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T H I S M O N T H ’ S F E A T U R E S From the Editor Fetching Yahoo! Mail by Mikel King Editorial by Chris Coleman I thought it might be nice to start off with a simple little article about a How can you help advocate simple app in the ports tree that I find perticularly useful. It is called BSD? fetchyahoo, basically what it does is fetch your email out of your mail.yahoo.com account via the http interface and download it into a mailbox. Of course that may not seem all that special or important, Get BSD Stuff but what is really cool about this app is where it can put the messages, and some of the advanced features, like dump the bulk messages, and automatic expunging of the deleted messages. Read More

NYC*BUG Hosts Eric Allman and Marshall Kirk McKusick Meeting in Manhattan by George Rosamond NYC*BUG Hosts Eric Allman and Marshall Kirk McKusick Meeting in Manhattan The NYC *BSD User Group held a special meeting on Saturday, Search October 16th with Eric Allman and Marshall Kirk McKusick speaking at Columbia University. Monthly Ezine Eric Allman , the creator of Sendmail, has been a critical component in the open source community for decades. Kirk McKusick is an Search original BSD Unix developer from the 1970’s, and continues to play a leading role in the FreeBSD project to this day. Both Eric and Kirk are also heavily involved in USENIX. Read More BSD News

BSDCan Schedule Released Lowest Common Denominator NetBSD and Xen by David Bogen NYCBUG monthly meeting Michael Shalayeff: OpenBSD on In most contexts, titling something the "lowest common denominator" PA-RISC is faint praise, if not an outright insult. Most people consider the Theo de Raadt presented lowest common denominator in social groups to be those traits and with the 2004 Free Software urges most closely associated with our base instincts: food, shelter, Award warmth, safety, procreation, etc. Some examples that social and First look at Solaris 10 technology critics might offer: Read More SCALE 3x Presentations and Wrap Up Repors Now Online ZoneBSD.org Launched! R E G U L A R C O L U M N S Comparison of NetBSD and FreeBSD Why They use BSD: Netcraft by George Rosamond Recently, Daemon News asked Mike Prettejohn from well-known web server survey firm Netcraft.com about why they use BSD. Here’s BSDMall what Mike wrote: Read More Office Applications for Mac OS X Panther Ver 2.0 $39.95 Unix Utilities for Mac OS X Daemon’s Advocate Panther Ver 3.0 $39.95 by Poul-Henning Kamp 1 of 2 08.03.2005 14:00 Daemon News: October 2004 http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200410/ I met Peter Salus the other evening, he was in Copenhagen for a talk Sipura SPA SIP Telephone and he invited me out because he has started writing yet a computer Adapter Just $105 history book (If you have not yet read "A quarter century of UNIX" Sayson Telephone PT-390 and "Casting the NET" by all means do so). Now $95 Digium T1 Controllers $480 He told me that Kirk had told him to talk to me about FreeBSD, and OpenBSD 3.4 $37.50 his first question, while we waited for our "Galletes" to arive was Need Reseller Pricing? Go to "Why bother ?" Read More Cylogistics!

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2 of 2 08.03.2005 14:00 Daemon News ’200410’ : ’"Advocating BSD "’ http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200410/editorial.html

October 2004 Get BSD New to BSD? Search BSD Submit News FAQ Contact Us Join Us

Advocating BSD Search Chris Coleman Monthly Ezine I’ve long been a fan of BSD. I began using BSD seriously in 1995, mostly FreeBSD, but dabbling with the other projects as needs arose. As I began to Search be more proficient in BSD and the Unix technologies I looked around for ways that I could contribute back to the project that was helping me out. I didn’t know how to code very well, so I turned to my other hobby and began Get BSD Stuff to write. I found I really liked writing about BSD and quickly found that I liked explaining technical things. The first project I started out on was overly difficult. I tried writing a book about FreeBSD. At the time, only Greg Lehey’s Complete FreeBSD book was around and I thought it would be a good idea to see another one. Linux books had started to pop up here and there. I ended up writing a great deal of text that I posted on the internet for everyone to read as I went. It wasn’t the success I dreamed about, however, I did manage to get a book contract with a large publisher a short time later and began working on a BSD book with two other friends. However, the publisher dropped the book after some difficulties with us turning in our chapters in a non-Word format. Also, I think they couldn’t see the market for the FreeBSD book yet. But I didn’t give up. I did decide that a book wasn’t really what I wanted to do anyway. I turned my time back to working on smaller technical articles that I could more easily wrap my brain around. It’s much easier to make one point in an article than to stay on topic while trying to lead up to that point in a larger work. So, all of my current work goes into the Daemon News Ezine. It’s a lot of work and it’s all volunteer. I also think it’s worth it. I find myself often referring to articles on Daemon News when working on BSD related tasks. Sometimes they are even my own articles. (Which I wrote just to document how I did something so I wouldn’t forget it.) But there is a lot more to be done. I feel that quite a bit more advocacy work could be done. Recently I have had to work with a few Linux installations and every time it reminds me how much I like BSD. I’m probably just biased, but I find BSD to be extremely well suited to the kind of work I do. However, I’d like to do more than just talk about how much advocacy we need. So, I’ve helped put together http://advocacy.daemonnews.org as a place where we can share ideas about BSD advocacy. Recently I put a note up there for people to call Digium to let them know about interest from the BSD community in their products. So far, their response seems to be positive. With a little effort from the community, we can keep BSD on the radar scope of companies developing hardware and add it to a few company buzz words. -Chris Coleman

