local policy.  This
  means
  you must preserve the case of everything to the left of the @ sign.
 
  According to the link provided by Erich Dollansky, FreeBSD's
  default sendmail.cf setting of
 
  Mlocal,   P=/usr/libexec/mail.local, F=lsDFMAw5
 
  needs to be added the u option to the F= parameter to preserve
  the uppercase letters in the the left side (username) of the
  address. Maybe this additiion is required in other cf files
  containing Mlocal settings too? Of course it would be nice if
  there was a corresponding setting for the mc files which the
  cf files are usually generated from...
 
 So, best practices aside, this would be a bug in the default config?

No. A convention. :-)



 (i.e. can I celebrate my bug-finding yet?)

Depends. If it's a _desired_ convention (because people regularly
have problems with e-mail addresses and just don't care for upper
and lower case), it's a good default setting. In _your_ case, it
does not apply, because it introduces problems. So if you intend
to make a local modification, that's no problem because you _can_
configure such things. This is the power that comes by the freedom
of choice. You can celebrate this. :-)




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: Keeping my system up to date with CTM or subversion?

2013-05-22 Thread Polytropon

On Wed, 22 May 2013 13:23:39 -0700, Ed Flecko wrote:
 So once you have a system up and running, how do you monitor if and when
 you need to upgrade your ports tree?

This highly depends on your updating policy. There are three
mainstream opinions:

a) always update, regularly (e. g. once a week)

b) only update if security requires it (e. g. when portaudit alerts)

c) update as soon as an additional functionality is desired

Of course, combined opinions are also valid. :-)

For updating the ports tree, portsnap is the eaiest tool. However,
if you follow opinion a) and update _very_ regularly (e. g. daily),
you could use SVN to obtain the (smaller) deltas to your local tree.
This also helps because you can directly access the tree and don't
have to wait until a snapshot is made available. For higher update
frequencies, this is often the better approach.

There is another valid opinion: Install once, make sure everything
works, never touch a running system. I'm a big fan of this attitude,
at least on my home systems. ;-)



 By the way, your ports tree is different than installed software packages,
 right?

That is possible when you update your ports tree (by whatever
method) _after_ you have installed something. A typical conclusion
is that you might need to rebuild stuff as soon as you install
something with that (newer) tree.

Example: Tree is at version 12345, you install foo-1.0 which
depends on bar-1.5. Two weeks later, you update your ports tree
and get version 23456. You don't want to touch foo and bar, but
you now need to install baz which requires bar-1.6 (which has
now arrived in the tree). So now you need to update bar from
1.5 to 1.6, and _maybe_ also foo to a newer version (whatever
that might be).



 In other words, the only reason people even bother to upgrade their
 ports tree is so that IF you install a package from source - the source is
 current? Is that correct?

Maybe the wording is a bit strange, but yes, updating the ports
tree means to have the lastest and _consistent_ versions of all
the programs in the tree (so their interconnections will work
properly). This is also helpful when you install from different
sources, e. g. some stuff from source, some stuff as binary
packages from Latest/.



 When security vulnerabilities are discovered and patches released by FBSD,
 the patch will tell you what steps you need to take to apply the patch and
 stay up to date, won't it?

The OS patches are announced that way. You should always read the
UPDATING files in /usr/src (for the OS) and /usr/ports (for installed
applications) to make sure you're not missing a simple (but important)
step during upgrades.

Patches for the OS are of course handled independently from those
applying to applications from the ports collection.




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: signal vs. sigaction and SIGCHLD

2013-05-20 Thread Polytropon

On Tue, 21 May 2013 15:24:26 +1000, Noel Hunt wrote:
 If I recompile with `#undef SIGACTION', waithandler is not
 called.
 
 I should add that even with the sigaction(2) interface, without
 the `sigprocmask' call, it still doesn't work, which suggests
 that SIGCHLD is being blocked.
 
 Can anyone explain why?

From reading man 3 signal, I get the following impression:

 NoName Default Action   Description
 20SIGCHLD  discard signal   child status has changed

The default action is to discard the signal, so the following
paragraph could make sense:

 The sig argument specifies which signal was received.  The func procedure
 allows a user to choose the action upon receipt of a signal.  To set the
 default action of the signal to occur as listed above, func should be
 SIG_DFL.  A SIG_DFL resets the default action.  To ignore the signal func
 should be SIG_IGN.  This will cause subsequent instances of the signal to
 be ignored and pending instances to be discarded.  If SIG_IGN is not
 used, further occurrences of the signal are automatically blocked and
 func is called.

From my limited understanding, maybe this could help you find
an explanation of the observed behaviour?

Also compare /usr/include/sys/signal.h for the definition of
the involved typedef's.


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: Acer Aspire One D250 special function keys

2013-05-19 Thread Polytropon

On Sun, 19 May 2013 20:33:14 +0200, Matthias Apitz wrote:
 
 Hello,
 
 I'm running a 10-CURRENT r250588 on that laptop, which has some special
 function keys, for example Fn+Down and Fn+Up to control the sound
 volume; how could I manage to get them to work? On my other netbook, an
 Asus EeePC 900, I have to load the kmod acpi_asus.ko to get the
 corresponding keys (Fn+F8/F9) working.

Did you use xev to check if those keys generate a unique
code or symbol? If not, try loading one of the present
/boot/kernel/acpi_*.ko modules to see if one of them can
enable the functionality. Of course none of the present
ones look as if it would support a Acer Aspire One D250,
but go ahead and try. :-)

If the keys don't work per se (like for comparison the
Fn+PageUp key on some IBM laptops to switch the keyboard
light on and off - totally independent from the OS -, you
need to make sure they emit a code or symbol (you can add
that with xmodmap) and then have some program pick it up
and act accordingly (e. g. calling mixer vol +10 and
mixer vol -10 for the volume control).

The x11/xev program from ports is a nice indicator to check
what's working out of the box, compared to additional
ACPI modules in action.

For example, I found the Fn + cursor keys on an Lenovo R61i
send specific key codes, but no action per default. Instead,
the keyboard light does not send any key code, but works.
Maybe volume and brightness keys are handled in a similar
way on your machine...


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: check variable content size in sh script

2013-05-18 Thread Polytropon

On Sat, 18 May 2013 11:58:30 -0400, Quartz wrote:
 
  newfoo=${foo:0:51}
 
 
  That works for bash, not sh.
 
 Ok granted, but I don't think that ${#foo} is straight sh either, so I 
 assumed things bash/tcsh/ksh/whatever accept when running in sh 
 emulation were ok.

By default, there is no bash on FreeBSD, and therefor no emulation
and implicit features. :-)

At least FreeBSD's implementation of sh (which is ash, I think)
supports the # functionality. From man sh:

 ${#parameter}
 String Length.  The length in characters of the value of
 parameter.

And:

 ${parameter#word}
 Remove Smallest Prefix Pattern.  The word is expanded to produce
 a pattern.  The parameter expansion then results in parameter,
 with the smallest portion of the prefix matched by the pattern
 deleted.

Check the chapter Parameter Expansion for more surprising
things that are supported by ye olde /bin/sh. :-)



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: detecting keyboard layout during boot

2013-05-15 Thread Polytropon

On Wed, 15 May 2013 09:35:54 +0200, Matthias Apitz wrote:
 
 Hello,
 
 I have in /etc/rc.conf a line
 
 keymap=german.iso
 
 to set the keyboard to German; as the system in question is on an USB
 key for boot and sometimes used in other laptops with QWERTY layout, I
 would like to have it adapt itself to the actual layout without changing
 anything before booting in rc.conf and without asking the user to press
 a key ... is there some way to detect the actual keyboard layout
 automagically?

Basically, it's impossible, but it can be made possible by the
power of FreeBSD. :-)

Allow me to explain:

Depending on where the keyboard is attached, some connections
(AT 5 pin plug, PS/2 6 pin mini-plug) do not offer any means to
detect what keyboard is connected (or even _if_ a keyboard is
connected). This case usually applies to keyboards built into
laptops. You can see that in dmesg | grep kbd.

Example:

% dmesg | grep kbd
kbd1 at kbdmux0
atkbdc0: Keyboard controller (i8042) at port 0x60,0x64 on isa0
atkbd0: AT Keyboard irq 1 on atkbdc0
kbd0 at atkbd0
atkbd0: [GIANT-LOCKED]
atkbd0: [ITHREAD]
ukbd0: vendor 0x0430 Sun USB Keyboard, class 0/0,
rev 2.00/1.05, addr 5 on usbus1
kbd2 at ukbd0

You see: The AT keyboard controller is detected, kbd0 is available.
But there is no actual keyboard connected to that PS/2 port. Instead,
a Sun USB Type 7 keyboard (german layout) is being used here, as
kbd2.

But as you're asking about USB, there is a way. But this way
depends on how the manufacturer cooperates. Let's discuss that.

As you know, every USB device is characterized by two specific
USB numbers: vendor ID and product ID. In some cases, the product
ID is different regarding the language layout, but you need to
test that individually, no standard seems to exist.

Then, you can use the devd.conf file to select per this ID and
load the correct keyboard layout. This is done in the rc.conf
stage. Prior to this stage, the kernel stage, you can hardcode
layouts in the kernel config. Last time I checked this stopped
working, I have been told that the use of kbdmux is the reason
for this observation.

Example:

options ATKBD_DFLT_KEYMAP
makeoptions ATKBD_DFLT_KEYMAP=german.iso
options UKBD_DFLT_KEYMAP
makeoptions UKBD_DFLT_KEYMAP=german.iso

Those options would enable a german keyboard layout even in SUM.
Even adding a font for proper display has been possible:

options SC_DFLT_FONT
makeoptions SC_DFLT_FONT=iso

Not sure if this is still supported. Using Umlauts and Eszett is
discouraged in filenames, and the blind knowledge of the US keyboard
layout is quite standard among sysadmins. :-)



As a summery: No soup for you! ;-)




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: detecting keyboard layout during boot

2013-05-15 Thread Polytropon

On Wed, 15 May 2013 15:53:08 +0200, Matthias Apitz wrote:
 Hello,
 
 Here on an laptop/netbook EeePC 900 with English keyboard it says:
 
 # dmesg | fgrep kbd
 kbd1 at kbdmux0
 atkbdc0: Keyboard controller (i8042) port 0x60,0x64 irq 1 on acpi0
 atkbd0: AT Keyboard irq 1 on atkbdc0
 kbd0 at atkbd0
 atkbd0: [GIANT-LOCKED]
 psm0: PS/2 Mouse irq 12 on atkbdc0
 
 how do I know that the kb layout is English?

By looking at it. ONLY by looking at it. :-)

Even if you would remove the built-in keyboard (disconnect the
flex), you would see that entry. It's not about the keyboard per
se, it's about the keyboard controller. This interface usually
is in parallel with a PS/2 connector (if present). There is
no language information in it.



  But as you're asking about USB, there is a way. But this way
  depends on how the manufacturer cooperates. Let's discuss that.
 
