The 3ourn l of AUUG Inc. Volume 25 ¯ Number 4 December 2004
Features:
A Convert to the Fold 7 Lions Commentary, part 1 16
News:
Minutes of AUUG Annual General Meeting, 1 September 2004 54 AUUG 2005 annual conference: CFP 58 First Australian UNIX Developer’s Symposium: CFP 59 First Digital Pest Symposium 60
Regulars:
Editorial 1 President’s Column 3 My Home Network 4 This Issue’s CD 29 The Future of AUUG CDs 30 A Hacker’s Diary 31 AUUG Corporate Members 56 Letters to AUUG 56 About AUUGN 61 Chapter Meetings and Contact Details 62 AUUG Membership Application Form 63
ISSN 1035-7521 Print post approved by Australia Post - PP2391500002 AUUGN
The journal of AUUG Inc.
Volume 25, Number 3 September 2004
Editor ial
Frank Crawford
Well, after many, many years of involvement with mittee, preparing each edition. Curr ently, this AUUGN, I’ve finally been roped into writing the consists of Greg Lehey and myself, but we are editorial. In fact, AUUGN has a very long and keen to expand this by a few more, in an effort to distinguished history, providing important infor- spr ead the load. And as with previous changes, mation to generations of Unix users. During that we have a “new” approach to finding contribu- time, therehave been a range of editors all of tions. AUUG has a huge body of work, from whom have guided it through ups and downs. both the Annual Conference and regional meet- Certainly you will know many of the recent ones, ings that should be seen morewidely, especially such as David Purdue (current AUUG President), by those who weren’t able to attend these events. Gunther Feuereisen and most recently Con Zy- Over and above this, we arealways looking for maris (Open Source Advocate). In fact, if I go new columns, book reviews and one offpapers. back through the past AUUGNs, it is interesting In addition we will also be publishing items of in- that the editors wereall well respected in the ter est fr om thr oughout the Open Source and Unix Unix community, spending a number of years un- (yes thereissome “proprietary” Unix) community. dertaking duty for the community. These includ- AUUG has a very wide and knowledgeable com- ed such people as Jagoda Crawford (yes, my munity and we want to see items of interest to all wife), John Carey and Peter Ivanov. parts of it, and hope to see all those parts con- Each one of these editors has brought their own tributing. style and experiences to the role and the AU- Finally I’d like to thank all those who have con- UGNs of each period reflect this. We move from tributed and continue to contribute, and that all the early periods wherealot of the content was the readers continue to find AUUGN an important on new developments within the Unix kernel, on part of their universe. to softwaredevelopment, and now to an era dominated by Open Source development. If thereisone thing constant throughout the en- tir e time it is the difficulty in finding contributors. This has been tackled by differ ent editors in their own ways. We have had republication of other user journals (e.g. USENIX’s :login;) to publication of AUUG regional conferences, and on to reprint- ing of open source publications found around the Inter net. Well now we have a new era, Con has stepped down, and rather than putting the load on a sin- gle person, AUUGN will have an editorial com- AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 2December 2004
AUUG Membership and General Correspondence
The AUUG Secretar iat Andrew Freder ickCowie Operational Dynamics AUUG Inc GPO Box 4339 PO Box 7071 Sydney, NSW,2001 Baulkham Hills BC NSW 2153 Telephone: +61-2-9977-6866 Telephone: 02 8824 9511 [email protected] or 1800 625 655 (Toll-Fr ee) Facsimile: 02 8824 9522 Enno Davids Email: [email protected] Michael Still Phone: +61 414 382 568 [email protected] AUUG ExecutiveDirector Immediate past president: Elizabeth Carroll AUUG Inc Greg Lehey PO Box 7071 PO Box 460 Baulkham Hills BC NSW 2153 Echunga, SA, 5153 [email protected] Bus. Tel (08) 8388 8286, Mobile 0418 838 708, Fax (08) 8388 8725 AUUG BoardofDirector s [email protected] Email: [email protected] President Retur ning officer: David Purdue Jason Ozolins Sun Microsystems Level 6, 476 St Kilda Road Assistant Returning officer: Melbour ne, VIC 3004 Phone: +61 3 9869 6412, David Baldwin Fax: +61 3 9869 6288 [email protected] See page 61 for information about AUUGN. Vice-president Ste veLander s AUUG Incorporated gratefully acknowledges the Digital Smarties support of its corporate sponsor: PO Box 717 Willetton WA6155 Business phone: +61 8 9313 6868 Business fax: +61 8 9313 6077 [email protected] Secretar y Jonathon Coombes Cybersite Consulting Pty Ltd 34 Newcastle Road, Wallsend NSW 2287 Business Telephone: +61 2 4965 6989 [email protected] Tr easurer Gordon Hubbard Custom Technology Australia Pty Ltd 3Spring Street, Bus Tel: 02 9659 9590, Bus Fax: 02 9659 9510 [email protected] Ordinar y boardmember s Grant Allen Adr ian Close Cybersource Pty.Ltd. 4, 10 Queen Street Melbourne VIC 3000 Business Telephone: +61 3 9621 2377 Business Fax: +61 3 9621 2377 Mobile: +61 417 346 094 [email protected] December 2004 3AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4
• The Digital Pests Symposium—to be held in President’sColumn Melbour ne on the 8th of February, this will featur e pr esentations discussing how to handle David Purdue
lar open source software, and AUUGN will ap- pear on those—in some differ ent bundles to facil- itate reading online or printing your own paper My Home Network copy. In 2005 we plan to move from distributing CDs to DVDs, so that we can send you even Fr ank Crawford
handle (e.g. “greylist”), a socket to communicate biggest drawbacks is from spam, etc, that is redi- thr ough (/var/milter-gr eylist/milter-gr eylist.sock), rected from some mail relay host. and optionally some other arguments. The final In particular this comes into play with site relay option, confINPUT_MAIL_FILTERS,specifies the hosts that arenot using the same facilities, that order that the milters areapplied in. In this case, ar e specified as higher value MX records. This is gr eylist first, followed by clmilter and finally spa- because spam engines will connect to these sites, massassin.Ifthis option is not given, then the or- deliver mail for you and then disconnect. Follow- der of definition is used. ing this, the relay sites will then keep trying to de- The next milter I installed was spamass-milter, liver the mail, and in most cases succeed. Even which runs all mail through spamassassin,toper- worse, some spam engines deliberately search for for m standard anti-spam checks. While this isn’t these relays and use them instead of the target too differ ent to the previous invocation, thereare host. This has meant that I’ve dropped all the acouple of differ ences for a site wide setup. The MX’s for my domain, because it was causing such biggest one being how to handle multiple ad- issues. Even worse, redir ections fr om some of my dr essees. For a single addressee, it attempts to old email addresses also suffer from this problem match it against a local user (note, this happens and arenow the main source of my spam. even when it may not be delivered locally), but if So, with these updates to my sendmail configura- ther e ar e multiple addressees, then the defaults tion, I have dramatically reduced my spam and for a “standard local user” areused. This may mor e importantly, viruses, although I haven’t mean that some specific settings may not take ef- completely eliminated it. However,with the use fect in these cases. Ther e ar e acouple of differ- of some of the new features of evolution,inpar- ent milters to invoke spamassassin, but the one I ticular the filtering of junk mail, it is almost gone. am using was from DAG’s repository (http://dag.wieers.com/packages/spamass-milter/). Of course all these updates won’t stop me receiv- ing good mail, and I hope you will send me such The final milter and the one that is most interest- items. I’d really like to hear what you areupto ing is milter-gr eylist,which is something I heard with your home network, or even with your mail about at a recent conference. It implements a filtering. Better yet, by the time I get it, I should new scheme to combat spam and viruses, by have my dead disk fixed and will be back on putting a delay in the acceptance of the mail. track! The assumption is that valid mail will be spooled and re-sent later,hence a delay is acceptable, See you all next year,have a good Christmas and while spam or virus engines will not retry and so aHappy New Year. it will be dropped. A full description of this can be found at http://pr ojects.puremagic.com/gr eylist- ing/. While this is a bit of a fudge it does seem to work well. The standard process used by the gr eylist- ing milter is the first time a new mail item at- tempts to be delivered, it collects the details of who sent it, who it was addressed to and what host it will come from, and then rejects it with a temporary error.After a configurable time (usual- ly 30mins) if mail with the same parameters is re- ceived, it will accept it. This triplet is also re- member ed for some time after to allow immediate delivery, rather than being “greylisted”. Of course it is also configurable to allow certain hosts or users to be automatically accepted (i.e. “whitelist- ed”) or even to accept mail that is authenticated. While thereare a couple of these milters around, the one I’m using is from http://hcp- net.fr ee.fr/milter-gr eylist/ and fits in fine. Ihave notice a dramatic drop in the spam and virus mail Iamreceiving ever since the installation of gr eylisting, although it isn’t perfect. One of the December 2004 7AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4
SourceForge.net [SOURCEFORGE] and had a real- AConvert tothe Fold istic idea of the effort involved in changing plat- Replacing Windows™ infrastructurewith Linux™ for m. He also had a number of new ideas that he wanted to develop, and pursuing them using an David Newall
Agood friend and colleague asked me to help We designed a new network comprising a central him move his infrastructurefromWindows 2000 routing firewall with four segments. One segment to Linux. He made this decision after Microsoft is for official servers and is maintained at high-se- took six months to repair a serious security vul- curity. The second segment is for non-servers nerability in Windows (#AD20040210) and is a medium-security segment. The final two (#TA04-041A)his machines suddenly started segments areq external internet links, one ADSL sending large amounts of data to Russia. He had and one wireless link to cable; both areconsid- thirteen machines, ran his own softwaredevelop- er ed low-security. ment and computer consultancy, and hosted twelve virtual domains (including e-shops) for clients This was a major change in infrastructure, to put it mildly. Over the years I had shown him unix a few times, and each time he was impressed by the incremen- tal improvements in ease of use and aesthetics Eventually he agreed it was as easy to install as Windows. He had discovered Open Source and AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 8December 2004
ed via ADSL, either using the machine’s assigned public IP address, or by NATing the non-routable addr ess using the router’s own public address.