1 of 1 08.03.2005 14:00 Daemon News ’200410’ : ’"Fetching Yahoo! Mail "’ http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200410/fetchyahoo.html

October 2004 Get BSD New to BSD? Search BSD Submit News FAQ Contact Us Join Us

Fetching Yahoo! Mail Search By Mikel King Monthly Ezine I thought it might be nice to start off with a simple little article about a simple app in the ports tree that I find particularly useful. It is called fetchyahoo. Search Basically, what it does is fetch your email out of your mail.yahoo.com account via the http interface and download it into a mailbox. Of course, that may not seem all that special or important, but what is really cool about this app is where it can put the messages, and some of the advanced features, like Get BSD Stuff dumping the bulk messages and automatic expunging of the deleted messages. Now, one of the first things I usually do before I build anything from the ports tree is run a quick cvsup off my in house mirror to refresh the tree on the machine I am using. I find that this is generally a good thing to do. For instance, the version in the ports tree is 2.8.6 and mine is 2.8.0 which, of course, is not that great, but if you are going to take the time to build something, then why not do it right? OK, so building the port is easy once you complete the cvsup. I did have some trouble with the fetching of various dependencies but I suspect that was more or less bandwidth related. But, eventually, the make install clean will complete and you will be able to step into the .fetchyahoorc configuration file. A sample can be found in the build directory, and excerpts are included for explanation, as follows. This first section is rather self explanatory, just substitute your yahoo credentials here and then proceed to the next section.

###### SHOULD configure these ###### username = *yahoo-user-name* # this can be a password or an md5_hex hashed password password = *yahoo-password* # set this to 0 to turn off HTTPS and login insecurely via plaintext instead use-https = 1 ###### mail spool, mbox file and procmail configs ###### # set use-spool to 0 to disable outputting to a file/filter use-spool = 1 # if spoolName ends with a / we output in maildir format to that directory spool = /var/spool/mail/*local-user-name* # spool-mode must be either append, pipe or overwrite # use pipe for procmail or other filter and append for a normal spool # ignored if spoolName is a maildir directory spool-mode = append

OK, at this point we could fire off a sync and download the email into a standard Unix type mailbox. Which is OK because you could then use pine or mutt, or even mail, to read through the messages and you’re done, right? Wrong, sorry, that just wasn’t good enough for me. For one, the server I installed this onto also happens to be running an IMAP server (cyrus, to be exact). So, once the messages were downloaded onto the server and appended into my mailbox, then served up by my IMAP server automagically -- this is cool -- you’d think that I’m done, right? Again, however, I had other plans. Well, for one, I’m now getting all of that bulk mail that tends to collect into my yahoo account, and well, I really don’t want it. Therefore, the first thing to do is set the

empty-bulk = 1 which means that the bulk messages are dumped prior to downloading into my inbox. Another setting I enable is empty-trash-before = 1 1 of 2 08.03.2005 14:00 Daemon News ’200410’ : ’"Fetching Yahoo! Mail "’ http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200410/fetchyahoo.html , which dumps the deleted messages -- just like it says -- before downloading your inbox. I feel that these are good settings and save on the bandwidth as well. OK, so a quick recap of what we have accomplished thus far is to configure fetchyahoo to download the messages from the specified account and to ensure that both the bulk and trash are emptied before the actual download begins. Then, once it has completed the operation, you can connect to the mailbox on your server via any of several methods; in this case I use IMAP. But one thing that is lacking is automation. I could schedule this with cron, and indeed this does work and was the case back when I first stumbled across this application, but now there is a new