 USB was only meant as the boot device.

Okay, then I misread it. English is not my native language. :-)

The logical conclusion: You have no way to find out what keyboard
is physically installed (or attached via PS/2).

This _might_ be not entirely true: If you can obtain some hardware
identification of the eeePC you're using, maybe some kind of ACPI
string or other vendor and product ID from some component, you could
guess what localization the device has, and then assume what
keyboard is installed. But that's just a wild guess from my side.



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: Hot Swapping SATA drive?

2013-05-14 Thread Polytropon

On Tue, 14 May 2013 07:45:21 -0400, Robert Huff wrote:
 
 Ronald F. Guilmette writes:
   1) Given a system running FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE, is anything bad
   gonna happen if I insert a drive into this thing while the system
   is running?  Will I be able to mount partitions contained on the
   drive in question after I do so?
 
   That works for me.  I need to re-scan the ata channel using
 atacontrol but once that happens it's fine.

Isn't that supposed to be camcontrol today?

I've been using SCSI hot swap devices for many years, and
they usually required a re-scan of the bus. The same often
works for USB-connected devices which also use CAM, and maybe
SATA and eSATA also support it today?



   2) Given a system running FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE, is anything bad
   gonna happen if I remove a drive from this thing while the system
   is running, assuming that I have already properly umounted all
   relevant partitions first?
 
   Nothing bad happened to me.

Again, it may be nice (to the system) to detach the ATA device
from the bus; see man atacontrol (and man camcontrol in
comparison) for the proper command to do this. From the electrical
point of view, there should be no problem.



   3) Assuming that I want to do this stuff, what BIOS options
   should I be setting or unsetting on the motherboard?
 
   I am unable to check the BIOS settings on that MB (which may be
 ASrock as well), but I don't believe I had to do anything other hand
 make sure eSATA was enabled.

The only thing that might be worth looking at in the CMOS setup
would be the method of the driver, making the device come up
as da0 (for example) or ada0, depending if EHCI or XHCI can be
selected. But I assume this only applies to USB devices (and
maybe Firewire). SATA should work fine with the default settings.





-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: Will i be force.

2013-05-14 Thread Polytropon

On Tue, 14 May 2013 21:18:43 +, k_win...@ovi.com wrote:
Dear Sir/Madam

My name is Kevin, I want to build an OS that is derived from freebsd but
Should i be worried about FreeBSD license when i am deriving.

You should not be worried about the license. Just follow it.
The license grants you several rights, and as long as you
comply with the license, there is no problem deriving a new
OS from FreeBSD. Just make sure you don't violate any
copyright.

Note that I am not a lawyer, and this is no official response
from a FreeBSD body. Depending on your local legislation, I
suggest you discuss the topic with a lawyer you trust to give
you further advice.

Also read the legal documents provided by FreeBSD itself and
other sources. Read and understand (!) the license itself.

http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-license.html

http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#2-clause_license_.28.22Simplified_BSD_License.22_or_.22FreeBSD_License.22.29

You may find more specific answers by directing your questions
to a legal representative of the FreeBSD foundation or a more
appropriate mailing list (-questions@ is for general questions,
usually answered by FreeBSD users and contributors).

--
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: Hot Swapping SATA drive?

2013-05-14 Thread Polytropon

On Tue, 14 May 2013 16:34:11 -0700, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
 
 In message 20130514144721.aa321c25.free...@edvax.de, 
 Polytropon free...@edvax.de wrote:
 
 I've been using SCSI hot swap devices for many years, and
 they usually required a re-scan of the bus. The same often
 works for USB-connected devices which also use CAM, and maybe
 SATA and eSATA also support it today?
 
 OK, so what command should I use when I plug a drive in?  Would that be
 camcontrol rescan foo where foo is something like /dev/ada0?

No. You use the typical SCSI-like device notation, bus:unit:lun,
for example 0:1:0, or all for all buses and devices.



 I'm
 guessing that that can't be correct, because ada0 is an actual drive.
 So what is the device id for the bus itself?

With camcontrol devlist, you can get a list that will show
you what devices have been recognized and how the bus:unit:lun
corresponds to the device files.

Example:

$ camcontrol devlist
HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-H42N RL00at scbus0 target 0 lun 0 (pass0,cd0)
HL-DT-ST DVD-ROM GDR8163B 0L30   at scbus0 target 1 lun 0 (pass1,cd1)
Generic Flash HS-CF 4.55 at scbus3 target 0 lun 0 (pass2,da0)
Generic Flash HS-MS/SD 4.55  at scbus3 target 0 lun 1 (pass3,da1)
Generic Flash HS-SM 4.55 at scbus3 target 0 lun 2 (pass4,da2)
WDC WD15 EARS-00MVWB0at scbus4 target 0 lun 0 (pass5,da3)

The disk you're attaching will probably be something like the
entries for the USB disk (last line).



 Again, it may be nice (to the system) to detach the ATA device
 from the bus; see man atacontrol (and man camcontrol in
 comparison) for the proper command to do this. From the electrical
 point of view, there should be no problem.
 
 I am a firm believer in being nice.  I just need to know the proper
 command.   Would that be camcontrol stop foo ?

Yes. You can use the start and stop commands like the attach
and detach commands for atacontrol. Additionally, you can use
tur for test (if) unit (is) ready, and readcap to print the
capabilities. Also reset and rescan are helpful.

See man camcontrol for details about what those commands do,
and how to properly call them. In most cases,

# camcontrol command bus:unit:lun | all

will be the correct form.



 The only thing that might be worth looking at in the CMOS setup
 would be the method of the driver, making the device come up
 as da0 (for example) or ada0, depending if EHCI or XHCI can be
 selected.
 
 Ummm... my new little SATA plug-in bay is strictly SATA... not eSATA,
 and *definitely* not USB, so I think that EHCI and/or XHCI are probably
 irrelevant.  Those are strictly USB things, no?

I'm not fully sure about that, but I assume you're right, if
the manufacturer has properly glued the SATA ports onto the
mainboard instead of creating some strange abomination of
a SATA through USB something. :-)



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: X11 screen grabber from cmd line

2013-05-10 Thread Polytropon

On Thu, 9 May 2013 20:41:45 +0200, Matthias Apitz wrote:
 Do we have something in the ports which could do a screen shoot of $DISPLAY, 
 but
 from the cmd line of an alpha console, and save it as PNG or JPEG?

% xwd -out screen.xwd
% convert screen.xwd screen.png
-or-
% convert screen.xwd screen.jpg

But if you've got installed ImageMagic (the convert command)
anyway, you can also use

% import screen.jpg
-or-
% import screen.png

For a whole screen capture, xwd -root or import -screen can
be used.


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: Downgrading a port

2013-05-10 Thread Polytropon

On Thu, 9 May 2013 18:03:22 +0200, b...@todoo.biz wrote:
 I wanted to know if there is a way to simply downgrade a package
 I have installed with pkgng ? 

There is no such thing as a simple downgrade. :-)

The primary goal of the new pkg system is to provide as
bleeding edge possible in binary precompiled form, with
the ability of binary upgrades. Switching to older versions
has not been a direct concern, I think.


 I know that there is portdowngrade, but I will have to reinstall
 all ports architecture to be able to install this. 

Correct. The portdowngrade program relies on the ports infra-
structure and requires you to build things yourself. I think
this will be the easiest way to go.




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: X11 screen grabber from cmd line

2013-05-10 Thread Polytropon

On Fri, 10 May 2013 09:29:07 +0200, Matthias Apitz wrote:
 El día Friday, May 10, 2013 a las 08:23:45AM +0100, Matthew Seaman escribió:
 
  You're somewhat missing the point here, I'm afraid.  There are many
  alternatives for grabbing screen shots from *within* an X session
  itself.  What the OP wants is a way to grab a screenshot of an X session
  from a different, non-graphical terminal.
  
 
 Exactly! But, more: the launched tool (which has access via $DISPLAY to
 the X server) must grab the screen *without* any further interaction on
 the screen (i.e. selecting a region or a mouse click is not an option);
 
 thanks for all the pointers, I will test and see what fits;

Exactly that's what has been my suggestion (without having been
mentioned): both xwd and import support a -display option.
In case the root window (equals the whole screen) is captured,
no further interaction is required (at least in case of xwd).
This makes it easy to obtain screenshots non-interactively
(e. g. time-triggered) from outside the X session.


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: pwd.db/spwd.db file corupption when having unsafe system poweroff

2013-05-05 Thread Polytropon

 BIOS settings!), press
it for just a moment. The system will then perform shutdown -p now
and bring the system down properly.



 i don't know what else to think of...

First I'd suggest to perform a SUM boot and run fsck. Then check
the files in /etc if they are damaged. Furthermore, keep calm and
carry a towel. :-)




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: ls(1), rm(1) - No such file or directory even though they are there.

2013-05-04 Thread Polytropon

On Sat, 4 May 2013 10:43:37 -0700 (PDT), Michael Bird wrote:
 
 Hi List,
 
 There is a rather curious problem that I have, which I haven't encountered 
 before.
 I make regular backups of my packages and put them onto an external usb drive,
 which is mounted read/write via sysutils/fusefs-ntfs.

Just to make sure I do understand what you're doing: You are
saving files from a FreeBSD UFS file system to a NTFS file
system? That's not a good thing(TM)(R)(C)!

Explanation: THe UFS file system and this NTFS differ in
how file names may be constructed (valid characters) and what
file attributes are supported. The best idea to backup (!)
files from FreeBSD to a different disk is to format it with
UFS. If you _need_ to use NTFS, make a containter that
will preserve file attributes. You can easily do this with
dump (and later on use restore), but also with tar (should
be sufficient).

The problem you're describing sounds familiar. It has been
discussed on this list some time ago. Maybe check the archives
to read that discussion thread.



 Now these backups don't exist no more and at the same time they are there.

Sorry, those don't qualify as backups (in what this term means).
They can be considered an imcomplete or damaged copy (even if
it's just a question of are there, but cannot be accessed).



 That 
 is to say, upon issuing ls and/or rm on the command line I get rather strange 
 results. 
 Here are some of my outputs:
 
 
 mike@machine1:/mnt/Programs/FreeBSD/91binaries/packages % ls
 [a long list that has been cut out]
 zip-3.0.tbz
 mike@machine1:/mnt/Programs/FreeBSD/91binaries/packages % ls zip-3.0.tbz 
 ls: zip-3.0.tbz: No such file or directory

You can use fstat for that file to obtain more information:

$ fstat /mnt/Programs/FreeBSD/91binaries/packages/zip-3.0.tbz



 Some have files that (don't) exist have i-nodes and some haven't:
 
 mike@machine1:/mnt/Programs/FreeBSD/91binaries/packages % ls -i zip-3.0.tbz 
 ls: zip-3.0.tbz: No such file or directory
 mike@machine1:/mnt/Programs/FreeBSD/91binaries/packages % ls -i 
 linux-f10-tiff-3.8.2.tbz 
 2469 linux-f10-tiff-3.8.2.tbz

I assume this is because NTFS does not have a compatible understanding
of inodes...