De vil-Linux Prior to my arrival, my colleague spent time re- searching differ ent Linux distributions, and found Devil-Linux [DEVIL] What he liked about it was that it runs directly from CD so there’s no chance of programs being modified by intruders. (This concer n might seem paranoid until you consider Figure1:New NetworkTopolog y why he was replacing his infrastructure.) Devil stor es configuration details on a floppy or USB disk and so when a machine dies, as they all Exter nal Links and Ad-hoc computers(Games) eventually will, restoring service can be as simple as inserting the CD and configuration disks into a The external links, almost by definition, have no new machine and turning on power. security, and aresuitable for ad-hoc networks for games, public access browsing and so on. Ma- Iparticularly like Devil’s configuration data being chines on the ADSL switch aregiven dynamic ad- stor ed on a separate disk. It permits use of RCS dr esses fr om asmall pool of public IP addresses, to storedif ferent versions, and use of difftoex- and route all of their packets via the ADSL mo- amine changes prior to committing them. Bearing dem. Machines on the wireless network aregiv- in mind that my colleague was somewhat new to en dynamic addresses from a pool of non- unix, my being able to easily see his changes us- routable addresses, and all of their packets are ing one diffprovided me with a sense of control NATedvia the cable modem. and security that I might otherwise not have en- joyed. Ser ver Segment Iwas concerned that the system would be too The Server segment is the most restrictive envi- slow running offCD, but that hasn’t been the ronment. Access is granted according to specific case. The system is slower to initially load a pro- type of services on specific machines. Machines gram, but after first use it remains in cache and ar e given fixed, public IP addresses. New net- subsequent invocations are“immediate”. I work connections areprefer entially routed via the wouldn’t recommend running unix from CD for a ADSL link, but fall back to a NATedconnection general workstation, but it does seem to work via the cable modem, if necessary. well for a dedicated purpose appliance.
De velopment Segment fwbuilder The development segment has less restrictive pro- My colleague chose Fwbuilder [FWBUILDER] to tection. As ageneral rule, incoming connections maintain his firewall rules, and using a simple ar e not permitted, but no restriction is made on awk script, he also uses it to generate his DHCP connections to external machines. Most machines and DNS tables. Fwbuilder is a simple GUI tool on the development network aredynamically as- which you use to describe your network, with the signed addresses from a pool of non-routable ad- ultimate aim of automatically generating a script dr esses. These machines have some limited trust for your firewall. In addition to Linux’s iptables,it relation with machines on the Server Segment, in can emit rules for Cisco PIX, ipf, ipfilter,and that the server machines can be trust that the data Berkeley packet filter.Fwbuilder saves your data really did come from a local machine. in an XML format, and this made it easy to write a script to extract MAC and IP addresses and gener- Routing ate DHCP and DNS tables for the complete net- Requests from the server segment areconsider ed work. As anice touch, when you select “Install”, important, and so all connections arerouted via fwbuilder calls our installation script which auto- the ADSL link if it’s up, and otherwise fall back to matically builds new iptable rules, Bind DNS and aNAT edconnection via the cable modem. The ISC DHCP tables, transfers them to the firewall us- development segment is considered less impor- ing SSH, and re-loads the appropriate services. tant, and for cost and load balancing purposes, it’s web traffic is routed via the cable using a sin- gle NATedaddr ess. Other types of data arerout- December 2004 9AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4
NetworkLogger be authenticated using a wide variety of mecha- We built a logger for the two external links using nisms, and it’s easy to write new mechanisms. aPCwith extra network cards. Packets are logged using Ethereal [ETHEREAL] with log files Web rotated hourly. This is discussed in the interview, My colleague originally had a number of virtual at the end of the paper. domains which he hosted, using a mixtureofASP and static pages. The plan was to move the static pages to Apache, and indeed Apache was loaded Migrate Services onto the new server,and to install a new IIS ma- chine for the pages which couldn’t be moved to Apache. Due to a late change in direction, my Email colleague instead chose to retir e some applica- tions and move others to third party servers. The business provides email-account hosting for a Apache is still running but is waiting for pages to number of domains, and we felt it was important serve! to choose the email server wisely. Sendmail [SENDMAIL] has been the mainstay of mail servers for morethan twenty years. It is powerful, flexi- ble, and popular.Although the numbers area Post Project Interview year old, [CREDENTIA03] reported that Sendmail is still the leading mail transport, with morethan Four months after completing the project I inter- twice as many servers as the second place getter, viewed my colleague to hear his thoughts about although it is losing market share [BERNSTEIN]. the change. Her e is an edited transcript of that Sendmail used to be my choice, and I have no interview. doubt that it could have easily met my colleague’s needs, but I advised against it. A30second Overall Impression glimpse at a Sendmail configuration file might help explain why. [See figure0onpage 13]. Q. What’sthe best thing about moving to For someone switching from Windows, I think I unix? can sum it up with one, simple statement: Send- A. The best thing? Ithink the thing that strikes mail is complex. It’s true that most people config- me most in my mind, is the one to know that ur e Sendmail using the .mc files, and that it can ther e isn’t any code in any system that I’m run- and does do everything you’relikely ever to need a ning that hasn’t been looked at by a number of mail system to do, but it is also takes a lot of learn- pairs of eyes, which means therearen’t secret ing. Therehave also been a fair number of securi- spies in the code; and if therewas one found it ty incidents during it’s long history. We looked at would be so devastating for the people who tried alter native mail servers and felt that Courier Mail to get away with it and the companies who were Server [COURIER] (#COURIER) would be better. associated with them, and anybody associated with it. The code is theresoyou can see it. Cour ier My colleague’s needs weremodest. So it’s the number of eyes, I’m really happy about the number of eyes that have looked at this thing His clients use Microsoft Outlook and Outlook befor e me so that I don’t have to be as con- Expr ess, but don’t use non-email functions, such cer ned. as calendering. Ther efor e it was sufficient to pro- vide SMTP,and POP3 or IMAP. Q. What’sthe wor st thing about moving to Courier is well documented and supports an ex- unix? tensive array of features. In addition to SMTP, A. I suppose it’s the unknown. Like you know IMAP and POP3 services, Courier includes Web- your backyard but there’s always that little corner mail, a minimal but functional web interface for that you don’t really know. Well, in linux, the sending and reading mail, which is a nice extra. cor ners ar e alot bigger than in Windows. I know Courier stores mail in Maildir format [BERN- it works, I’m happy to install the upgrades, but I STEIN2] (#BERNSTEIN2), which is much faster have to dedicate months of my life to some sub- than traditional unix mailboxes (mbox). It sup- component to really get to know it. ports virtual email addresses, quotas, LDAP, Pr obably the only other thing that would give me comes with a mailing list software, a rich filtering abit of angst is: I’ve reset my clock once. When facility and can send and receive faxes. Users can AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 10 December 2004
does the same amount of threat that Microsoft is enduring now, when does the same sort of threat Q. What services did you shut down? raise it’s ugly head at Linux? Has Linux got five years beforeitsuf fers the same threat as Microsoft A. Web serving. Ther e wer e thirteen domains, or has it got 20 years? nine werebur ned to CD and handed back, and the other four have been moved somewhereelse. Q. What was the hardest thing about moving In fact at the time I was going to put in a Win- to unix? dows server in to run the Windows domains, and the others, I could have done them on Apache. A. The short answer is that there’s a lot there. It’s I’d still consider putting in an IIS server,but just the whole back yard thing. make sureitwas very, very tight. Cur rent Use Samba
The big one for me was Samba, because other- Q. What machines areyou running now? wise it’s too hard to move stuffaround. It’s got to A. Well right now the only ones I’ve got running be easy to move stuffaround otherwise it’s too ar e my new firewall, my web and email server, hard to play with. Primarily Samba lets all of my my samba server,and my windows game ma- machines, based on who’s using them and where chine. And anotebook, well I’ve got three note- they are, sharedata. If it wasn’t for Samba I’d be books, and my windows development machine. running two networks: A windows network and a Ther e’s another eight machines I don’t have any unix network and never the two shall meet. It’s use for at the moment. I’ve got some ideas for the glue that binds them together (other than them like backup servers. whatever application is on them.)
Q. How manyWindows servers doyou still Q. How doyou shareprinter s? run? Idon’t print directly from linux at this stage be- A. None. I’ve changed my entirefocus. Now I’m cause the bulk of my printing comes from win- focusing on developing a whole lot of ideas I’ve dows. had over the years. NetworkUse and Security With Windows letting me down so harshly, I had an awakening of whether or not I really wanted to provide services to people. It’s hard enough Q. How has your traf fic use changed? for Telstra and major corporations to do these A. I use about 1.2 to 1.8G a month. It turns out things well, when you get flaky this and flake that that before, about half of the traffic was the out- that it becomes very, very painful, so I pretty side world trying to break in. The firewall keeps much made the active decision to leave serving that out. My usage has about halved. Istill do for others. The only things I’ll be serving in the the same email, my usage therehasn’t changed futur e ar e my own things. I’ll serve my own web much. Maybe it’s gone up a little as they put on a sites and my own email and my own this and my new staffmember but it hasn’t changed much. own that, so the only person who can be dam- aged by any sort of failurewill be myself and Q. Havetherebeen anysecur ity incidents maybe immediate family, no external company. since you converted, and if so, What that new focus effectively means is that a lot have you been affected by them? of the stuffIwas doing is no longer going to be necessary because it all came from the fact that I A. Therehave been some. I’ve got my firewall was putting together custom serving environ- tur ned down so tight, even to the point of having ments for customers. special permission to contact the Windows patch server.Nothing goes on now unless I allow it. Q. How central has unix been to your deci- What I do find is that when something stops sion to changefocus? working I was far moreused to pulling out a win- dows machine and checking its network or moni- A. Well the ideas I’ve got aregoing to build on tor cable. Now thereare dif ferent levels of top of a lot of tools, and all of those tools are routers and firewalls, and so finding a fault, available in unix for free. I couldn’t have afford- ther e’s alot morethings to look at to get the final ed all those tools on a Windows system. verdict. December 2004 11 AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4
Q. Are you happytohavealevel of control security had been compromised and once you’ve that detailed? got that you might as well refor mat and start again. But why do it with windows? A. No, I wish I could do my job without it. Final Thoughts Q. Tell me about your networklogger.