setting repeat-interval = n , where n = the number of minutes between mailbox checks. I have tested the repeat interval and, while it does work, it’s just not as daemonized as I’d like. Therefore, you’ll need to either run the app in a detached screen (also available in the ports tree) session or set up a personal cron job. The reason is that after a couple of iterations the fetchyahoo process terminates even if it is running in the background. My personal feeling is to go with the latter as cron is more reliable and it is fairly easy to set up a crontab. That sounds like a good lead in for a sequel, doesn’t it? Finally, there are a couple of other features that are quite handy. For instance, you can setup fetchyahoo to forward all of the downloaded messages to a particular SMTP address, which is good if you don’t have your own IMAP server. But another possibility is to use the IMAP forward feature which is good if, for instance, your main office uses Lotus Domino to which you connect via any IMAP-enabled mail client. In order to use the IMAP forward feature you need to have the CPAN Mail::IMAPClient installed, and since it is not listed as a dependency yet, you will need to jump into the port and manually install p5-Mail-IMAPClient or, if you are good with perl, then via the CPAN console. Once you have completed the p5-Mail-IMAPClient from the ports tree, update your .fetchyahoorc with the appropriate credentials and server settings and you are good to go.

###### IMAP configuration ###### # set use-imap to 1 to enable output to an IMAP mailbox use-imap = 0 imap-host = imap.example.com imap-port = 143 imap-username = imap-user-name imap-password = imap-password imap-mailbox = INBOX

There is one issue that you should consider: the security of this application is rather light. Meaning that, although it does use SSL for the network traffic, the credentials are stored in plain text which for some can be a huge issue. At a minimum, you should set the permissions on your .fetchyahoorc file accordingly (mode 0700). I would suspect that future updates will most likely include some sort of security enhancements, but only time will tell. So, in summary, what I end up with is fetchyahoo will download my messages from the yahoo server account and then upload them into my main account for work which I then use Thunderbird to check the messages. Or, as silly as this sounds, our webmail system (based on horde/imp, which coincidentally enough is also available via the ports tree).

2 of 2 08.03.2005 14:00 Daemon News ’200410’ : ’"NYCBUG Hosts Eric Allma... http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200410/kirkericmtg.html

October 2004 Get BSD New to BSD? Search BSD Submit News FAQ Contact Us Join Us

NYCBUG Hosts Eric Allman and Marshall Kirk Search McKusick Meeting in Manhattan

by George Rosamond < george at daemonnews dot org > Monthly Ezine Search The NYC BSD User Group held a special meeting on Saturday, October 16th at Columbia University with Eric Allman and Marshall Kirk McKusick speaking. Eric Allman, the creator of Sendmail, has been a critical component in the open source community for decades. Kirk McKusick is an original BSD Unix Get BSD Stuff developer from the 1970’s, and continues to play a leading role in the FreeBSD project to this day. Both Eric and Kirk are also heavily involved in USENIX. Almost 75 people packed the lecture hall in the Upper West Side Mathematics building, as Eric spoke about the continuing problems of unsolicited commercial email (uce), a.k.a., spam, and the possibilities and controversies attached to the proposed sender ID method. Kirk McKusick presented a more roundabout history of BSD Unix, with stories from the 1970’s at the Computer Science Research Group at Berkley, to more recent overviews about the structure of the FreeBSD project. The meeting including some additional goodies, including a raffle for a a number of books, including Kirk’s recent release "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System." A number of people from Ottawa, Canada came down for the meeting, including BSD Hacks author and OnLamp writer Dru Lavigne, NetBSD Security Officer David Maxwell and Freshports, FreeBSDDiary, BSDCan organizer Dan Langille and PostgreSQL’s Business Intelligent Analyst Robert Bernier. Dru also brought down several boxes of technical books, which were given away to interested parties. A good cross-section of the user community of New York City was represented, along with a good representation of local NYC*BUG members. Discussions ranged from intellectual property issues as related to anti-uce mechanisms to questions about how security issues are approached by the FreeBSD developers. Eric provided his presentation slides to NYC*BUG and they are available here. And an audio recording of the meeting, and and it is available here. Thanks to all who made the meeting success, including our expatriate NYC*BUG member Pete Wright who recently relocated to Los Angeles, but still managed to get us a room at Columbia University.