 Running rm on the folder I get No such file or directory for every single 
 entry:
 
 mike@machine1:/mnt/Programs/FreeBSD/91binaries/packages % rm *
 [a long list that has been cut out]
 rm: linux-f10-tiff-3.8.2.tbz: No such file or directory

This is correct when you consider that the required inode structures
for the file system access haven't been properly constructed.



 Yet again some of the files can be test via gzip and some can't:
 
 mike@machine1:/mnt/Programs/FreeBSD/91binaries/packages % gzip -t 
 linux-f10-tiff-3.8.2.tbz
 mike@machine1:/mnt/Programs/FreeBSD/91binaries/packages % echo $?
 0
 mike@machine1:/mnt/Programs/FreeBSD/91binaries/packages % gzip -t zip-3.0.tbz 
 gzip: can't stat: zip-3.0.tbz: No such file or directory
 mike@machine1:/mnt/Programs/FreeBSD/91binaries/packages %

So the backup (in this case: quotation marks deserved, sorry) is
highly inconsistent. But gzip provides an important information:

gzip: can't stat: zip-3.0.tbz: No such file or directory

Cannot stat. The file status cannot be determined. This means the
file system cannot be used as intended.



 Looks like the this part of the file system is corrupt. I also booted the 
 drive up under 
 Windows and got the same result. The files are there, but can't be read, 
 overwritten
 or deleted.

The whole NTFS is corrupt. You should not use this for backups,
or at least use an encapsulation as suggested. This NTFS is
known to be easily affected by errors, and it does not provide
the required compatibility to store FreeBSD backups.



 What does the list say about the above mentioned?

Do not use NTFS, especially not for backups of FreeBSD. :-)


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: sshd - time out idle connections

2013-05-03 Thread Polytropon

On Fri, 3 May 2013 17:22:04 +0200, Fleuriot Damien wrote:
 Allow me to add a bit of context here.
 
 
 We're wrapping things up to obtain the PCI DSS certification which
 is awarded for running through a long and annoying series of hoops.
 This certification is rather important to our business so like it
 or not, we have to play along.

I'm familiar with this stupid concept. They are forcing you to
fiddle with things that work fine as it is, just to get a sheet
of shiny paper. After all, this sheet of paper allows you to
raise your prices. :-)



 Allowing the use of screen defeats the purpose of logging out idle
 connections, I don't think we're going to pass this specific
 requirement if we let users run screen.

What _defines_ an idle connection? Let's say a user logs in via
SSH and leaves the session untouched. Idle for 5 minutes? True.
Disconnect.

But what about this? After logging in, the user starts some program,
maybe something like top, mc (Midnight Commander) or pine. Is this
also considered idle?

Is idle tied to keystrokes received on the other end, or more
like data send to the client? Is one sufficient, or are both
required, to consider a connection not idle, therefor not
disconnecting it? What about batch processes? Can a user log in,
submit a batch job, and then leave, while his batch job starts
to run 10 minutes later (and finishes after 30 minutes)?

Does the oh so holy specification for the glorious certification
say anything about it, something you could incorporate into the
concept and _then_ come up with an idea for implementation?

The only chance to _really_ comply with the certification rule
and therefor defeat any countermeasures possibly taken by users
(tmux, screen, detach et al.) is to disconnect _any_ connection
regardless of what the user is doing, killing all additional
background processes and at-timed commands. Does this stop
users from being idle more than 5 minutes? Sure, but it also
STOPS THEM FOR DOING ACTUAL WORK, depending on how they use
their SSH connections for that! However, the most excellent
certification does not take that into mind, so why should you? ;-)





-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: difference img \ iso

2013-05-02 Thread Polytropon

On Thu, 2 May 2013 19:03:00 +0600, Osinnyy Bogdan wrote:
 Hi there.
 
 I just want to try some freebsd and get stunned by choosing what release I
 should to download\install.
 
 So I ask you: what difference between iso\img, I mean, If I download
 dvd1.iso and mount it on USB drive = starting installation, what difference
 between this method and by using *.img ? Why am I asking, 'cause dvd1's got
 3 times more weight, but I never faced with .img when installing windows
 systems.

The difference is what's in the files.

An IMG is an image of basically _any_ kind of media. It _could_
also be for a DVD or a hard disk. In case of the FreeBSD
installation media it's intended for a USB stick. The image
contains _everything_ that is needed to make the stick usable,
like boot mechanism, file systems and so on. It can carry any
file system(s) required. It's an exact 1:1 representation of
the content that has to go to the media.

An ISO (read: ISO 9660) is also an image, but primarily intended
to be used with CDs and DVDs. It carries an ISO-9660 file system,
typically with a RR (RockRidge) extension, and it can include
a boot mechanism. However, it has less complicated stuff in
it. It can still be used as a basis for _creating_ non-ISO-9660
file systems in memory (memory disks).

Both provided installation media data differs in _content_. While
the install DVD has lots of prepackaged software that you can
install, the bootonly media obviously does not have this. The
memstick file is somewhere in between.

So you would first make a choice on what installation media you
want to use, for whatever reasons (e. g. no DVD drive, or system
cannot boot from USB). Then you would select the appropriate
installation media data file:

ISO  650 MB --- CD
ISO  4,7 GB --- DVD
IMG  USB stick

Of course the _tools_ you need to use to deal with them are different!
For example, burning a CD or DVD involves the required recording
application, such as cdrecord (CD) or growisofs (DVD), while for
writing the IMG file you'd simply use dd.




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: pwd.db/spwd.db file corupption when having unsafe system poweroff

2013-05-01 Thread Polytropon

On Wed, 1 May 2013 12:58:49 +0430, takCoder wrote:
 Excuse me again..
 
 i was trying to test the situation explained here, so i just defined a user
 with pw command, waited for 2minutes and then power off the system.. Again
 i couldn't login anymore..
 
 if we assume that, pw is still working with db files after 2 minutes, the
 question is that, is it usual for a command to keep db files busy, this
 long??
 or is it pw problem?
 or is t something else that i'm missing??

For login processes, the plain text files and the database
files are involved. The pw command will modify all of them
if you add a new user. The 2 minutes problem should not
be related to pw (or pwd_mkdb), but maybe due to syncing.
File system access (here: write) is done asynchronously,
so the system will decide when it will sync the memory
buffers with the (non-volatile) disk content. This task
involves both the sync() call and how the actual disk
driver acts to it. Note: Just because someone calls sync()
does _not_ imply that the synchronisation takes place in
that exact moment. But it should not require several
minutes to complete the write and bring the files into
the required state (on disk).

Furthermore, file system corruption due to an abrupt
cut of power should be avoided. Whenever the system comes
up in a non-clean state, fsck should be run first, _then_
the boot process should continue. Still it's possible that
this process leaves truncated files behind (e. g. the
binary database files with a length of zero, which implies
they will have to be rebuilt by pwd_mkdb).

Alternatively to pw, you could try adduser, which is more
an interactive program, but can perform the same tasks.
Again, it would take care of updating all required files.
This is the situation one would expect after the program
ended, or at least some seconds after one got back to the
root prompt.

During the 2 minutes, you could use programs like lsof
(it's in ports) to check if a program has a file open,
so you could capture the power off while writing to
file incident.

After you could not login again, did you check the
files involved in the login process? Those should include:

/etc/passwd
/etc/master.passwd
/etc/group
/etc/pwd.db
/etc/spwd.db

Probably also /etc/login.conf and /etc/login.conf.db, but
I think those are not critical to the success of a login
attempt per se.



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: Firefox is so slow

2013-04-30 Thread Polytropon

On Tue, 30 Apr 2013 14:08:55 -0500, Edwin L. Culp W. wrote:
 Thanks for your comment.  I agree that firefox is intermittently slow or
 stop.  Which do you use? 

Opera. No, really. :-)



 I tend to use chromium although I still will
 probably go back to firefox unless chrome becomes a bit more firefox like.

Hopefully not speed-wise! :-)



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: loading ipfw at boot time

2013-04-28 Thread Polytropon

On Sat, 27 Apr 2013 21:23:58 -0400, Joe wrote:
 I know ipfw can be loaded at boot time by adding statements to 
 /boot/loader.conf.
 
 Problem is I dont know what the ipfw module names are.
 
 How do I find the ipfw names to use?

There are two ways. The first is to do a ls command in
/boot/kernel to see the modules related to ipfw:

/boot/kernel/ipfw.ko
/boot/kernel/ipfw_nat.ko

According to the rule (see man loader.conf for details)
of how modules are enabled, the corresponding statements
for /boot/loader.conf would be:

ipfw_load=YES
ipfw_nat_load=YES

Note that the ipfw_nat module is only needed if you're
going to use NAT functionality.

The second way is to check /boot/defaults/loader.conf
for related statements. It contains this line:

ipfw_load=NO  # Firewall

Is this what you've been searching for, or did I
misunderstand your question?




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: enter single user mode from boot menu

2013-04-28 Thread Polytropon

On Sun, 28 Apr 2013 18:44:46 -0400, Joe wrote:
 running 9.1 and can not figure how to get into single user mode or safe 
 mode from the BOOT menu.
 
 After hitting the 5 or 6 keys to select those options, what do you do 
 next to continue?
 
 Hitting enter key just boots the system without regard to options selected.

TO be honest, I don't use the boot menu. Instead I tend to
access SUM (single user mode) when neccessary by the respective
loader command.

To illustrate this approach:

The /boot/loader.conf file contains those two line:

autoboot_delay=1
beastie_disable=YES

The delay time (in seconds) is the time you have to choose
when _not_ going into multi-user mode (default), so increase
this value if needed.

After the BTX loader has started, keep hammering the space
bar. :-)

At some point, you'll see the 

Ok
_

prompt. This is where you enter the command

boot -s

to go into single-user mode. The kernel will load as you would
expect, but no further action (rc.d startup) will be taken. Instead
you have to confirm the shell (/bin/sh by default) by pressing
enter at the

When prompted Enter full pathname of shell or RETURN for /bin/sh:

prompt; and then you're left at the

# _

prompt, which means you're in single user mode. Type exit to
start into multi-user mode as usual.

Of couse, this is what _should_ happen if you select the proper
item from the loader menu (key '4'), but as I don't use this,
I can't be more specific. It's just a natural assumption. :-)



 Can not find usage of boot menu in the handbook.

The FreeBSD Handbook only briefly visits this topic:

13.6.2: Single-User Mode

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/boot-init.html

25.7.6: Drop to Single User Mode

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/makeworld.html

Fortunately, good documentation can be found in the manual pages.
I recommend man 8 boot and man 8 loader, which are involved
in getting into SUM (loader more than boot regarding your question).



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: upgrade packages

2013-04-25 Thread Polytropon

On Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:05:25 +0200, Pol Hallen wrote:
 Hi all!
 
 I come from linux os and I read a lot documentations about freebsd.
 