Over the last couple of months I’ve had a few Q. Isthereanything you’dhavedone different- times when an email wasn’t getting through for ly? one of my clients, so for a couple of hours I cap- tur ed every packet and I narrowed it down to the A. No. The only thing that might have changed particular IP address and and no, I’m perfectly was because Sourceforge had a certain set of soft- fine, it’s their end that’s got the problem. Maybe war e available at that particular time. At another seven or eight cases like that wherethe only way time it might have been a differ ent choice, or per- Icould really truly know was by looking at the haps something might not have been available, traf fic. but apart from that I’d have done it the same. Acouple of weeks ago therewas another Mi- Q. What advice would you givesomeone con- cr osoft thing when all of a sudden the traffic crept templating making the same switch? up a bit on my only three Windows machines and it was just the people out theretrying it on, but A. Go to Sourceforge. the machines behind the linux firewall wereunaf- Spend about a month looking at what’s there, and fected. I also looked at packets coming to the what you need, because everything’s thereand fir ewall that weretrying to break in to windows you’ve got multiple choices for everything. It machines which I keep on the outside of the fire- doesn’t really matter which one you choose, so wall and don’t have the benefit of the security. just pick one and go with it. No doubt there’s many tools like it, but the graph- ic interface, whereyou can colourise it, you can look through huge amounts of stuffand sort it. References It’s very, very powerful. I used to have my note- book doing nothing but sniffing packets so that I [AD20040210-2] could take it to clients. Athousand dollar note- eEye Digital Security Advisory book and Linux used for nothing else. AD20040210-2, Micr osoft ASN.1 Library Bit The beautiful part of it is my logger just copies String Heap Corruption, hour long chunks of data, and even that alone, (http://www.eeye.com/html/Resear ch/Advi- you can run your eye down it and see what’s go- sories/AD20040210-2.html) ing on, and if you’rereally keen you can find out [AD20040210] exactly what’s going on. Up to this point in my eEye Digital Security Advisory life I’ve never had everything beforeme. You AD20040210, Micr osoft ASN.1 Library used to feel like you could look and touch and Length Overflow Heap Corruption, maybe think you knew what was going on but (http://www.eeye.com/html/Resear ch/Advi- you never really did know what was going on. sories/AD20040210.html) The way that Ethereal breaks the packets down [BERNSTEIN2] and understands the packets, it’s not just saying D. J. Bernstein, Using maildir format, her e’s apacket and it’s from this address to that (http://cr.yp.to/pr oto/maildir.html) addr ess. Ther e’s just huge amounts of data which [BERNSTEIN] it gives. D. J. Bernstein, Inter net host SMTP server survey,(http://cr.yp.to/surveys/smtpsoft- Half the battle, of course, is security. With my war e6.txt) early Windows environments, I could get in, but [COURIER] have each machine unto itself and I’d only do Double Precision, Inc, Courier Mail Server, what was requir ed on each machine. The prob- (http://www.courier-mta.or g) lem was that the patches and the vulnerabilities [CREDENTIA02] for windows werecoming out so quickly, and try- Cr edentia, E-Mail Server Survey Results, ing to keep ten machines unbelievably, perfectly (http://www.cr edentia.cc/sur- aligned with no gaps. Somehow I got a gap in veys/smtp/200212/) ther e and someone got in and re-jigged me so [CREDENTIA03] that it was no longer a single virus but it was my Cr edentia, E-Mail Server Survey Results for AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 12 December 2004
April 2003 (http://www.cr edentia.cc/sur- grams werecomposed using dia. veys/smtp/200304/) [DEVIL] Devil-Linux, (http://www.devil-linux.or g) [ETHEREAL] Ether eal, (http://www.ether eal.com) [FEDORA] Fedora™ Project, Fedora Core1,(http://fe- dora.r edhat.com) [FWBUILDER] Fir ewall Builder,(http://www.fwbuilder.or g) [MS04-007] Micr osoft Security Bulletin MS04-007, ASN.1 Vulnerability Could Allow Code Exe- cution (828028),(http://mi- cr osoft.com/technet/security/bul- letin/MS04-007.asp) [SENDMAIL] The Sendmail Consortium, Sendmail, (http://sendmail.or g) [SOURCEFORGE] SourceForge.net, (http://sour ceforge.net) [TA04-041A] US-CER T Technical Cyber Security Alert, TA04-041A, Multiple Vulnerabilities in Mi- cr osoft ASN.1 Library,(http://www.us- cert.gov/cas/techalerts/TA04-041A.html)
About David Newall
David is a local unix luminary, and a softwareex- pert of almost 30 years experience. His first pro- gramming language was APL, and then Pascal, BASIC and FORTRAN in quick succession. He has worked on a wide variety of machines and envir onments, including the venerable IBM 1130, Apple ][, Cyber 173, Vax and, of course, the ubiq- uitous "Wintel." David discovered UNIX in the early 1980’s, and his first commercial use of it was in 1986, using UNIX System V on a Motorola 68000 made by Stride Micro. He is very vocal within his local lin- ux community and has been a member of AUUG for over ten years. As an independent, private consultant, David spe- cialises in multi-tiered, client/server systems, or “making computers talk to computers.” Windows™ and Microsoft™®; apparently arereg- ister ed trademark thingos belonging to Microsoft Corporation. Linux™ is not; it belongs to Linus Torvalds. Other non-attributed marks may appear in this paper,and they belong to their respective owners. This document was written using vi.The dia- December 2004 13 AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4
# #Copyright (c) 1998-2003 Sendmail, Inc. and its suppliers. #All rights reserved. #Copyright (c) 1983, 1995 Eric P. Allman. All rights reserved. #Copyright (c) 1988, 1993 #The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. # #Byusing this file, you agree to the terms and conditions set #forth in the LICENSE file which can be found at the top level of #the sendmail distribution. # # ###################################################################### ###################################################################### ##### ##### SENDMAIL CONFIGURATION FILE ##### ##### built by [email protected] on Tue Oct 28 16:06:03 EST 2003 ##### in /usr/src/build/320829-i386/BUILD/sendmail-8.12.10/cf/cf ##### using ../ as configuration include directory ##### ###################################################################### ##### ##### DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE! Only edit the source .mc file. ##### ###################################################################### ###################################################################### ##### $Id: cfhead.m4,v 8.108.2.3 2003/04/03 17:51:51 ca Exp $ ##### ##### $Id: cf.m4,v 8.32 1999/02/07 07:26:14 gshapiro Exp $ ##### ##### setup for Red Hat Linux ##### ##### $Id: linux.m4,v 8.13 2000/09/17 17:30:00 gshapiro Exp $ ##### ##### $Id: local_procmail.m4,v 8.21.42.1 2002/11/17 04:25:07 ca Exp $ ##### ##### $Id: no_default_msa.m4,v 8.2 2001/02/14 05:03:22 gshapiro Exp $ ##### [...] ##### $Id: proto.m4,v 8.649.2.24 2003/08/04 21:14:26 ca Exp $ ##### #level 10 config file format V10/Berkeley #override file safeties - setting this option compromises system security, #addressing the actual file configuration problem is preferred #need to set this before any file actions are encountered in the cf file #O DontBlameSendmail=safe #default LDAP map specification #need to set this now before any LDAP maps are defined #O LDAPDefaultSpec=-h localhost ################## #local info # ################## #myLDAP cluster #need to set this before any LDAP lookups are done (including classes) #D{sendmailMTACluster}$m Cwlocalhost #file containing names of hosts for which we receive email Fw/etc/mail/local-host-names [...] ############### #Options # ############### #strip message body to 7 bits on input? OSevenBitInput=False #8-bit data handling #O EightBitMode=pass8 #wait for alias file rebuild (default units: minutes) OAliasWait=10 #location of alias file OAliasFile=/etc/aliases #minimum number of free blocks on filesystem OMinFreeBlocks=100 [...] ########################### #Message precedences # ########################### Pfirst-class=0 Pspecial-delivery=100 Plist=-30 Pbulk=-60 Pjunk=-100 ##################### #Trusted users # ##################### #this is equivalent to setting class "t" Ft/etc/mail/trusted-users Troot Tdaemon Tuucp ######################### #Format of headers # AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 14 December 2004
######################### H?P?Return-Path: <$g> HReceived: $?sfrom $s $.$?_($?s$|from $.$_) $.$?{auth_type}(authenticated$?{auth_ssf} bits=${auth_ssf}$.) $.by $j ($v/$Z)$?r with $r$. id $i$?{tls_version} (version=${tls_version} cipher=${cipher} bits=${cipher_bits} verify=${verify})$.$?u for $u; $|; $.$b H?D?Resent-Date: $a H?D?Date: $a H?F?Resent-From: $?x$x <$g>$|$g$. H?F?From: $?x$x <$g>$|$g$. H?x?Full-Name: $x #HPosted-Date: $a #H?l?Received-Date: $b H?M?Resent-Message-Id: <$t.$i@$j> H?M?Message-Id: <$t.$i@$j> # ###################################################################### ###################################################################### ##### ##### REWRITING RULES ##### ###################################################################### ###################################################################### ############################################ ### Ruleset 3--Name Canonicalization ### ############################################ Scanonify=3 #handle null input (translate to <@> special case) R$@ $@ <@> #strip group: syntax (not inside angle brackets!) and trailing semicolon R$* $: $1 <@> mark addresses R$* < $* > $* <@> $: $1 < $2 > $3 unmark
# SEnvToL R$+ < @ $* > $: $1 strip host part # #Header sender rewriting # SHdrFromL R<@> $n errors to mailer-daemon R@ <@ $*> $n temporarily bypass Sun bogosity R$+ $: $>AddDomain $1 add local domain if needed R$* $: $>MasqHdr $1 do masquerading # #Header recipient rewriting # SHdrToL R$+ $: $>AddDomain $1 add local domain if needed R$* < @ *LOCAL* > $* $: $1 < @ $j . > $2 # #Common code to add local domain name (only if always-add-domain) # SAddDomain R$* < @ $* > $* $@ $1 < @ $2 > $3 already fully qualified R$+ $@ $1 < @ *LOCAL* > add local qualification Mlocal, P=/usr/bin/procmail, F=lsDFMAw5:/|@qSPfhn9, S=EnvFromL/HdrFromL, R=EnvToL/HdrToL, T=DNS/RFC822/X-Unix, A=procmail -t -Y -a $h -d $u Mprog, P=/usr/sbin/smrsh, F=lsDFMoqeu9, S=EnvFromL/HdrFromL, R=EnvToL/HdrToL, D=$z:/, T=X-Unix/X-Unix/X-Unix, A=smrsh -c $u
Figure2:Extract from sendmail.cf file AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 16 December 2004
Acommentar y on the Sixth Edition UNIX Operating Sys- Processor Status Word tem, part2 This sixteen bit register has subfields which are interpr eted as follows: John Lions bits description This is the second article in a series of reprints of 14,15 current mode (00 = kernel;) the infamous “Lions Book”, written by John Lions 12,13 previous mode (11 = user;) ar ound 1977. 5,6,7 processor priority (range 0..7) The copyright notice below is the original. It is 4trap bit now of historical importance only. The current 3 N, set if the previous result was nega- version is repr oduced with the kind permission of Peter Salus, who has full rights to repr oduce the tive documents. 2 Z, set if the previous result was zero 1 V, set if the previous result gave an The format of this installment has been adapted to mor e closely resemble the original. We’r e not try- over flow ing to repr oduce the original nr off output: in- 0 C, set if the previous operation gave a stead we’reaiming for a reasonable approxima- carry tion of what it might have looked like had it been The processor can operate in two differ ent set in tr off. modes: kernel and user.Ker nel mode is the more privileged of the two and is reserved by the oper- ating system for its own use. The choice of mode Chapter 2 deter mines: • The set of memory management segmentation registers which is used to translate program virtual addresses to physical addresses; Fundamentals • The actual register used as r6,the “stack pointer”; UNIX runs on the larger models of the PDP11 se- ries of computers manufactured by Digital Equip- • Whether certain instructions such as “halt” will ment Corporation. This chapter provides a brief be obeyed. summary of certain selected features of these computers with particular refer ence to the PDP11/40. General Register s If the reader has not previously made the ac- quaintance of the PDP11 series then he is directed The processor incorporates a number of sixteen forthwith to the “PDP11 Processor Handbook”, bit registers of which eight areaccessible at any published by DEC. time as “general registers”. These areknown as APDP11 computer consists of a processor (also r0, r1, r2, r3, r4, r5, r6 and r7. called a CPU connected to one or morememory The first six of the general registers areavailable storage units and peripheral controllers via a bidi- for use as accumulators, address pointers or index rectional parallel communication line called the registers. The convention in UNIX for the use of “Unibus”. these registers is as follows: r0, r1 ar e used as temporary accumula- The Processor tors during expression evaluation, to re- tur n results from a procedur e, and in The processor,which is designed around a six- some cases to communicate actual pa- teen bit word length for instructions, data and rameters during a procedur e call; pr ogram addr esses, incorporates a number of r2, r3, r4 ar e used for local variables high speed registers. during procedur e execution. Their val- ues arealmost always stored upon pro- cedur e entry, and restor ed upon proce- dur e exit; December 2004 17 AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4