1 of 1 08.03.2005 14:00 Daemon News ’200410’ : ’"In Praise Of the Lowest C... http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200410/lcd.html

October 2004 Get BSD New to BSD? Search BSD Submit News FAQ Contact Us Join Us

In Praise Of the Lowest Common Denominator Search By David Bogen Monthly Ezine In most contexts, titling something the "lowest common denominator" is faint praise, if not an outright insult. Most people consider the lowest common Search denominator in social groups to be those traits and urges most closely associated with our base instincts: food, shelter, warmth, safety, procreation, etc. Some examples that social and technology critics might offer: Get BSD Stuff Reality TV panders to the lowest common denominator. Advertising is targeted at the lowest common denominator. Retail chains meet the needs of the lowest common denominator. Microsoft Windows(TM) is used by the lowest common denominator. Unfortunately, the fundamental appeal of the lowest common denominator has been lost with its stigmatization. When selecting software and administering systems, the lowest common denominator is very much your friend. The Internet Message Access Protocol, IMAP, was new and sexy years ago, but is now supported by nearly every single mail user agent with a significant user population. In fact, there are widely used mail user agents (squirrelmail comes to mind) that support IMAP out of the box, but do not support POP3 very well or at all. When support of a protocol becomes ubiquitous, that protocol becomes the lowest common denominator. The ubiquitous nature of IMAP usage means that you should consider using and installing it for yourself and your users. Because it is the lowest common denominator, you can be reasonably assured that nearly any mail user agent you select will support it. Pretend for a minute that you chose to use MAPI as your server-client e-mail communication protocol. How many clients that are not Microsoft Outlook or a derivative fully support MAPI? Five? Seven? How many of those clients are free or low cost? MAPI may have more functionality than IMAP, but at what cost are you willing to get it? Is it worth being locked in to a given subset of mail user agents and servers? XML is very much the hot language in software and web development circles these days. More and more PDF documents appear on-line every day. And yet, HTML remains the lowest common denominator on the World Wide Web. HTML is such a low and common denominator that it is the default type of message composition and display in many mail user agents. There is nothing wrong with spending hours crafting Javascript to work around some obscure browser bug or to simplify some on-line task. PDF works great to digitally transmit forms from one location to another without distortion. XML is a godsend for transmitting arbitrary information between applications and processes. Even XHTML has its place in the world and some very nice features. However, if you really want your message to reach the broadest possible audience, much like any advertiser will tell you, use the lowest common denominator. In this case, that means well crafted, plain old HTML. Opening a PDF from lynx is certainly no fun. A document full of XML does not do the average person much good. A Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document does not help those without Microsoft Office or one of its disk-filling and compatible brethren. Those who surf the web without Javascript will certainly not bless your name when they cannot access information because they are unable to manipulate some little Javascript widget. For all that some might like XHTML to eventually become the page creation language of choice on line, does anyone truly think that browser makers will one day wake up and say, "XHTML2 does not have an IMG tag so we will no longer support it in our browser." Of course not. As long as there are millions and millions of documents on-line with IMG tags, browsers will support it and the lowest common denominator will win out again. Writing and choosing software to run on your systems is also an exercise in the lowest common denominator. I’m sure that Java is a great language for something. I admit to not having seen what that something is yet, but I’m sure it is out there somewhere. That hasn’t stopped thousands, if not millions, of people from writing applications in Java with the idea that it will "run anywhere." Those folks are of the opinion that Java is very much a lowest common denominator. 1 of 2 08.03.2005 14:01 Daemon News ’200410’ : ’"In Praise Of the Lowest C... http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200410/lcd.html Unfortunately, Java support on the various BSD’s is spotty, at best. As such, supporting software written in Java can be a trial on a BSD system. For instance, I wanted to use the Apache Forrest project on a BSD. However, my research led me to believe I could not do so without running a JRE in Linux emulation due to lagging native Java support on the various BSD’s. Software written in languages closer to the lowest common denominator, however, has no problems running on the various BSD’s. perl, python, and PHP, among others, constitute the lowest common denominator of software languages today. Software written in those languages generally compiles and runs flawlessly on the various BSD’s without extensive customization. At the same time, much of the same software can be run on Linux, Solaris, Windows, HP-UX (shudder), OS X, etc. So, while I cannot run Forrest on my BSD systems, I can run Geeklog, SquirrelMail, phpMyAdmin, and TMDA. Those packages all function without excessive monkeying around with compatibility libraries because they have all been written in languages with nearly universal interpreters. While the lowest common denominator can get us into trouble (think "Macarena" in the USA a few years ago), it does not deserve the general vilification it has received. The lowest common denominator can be your friend. Just keep a wary eye on it in case it flips on the TV to some sort of "Greatest Commercials of All Time" special.