 I've a doubt: when I've some packages installed and I need upgrade it, I
 need to recompile those packages or there's another (fast) way to do this?

With the new pkgng (the replacement for the traditional
pkg infrastructure that handles precompiled binary packages)
this won't be a problem, as long as the default compile
options and settings are fine for you.

If not, today's PCs have multiple plenticore CPUs with tons
of RAM and endless hard disks, so running portmaster -a
won't be a big deal. :-)

On FreeBSD, it's _your_ choice.

It's already in The FreeBSD Handbook:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/pkgng-intro.html

Soon, it will be the system's default.


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: FreeBSD-update?

2013-04-25 Thread Polytropon

On Thu, 25 Apr 2013 07:37:01 -0400 (EDT), Daniel Feenberg wrote:
 
 
 On Thu, 25 Apr 2013, Steve O'Hara-Smith wrote:
 
 
  The problem under discussion is that the kernel version does not
  change when a freebsd-update update does not include a kernel change.
 
 
 Perhaps we could adopt the Linux practice of placing the release 
 information in /etc/issue

I'd like to see a working placeholder for this file, not a
modification, because it could be a custom file (created
specifically for a system). Or do you perhaps refer to /etc/motd
and the update_motd=YES (update version info in /etc/motd)
as seen in /etc/defaults/rc.conf?

In /etc/issue, you write something like %s/%m %r to print
the information before the login prompt. Or you use something
like the traditional im=\r\n%s/%m (%h) (%t) in /etc/gettytab.

Those are placeholders, the information is stored _outside_
of the files.

Maybe it could be possible to add a text file in /etc that will
contain the correct OS and kernel version number, maybe the
date of the source the system has been built from (or the
binary package for freebsd-update has been created from),
and maybe the SVN revision number, because it looks important. :-)

Then, if there could be mechanisms to plug this information
properly into the traditional placeholders as described.
Uhm... that would be great.



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: FreeBSD-update?

2013-04-25 Thread Polytropon

On Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:14:06 -0400 (EDT), Daniel Feenberg wrote:
 This is written as though it applies to FreeBSD, but I was
 under the impression that FreeBSD didn't do anything with
 /etc/issue.

It actually works quite well, I'm using it for decades. :-)

You just need to add the item if=/etc/issue to your default
setting (or whichever you use) in /etc/gettytab.



 There isn't any man page for it, and when I
 created a file /etc/issue it wasn't presented at login.

See man gettytab:

 if  str unuseddisplay named file before prompt, like
   /etc/issue

This is not part of the default configuration.



 Is
 there something else I need to do? I am using 9.1

Just change your /etc/gettytab to something like this:

default:\
:cb:ce:ck:lc:fd#1000:im=TEXT :sp#1200:\
:if=/etc/issue:

The system's default setting is like this:

default:\
:cb:ce:ck:lc:fd#1000:im=\r\n%s/%m (%h) (%t)\r\n\r\n:sp#1200:\

There is no issue file defined.

The im= setting contains (additional) text presented directly
before the text login: appears. It could be the hostname or
any other identification. In this file, as well as in /etc/issue,
you can use the following placeholders:

OS name:%s  FreeBSD
architecture:   %m  i386
OS version: %r  8.3
hostname:   %h  foo.example.com
terminal line:  %t  ttyv1
date:   %d  Fri Apr 26 04:37:00 CEST 2013

They are also listed in man gettytab.

Also know the figlet program (plus the figlet-fonts package)
to design nice ASCII banners. :-)




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: FreeBSD-update?

On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 16:00:47 + (UTC), Walter Hurry wrote:
 When I issue 'freebsd-update fetch install I see this:
 
 Looking up update.FreeBSD.org mirrors... 3 mirrors found.
 Fetching metadata signature for 9.1-RELEASE from update5.freebsd.org... 
 done.
 Fetching metadata index... done.
 Inspecting system... done.
 Preparing to download files... done.
 
 No updates needed to update system to 9.1-RELEASE-p2.
 No updates are available to install.
 
 So if 'No updates (are) needed to update system to 9.1-RELEASE-p2',
 how do I actually update to 9.1-RELEASE-p2?
 
 $ uname -r
 9.1-RELEASE

The kernel's version message will only change if the _kernel_
has been receiving changes. So, for example, if you update
from 9.1 to 9.1-p2, and _no_ change has been written to the
kernel, it will still report 9.1, even though the updates
for -p2 have been applied to other places (like system binaries
or libraries).

You can use the -r option to freebsd-update to explicitely
specify a version to update to. See man freebsd-update for
details.




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: Procmail Decoding Mime Messages

On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 16:07:35 -0500, Martin McCormick wrote:
   Is there a filter that one can run in procmail in which
 base64 encoded data go in and text comes out so one can allow
 procmailrc to do its work?
 [...]
   Is there anything which will take a raw email message
 and spit out linear strings which can be processed like normal
 text?

I think this is possible with uudecode, in this case b64decode.
See man uuencode for more information.


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: FreeBSD-update?

On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 21:13:56 -0500, Mark Felder wrote:
 The point is that the uname and sysctl output is inaccurate. If the
 latest release is -p6 and the kernel hasn't been touched since -p4, both
 uname and the sysctl only show -p4. It's impossible to tell otherwise
 that the system is really -p6 if you don't have /usr/src/.

The src component can be updated using the appropriate entry
in /etc/freebsd-update.conf so the information is there, no
matter if the kernel has been touched or not.

In my opinion, it could be helpful to have a somehow more
precise information about what version of the OS is currently
installed. I suggest having a text file in /etc that contains
the currently installed version, maybe also a SVN revision
number and a date. Updating via freebsd-update should not be
that complicated. Also by updating from source (e. g. when
following -STABLE where no X.Y-pZ version information is
provided) this file could be installed properly. By checking
this file the user could quickly retrieve the required
information in a quickly understandable form.



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: FreeBSD-update?

On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 22:32:17 -0400, Mike. wrote:
 If uname -r [-a] does not give the proper version of the OS, then it is
 either a bug, or the documentation for uname should be changed.
 Currently, the man page for uname gives the following option:
 
 -r  Write the current release level of the operating system to
 stan-
dard output.

Also the manpage of uname(3) would require a change to make clear
that the version of the _kernel_ is provided, which _may_ stay the
same during patchlevels of a given version. From that point of
view, if we consider the patchlevel _not_ being part of the OS
_version_, the statement (as it currently reads) makes sense.
The understanding is: Version 9.1 is the OS version, and if
a patch has been added, it's still 9.1 (even though the more
precise information is 9.1-p5 for example). Similarly consider
followint -STABLE: in this case, 9-STABLE or 9.1-STABLE is being
reported, because no precise version numbers exist on that
branch (at least not in the terms of patchlevels, instead a
repository revision number or the date of the checkout could
be considered for precision).

The uname program relies on the uname system call to get the
system identification, which queries the information stored in a
(struct utsname *) data structure:

 The uname() function stores NUL-terminated strings of information identi-
 fying the current system into the structure referenced by name.


 The utsname structure is defined in the sys/utsname.h header file, and
 contains the following members:

   release   Release level of the operating system.

   version   Version level of the operating system.

This part of documentation would, given the case, also require
adjustment, refering to the kernel instead of the OS.





-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: Newbies Questions

2013-04-20 Thread Polytropon

. :-)

-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: sata/ata device permission for user

2013-04-18 Thread Polytropon

On Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:32:09 -0700 (PDT), Beeblebrox wrote:
  The user also needs access to the corresponding pass device which is shown
 by camcontrol devlist. He also needs access to /dev/xpt0 I think. 

Correct, that matches my settings. :-)



 HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-4165B DL05   at scbus6 target 0 lun 0 (cd0,pass3)
 
 crw---  1 root  operator  0x48 Apr 18 07:08 pass0
 crw---  1 root  operator  0x49 Apr 18 07:08 pass1
 crw---  1 root  operator  0x4a Apr 18 07:08 pass2
 crw---  1 root  operator  0x4b Apr 18 07:08 pass3
 crw---  1 root  operator  0x42 Apr 18 07:08 xpt0
 
 User is member of operator group.

But the group permissions are --- (none).



 However, I agree with your idea because
 just now I was working with cdrtools and got this error, but when I ran as
 root no error:
 
 % cdda2wav summary --device /dev/cd0
 cdda2wav: Permission denied. Open of /dev/xpt0 failed. Cannot open or use
 SCSI driver.
 cdda2wav: For possible targets try 'cdda2wav -scanbus'. Make sure you are
 root.
 Probably you did not define your SCSI device.
 Set the CDDA_DEVICE environment variable or use the -D option.

You should be able to see something like this:

% cdda2wav summary --device /dev/cd0
No target specified, trying to find one...
cdda2wav: Too many CD/DVD/BD-Recorder targets found.
scsibus0:
0,0,0 0) 'HL-DT-ST' 'DVDRAM GSA-H42N ' 'RL00' Removable CD-ROM
0,1,0 1) 'HL-DT-ST' 'DVD-ROM GDR8163B' '0L30' Removable CD-ROM
0,2,0 2) *
0,3,0 3) *
0,4,0 4) *
0,5,0 5) *
0,6,0 6) *
0,7,0 7) *
cdda2wav: Select a target from the list above and use 'cdda2wav dev=b,t,l'.


As it has been mentioned, access to xpt is also required.
It should be fine to set this via group permissions.

This is an example of possible settings:

linkcd0 dvd
own cd0 root:operator
permcd0 0660
own cd1 root:operator
permcd1 0660
own pass0   root:operator
permpass0   0660
own pass1   root:operator
permpass1   0660
own xpt0root:operator
permxpt00660

See man xpt for details.


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: sata/ata device permission for user

2013-04-18 Thread Polytropon

On Thu, 18 Apr 2013 03:41:11 -0700 (PDT), Beeblebrox wrote:
  But the group permissions are --- (none).
 D'oh!
 Well, that made a difference and I can query the cd0 device with cdda2wav as
 my user now.
 
 I still can't mount a data CD however.

You need write access to the cd, pass and xpt devices.
You also need to _own_ the mount target directory. If
you try something temporary within your home directory,
it should always work:

% cd
% mkdir mnttest
% mount -o ro -t cd9660 /dev/cd0 mnttest

If you intend to mount below /media or into /cdrom or
/dvd, you need to set the proper owner. If you are
using X with the GiveConsole and TakeConsole script.
Then you can do things like this:

% mount /media/dvd

given that all the over information is preprogrammed
in /etc/fstab.




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: pwd.db/spwd.db file corupption when having unsafe system poweroff

 completes. 
 Using the power button ACPI/BIOS only compounds this situation.

Correct. That's why the time to have fsck perform its task in
the foreground should be invested, at least after such an abrupt
action.



 I would recommend you do NOT use the power button as you described above. 
 Period.