r5 is used as the head pointer to a “dynamic asr Shift all bits one place to the right. Bit 15 chain” of procedur e activation records stored is replicated and bit 0 is loaded into C; in the current stack. It is referr ed to as the beq Branch if eaual, i.e. if Z = l; “envir onment pointer”. bge Branch if greater than or equal to, i.e. if The last two of the “general registers” do have a N=V; special significance and aretoall intents, “special purpose”: bhi Branch if higher,i.e if C = 0 and Z = 0; r6 (also known as “sp”) is used as the bhis Branch if higher or the same, i.e. if C = stack pointer.The PDP11/40 processor 0; incorporates two separate registers bic Clear each bit to zerointhe destination which may be used as “sp”, depending that corresponds to a non-zerobit in the on whether the processor is in kernel or source; user mode. No other one of the general registers is duplicated in this way; bis Per forman“inclusive or” of source and destination and storethe result in the r7 (also known as “pc”) is used as the destination; pr ogram instruction address register. bit Per formalogical “and” of the source and destination to set the condition Instr uction Set codes; ble Branch if greater than or equal to, i.e if The PDP11 instruction set includes double, single Z=1orN=V; and zerooperand instructions. Instruction length blo Branch if lower (than zero), if C = l; is usually one word, with some instructions being extended to two or three words with additional bne Branch if not equal (to zero), i.e. if Z = addr essing infor mation. 0; With single operand instructions, the operand is br Branch to a location within the range usually called the “destination”; with double oper- (.˜-128, .˜+127) where“.” is the current and instructions, the two operands arecalled the location; “source” and “destination”. The various modes of clc Clear C; addr essing ar e described later. clr Clear destination to zero; The following instructions have been used in the file “m40.s” i.e. the file of assembly language sup- cmp Compar e the source and destination to port routines for use with the 11/40 processor. set the condition codes. N is set if the Note that N, Z, V and C arethe condition codes source value is less than the destination i.e. bits in the processor status word (“ps”), and value; that these areset as side effects of many instruc- dec Subtract one from the contents of the tions besides just “bit”, “cmp” and “tst” (whose destination; stated function is to set the condition codes). div The 32 bit two’s complement integer adc Add the contents of the C bit to the des- stor ed in rnand r(n+l) (whereniseven) tination; is divided by the source operand. The add Add the source to the destination; quotient is left in rn, and the remainder in r(n+l); ash Shift the contents of the defined register left the number of times specified by the inc Add one to the contents of the destina- shift count. (A negative value implies a tion; right shift.); jmp Jump to the destination; ashc Similar to “ash” except that two registers jsr Jump to subroutine. Register values are ar e involved; shuf fled as follows: pc, rn, --(sp) = dest., asl Shift all bits one place to the left. Bit 0 pc, rn becomes 0 and bit 15 is loaded into C; mfpi Push onto the current stack the value of the designated word in the “previous” addr ess space; AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 18 December 2004
mov Copy the source value to the destination; clr r0 mtpi Pop the current stack and storethe value mov rl,r0 in the designated word in the “previous” add r4,r2 addr ess space; In the following modes, the designated register mul Multiply the contents of rnand the contains an address value which is used to locate source. If n is even, the product is left in the operand. Register Deferred Mode.The regis- rn and r(n+l); ter contains the address of the operand, e.g. reset Set the INIT line on the Unibus for 10 inc (rl) milliseconds. This will have the effect of asr (sp) reinitialising all the device controllers; add (r2),rl ror Rotate all bits of the destination one Autoincr ement Mode.The register contains the place to the right. Bit 0 is loaded into C, addr ess of the operand. As a side effect, the regis- and the previous value of C is loaded in- ter is incremented after the operation, e.g. to bit 15; rts Retur n fr om subr outine. Reload pc from clr (rl)+ mfpi (r0)+ rn,and reload rnfromthe stack; mov (r1)+,r0 mov r2,(r0)+ rtt Retur n fr om interrupt or trap. Reload cmp (sp)+,(sp)+ both pc and ps from the stack; sbc Subtract the carry bit from the destina- Autodecr ement Mode.The register is decrement- tion; ed and then operand, e.g. sob Subtract one from the designated regis- inc -(r0) ter.Ifthe result is not zero, branch back mov -(r1),r2 mov (r0)+,-(sp) “of fset” words; clr -(sp) sub Subtract the source from the destination; Index Mode.The register contains a value which swab Exchange the high and low order bytes is added to a sixteen bit word following the in- in the destination; struction to formthe operand address, e.g. tst Set the condition codes, N and Z, ac- clr 2(r0) cording to the contents of the destina- movb 6(sp),(sp) tion; movb _reloc(r0),r0 mov -10(r2),(rl) wait Idle the processor and release the Unibus until a hardwareinterrupt occurs. Depending on your viewpoint, in this mode the The “byte” version of the following instructions register is either an index register or a base regis- ar e used in the file “m40.s”, as well as the “word” ter.The latter case actually predominates in versions described above: “m40.s”. The third example above is actually one of the few uses of a register as an index register. bis inc (Note that “ reloc” is an acceptable variable clr mov name.) Thereare two addressing modes whose cmp tst use is limited to the following two examples: jsr pc,(r0)+ jmp *0f(r0) Addressing Modes The first example involves the use of the “autoin- Much of the novelty and complexity of the PDP11 cr ement deferr ed”mode. (This occurs in the rou- instruction set lies in the variety of addressing tine “call” on lines 0785, 0799.) The address of a modes which may be used for defining the source routine intended for execution is to be found in and destination operands. the word addressed by r0, i.e. two levels of indi- The addressing modes which areused in “m40.s” rection areinvolved. The fact that r0 is incre- ar e described below. mented as a side effect is not relevant in this us- age. Register Mode.The operand resides in one of the general registers, e.g. The second example (which occurs on lines 1055, December 2004 19 AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4
1066) is an instance of the “index deferred”mode. (c) If two or morestatements occur on the The destination of the “jump” is the content of the same line, they must be separated by word whose address is labelled by “0f” plus the semicolons; value of r0 (a small positive integer). This is a (d) The character “.” is used to denote the standard way to implement a multi-way switch. curr ent location; The following two modes use the program (e) UNIX assembler uses the characters $ counter as the designated register to achieve cer- and “*” wherethe DEC assemblers use tain special effects. Immediate Mode.This is the “r espectively. pc autoincrement mode. The operand is thus ex- tracted from the program string, i.e. it becomes (f) An identifier consists of a set of alphanu- an immediate operand, e.g. meric characters (including the under- scor e). Only the first eight characters add $2,r0 ar e significant and the first may not be add $2,(rl) bic $17,r0 numeric; mov $KISA0,r0 mov $77406,(rl)+ (g) Names which occur in “C” programs for variables which aretobeknown global- Relative Mode.This is the pc index mode. The ly, aremodified by the addition of a pre- addr ess relative to the current program counter fix consisting of a single underscore. value is extracted from the program string and Thus for example the variable “ regloc” added to the pc value to formthe absolute ad- which occurs on line 1025 in the assem- dr ess of the operand, e.g. bly language file, “m40.s”, refers to the same variable as “regloc” at line 2677 of bic $340,PS the file, “trap.c”; bit $l,SSR0 inc SSR0 (h) Thereare two kinds of statement labels: mov (sp),KISA6 name labels and numeric labels. The lat- ter consist of a single digit followed by a It may be noted that each of the modes “index”, colon, and need not be unique. Arefer- “index deferred”, “immediate” and “relative” ex- ence to “nf” where“n” is a digit, refers tends the instruction size by one word. to the first occurrence of the label “n:” The existence of the “autoincrement” and “au- found by searching forward. Arefer- todecr ement” modes, together with the special at- ence to “nb” is similar except that the tributes of r6, make it conveniently possible to search is conducted in the backwards di- stor e many operands in a stack, or LIFO list, rection; which grows downwards in memory. Thereare a (i) An assignment statement of the form number of advantages which flow from this: code string lengths areshorter and it is easier to write identifier = expression position independent code. associates a value and type with the identifier.Inthe example Unix Assembler .=60+ˆ+. The UNIX assembler is a two pass assembler without macrofacilities. A full description may be the operator ’+ˆ+’ delivers the value of found in the “UNIX Assembler Reference Manual” the first operand and the type of the sec- which is contained in the “UNIX Documents” The ond operand (in this case, “location”); following brief notes should be of some assis- (j) The string quote symbols are“<” and tance: “>”. (a) a string of digits may define a constant (k) Statements of the form number.This is assumed to be an octal number unless the string is terminated .globl x, y, z by a period (“.”), when it is interpreted as a decimal number. serve to make the names “x”, “y” and “z” exter nal; (b) The character “/” is used to signify that the rest of the line is a comment; AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 20 December 2004
(l) The names “ edata” and “ end” are Each page can be divided on a 32 word boundary loader pseudo variables which the de- into two parts, an upper part and lower part. Each fine the size of the data segment, and such part has a size which is a multiple of 32 the data segment plus the bss segment words. In particular one part may be null, in respectively. which case the other part coincides with the whole page. One of the two parts is deemed to contain valid Memor y Mana gement virtual addresses. Addresses in the remaining part ar e declar ed invalid. Any attempt to refer ence an Pr ograms running on the PDP11 may address di- invalid address will be trapped by the hardware. rectly up to 64K bytes (32K words) of storage. The advantage of this scheme is that space in the This is consistent with an address size of sixteen physical memory need only be allocated for the bits. Since it is economical and not unreasonable valid r)art of a page. to do so the larger PDP11 models may be equipped with larger amounts of memory (up to 256K bytes for the PDP11/40) plus a mechanism Pa geDescr iption Reg ister for converting sixteen bit virtual (pr ogram) ad- dr esses into physical addr esses of eighteen bits or The page description register defines: mor e. The mechanism, which is known as the (a) the size of the lower part of the page. memory management unit, is simpler on the (The number stored is actually the num- PDP11/40 than on the 11/45 or the 11/70. ber of 32 word blocks less one); On the PDP11/40 the memory management unit (b) a bit which is set when the upper part is consists of two sets of registers for mapping virtu- the valid part. (Also known as the “ex- al addresses to physical addresses. These are pansion direction” bit); known as “active page registers” or “segmentation registers”. One set is used when the processor is (c) access mode bits defining “no access” or in user mode and the other set, in kernel mode. “r ead only access” or “read/write ac- Changing the contents of these registers changes cess”. the details of these mappings. The ability to make Note that if the valid part is null, this fact must be these changes is a privilege that the operating sys- shown by setting the access bits to “no access”. tem keeps firmly to itself.