2 of 2 08.03.2005 14:01 Daemon News ’200410’ : ’"Why They Use BSD: Netcra... http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200410/netcraft.html

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Why They Use BSD: Netcraft Search By George Rosamond Monthly Ezine Recently, Daemon News asked Mike Prettejohn from well-known web server survey firm Netcraft.com about why they use BSD. Here’s what Mike wrote: Search Initially [early 1995], we opted for FreeBSD because it was similar to SunOS, which we knew and liked. Get BSD Stuff We felt safer with FreeBSD because we were quite conscious of the security implications of the Internet. We wanted to run an operating system for which source was available in the expectation that fixes for security vulnerabilities or other serious bugs would become available more quickly, and if needed we would have the opportunity to write it ourselves. FreeBSD wasn’t a big investment in money or time, and so we thought if we wanted to replace it when something better came along it wouldn’t have cost us much. So far [nine years & counting ...] we’ve not felt the urge to replace it :) Mike If you would like to explain to Daemon News EZine readers why your firm uses BSD, send your comments to george at daemonnews dot org.

1 of 1 08.03.2005 14:01 Daemon News ’200410’ : ’"Why bother? "’ http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200410/dadvocate.html

October 2004 Get BSD New to BSD? Search BSD Submit News FAQ Contact Us Join Us

Why bother? Search By Poul-Henning Kamp Monthly Ezine I met Peter Salus the other evening. He was in Copenhagen for a talk, and he invited me out because he has started writing yet another computer history Search book (If you have not yet read "A quarter century of UNIX" and "Casting the NET," by all means do so). He told me that Kirk had told him to talk to me about FreeBSD, and his first Get BSD Stuff question, while we waited for our "Galletes" to arive was, "Why bother ?" There’s a Calvin and Hobbs strip where Calvin asks his dad "How come you live here with Mom instead of in a penthouse apartment with 21 scantily clad dancers ?" My face probably looked like Calvin’s dad’s: It was not a question I was mentally prepared for. There’s a gentleman, or at least a bloke, named Lloyd Scott, who is dressed like one, who is attempting to ride a penny-farthing bicycle from Perth to Sydney to raise funds for charity. That’s a cool thing to do, even if rather pointless, but I bet he has already answered the question "Why Bother" several times with a coherent and reasoned explanation for his madness. I don’t think I gave Peter a coherent answer that evening. But I promised myself I’d come up with one eventually, simply because it was too embarrasing not to know the answer when I’ve made over 6000 commits to the FreeBSD cvs tree over the last decade. It would have been easy if I could have pulled out an official project answer to the question, but there is no help there: we’ve never really sat down and answered that question in the project: we don’t have a "mission statement" or even a "project goal". Heck, the only reason we even have our cuddly, but politically incorrect, mascot is by default: we inherited him. I guess the closest we get to anything of the sort is the "FreeBSD: tools not policies" catchphrase which I coined some years ago (heavily inspired by the Software Tools concept, which you can read more about in Peter’s book). "FreeBSD - the power to serve" is about as lame a slogan for anything I have ever known. It is about as pointless as the time & temperature sign companies which have nothing else to advertise for put up in order to not leave their facade naked. But I digress. Why am I sitting here at ten in the night, writing a column for an e-zine that I don’t know when will come out next ? Why did I even volunteer to co-write this column in the first place ? Why will I rattle off on a night-train to Karlsruhe in a couple of weeks ("Be there or be a rectangular thing!") to participate in a conference about an operating system which nobody has heard about on the road where I live? Actually, scratch that: I’d go to Karlsruhe on any flimsy pretext to taste some of their local beer. Anyway... Why bother? I have been close to quitting the project a couple of times over the years. But each time, emails from friends and strangers and the soft seducing song of code needing improvement have lured me back. I guess that gives me personally an answer: I bother because I can make a positive difference in FreeBSD and have some fun with friends and likeminded individuals while doing so. But shouldn’t we also be able to answer the question as a project? Isn’t it about time, after a decade, for us to face that big existentialist question: Why bother? In the light of the increasing commercial momentum of Linux, not, by definition, an entirely good thing for them, and with "Linux Standards Base 2" looking like a strong contender for the long promised definitive UNIX standard, we could find ourselves relegated to being "a better linux than linux" if we are caught unprepared. 1 of 2 08.03.2005 14:01 Daemon News ’200410’ : ’"Why bother? "’ http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200410/dadvocate.html Why do we bother? Share your answer with us at Dæmon News: [email protected]

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