In case of _servers_, this button is commonly considered an
emergency button anyway, and therefor hardly used. :-)



 In any event pay particular attention to that very first boot after 
 an 'uh-oh' power off event. Look at top and watch for the background fsck to 
 kick off and complete, returning the machine to quiescent state BEFORE you do 
 ANYTHING else to it. This includes pressing the button on the front.

The doing anything else can be the problem with a background fsck.
Let's say the server starts its services which start accessing the
partitions currently checked by fsck. Yes, I know, snapshots and all
this stuff. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. My additional
advice would be: Do not use a background fsck. If you had a power
failure (for whatever reason), take the time to make sure your system
boots into a verified state (NOT: boots into a questionable state,
tries to verify it during normal operations, and pretends everything
is fine).





-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: portmaster -- no execute command

On Wed, 17 Apr 2013 16:34:24 -0400, Jerry wrote:
 Does portmaster have a --noexecute flag like portupgrade?
 Specifically, I want to run the following command and see exactly what
 would be updated / modified sans actually doing it.
 
   portmaster -o new_app old_app

Is the -n option what you are looking for?

From man portmaster:

-n  run through all steps, but do not make or install any ports

This common flag seems to be allowed for installation via -o,
according to the synopsis:

portmaster [Common Flags] -o new port dir in /usr/ports
installed port



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: Keeping FreeBSD with custom kernel up to date: freebsd-update no option?

On Wed, 17 Apr 2013 22:37:06 +0200, andreas scherrer wrote:
 For some reason I was under the impression that /usr/src/sys is not
 being updated by freebsd-update if I remove kernel from the
 Components directive in freebsd-update.conf. But I might be wrong (I
 will check).

According to the documentation, /usr/src (and therefor the
/usr/src/sys subtree) is part of the src component, not
of kernel, so it should be updated properly.



 Maybe related to this: how does freebsd-update know what
 sources/binaries to get when I don't use the -r switch? Does it rely
 on /usr/src/sys/conf/newvers.sh?
 
 Could it be that I never saw a change to my kernel sources
 (/usr/src/sys) because freebsd-update was tracking some static sources?

Not neccessarily. For example, if only a userland program has
received a security update, and the kernel was kept the same,
no change would be done in /usr/src/sys. In this case, the
kernel version output (as seen by the uname program) would
not have changed.



 As I currently have a checkout from SVN in /urs/src I need to get rid of
 this. Can I just copy (read: move) back my previous /usr/src directory
 and continue to use freebsd-update?

You should not switch between both methods, it may cause problems.
The simplest way would be to

# mv /usr/src /usr/src.svn

and let freebsd-update populate the sources with the required
version. Note that it will install the world your (custom) kernel
will finally have to match, and so it should make sure you have
the correct revision of the sources to avoid a version conflict.

However, it's basically not a problem to use SVN to track -RELEASE,
but in this case, you should recompile world and kernel from that
sources, instead of relying on freebsd-update for a binary update
of the world only. But as you said you're only interested in a
custom kernel (which _requires_ building from source), you can
safely leave everything else to freebsd-update and don't use SVN.
(It would be a totally different thing if you would track -STABLE
or -CURRENT which is not possible with freebsd-update, and which
would _force_ you to build everything from source.)

By following -RELEASE, freebsd-update will apply _that_ snapshot
of the source tree and the prebuild world and kernel at the
revision when X.Y-RELEASE-pZ has been verified, sloppily said.
So it basically doesn't matter what sources you have on your
machine (or even if you have any sources) as long as you're not
going to compile anything. But because this is a requirement in
your specific setting, freebsd-update will take care of that by
having the src component on its list.




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: How to manually start firewall after system completed boot.

On Wed, 17 Apr 2013 08:25:46 -0400, Joe wrote:
 Is there some format of the service command that could be used to 
 manually start the selected firewall?

How about the rc.d framework?

# /etc/rc.d/ipfw start

Or

# service ipfw start

Both will honor the firewall_type= setting in /etc/rc.conf
(here: for IPFW).

-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: FreeBSD fstab Entry for Windows Share

On Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:45:24 -0700, Mehmet Erol Sanliturk wrote:
 I could not be able to write an /etc/fstab entry to mount that share during
 boot .
 
 When examples in many documents from Internet are imitated , no one of them
 is working , or
 man pages are not much helpful.

Try to adapt the following configuration example I just copied
from a system image which has been working many years ago:

Edit the file /etc/nsmb.conf to contain access credentials if
those are needed:

[default]
workgroup=THEGROUPNAMEHERE

[WINPC]
addr=192.168.123.456

[WINPC:Administrator]
password=MYTOPSECRETPASSWORD

In this example, WINPC is then name of the PC you want to
mount the SMB shares from. Also Administrator will be the
user account by which they are mounted. Please note that this
might be a stupid practice. :-)

Then add those entries to /etc/fstab:

//Administrator@WINPC/a$  /smb/a  smbfs  rw,noauto  0  0
//Administrator@WINPC/c$  /smb/c  smbfs  rw,noauto  0  0
//Administrator@WINPC/d$  /smb/d  smbfs  rw,noauto  0  0
//Administrator@WINPC/e$  /smb/e  smbfs  rw,noauto  0  0
//Administrator@WINPC/f$  /smb/f  smbfs  rw,noauto  0  0

Of course you can be more specific by naming the shares by name.
In this case here, the drive letters have been used to access
the entire drives / logical partitions / whatever.

If the shares should be mounted on boot time, remove ,noauto.
If not, use mount /smb/c for example when needed. Of course
make sure that the mount targets, /smb/[acdef] in this case,
do exist.

Finally, make sure that if you're using WINPC in /etc/fstab,
put an IP for in in /etc/hosts, or it won't resolve:

192.168.123.456 WINPC

This is also helpful as soon as you have to run network diagnostics
as you can now use WINPC for the Windows PC in any commands.






-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: pwd.db/spwd.db file corupption when having unsafe system poweroff

On Tue, 16 Apr 2013 13:36:42 +0430, Tak Tak wrote:
 hi everyone,
 
 i wanna know what exactly happens for freebsd files and processes,
 when we shutdown system via pressing hardware power key for 3 seconds?

Actually no shutdown happens in this situation. The normal
programming for the power button is:

press for short time:
send ACPI signal to OS to perform action
action: usually shutdown -p now

press for 4 seconds:
forced power off, no signal sent to OS
equivalent: pull power plug

Check the BIOS settings if this is actually the programming
in your case. (This has been discussed recently on this list,
check the archives to find the corresponding thread.)

There are only very few occassions where you _need_ to press
the power button for 4 seconds, i. e. if the OS is hanging
in a totally dysfunctional state (usually massive hardware
errors cause this). Whenever possible, perform a clean shutdown
controlled by the OS.



 here's what has happened to me, recently:
 i've faced a strange problem.. on one of my bsd servers, one of my
 coworkers had defined and edited some system users, and then, instead
 of safe shutdown, he kept pressing power-button for 3 seconds!..
 after next startup, we couldn't login anymore! we had to replace
 pwd.db and spwd.db files, via bootable-freebsd Fixit mode, and then,
 everything was fine!

If the plain text files /etc/passwd and /etc/master.passwd, it
could have been possible to construct the binary databases with
the pwd_mkdb program (see man pwd_mkdb for details).



 we know that we are, for sure, better to use safe shutdown, but i
 can't guarantee it always happens.

You should. :-)



 what if sudden power off makes same
 problem??so i can't leave my servers in such situations..

Suddenly and _unintendedly_ powering off a computer (or better:
a server) should be somthing worth thinking about. It's definitely
not a good idea. However, you can apply some file system tweaks to
_hope_ to make the impact less severe -- for example, you can use
journaling for the filesystem so it should be in a good condition.



 My questins are:
 what has happened exactly?

You probably disconnected the _essential_ power during a write
operation (performed by the disk).



 just in-used corrupted files ??

That's quite possible.



 is there any way to prevent this situation? (instead of  having a
 read-only FS.. i can't apply it on this server for now..).

As I said, make sure power is provided constantly. Maybe add a
UPS to the mix. Use a safe shutdown, prevent accidental forced
power off, maybe by disabling the power button (or putting a
protector on it). If possible, use a software command (shutdown,
reboot, halt). Add journaling to the file system. Make sure to
perform a fsck _prior_ to going live (i. e., put the setting
background_fsck=NO in /etc/rc.conf because you NEVER know).



 i'm sorry if my question seems dummish!

No, it doesn't. It's just important that you recognize what you
are actually doing, and what it implies for the OS and the tasks
it performs.



 i'm trying to increase my bsd
 knowledge, but i'm just on my way..

This is to be considered basic hardware knowledge. :-)





-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: FreeBSD fstab Entry for Windows Share

On Tue, 16 Apr 2013 02:28:33 -0700, Mehmet Erol Sanliturk wrote:
 Your message has supplied important information .

As I said, I did obtain it from a system that _has been working_
in that regards. :-)



 When their equivalent values are entered , they worked :
 
 
 WINPC : NetBIOS_NAME_in_Windows
 workgroup : Work_Group_NAME_in_Windows
 Administrator : user_name_in_Windows_Administrators
 F$ : Share_Name_in_Windows
 
 
 With the above values :
 
 /etc/nsmb.conf :
 
 -
 
 
 [default]
 Workgroup=Work_Group_NAME_in_Windows
 
 [NetBIOS_NAME_in_Windows]
 addr=192.168.10.25
 
 -
 
 The following values are NOT required ( they are not taken into
 consideration ) :
 
 [WINPC:Administrator]
 password=MYTOPSECRETPASSWORD
 
 During boot , the password is asked .

If this case of interactivity at system startup is _not_ intended,
the information (username, password) can be obtained from the
/etc/nsmb.conf file. It's important to pay attention to the file
permissions.



 /etc/fstab :
 
 
 -
 
 
 //user_name_in_Windows_Administrators@NetBIOS_NAME_in_Windows/Share_Name_in_Windows
 /mnt smbfs  rw 0  0

You could possibly add the late option (rw,auto,late) so in
case of network problems, the boot process won't stop at the
early stage (fstab error).




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: dvd recorder audio cd problems

On Tue, 16 Apr 2013 10:16:29 -0700 (PDT), Beeblebrox wrote:
 Hi,
 
  Regarding audio playback via cdcontrol ... requires a seperate internal
  wiring (CD audio wire) to the sound card.
 
 Thanks: Using an older dvd drive, so that's probably the problem. On my
 linux I once had that cable to the mobo.

The ability to transmit audio via data lines has been present
already with parallel ATA drives. I'm not sure how this is handled
with SATA, but I assume it's done similarly because the internal
CD audio connectors (and worse, the respective cables) do not seem
to be common anymore.



  on FreeBSD 8 you would have something like this in your kernel
  configuration:# ATA and ATAPI devices 
 
 You seem to be using 8.* while I am on 10-current (info provided in my
 signature). Unfortunately there are a number of important hardware driver
 changes between 8-9-10.