Segmentation Register s. Memor y Allocation The hardwaredoes not dictate the way areas in Each set of segmentation registers is composed of physical memory which correspond to the valid eight pairs, each consisting of a “page address reg- parts of pages should be allocated (except to the ister”(PAR) and a “description register”(PDR). extent that they must begin and end on a 32 word Each pair of registers controls the mapping of one boundary). These areas may be allocated in any page i.e. one eighth part of the virtual address order and may overlap to any extent. space which 8K bytes (4K words). In practice the allocation of areas of physical Each page may be regarded as an aggregate of memory is much moredisciplined as we shall see 128 blocks, each of 64 bytes (32 words). This lat- in Chapter Seven. Ar eas for pages which arere- ter size is the “grain size” for the memory map- lated aremost often allocated contiguously and in ping function, and as a practical consequence, it the order of their page numbers, so that all the is also the “grain size” for memory allocation. segment areas associated with a single program ar e contained within one or at most two large ar- Any virtual address belongs to one page or other. eas of physical memory. The corresponding physical address is generated by adding the relative address within the page to the contents of the corresponding PAR to forman extended address (18 bits on the PDP11/40 and 11/45; 22 bits on the 11/70). Thus each page address register acts as a reloca- tion register for one page. December 2004 21 AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4
Memor y Mana gement Status Regis- ter s Special Device Register s
In addition to the segmentation registers, on the The high page of physical memory is reserved for PDP11/40 thereare two memory management various special registers associated with the pro- status registers: cessor and the peripheral devices. By sacrificing one page of memory space in this way, the SR0 contains abort error flags and other es- PDP11 designers have been able to make the vari- sential information for the operating sys- ous device registers accessible without the need tem. In particular memory management to provide special instruction types. is enabled when bit 0 of SR0 is on; The method of assignment of addresses to regis- SR2 is loaded with the 16 bit virtual address ters in this page is a black art: the values arehal- at the beginning of each instruction lowed by tradition and arenot to be questioned. fetch.
“i” and “d” Spaces Chapter three
In the PDP11/45 and 11/70 systems, thereare ad- ditional sets of segmentation registers. Addresses cr eated using the pc register (r7) aresaid to be- Reading “C” Programs long to “i” space, and aretranslated by a differ ent set of segmentation registers from those used for Lear ning to read programs written in the “C” lan- the remaining addresses which aresaid to belong guage is one of the hurdles that must be over- to “d” space. come beforeyou will be able to study the source The advantage of this arrangement is that both “i” code of UNIX effectively. and “d” spaces may occupy up to 32K words, As with natural languages, reading is an easier thus allowing the maximum space which can be skill to acquirethan writing. Even so you will allocated to a program to be increased to twice need to be careful lest some of the moresubtle the space available on the PDP11/40. points pass you by. Ther e ar e two of the “UNIX Documents” which Initial Conditions relate directly to the “C” language: “C Reference Manual”, by Dennis Ritchie When the system is first started after all the de- vices on the Unibus have been reinitialised, the “Pr ogramming in C -- A Tutorial”, memory management unit is disabled and the by Brian Kernighan pr ocessor is in kernel mode. Youshould read them now, as far as you can, Under these circumstances, virtual (byte) address- and retur n to rer ead them from time to time with es in the range 0 to 56K aremapped into identi- incr easing compr ehension. cally valued physical addresses. However the Lear ning to write “C” programs is not requir ed. highest page of the virtual address space is However if you have the opportunity, you should mapped into the highest page of the physical ad- attempt to write at least a few small programs. dr ess space, i.e. on the PDP11/40 or 11/45, ad- This does repr esent the accepted way to learna dr esses in the range pr ogramming language, and your understanding of the proper use of such items as: 0160000 to 0177777 semicolons; ar e mapped into the range “=” and “==” “” and “” 0760000 to 0777777 “++” and “--” declarations; register variables; “if” and “for” statements etc. AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 22 December 2004
will be quickly reinforced. “=” is the assignment operator,and “u.u err or” is an element of the structure“u”. (See line 0419.) Youwill find that “C” is a very convenient lan- Note the use of “.” as the operator which selects guage for accessing and manipulating data struc- an element of a structure. The element name is tur es and character strings, which is what a large “u err or” which may be taken as a paradigm for part of operating systems is about. As befits a ter- the way names of structureelements arecon- minal oriented language, which requir es concise, structed in the UNIX source code: a distinguishing compact expression, “C” uses a large character set letter is followed by an underscorefollowed by a and makes many symbols such as “*” and “&” name. work hard. In this respect it invites comparison with APL. Ther e many features of “C” which arereminiscent Example 3 of PL/1, but it goes well beyond the latter in the range of facilities provided for structured pro- gramming. 6585 bcopy (from, to, count) int *from, *to; { register *a, *b, c; Some Selected Examples a=from; b=to; c=count; The examples which follow aretaken directly do fr om the source code. *b++ = *a++; while (--cc); }
Example 1 The function of this procedur e is very simple: it copies a specified number of words from one set The simplest possible procedur e, which does of consecutive locations to another set. nothing, occurs twice(!) in the source code as “nullsys” (2864) and “nulldev” (6577), sic. Ther e ar e thr ee parameters. The second line int *from, *to; 6577 nulldev () { } specifies that the first two variables arepointers to integers. Since no specification is supplied for the While thereare noparameters, the parentheses, third parameter,itisassumed to be an integer by “(” and “)”, arestill requir ed. The brackets “” and default. “” delimit the procedur e body, which is empty. The three local variables, a, b, and c, have been assigned to registers, because registers aremor e accessible and the object code to refer ence them Example 2 is shorter.“a” and “b” arepointers to integers and “c” is an integer.The register declaration could The next example is a little less trivial: have been written morepedantically as 6566 nodev () { register int *a, *b, c; u.u_error = ENODEV; } to emphasise the connection with integers.
The additional statement is an assignment state- The three lines beginning with “do” should be ment. It is terminated by a semicolon which is studied carefully. If “b” is a “pointer to integer” part of the statement, not a statement separator as type, then in Algol-like languages. *b “ENODEV” is a defined symbol, i.e. a symbol which is replaced by an associated character denotes the integer pointed to. Thus to copy the string by the compiler prepr ocessor befor e actual value pointed to by “a” to the location designated compilation. “ENODEV” is defined on line 0484 by “b”, we could write as 19. The UNIX convention is that defined sym- bols arewritten in upper case, and all other sym- *b = *a; bols in lower case. If we wrote instead December 2004 23 AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4
b=a; while (--c); this would make the value of “b” the same as the value of “a”, i.e. “b” and “a” would point to the delimits the end of the set of statements which same place. Her e at least, that is not what is re- began after the “do”. The expression in parenthe- quir ed. ses “--c”, is evaluated and tested (the value tested is the value after decrementation). If the value is Having copied the first word from source to desti- non-zer o, the loop is repeated, else it is terminat- nation, we need to increase the values of “b” and ed. “a” so that the point to the next words of their re- spective sets. This can be done by writing Obviously if the initial value for “count” were negative, the loop would not terminate properly. b=b+1; a = a+1; If this wereaserious possibility then the routine would have to be modified. but “C” provides a shorter notation (which is mor e useful when the variable names arelonger) viz. Example 4 b++; a++; 6619 getf (f) or alternatively { register *fp, rf; ++b; ++b; rf = f; if (rf < 0 || rf >= NOFILE) goto bad; Now thereisnodif ference between the state- fp = u.u_ofile[rf]; ments “b++;” and “++b;” here. if (fp != NULL) return (fp); However “b++” and “++b” may be used as terms bad: in an expression, in which case they aredif ferent. u.u_error = EBADF; return (NULL); In both cases the effect of incrementing “b” is re- } tained, but the value which enters the expression is the initial value for “b++” and the final value for The parameter “f” is a presumed integer,and is “++b”. copied directly into the register variable “rf”. (This The “--” operator obeys the same rules as the “++” patter n will become so familiar that we will now operator,except that it decrements by one. Thus cease to remark upon it.) “--c” enters an expression as the value after decre- The three simple relational expressions mentation. rf < 0 rf >=NOFILE fp != NULL The “++” and “--” operators arevery useful, and ar e used throughout UNIX. Occasionally you will ar e each accorded the value one if true, and the have to go back to first principles to work out ex- value zeroiffalse. The first tests if the value of actly what their use implies. Note also thereisa “r f” is less than zero, the second, if “rf” is greater dif ference between than the value defined by “NOFILE” and the third, *b++ and (*b)++. if the value of “fp” is not equal to “NULL” (which is defined to be zero). These operators areapplicable to pointers to The conditions tested by the “if” statements are structur es as well as to simple data types. When a the arithmetic expressions contained within pointer which has been declared with refer ence par entheses. to a particular type of structureisincr emented, the actual value of the pointer is incremented by If the expression is greater than zerothe test is the size of the structure. successful and the following statement is execut- ed. Thus if for instance, “fp” had the value We can now see the meaning of the line 001375, then
*b++ = *a++; fp != NULL
The word is copied and the pointers areincr e- is true, and as a terminanarithmetic expression, mented, all in one hit. is accorded the value one. This value is greater The line than zero, and hence the statement AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 24 December 2004
return(fp); the array “proc”. The operator “&” in this context means “the address of”. would be executed, to terminate further execution of “getf”, and to retur n the value of “fp” to the Note that if an array has n elements, the elements calling procedur e as the result of “getf”. have subscripts 0, 1, .., (n-1). Also it is permissi- ble to write the above statement moresimply as The expression p=proc; rf < 0 || rf >= NOFILE Ther e ar e two statements in between the “do” and is the logical disjunction (“or”) of the two simple the “while”. relational expressions. The first of these could be rewritten moresimply An example of a “goto” statement and associated as label will be noted. if (p->p wchan == c) setrun (p); “fp” is assigned a value, which is an addr ess,from the “rf”-th element of the array of integers i.e. the brackets aresuper fluous in this case, and “u ofile”, which is embedded in the structure“u”. since “C” is a free formlanguage, the arrangement The procedur e “getf” retur ns avalue to its calling of text between lines is not significant. pr ocedure. This is either the vale of “fp” (i.e. an The statement addr ess) or “NULL”. setrun (p);
Example 5 invokes the procedur e “setrun” passing the value of “p” as a parameter (All parameters arepassed by value.). 2113 wakeup (chan) { The relation register struct proc *p; register c, i; p->p_wchan == c c= chan; p=&proc[0]; i= NPROC; tests the equality of the value of “c” and the value do { of the element “p wchan” of the structurepointed if (p->p_wchan == c) { setrun(p); to by “p”. Note that it would have been wrong to } have written p++; }while (--i); p.p_wchan == c } name Ther e ar e anumber of similarities between this because “p” is not the of a structure. example and the previous one. Wehave a new The second statement, which cannot be combined concept however,anarray of structures. Tobe with the first, increments “p” by the size of the just a little confusing, in this example it turns out “pr oc” structur e, whatever that is. (The compiler that both the array and the structureare called can figureitout.) “pr oc” (yes, “C” allows this). They aredeclar ed on Sheet 03 in the following form: In order to do this calculation correctly, the com- piler needs to know the kind of structurepointed 0358 struct proc at. When this is not a consideration, you will no- { tice that often in similar situations, “p” will be de- char p_stat; clar ed simply as ...... int p_wchan; ...... register *p; }proc[NPROC]; because it was easier for the programmer,and the “p” is a register variable of type pointer to a struc- compiler does not insist. tur e of type “proc”. The latter part of this procedur e could have been p=&proc[0]; written equivalently but less efficiently as
...... assigns to “p” the address of the first element of i=0; December 2004 25 AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4
do dur e “suser” retur ns avalue which is used for the if (proc[i].p_wchan == c) setrun (&proc[i]); “if” test. The three statements whose execution while (++i < NPROC); depends on this value areenclosed in the brack- ets “” and “”. Note that a call on a procedur e with no parame- ters must still be written-with a set of empty Example 6 par entheses, sic.