This is correct. The old ATAPI infrastructure (acd, acdXtY) has
been deprecated.



 these are the only options allowed:
 # ATA controllers
 deviceahci# AHCI-compatible SATA controllers
 deviceata # Legacy ATA/SATA controllers
 # ATA/SCSI peripherals
 devicescbus   # SCSI bus (required for ATA/SCSI)
 devicech  # SCSI media changers
 deviceda  # Direct Access (disks)
 devicesa  # Sequential Access (tape etc)
 devicecd  # CD
 devicepass# Passthrough device (direct ATA/SCSI 
 access)
 deviceses # Enclosure Services (SES and SAF-TE)
 #device   ctl # CAM Target Layer
 
 In GENERIC, 'option  ctl' is disabled because pulling in any one of the
 da/cd/pass etc also enables/calls ctl.
 For the same reason, '# atacontrol list ' =
 ATA_CAM option is enabled in kernel. Please use camcontrol instead.

So this tool is also deprecated, and I assume it has taken
cdcontrol and maybe even burncd with it.



 $ ll /dev/cam =
 crw---  1 root  operator  0x3f Apr 16 19:36 ctl
 So it seems, after playing around that 'acd_' is deprecated in 10.

True, it is.



 As to why /dev/cd0 does not show up in Brasero, it is probably related to my
 other thread on user-level permissions.

I highly assume this is the case, because specific permissions have
to be granted. Also check if this Gnome program requires additional
fiddling with DBUS or HAL (or something similarly deprecated), or
with specific groups your username has to be a member of.



 Since my user cannot mount the cd0,
 brasero has not enabled access to it (problem valid for all GUI-based-apps
 unless root starts running a GUI)

It should not be _that_ drastic. When you are logged in with your
regular user account, and running X, open an X terminal and enter
the command su -m, and confirm the password. Then start brasero
or any other GUI program you want to check from that command line.

The -m option will preserve your user's environment; see man su
for details. That could be worth a try (and a partial solution).

Anyway, check the permissions. What you're attempting _is_ possible.
I've been able to do all this stuff as a regular user after proper
configuration (on a v4, v5 and v7 system).





-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: Keeping FreeBSD with custom kernel up to date: freebsd-update no option?

On Tue, 16 Apr 2013 21:38:16 +0200, andreas scherrer wrote:
 Dear FreeBSD savvies
 
 I am (still) struggling to understand how to keep my FreeBSD system up
 to date (world/system, not ports). I want to track RELEASE (not a
 development branch) and I want to receive security related updates. And
 I want to run a custom kernel.

Without actually havint tested it, it seems that if you want
to use freebsd-update (binary updating), you should note this:

In /etc/freebsd-update.conf, you should have the line for what
to update as Components src world.

This should prevent overwriting of the kernel, but you need to
compile your kernel and install it. The component src will
make sure you have the proper kernel sources. I assume a custom
kernel configuration file in /usr/src/sys/{i386|amd64}/conf/
is _not_ being overwritten by freebsd-update.

Use the -r option of freebsd-update to specify the correct
release if required. It should follow -RELEASE-pN for the
currentl patchlevel N (which you intend to follow) normally.



 From what I understand I cannot use freebsd-update in this case
 because it will invariably either overwrite my custom kernel (if I have
 Components kernel in the config file) or not update the kernel sources
 in /usr/src/sys (when I do not have Components kernel in the config
 file). See [1].

As far as I read from man freebsd-update.conf, the src component
will not exclude kernel sources; kernel refers to the kernel and
the modules as binary stuff.

This is the relevant text passage:

The components are ``src''
(source code), ``world'' (non-kernel binaries),
and ``kernel''; the sub-components are the indi-
vidual distribution sets generated as part of
the release process (e.g., ``src/base'',
``src/sys'', ``world/base'', ``world/catpages'',
``kernel/smp'').  Note that prior to
FreeBSD 6.1, the ``kernel'' component was dis-
tributed as part of ``world/base''.

So src will include src/sys which is the kernel sources you
will need to build your custom kernel.



 This leaves me with the only possibility to use SVN to update /usr/src,
 right?

No, but it might be the more advanced alternative, and it should
work. Note that in _this_ case, you will also have to rebuild the
world, so kernel and world are in sync after an update. Refer to
the comment header of /usr/src/Makefile for the whole process that
has to be performed after updating (or see in the Handbook: the
section about updating by source).



 I have a copy of the SVN sources (for the outdated RELEASE-9.0.0
 but that's a different story), see below for svn info). As I
 understand [2] I cannot mix freebsd-update and SVN, right?

It could cause trouble. Deciding for _one_ way should be better.



 So I can run svn update in /usr/src whenever I like. But what then? Do
 I need to rebuild the world and my custom kernel every time I run svn
 update (and there are some updates)?

Yes, or better: As soon as it is required. This depends on _what_
has been part of the update. For example, kernel updates _can_
require updates of userland programs or libraries, but it's also
possible that it's not the case. To be sure, rebuild.



 I'm on a low powered consumer
 device and it takes considerable amount of time to build the world and
 kernel (plus I still don't feel comfortable doing such tasks remotely).

In this case, use freebsd-update as explained at the beginning of
my message: Update components world and src, leave out kernel,
the rebuild the kernel by source and install it. Then reboot.



 Is this really the way to do it or am I missing something?

There are _several_ ways to do it. :-)



 There are quite some posts, websites and threads out there (see [3] or
 [4] for example) about this topic but (surprisingly?) I could not (yet)
 find a conclusive answer.

This is because the answer depends on what you actually want to do
(follow RELEASE, STABLE, CURRENT), and how you want to do it (binary,
by source).




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: dvd recorder audio cd problems

2013-04-15 Thread Polytropon

On Sun, 14 Apr 2013 22:46:22 -0700 (PDT), Beeblebrox wrote:
 I have an audio CD I want to rip/copy but I have some problems:
 
 % cdcontrol -f /dev/cd0 info
 Starting track = 1, ending track = 17, TOC size = 146 bytes
 track start  duration   block  length   type
 -
 1   0:02.00   4:02.31   0   18181  audio
 2   4:04.31   5:08.45   18181   23145  audio   etc...
 
 But when I do #-or-% cdcontrol -f /dev/cd0
  play = starts playing (confirmed with 'status audio')
 But there is no sound. 'status volume' shows 255 for both channels.

This is a known problem of the transition from acd to cd driver
subsystem. I'm not sure in how far cdcontrol has made the
transition from ATAPI to SCSI/CAM successfully...

In order to copy an audio CD, try CD Paranoia (in ports:
audio/cdparanoia). If you want to really just copy a CD, try
something like this:

% cdrdao read-cd --device 0,0,0 --driver generic-mmc-raw --eject 
--read-raw --datafile music.bin music.toc

% cdrdao write --device 0,0,0 --driver generic-mmc-raw --speed 8 
--eject music.toc

Note that this might be problematic on damaged CDs; in this
case, cdparanoia works better. Check camcontrol devlist for
the correct LUN of your device.

Regarding audio playback via cdcontrol: If I remember correctly,
this requires a seperate internal wiring (CD audio wire) from
the drive to the sound card. If your drive has a front connector
for headphones, check if it's actually playing. Considering this
wiring deprecated, audio data should be transmitted with the
PATA or SATA cable somehow...



 cam.ko is built-in to my custom kernel. From what I have read, shouldn't the
 DVD show up as /dev/acd0? In which case each song on the cd should be
 visible as /dev/acd0t__? Not happening though, since the dvd is registered
 as plain cd0 in /dev.

No. Those infrastructures have to be considered deprecated. The
track device files (acdXtYY) correspond to the ATAPI device driver
which also controls the acdX devices.

For example, on FreeBSD 8 you would have something like this in
your kernel configuration:

# ATA and ATAPI devices
device  ata
device  atadisk # ATA disk drives
device  ataraid # ATA RAID drives
device  atapicd # ATAPI CDROM drives
device  atapifd # ATAPI floppy drives
device  atapist # ATAPI tape drives
options ATA_STATIC_ID   # Static device numbering
device  atapicam

This enables you both the acd (device atapicd) and the cd (device
atapicam) driver subsystems. Both the traditional ATAPI _and_ the
SCSI over ATA can be used this way.



 # camcontrol devlist =
 HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-4165B DL05   at scbus6 target 0 lun 0 (cd0,pass3)

Correct. This is the cd driver reporting. If you wanted to check
if you're able to access ATAPI devices, try the atacontrol command.

Examples (trimmed):

# atacontrol list
ATA channel 1:
Master: acd0 HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-H42N/RL00 ATA/ATAPI revision 7
Slave:  acd1 HL-DT-STDVD-ROM GDR8163B/0L30 ATA/ATAPI revision 6

# camcontrol devlist
HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-H42N RL00at scbus0 target 0 lun 0 (pass0,cd0)
HL-DT-ST DVD-ROM GDR8163B 0L30   at scbus0 target 1 lun 0 (pass1,cd1)

You can see two drives in this example:

HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-H42N RL00 = 0,0,0 = cd0 = acd0
HL-DT-ST DVD-ROM GDR8163B 0L30 = 0,1,0 = cd1 = acd1







-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: sata/ata device permission for user

2013-04-14 Thread Polytropon

On Sun, 14 Apr 2013 01:11:38 -0700 (PDT), Beeblebrox wrote:
 My user is unable to mount cdrom and cannot use qemu for the HDD devices. Why
 is access to these devices being refused for my user?

Because there have to be certain permissions in order to allow
a non-root user perform such tasks:

1. The setting vfs.usermount=1 has to be present in /etc/sysctl.conf .

2. The user must have write access to the device file.

3. The user has to own the mount directory.

It helps if the user is in the wheel group.



 1. % mount_cd9660 /dev/cd0 /cdrom
 mount_cd9660: /dev/cd0: Operation not permitted

Check permissions of /dev/cd0 and /cdrom.



 2. % qemu-system-x86_64 -hda /dev/ada2
 qemu-system-x86_64: -hda /dev/ada2: could not open disk image /dev/ada2:
 Operation not permitted

Check permissions of /dev/ada2, maybe write permission is needed?



 *SETTINGS:*
 % id = uid=1001(xyz) gid=0(wheel) groups=0(wheel),5(operator),1001(xyz)
 
 /etc/devfs.rules has:  [localrules=10]
 add path 'ada[0-9]*' mode 0660 group operator
 add path 'da[0-9]*' mode 0660 group operator
 add path 'cd[0-9]*' mode 0660 group operator
 
 /etc/rc.conf has:
 devfs_system_ruleset=localrules

Looks correct, but doesn't seem to be sufficient. But take into
mind that /etc/devfs.rules is used for dynamically allocated devices,
and /etc/devfs.conf for those present at boot time (usually cd,
maybe also da and ada depending on your setup).



Also see:

http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=5796

Compare to Handbook 19.5.2:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/usb-disks.html

Maybe also helpful:

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/freebsd-allow-ordinary-users-mount-cd-rom-dvds-usb-removabledevice/


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: Power switch not working

2013-04-09 Thread Polytropon

On Tue, 09 Apr 2013 02:49:49 -0700, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:

In message 20130407060507.76fd8bd1.free...@edvax.de,
Polytropon free...@edvax.de wrote:

This is what shutdown -p now does.

It's times like these than make me want to go off to some dark place and
hang my head in shame.

No need to do so. In AT times, before ATX was common, there
was no way to power off the machine as it had a mechanical
power switch (a _real_ switch), so using -h was the way to
go.

For example, I've programmed Ctrl+Alt+Moon on my Sun USB keyboard...

Sun keyboards have moon keys??

The moon key is on the top right, and only present on the type
6 and 7 keyboards. Pervious models had a (I) key (power key)
in that location.

http://stuartconnections.com/products/Computers/Peripherals/Keyboard_and_Mouse_Combos/Sun_320-1366-03/DSC09864w.jpg

http://i.stack.imgur.com/D8RsW.jpg

http://www.lemis.com/grog/Photos/20120509/big/Keyboard-1.jpeg

For comparison:

http://imageshack.us/scaled/landing/387/suntype5cks2.jpg

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19683-01/806-4743/images/keyboard_a.tif.gif

The original function of the (I) power key has been to switch
the computer on and off. Today I'm using it for session logout,
and for power off (with Ctrl and Alt, just to reduce the change
of accidental system shutdown).

(I hope and trust that I'm not the only one who finds this fact rather
comical. Perhaps that's why Sun put the key there (?))

Now that Sun doesn't exist anymore, there's the word Oracle
on top of the keyboard. The moon is more associated with the
uncertainity of a mysterious oracle than the sun. :-)

In the past, this kind of operation has been performed via APM.
When APM has been fully supported, it was abolished and replaced
by ACPI. At the time ACPI is fully working, standard-compliant
and supported among all the many vendors, it will be obsoleted
by something different, probably UEFI, and the fun restarts. :-)

Yea.

ISA - PCI - PCIe - PCIe2.x - PCIe3.x ...

DRAM - SDRAM - DDR - DDR2 - DDR3 ...

ATX 20 pin - ATX 24 pin ...

Somebody is always coming up with something new that will inevitably force
me to spend money, buing new hardware, despite all my resistance.

I cannot wait to participate in this wonderful experience
that keeps the throw away society alive (and enable us
to buy cheaper and more powerful stuff, on the other hand).
How will I be going to have a video feed from a VCR when
I cannot plug in my fully working and excellently supported
PCI TV card (with video input) anywhere? It's hard to keep
doing the same over the period of time the equipment will
work. Okay, no problem if you need to to something new
(which requires more power, more storage or faster speed),
but if that's not the case, the wheel keeps being reinvented.
What has been old will be new, except it comes in shiny new
marketing mumbo-jumbo to convince us. :-)

Re: Youtube Flash Videos broken?

2013-04-08 Thread Polytropon

On Mon, 8 Apr 2013 17:03:13 +0200, Harald Weis wrote:
 On Sun, Apr 07, 2013 at 12:09:32AM +0200, Polytropon wrote:
  
   If it's just about YouTube video, why not use youtube-dl and
   mplayer? I haven't tested it for those particular two videos,
   but it tends to work for everything. :-)
  
 Can you please help me how to find the right URLs for youtube-dl ?

There is no URL. You install it from ports:

# cd /usr/ports/www/youtube_dl
# make install

If the version in ports is not current enough (e. g. when YT
has again fiddled with the format), you can usually get it
from its source https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl.



 For example on
 http://www.youtube.com/user/ConcertosLive/videos
 
 When I copy URLs with mouse in opera I always get
 youtube-dl: No match.

Make sure you use proper quoting as the URL contains
characters that the shell will interpret. The common form
to use youtube-dl is e. g.

% youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0;

Any superflous stuff in the URL will be ignored. This is
the easiest way to work, e. g. from copying the URL from
the URL line or via the Copy link address function; then
just type 'youtube-dl ', press the middle mouse key, ''
and Enter.

As youtube-dl doesn't have a manpage, you can use

% youtube-dl -h

to get a list of supported command line options.



 (opera and flash work fine for playing and also for downloading the
 the ogg file)

That's normal. :-)



 I definitely prefer the command line tool.

What I like about this approach is that I can watch films
in a usable (!) environment, which is mplayer, and not be
dependent on some low-quality web player plugin. It's also
nice to have interesting videos stored on the local disk
so they can be watched without Internet connection. :-)



 Getting rid of flash would be a tremendous relief.

It will happen, as soon as HTML5 is adopted more widely
(currently happening especially for rich web content
and the mobile market) and lawyers agree on a usable
media codec.

But for now, I don't actually see any problems running
Flash if it is _intended_ to do so.


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: Youtube Flash Videos broken?

2013-04-07 Thread Polytropon

On Sun, 7 Apr 2013 07:44:30 -0400, Jerry wrote:
This site:
http://aattp.org/watch-jon-stewart-annihilate-anti-gun-control-arguments-in-this-amazing-daily-show-clip-video/
plays fine on Windows using either IE or Firefox. It also works on
Ubuntu. However, it bombs out with FreeBSD and Firefox. I haven't had
an opportunity to try it on a Linux system yet..

Strange. Very strange. What am I doing wrong for all the years?
Even though this page is slow as (insert slow stuff) on loading
and polluted with ads, it plays totally fine with Opera, installed
in summer 2011. This is since almost 3 years ago.

Using Flash is way
harder than it needs to be on FreeBSD.

You are right about this. It should be a selectable (switchable)
function of the browser. Do you have a proprietary plugin to have
text in blue color? One to display PNG images? Another one to
render text centered? No?

If Flash is used instead of HTML, or as an excuse for not
being able or willing to use HTML properly, and if lawyers keep
fighting their patent war on codecs, then Flash is not the
problem per se - it's the way it is (ab)used.

Imagine you could treat it as a first class browser functionality.
Like displaying images or rendering text. You want to use it?
It's already part of the browser, properly maintained to work
with the browser, indepdent of lower-level system components.
You do _not_ want to see any Flash stuff? One click to disable
it. That would be the ideal solution, as it is possible with
_everything else_ except Flash.

You hear FreeBSD users who claim
that they never use Flash, which in itself is an interesting statement.

No, it's not that interesting. For example, I have kept two
browsers in the past: Firefox with no Flash, and Opera with
Flash. So whenever a non-Flash experience was desired,
I just switched the browser, and no Flash has been used.

Also, for specific things, using programs to download video
and then watch it locally with mplayer (much more comfortable
than all those web players) has been possible for many years.

If it doesn't work, then obviously you cannot take advantage of it. I
suspect at least 50% of them are liars. The rest are more than likely
expressing their sour-grapes wrath.

That's quite possible.

The real goal should be to get it working and working correctly and as
easily as other Operating Systems have.

I actually don't know where the problem is: It _is_ working
correctly and easily as on other operating systems and even
in comparison to Windows.

The world is not going to adapt
to your specifications, you have to adapt to its or else fall by the
wayside.

And those who _always_ go with the flow will never reach
the source. ;-)

To educated people, Flash is just a tool, and they can
answer the question what it is good for, and what it is
not the tool for, and additionally how to properly use it.
Considering that Flash has had 4 hits among the top 10
of security threats, like Gain access to a system and
execute arbitrary code with local user privileges. Gain
access to sensitive data. Highly Critical. and Gain
access to a system and execute arbitrary code with local
user privileges. Bypass security systems. Gain access to
sensitive data. Extremely Critical., there might be a
reason not to use it - it depends. It _always_ depends.

Re: Youtube Flash Videos broken?

2013-04-07 Thread Polytropon

On Sun, 07 Apr 2013 13:05:19 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
 If users would stop visiting bad programmed sites, we would get better
 programmed websites, so IMO we shouldn't fix the issues others cause,
 it's their task to fix their websites.

There's hope in browsers implementing the Flash-like
functionalities using HTML5, which has become important
due to the growing markets in tablets and smartphones
(the mobile web where Flash doesn't play a significant
role). One of the problems is media codecs (where lawyers
fight), another one is the availability of design and
development environments for non-technical users who
normally use pirated copies of some Adobe programs
to create Flash content for (or instead of) HTML-based
web pages. Those who actually _pay_ for their tools often
tend to deliver a much better user experience even by
using Flash. As I said, it's just a tool, but a tool
by itself doesn't get the work done, you need to properly
use it. Flash is already on its way into the coffin,
it will be much more profitable (and essential to stay
in business) to publish content in a more portable way.
In my opinion, HTML5 is the way to go, as soon as they
got the mentioned main problems out of the way.



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: Youtube Flash Videos broken?

2013-04-06 Thread Polytropon

On Sat, 6 Apr 2013 23:39:11 +0200, Jens Schweikhardt wrote:
 Since I haven't heard the FreeBSD community screaming Gimme back
 my Youtube!!!1!, I'll bite. What could the problem be? Is anyone
 else but me able to play flash, like for example The true science
 of multiple universes in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ywn2Lz5zmYg ?

The video has a ad overlay (can skip after a few seconds),
video itself plays fine here. Note that I'm providing you
this reference from the past: I'm using Opera with the Linux
Flash plugin (installed as described in the handbook), and
the versions are opera-11.50, opera-linuxplugins-11.50,
and linux-f10-flashplugin-10.3r183.5, installed in summer 2011.
So I haven't changed things, and it still works, because
the rule is: Never touch a running system. ;-)



 Other types play just fine, like Pt1gard's 10-Question Apollo Test
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUPtiYiMCbQ

Yes, plays fine.



 I can work around this by downloading the files with clive and watching
 with mplayer, but I'd like to make this work again.

If it's just about YouTube video, why not use youtube-dl and
mplayer? I haven't tested it for those particular two videos,
but it tends to work for everything. :-)

I cannot provide a reference regarding Firefox (with Flash
installed as described in the Handbook) because it freezes
mny system (faulty GPU).




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: Youtube Flash Videos broken?

2013-04-06 Thread Polytropon

On Sat, 6 Apr 2013 15:23:49 -1000, Parv wrote:
 I have tried some extensions -- e.g. Flash and Video
 Download, Download Helper -- that require a bit of video to be
 played initially before it can be downloaded (outside of YouTube;
 for YouTube videos, I prefer to use youtube_dl).

Yes, Download Helper is very prominent in combination
with Firefox. However, it requires interactivity within
the browser. In case that's not desired, youtube-dl can
help. For non-YT-videos, get-flash-videos (a per script)
works in many cases. The result FLV file can be played
comfortably with mplayer. I'm not sure in how far this
combination can be integrated with the web browser...

Again, it's worth noting that you should not touch a
running system. ;-)


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: Power switch not working

2013-04-06 Thread Polytropon

On Sat, 06 Apr 2013 20:51:58 -0700, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
 I'll be attending to those thing, but for now I'd just like to know
 why, when I do shutdown -h now and then let the system come down to
 the point where it says Press any key to reboot pressing the power
 switch at that point no longer causes the system to actually power down.
 If fact it does nothing.