suser () 5336 geterror (abp) struct buf *abp; { register struct buf bp; bp = abp; if (bp->b flags&B_ERROR) Example 8 if ((u.u_error=bp->b_error)==0) u.u_error = EIO; “C” provides a conditional expression. Thus if “a” } and “b” areinteger variables,
This procedur e simply checks if therehas been (a > b ? a : b) an error,and if the error indicator “u.u err or” has not been set, sets it to a general error indication is an expression whose value is that of the larger “B ERROR” has the value 04 (see line 4575) so of “a” and “b”. that, with only one bit set, it can be used as mask However this does not work if “a” and “b” areto to isolate bit number 2. The operator “&” as used be regarded as unsigned integers. Hence thereis in ause for the procedur e
bp->b_flags&B_ERROR 6326 max (a, b) char *a, *b; is the bitwise logical conjunction (“and”) applied { if (a > b) to arithmetic values. return(a); return(b); The above expression is greater than one if bit 2 } of the element “b flags” of the “buf” structure pointed to by “bp”, is set. The trick hereisthat “a” and “b”, having been de- Thus if therehas been an error,the expression clar ed as pointers to characters aretreated for comparison purposes as unsigned integers. (u.u_error) = bp->b_error) The body of the procedur e could have been writ- ten as is evaluated and compared with zero. Now this expr ession includes an assignment operator “=”. max (a, b) The value of the expression is the value of char *a, *b; “u.u err or” after the value of “bp->b flags” has { if (a > b) been assigned to it. return(a); else This use of an assignment as part of an expres- return(b); sion is useful and quite common. }
but the natureof“retur n” is such that the “else” is Example 7 not needed here!
3428 stime () Example 9 { if (suser()) { time[0] = u.u_ar0[R0]; Her e ar e two quickies which introduce some dif- time[1] = u.u_ar0[R1]; fer ent and exotic looking expressions. First: wakeup (tout); } } 7679 schar() { return *u.u_dirp++&0377); In this example, you should note that the proce- } AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 26 December 2004
wher e the declaration which is syntactically an address variable but se- mantically just a unique bit pattern. char *u_dirp; This is an example of a device which is used is part of the declaration of the structure“u”. thr oughout UNIX. The programmer needed a unique bit patternfor a particular purpose. The “u.u dirp” is a character pointer.Ther efor e the exact value did not matter as long as it was value of “*u.u dirp++” is a character.(Incr ementa- unique. An adequate solution to the problem tion of the pointer occurs as a side effect.) was to use the address of a suitable global vari- When a character is loaded into a sixteen bit reg- able. ister,sign extension may occur.By“and”ing the word with 0377 any extraneous high order bits ar e eliminated. Thus the result retur ned is simply Example 11 acharacter.
Note that any integer which begins with a zero 4856 bawrite (bp) (e.g. 0377) is interpreted as an octal integer. struct buf *bp; { The second example is: register struct buf *rbp; rbp = bp; 1771 nseg(n) rbp->b_flags =| B_ASYNC; { bwrite (rbp); return ((n+127)>>7); } } The second last statement is interesting because it The value retur ned is n divided by 128 and could have been written as rounded up to the next highest “integer”. rbp->b_flags = rbp->b_flags | B_ASYNC; Note the use of the right shift operator “>>” in pr efer ence to the division operator “/”. In this statement the bit mask “B ASYNC” is “or”ed into “rbp->b flags”. The symbol “|” is the logical disjunction for arithmetic values. Example 10 This is an example of a very useful construction in UNIX, which can save the programmer much Many of the points which have been introduced labour.If“O+ ”isany binary operator,then above arecollected in the following procedur e: x=xO+a; 2134 setrun (p) { register struct proc *rp; wher e “a” is an expression, can be rewritten more rp = p; succinctly as rp->p_wchan = 0; rp->p_stat = SRUN; if (rp->p_pri < curpri) x= O+ a ; runrun++; if (runout != 0&& Aprogrammer using this construction has to be (rp->p_flag&SLOAD) == 0) { runout = 0; car eful about the placement of blank characters, wakeup (&runout); since } } x=+1;
Check your understanding of “C” by figuring out is differ ent fr om what this one does. x=+1; Ther e ar e two additional features you may need to know about: What is to be the meaning of “&&” is the logical conjunction (“and”) for rela- tional expressions. (Cf. “+||+” introduced earlier.) x=+1; ? The last statement contains the expression
&runout December 2004 27 AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4
Note that “proc[NPROC]” is the address of the Example 12 (NPROC+1)-th element of the array (which does not of course exist) i.e. it is the first location be- yond the end of the array. 6824 ufalloc () { At the risk of overkill we would point out again register i; for (i=0; i This example introduces the “for” statement, means “skip p to point to the next structure”. which has a very general syntax making it both power ful and compact. The structureofthe “for” statement is adequately Example 14 described on page 10 of the “C Tutorial”, and that description is not repeated here. 8870 lpwrite () The Algol equivalent of the above “for” statement { register int c; would be while ((c=cpass()) >= 0) lpcanon(c); for i:=1 step 1 until NOFILE-1 do } The power of the “for” statement in “C” derives This is an example of the “while” statement, fr om the great freedom the programmer has in which should be compared with the “do ... while choosing what to include between the parenthe- ...” construction encountered earlier.(Cf. the ses. Certainly thereisnothing which restricts the “while” and “repeat” statements of Pascal.) calculations to integers, as the next example will The meaning of the procedur e is demonstrate. Keep calling “cpass” while the result is posi- tive, and pass the result as a parameter to a Example 13 call on lpcanon. Note the redundant “int” in the declaration for “c”. It isn’t always omitted! 3949 signal (tp, sig) { register struct proc *p; for (p=proc;p<&proc[NPROC];p++) if (p->p ttyp == tp) Example 15 psignal (p,sig); } The next example is abbreviated from the origi- nal: In this example of the “for” statement, the pointer variable “p” is stepped through each element of 5861 seek () the array “proc” in turn. { int n[2]; Actually the original code had register *fp, t; fp = getf (u.u_ar0[R0]); ...... for (p=&proc[0];p<&proc[NPROC];p++) t=u.u_arg[1]; switch (t) { but it wouldn’t fit on the line! As noted earlier,the case 1: case 4: use of “proc” as an alternative to the expression n[0] =+ fp->f_offset[0]; “&pr oc[0]” is acceptable in this context. dpadd (n, fp->f_offset[1]); break; This kind of “for” statement is almost a cliche in default: UNIX so you had better learntorecognise it. n[0] =+ fp->f_inode->i size0&0377; dpadd(n,fp->f_inode->i_size1); Read it as case 0: case 3: for p = each process in turn ; AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 28 December 2004 } This example has a number of interesting fea- ...... } tur es. The declaration for “d major” is Note the array declaration for the two word array “n”, and the use of getf (which appeared in Ex- struct { ample 4). char d_minor; char d_major; The “switch” statement makes a multiway branch } depending on the value of the expression in par entheses. The individual parts have “case la- so that the value assigned to “maj” is the hiqh or- bels”: der byte of the value assigned to “dev”. • If “t” is one or four,then one set of actions is In this example, the “switch” statement has onlv in order. two non-null cases, and no “default”. The actions for the recognised cases, e.g. • If “t” is zeroorthr ee, nothing is to be done at all. (*bdevsw[maj].d_close)(dev,rw); • If “t” is anything else, then a set of actions la- look formidable at first glance. belled “default” is to be executed. First it should be noted that this is a procedur e Note the use of “break” as an escape to the next call, with parameters “dev” and “rw”. statement after the end of the “switch” statement. Without the “break”, the normal execution se- Second “bdevsw” (and “cdevsw”) arearrays of quence would be followed within the “switch” structur es, whose “d close” element is a pointer statement. to a function, i.e. Thus a “break” would normally be requir ed at the bdevsw[maj] end of the “default” actions. It has been omitted safely herebecause the only remaining cases ac- is the name of a structure, and tually have null actions associated with them. bdevsw[maj].d_close The two non-trivial pairs of actions repr esent the addition of one 32 bit integer to another.The lat- is an element of that structurewhich happens to er versions of the “C” compiler will support “long” be a pointer to a function, so that variables and make this sort of code much easier to write (and read). *bdevsw[maj].d_close Note also that in the expression is the name of a function. The first pair of paren- fp->f_inode->i_size0 theses is “syntactical sugar” to put the compiler in the right frame of mind! ther e ar e two levels of indirection. Example 17 Example 16 We offer the following as a final example: 6672 closei (ip, rw) 4043 psig () int *ip; { { register n, p; register *rip; ...... register dev, maj; switch (n) { rip = ip; case SIGQIT: dev = rip->i_addr[0]; case SIGINS: maj = rip->i_addr[0].d major; case SIGTRC: switch (rip->i_mode&IFMT) { case SIGIOT: case IFCHR: case SIGEMT: (*cdevsw[maj].d_close)(dev,rw); case SIGEPT: break; case SIGBUS: case IFBLK: case SIGSEG: (*bdevsw[maj].d_close)(dev,rw); case SIGSYS: } u.u arg[0] = n; iput(rip); if (core()) } n=+0200; } December 2004 29 AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 u.u_arg[0]=(u.u_ar0[R0]<<8) | n; war e is planned for futurereleases. exit (); } For the first time, Debian comes with the K Desktop Environment 2.2 (KDE). The GNOME Her e the “switch” selects certain values for “n” for desktop environment is upgraded to version which the one set of actions should be carried 1.4, and X itself is upgraded to the much im- out. pr oved XFr ee86 4.1. With the addition of sever- An alternative would have been to write a “mon- al full-featured free graphical web browsers in ster” “if” statement such as the formofMozilla, Galeon, and Konqueror, Debian’s desktop offerings have radically im- if (n==SIGQUIT || n==SIGINS || ... pr oved. ... || n==SIGSYS) This version of Debian supports the 2.2 and 2.4 but that would not have been either transparent releases of the Linux kernel. Along with better or efficient. support for a greater variety of new hardware (such as USB) and significant improvements in Note the addition of an octal constant to “n” and usability and stability, the 2.4 kernel provides the method of composing a 16 bit value from two support for the ext3 and reiser fs jour naling eight bit values. filesystems. Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 features a morestr eam- This issue’sCD lined and polished installation, which is trans- lated into numerous languages. The task system has been revamped and made moreflexible. Greg Lehey fr om that announcement (http://www.de- wer e illegible. bian.or g/News/2004/20041026): • CD-R capacity issues. Our budget is sufficient for one CD-R per issue. We can occasionally Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 updated go to two, but that’s about the limit. (r3) Unfortunately, there’s not too much that will fit on a single CD-R any more. A few months October 26th, 2004 ago we had to drop support for the Microsoft version of OpenOffice because therewasn’t This is the third update of Debian GNU/Linux space on the disk. We also found ourselves 3.0 (codename “woody”) which mainly adds se- out of pocket with Fedora CoreIIbecause it curity updates to the stable release, along with tur ned out that our original intention of dis- afew corrections to serious problems. Those tributing only CD 1 was a non-starter,sowe who frequently update from security.debian.org had to include CD 2. Even so, some people won’t have to update many packages and most might have had problems because we didn’t updates from security.debian.orgare included include CD 3. This quarter we’redistributing in this update. CD 1 (only) of Debian Woody upgrade 3. Please note that this update does not produce a That will work, but for anything serious you’ll new version of Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 but only need to get softwarefromthe net. adds a few updated packages to it. Thereisno This problem is exacerbated by our decision need to throw away 3.0 CDs but only to update to move to publishing AUUGN in electronic against ftp.debian.orgafter an installation, in or- for m. That requir es extra space. It’s only a der to incorporate those late changes. couple of megabytes, but that’s often note Upgrading to this revision online is usually available: release engineers shoe-hornevery- done by pointing the apt package tool (see the thing they can into an ISO, arethey’r e often sources.list(5) manual page) to one of Debian’s full to bursting point. many FTP or HTTP mirrors. A comprehensive We’r e addr essing the quality issues: starting with list of mirrors is available at: http://www.de- this issue, we have a new CD duplicator.Hope- bian.or g/distrib/ftplist. fully they will deliver consistently good quality. It should also address some of the timing problems we’ve been having. If you do have problems, tell The futureofAUUGN CDs let Liz Carroll, our executive director,immediately. See page 2 for contact details. Greg Lehey /usr/shar e/grof f_font/devps/download,and it con- AHacker’sDiar y tains a lookup from font name to the file which contains the description: Greg Lehey Back to working on AUUGN today, in the process debugging some macros and working out an au- tomatic way to build the download file that gr off uses to decide which fonts to include in a Post- Script document. In FreeBSD, the file is called AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 32 December 2004 suspect that the real issue is that Microsoft plat- Sunday, 4 July2004 for ms can’t use higher resolution. In March two of our video recorders died in rapid Put the new motherboard into new wantadilla, succession, and we sent them down to an el- and no longer had the stability problems I had cheapo place to have the symptoms (tape eating) seen before. Instead, Igot an interrupt flood on fixed. This tur ned out to be a bad idea; yes, it the Ethernet cards. Ihad seen this beforeonthe didn’t cost much, but one still had such bad track- pr evious motherboard, too, but thereIcould get ing that we can only use it as a tuner for the TiVo rid of it by disabling the APIC. This time, dis- and the other one died again with the same abling the APIC didn’t help. Ihad to reallocate symptoms this evening. It doesn’t seem to be the IRQ to get rid of the problem. Why does worth replacing it. We bought a special offer each motherboard have its own problems? And video recorder from Coles last month for only yes, of course I set the BIOS settings to the same $129, with 6 head technology and NTSC playback. values. The firmwar e’s abit baroque, but we’ll survive Still, the system upgrade procedur e is working until I finally get my computer-based system to- well. I think I’ve made enough progr ess now to gether,sowe’ll look for another one. start again from scratch and confirmthat it works. Monday, 5 July2004 Wednesday, 7 July2004 The new motherboard does seem to be defective. How long these things take! The admin work, Now it’s in the old wantadilla,which has been which I had hoped to have out of the way this stable for months, but today I had multiple prob- time last week, is still with me. To get the system lems: first Netscape crashed multiple times, not in update thing working properly, decided to start itself such an uncommon occurrence, but it hasn’t again, this time with the new 80 GB disk that I happened for a while; later I had two sponta- had got yesterday in exchange for the defective neous system resets. How Ihate flaky hardware! /sr c.Ther e’s enough space on that to have two system partitions of 10 GB each and a separate /home partition. That way futureupgrades use Tuesday, 6 July2004 the alternate system partition, and you don’t have to worry about changing hardwarearound: just Another hardwareday. Finally decided that the boot from the other partition. If it doesn’t work new motherboard was flaky enough to send back, as expected, going back to the old version is as even though I couldn’t demonstrate obvious simple as rebooting from the other partition. pr oblems. Also sent back the motherboard and disk from echunga that died last week Of course Also accepted the fact that I had to do something they couldn’t replace the motherboard imemedi- about my mail. My inbox was hitting the 10,000 ately—it’s 9 months old and thus obsolete—so I’ll message mark, and moreimportantly coming to- have to wait a couple of weeks for a replacement. wards the magic 48 MB after which postfix stops saving messages. Ithought I could get rid of Yvonne came back with the new hardwareand 5,000 messages relatively quickly. Maybe I did: also a Samsung cordless mouse. She also brought interleaved with other work, it took me 4 hours, back another video recorder,the same as the one or about 4 seconds per message. Still too long. I she bought from Coles last month. The last one should unsubscribe from some lists. cost $129; this one cost $99, probably less than the cost of repairing the old failed one. Didn’t Then turned my attention to the new Inspiron have the time (or necessity) to install it today. 9100 which runs Microsoft “XP Professional”. Getting that to run was quite an experience. Mor e inter esting than either was my new laptop, Though the machine had already installed all the aDell Inspiron 9100 that had been left me by softwar e, Ihad to add myself as another user, somebody else in the company. In general, hand- which requir ed reinstalling the software. “Out- me-downs areless than successful, but in this look 2003” requir ed remote product registration, case it was almost exactly what I want, especially either via the Internet or by phone. Ihave no in- since it was a top-end unit. Somehow it’s typical, tention of taking the risk of connecting any Mi- though, that the one thing that interests me—the cr osoft machine to the Internet, so I chose the display resolution—wasn’t top-end: only phone method. Type in 42 digits, and get anoth- 1680x1050, barely morethan 4-year-old sydney.I er 42 digits back. You’d think that people would December 2004 33 AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 make moreofthe advantage of Open Source soft- In case that’s still not obvious, it’s the black area war e that you don’t have to do this kind of non- between the connector and the inscription INPUT. sense. It has nothing to do with the cost of the It even contained a replacement fuse, quite a nice softwar e, just the time and inconvenience it takes idea. Now if only that had been moreobvious to install it. fr om the outset. Thur sday, 8 July2004 Fr iday, 9 July2004 Still moreadmin work today, and got to under- Finally things arealmost back to normal again. stand the Microsoft box better; it’s running a ver- I’m continuing my upgrade of wantadilla in the sion called “XP Professional”, and although it’s backgr ound, and I managed to sort out my prob- pr etty much as painful as other versions of Mi- lems with the Microsoft box as well: it seems that cr osoft, it has one good feature: I can access the rdesktop pr oblems wer e due to a strange feature “desktop” from another machine with the rdesk- of “XP Professional” that turns the mouse buttons top pr ogram. rdesktop has some strangenesses, round for USB mice only (well, also for rdesktop, and I couldn’t get it to stop reversing the mouse it would seem). Iwonder why anybody would buttons, but it means that I have almost a real want his buttons reversed only for specific mice. keyboard and a reasonable sized display to work Also managed to install a newer license manager with. for the Oxford English Dictionary which actually looks a lot better on rdesktop than it ever did on Also continued work on the upgrade to wantadil- the machine itself. la —the machine paniced once in bzero,which doesn’t make me very happy. Maybe it’s the Back to work on my program, and I’m roughly memory after all. I’ll have to keep an eye on it. wher e Iwas two weeks ago, beforeIdecided to rewrite the endian layer,and beforeIhad the In the evening, the Digitrex DVD recorder hung hardwar e pr oblems. The differ ence is that things itself up again. It’s been less frequent, but it’s still look so much clearer now. ther e. The only way to reset it is to pull the pow- er plug and reinsert it: if ever a device needed a Having a Microsoft box on the network means power switch, it’s this one. This time it caused opening yourself to many morevulnerabilities, enough of a surge to blow the residual current and I’ve been working on tightening up my fire- sensor,quite a feat for a device without a ground wall. The output of ’iptables-vL’ shows that in the pin. When Itur ned it back on again, the UPS course of 24 hours I have bounced in the order of continued to beep, although it had power.Took 12 MB of traffic—not only unwanted, but indis- the thing apart (“no user-serviceable parts inside”) criminate. and found, well, no user-serviceable parts. After The online version of the diary includes example some investigation discovered that the power output, but doesn’t fit in the magazine format. connector itself included a well hidden fuse: That’s about a third of my total traffic. It’s about time that this kind of abuse weremade illegal, world-wide. I suppose it will be one day, but first the legislators need to understand what it’s all about. And yes, probably most of the traffic comes from innocently affected Microsoft boxes. That’s not an excuse, any morethan driving an unr oadworthy car is an excuse for having an acci- dent. Saturday, 10July2004 Back to working on AUUGN today, and again made relatively good progr ess. If this continues, I may be able to continue to edit it. But it would be a whole lot better if I could get morepeople to participate. In the afternoon, Gareth Andrews came around AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 34 December 2004 with a computer on which he wanted to run my temperatur e contr ol softwar e (br ewing/tempera- tur e-control.html). Installed Fr eeBSD 4.10 on it (and, as I later discovered, left the CD in the drive when he took it home), and then the temperature contr ol softwar e. That was worthwhile: I found numer ous buglets which needed correcting. Still, all told, including installing FreeBSD, the hard- war e and the temperaturecontr ol softwar e, not to mention a bit of beer tasting, we weredone in thr ee hours. Gareth knows nothing about Free- BSD, though, and I fear he might have a bit of dif ficulty coming to terms with differ ent concepts. Sunday, 11July2004 It looks like a toy, but if the “toy” impression isn’t Somehow another day wherenothing much hap- str ong enough, it’s relatively trivial to convert this pened. Chris Yeardley showed up to pick up a stupid window into an even morestupid-looking laptop I had got for her,and spent some time “skin”: looking at that; it’s a hot-off-the-pr ess Asus W1000. It has lots of multimedia stuffonit, in- cluding a remote control, and I was left wonder- ing whether it was a computer or a TV.Spent some time playing with the multimedia stuff, and in the process brought out my new Inspiron 9100 and discovered it had much of the same stuffon it. I can’t help marvelling, though, how bad all this stuffis. It has a thing called “Dell Media Ex- perience™” which claims to have “the features and controls of a normal living-room DVD play- er”. I suppose that depends on your definition of On the other hand, I haven’t found out how to “nor mal”, but I’d expect at least slow motion and display a