This is to be expected. When you press the power switch, a
signal will be sent to the OS which causes a custom action,
which in most cases is to shutdown the system and then power
it off. This is what shutdown -p now does.

When you use shutdown -h now the system will be shut down.
When you _then_ press the button, there's nothing left to
act. Your only choice is to hold the button for about 4 seconds
which will cause a hardware switch-off.

Just a question: Why don't you simply press the button from
out of a safe system state (e. g. when you've logged out)?
It will cause the ACPI message system to tell the OS to
shut down and power off - which you seem to intend.

For example, I've programmed Ctrl+Alt+Moon on my Sun USB keyboard
to exactly perform that action. But I can press the button
at any time to have the same operation performed.



 I'm guessing that this relates to some BIOS setting that I need to diddle,
 but which one?  Something to do with ACPI?

Usually the BIOS settings are okay for the normal case: to
send the shutdown + poweroff signal. However, you can select
the other variant, immediately power off (forced power off)
in the CMOS setup. Pressing the button, even with a running OS,
will then switch the machine off, no matter in which state it is.



 I'm ignorant about this stuff.  Guidance would be appreciated.  Thanks.

In the past, this kind of operation has been performed via APM.
When APM has been fully supported, it was abolished and replaced
by ACPI. At the time ACPI is fully working, standard-compliant
and supported among all the many vendors, it will be obsoleted
by something different, probably UEFI, and the fun restarts. :-)



 P.S.   I *did* hook up the case power switch correctly.  It does do the
 Right Thing when I'm just in the BIOS.

This is also to be expected: In the BIOS, and _any_ stage prior
to loading the OS, there will be only one thing the button can
do: power the system off immediately.



 But running FreeBSD seems to
 cause it (the case power switch) to be ignored.

Check the BIOS settings, the switch should be programmed to
something like soft power-off, it's the other thing to
whatever caption has been chosen for immediately power
off (forced by the 4 second press).

When in FreeBSD, pressing the button should shutdown the
system and then power it off. Allow this process few seconds
to work. You can easily examine if it's working properly
when you have a look at the system messages on ttyv0.

I cannot remember the correct messages because I'm too lazy
to press this switch when Ctrl+Alt+Moon is so much more
comfortable - thank you, Sun Microsystems. :-)

If this does _not_ happen, the BIOS setting makes the button
send the wrong message (maybe sleep or some other strange
ACPI stuff).



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: Recipie for CPU souffle'

2013-04-04 Thread Polytropon

On Fri, 5 Apr 2013 05:23:31 +1100 (EST), Ian Smith wrote:
 In freebsd-questions Digest, Vol 461, Issue 6, Message: 1
 (sorry about the threading)
 On Wed, 3 Apr 2013 15:12:17 +0200 Polytropon free...@edvax.de wrote:
   On Tue, 02 Apr 2013 19:10:59 -0700, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
It doesn't have to cover everything.  But it _should_ completely 
 describe
the programatic interface.
   
   At least is leaves questions, like stating use the syscalls
   in order to..., and the reader is left with the most obvious
   question: _which_ syscalls?
 
 Sometimes examples are the best teachers. 

Somethimes even manpages contain EXAMPLES. :-)



But like I said, somewher along the line, a lot of man page writers
apparently got lazy... VERY lazy.
 
 Mmm, and a few man page readers too?  It's really not rocket science ..

No, it's just reading the letters which form words and sentences,
expressing things. But that can already be considered hard work
if you're not used to that intellectual stuff. :-)



   But keep in mind they're still alive! Judging from the manpages
   of... *cough* can I say this? YOu know, more prominent open
   source operating systems for desktops... they're usually much
   worse _if_ there is a manpage. In most cases, there's none.
 
 True.  And I can usually get little more sense out of info(1) than from 
 windows 'troubleshooter' :)

You can shoot trouble as much as you like. It doesn't work.
It always comes back. To eliminate the source, you need to
understand the initial problem, then kill it with fire. :-)



 Second order question:  Why can't I just pipe a .wav file to the
 /dev/speaker device file and have it play?  Wouldn't that make quite
 a lot of sense?

No, that does not work.

Apparently not.

Why it doesn't work (or couldn't work) is less clear.
   
   The speaker interface to the _PC speaker_ is not a DSP. It's
   programming is much simpler. The note language that it
   uses on FreeBSD is much more than other interfaces offer.
   Better ones have stuff like pitch, duration, turn off.
 
 Not to mention staccato, legato, dotted notes - sophisticated stuff!

Plus interpretation of UTF-8 strings that contain note language,
I assume those characters are in there... :-)



% echo c  /dev/speaker

Humm... now _that_ is both interesting and enlightening.
   
   I actually remember having used something comparable on
   BASIC, when my brain wasn't fully developed yet. :-)
 
 The note language is _from_ BASIC .. do read the source, Luke(s)!

That's why I could remember it. I think it was QBasic
(on a PC platform, no idea if other platforms also supported
it, but I assume more sophisticated BASICs could have
contained that functionality).



  echo cdefgabc  /dev/speaker
   
   It's still a nice interface to generate attention sounds
   in case you want to make an audible alarm or signal for
   some specific action, like a program which has aborted,
   an unverified backup or the successful completition of
   a task.
 
 Indeed it is.  On an old laptop using APM I used to play little tunes as 
 the battery got down to 30, 20, 10%, noiser just before forced suspend,
 which saved me not a few times.  A nice little chirp when fully charged.

You can still find it in /etc/apmd.conf:

echo T250L16B+BA+AG+GF+FED+DC+CC /dev/speaker

echo T250L8CE-GE-C /dev/speaker

Sadly, when APM was working properly, it has been abolished. :-(





-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: Recipie for CPU souffle'

On Tue, 02 Apr 2013 19:10:59 -0700, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
 See how the entire ioctl() interface for these device types is completely
 documented IN THE MAN PAGE?  That's the way it should be... None of this
 rooting around in the sources for something that should have been documented
 properly, external to the kernel sources.

I agree that especially to developers, that sounds logical
and very helpful. Seems that manpages do not aim for that
goal anymore...



 It doesn't have to cover everything.  But it _should_ completely describe
 the programatic interface.

At least is leaves questions, like stating use the syscalls
in order to..., and the reader is left with the most obvious
question: _which_ syscalls?



 But like I said, somewher along the line, a lot of man page writers
 apparently got lazy... VERY lazy.

But keep in mind they're still alive! Judging from the manpages
of... *cough* can I say this? YOu know, more prominent open
source operating systems for desktops... they're usually much
worse _if_ there is a manpage. In most cases, there's none.



  Second order question:  Why can't I just pipe a .wav file to the
  /dev/speaker device file and have it play?  Wouldn't that make quite
  a lot of sense?
 
 No, that does not work.
 
 Apparently not.
 
 Why it doesn't work (or couldn't work) is less clear.

The speaker interface to the _PC speaker_ is not a DSP. It's
programming is much simpler. The note language that it
uses on FreeBSD is much more than other interfaces offer.
Better ones have stuff like pitch, duration, turn off.
Worse ones only can emit ^G (BEL character) and have
some terminal driver make a beep and nothing more.



 However, try this example (cw.sh):
 
 #!/bin/sh
 
 read -p CW ===  TEXT
 echo ${TEXT} | morse | awk '{
  if(length($0) == 0)
  printf(P4\n);
  else {
  gsub( dit, P32L32E, $0);
  gsub( di,  P32L32E, $0);
  gsub( dah, P32L8E,  $0);
  printf(%sP16\n, $0);
  }
 }' | dd bs=256 of=/dev/speaker  /dev/null 21
 
 Ummm
 
 % /tmp/beeps.sh
 CW === x
 /tmp/beeps.sh: morse: not found

Seems your OS is installed incompletely?

% which morse
/usr/games/morse

This is on my home 8.2 system. The morse program is part of
the games distribution. Maybe you've decided to leave it out
when installing your system?

Just in case, you can easily install it from the source tree,
cd /usr/src/games/morse/ and make install.




 But probably not required, because the simplest test you could
 construct is something like
 
  % echo c  /dev/speaker
 
 Humm... now _that_ is both interesting and enlightening.

I actually remember having used something comparable on
BASIC, when my brain wasn't fully developed yet. :-)

echo cdefgabc  /dev/speaker

It's still a nice interface to generate attention sounds
in case you want to make an audible alarm or signal for
some specific action, like a program which has aborted,
an unverified backup or the successful completition of
a task.



 Can you hear a sound?
 
 Yes.

This means two things: Your speaker is present and works, and
the /dev/speaker mechanism also works.



  I wonder if whoever write and distributed this realized that he/she could
  be sued for copyright infringement for about 5 of the simple tunes that are
  embedded in that thing.  Sad but true.
  :-(
 
 Is it really that bad already?
 
 Haven't you noticed?

I _try_ not to notice it, because in some cases, it's totally
insane what's happenning on that front...



 In the future, there will be no more engineers... only lawyers.

Two lawyers, three opinions. ;-)





-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: Recipie for CPU souffle'

On Wed, 03 Apr 2013 12:35:49 +0100, Arthur Chance wrote:
 I'm not sure even the music industry's 
 paranoid lawyers would worry about something that sounds that bad, and 
 any half way sane judge would throw it out as de minimis.

They care about the crappy glaring sound of 8 bit, 11 kHz,
mono, with low bitrate and ugly quality which comes out of
almost any smartphone these days. And you don't even need
a judge to bully people or scare them into paying money
(at least in Germany a lawyer can work for your and have
you pay money even if you've never met him), de impera et
virtutibus loquitur, as the lawman would say. ;-)




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: Recipie for CPU souffle'

On Wed, 03 Apr 2013 08:51:21 -0700, Carl Johnson wrote:
 Polytropon free...@edvax.de writes:
 
  On Tue, 02 Apr 2013 12:55:20 -0700, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
 
  No, that does not work. Read the manpage to recognize clearly
  _what_ kind of input the /dev/speaker device accepts. It does
  not understand WAV files.
 
  However, try this example (cw.sh):
 
  #!/bin/sh
 
  read -p CW ===  TEXT
  echo ${TEXT} | morse | awk '{
  if(length($0) == 0)
  printf(P4\n);
  else {
  gsub( dit, P32L32E, $0);
  gsub( di,  P32L32E, $0);
  gsub( dah, P32L8E,  $0);
  printf(%sP16\n, $0);
  }
  }' | dd bs=256 of=/dev/speaker  /dev/null 21
 
  This script doesn't require any non-OS components. You can use
  it as a basis to build a program that will send you system messages
  in an audible way in morse code... :-)
 
 Have you looked at the morse man page lately, specifically the -p
 option? :-)  Just try 'morse -p sos' to test it.

That's actually quite cool, didn't know about that - but the
script shown is already old, so _maybe_ I have written it
when -p hasn't been introduced yet. And note -p does have
a better space and pausing melody.

A nice means to transmit system messages! :-)




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org

Re: Restaging from scratch