DVD with it. Iput a DVD in the drive, search functions, all of which aremissing. Com- but it didn’t find it. When I tried navigating the paring with Chris’ machine, it appears that the windows that Microsoft makes you use for finding “Dell Media Experience™” is really a front end to files, they werether e: the equally emetic “Windows Media Player”, though I can’t see wherethe interface is. About the only thing that the latter has in common with the living-room DVD player is the stupid button panel at the bottom of the window: Ican also display them if I go via the “Dell Media Experience™”, so it’s obviously just a matter of pr essing the right mouse buttons. What a pain! After that, to complete the joy of Microsoft, we tried to set up satellite networking with another December 2004 35 AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 machine that Chris had brought. Wefinally suc- constitution, which limited the number of people ceeded, but like with so many things about Mi- on the board of directors to 9 (isn’t that a popular cr osoft, we don’t know why. Very frustrating. number?), Both the AUUG board of directors and the Free- Monday, 12July2004 BSD coreteam have 9 members. and elected new members, one of whom was me. Up bright and early this morning to get back to It’ll be interesting to see how things go now. “r eal” work. First, noticed that one of my nightly In the evening, zaphod hung again. Still no backups had failed because of lack of space, so dumps! decided to put in the new 200 GB drive that I had bought for that purpose. Acouple of minutes in- to the backup, the system panicked with a divide Wednesday, 14July2004 fault. Tried to take a processor dump, but it didn’t work. On rebooting, the system panicked My dump failed again! Only half an hour after I again, this time with a differ ent pr oblem. Still no started it, kondoparinga (pr ovisional name for dump possible. Tried to do remote debugging new wantadilla )panicked in the rl Ether net and discovered that the sources wereonthe same driver with a VM fault. That’s certainly nothing to system. But Ididn’t want to move them to where do with the disk system, but I still couldn’t get a they belonged, because that was the file system I dump. I suspect a conspiracy of hardwareand wanted to back up. softwar e. Addr essed the rl pr oblem by replacing Tried a number of differ ent things and established the Realtek card with a 3Com, though it’s not that it was definitely a softwarebug, presumably clear that it’s a problem with the card or the driv- somewher e in UFS, triggered by the somewhat er. unusual parameters I set up for the drive, possibly One thing is becoming clear: dump is not the the -g 1000000000 (“average file size is 1 tool to use. It has a number of great disadvan- GB”). Gave up on it for now; the backup is more tages: important. Hopefully I’ll be able to repr oduce the bug when I have time; it could be an interesting 1. It only works on real file systems. one for my debug tutorial. 2. As aresult, you can’t make dumps of individu- After that, thoroughly exhausted, back to work on al directories. my program. Didn’t get very far.I’m coming to 3. You also can’t dump a network mounted file the conclusion that programming is like running: system. you can sprint for a short distance, but you can’t keep that pace up for very long, and you need to 4. dump has differ ent for mats on almost every find a (slower) sustainable pace. system. Even in FreeBSD, restor e on release 4 can’t read dumps from release 5. Years ago I recommended tar for these reasons; it Tuesday, 13July2004 has none of these disadvantages (well, thereare still some minor format differ ences, but thereare Mor e stability problems; zaphod hung up during solutions to them). Time to retur n to tar.Today alevel 0 dump shortly after 9 pm last night, pre- Istarted doing a backup of the top-level directo- sumably the old NFS deadlock. I’ve been trying ries in /sr c,which took at least as long. It’s possi- to do a dump for 24 hours now. Grrr. ble that dump has a slight perfor mance edge. Al- bzip2 Mor e work on my program today, and finally got so, must be one of the most CPU-intensive back on track with what I had been doing before pr ograms Iknow. It took over 2 hours of CPU kondoparinga my current spate of hardwareproblems. Things time on (curr ently running as an ar e looking good again. Athlon XP 2500+) to compress a 17 GB tar ar- chive. At least—by the evening—I completed the In the afternoon, another dump failure, this time dump. caused by kondoparinga panicking. I wish I knew why I can’t get a dump on this machine. Started the dump Yet Again. Later in the afternoon into town for a normal and aspecial general meeting of the IT Council of South Australia The latter was to approve a new AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 36 December 2004 conditioner,this time with the screw facing up- Thur sday, 15July2004 wards, and was able to adjust the thing so that it de-iced properly. What asurprise! It’s been over Mor e work with the air conditioner today, which six years since we first reported this problem, and has been icing up continually. Took the thing it’s all a documentation problem, one that obvi- apart and put the sensor in the coolest part of the ously no air conditioner technicians know about. coil; hopefully we’ll have some peace now. Spent some time adjusting the screw, which is surprisingly sensitive. Fr iday, 16July2004 I’m also left with the question: should I turnon early, which results in a de-icing cycle of only a Spent most of today looking through some code few seconds, but which happens relatively fre- to add to my program, and finally decided that quently, or turnoff late, which can take up to 30 the easiest way to find out how it worked would seconds to de-ice, but which doesn’t happen very be to look at it in action with other code that often? used it, not made any easier by the fact that my tr ee was out of date, and that I had unwittingly added updates since. Managed to get that sorted Saturday, 17July2004 out and found another 5 levels beyond whereI had got in the documentation. Debuggers arere- Quiet day. Ihad intended to finish my work on ally useful, especially since the documentation AUUGN today, but didn’t make much progr ess. can’t say which parser is used. Spent the rest of Bottled some beer in the morning, and spent re- the day analysing what I had found. peated short periods of time adjusting the de-icing switch on the air conditioner. Another letter from Canon today, relating to my scanner.They’r e not prepar ed to do anything be- I’m beginning to think that the de-icing switch yond refund the money for the scanner.I’ll prob- sensor is still in the wrong place. First, some ably do that in the end, but I’m left with a bad backgr ound about the machine and how it works: taste in my mouth. It’s clear that this scanner was like all air conditioners and refrigerators, it com- br ought to the market with inadequate software, pr esses refrigerant, which heats it up, and then al- and since they refuse to release the specs—by no lows it to expand, which cools it down signifi- means typical of the industry—they’reeffectively cantly. The trick is maintaining refer ence temper- releasing non-functional products and just putting atur es. up with the not-too-frequent complaint. That’s Nor mally, fridges and air conditioners first pass not the behaviour of a reputable company. the heated refrigerant through a coil (think: “radi- My hopes to have fixed the air conditioner ator”) to cool it down to ambient temperature; af- pr oved to be prematur e, as I came out and found ter further cooling through expansion, the refrig- the de-icing sensor probe covered in ice. Decid- erant is used for cooling something, such as a ed that it was obviously defective, so removed it room or the interior of a fridge. fr om the machine for Yvonne to take and get a It can also work in the other direction: after cool- replacement. When Ihad done so, I saw the un- ing, the refrigerant is warmed up to ambient tem- derside of the switch (wherethe contacts are) for peratur e, again through a coil. Then it’s com- the first time: pr essed and gets a lot hotter,and that’s used to war m things. This is the way we use it in winter. Ther e ar e two problems with heating: 1. The cooled refrigerant enters the coil at tem- peratur es below 0 °C, which causes atmo- spheric humidity to condense and freeze. That’s why we need de-icing. In a completely dry atmosphere, it wouldn’t be necessary, and the coil temperaturecould easily drop far be- The third contact (between the other two) is un- low 0°. used; it’s normally open. But what’s that screw in 2. The switch measures temperature, not icing, the middle? It looked like an adjusting screw, and and the temperaturecurve is very non-linear. some experiments with the deep freeze and some It drops rapidly to 0°, but if enough ice forms, iced water proved it was. Put it back in the air it then stays there: freezing water creates a lot December 2004 37 AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 of heat. Ican adjust the temperaturetojust about anything I want, but it needs to be very exact. Tuesday, 20July2004 All this makes me think that maybe the sensor is mounted in the wrong place, or mounted incor- Mor e work on my program today. Incorporating rectly. I can think of two ways to take advantage the existing code into my program turned out to of the physical situation: be easier than expected. Ihad planned for the rest of the week to do it, but by midday I had the 1. Mount the sensor less closely in contact with first half finished, the half that I thought would be the coil. It won’t cool down until some ice mor e dif ficult. That probably means that the oth- for ms, cr eating better thermal contact. er half will be a pig and will keep me busy until 2. Mount the sensor higher up the coil, where the end of next week... the temperatureisalso higher (the refrigerant enters at the bottom and leaves at the top), and wait for the ice to formther e befor e de-ic- Wednesday, 21July2004 ing. Today spent most of the morning looking at the The sensor was originally mounted higher up, so second half of this week’s work, a library function maybe I should do something about that. in our library which I needed to extricate from the functions with which it’s bound. Then I dis- cover ed that both FreeBSD and Linux have the Sunday, 18July2004 same functionality in the library. By that time I was just about done with the extraction, so I Spent most of the day working on AUUGN, and wr ote atest program with both versions and con- mor e or less got finished. Alarge part of the job fir med that they both did the same thing. That’s was just getting a framework together; next time the rest of this week’s work done already. round should be a lot easier,but I suspect if any- body else takes over editorship, he’ll change the tools again, and it’ll all be a throwaway imple- Thur sday, 22July2004 mentation. Still, since I’m using my standard macr os (tmac.G), it gives me a chance to fine- Mor e tidying up work today; it’s about time I fi- tune them, particularly the macros for generating nally cut over kondoparinga as the new wan- the table of contents. tadilla.Installing OpenOffice still proves to be a pain, not made any easier by some Ethernet prob- lems: yesterday a card died on me, and today one Monday, 19July2004 started reporting ridiculously long packets (over 32 kB). This caused a panic in bcopy,called Back to normal work today, researching some ex- fr om rl_rxeof,presumably because the inter- isting code that I have to put into my program. rupt handler hadn’t checked the length before The main issue is that it’s part of a library, and I calling it. Unfortunately, I still can’t dump the need to disentangle it. Made reasonable progr ess system, so wasn’t able to do much except put in with that. another card. Also paid some attention to mail; I’ve now passed Some perfor mance measur ements on the work the 10,000 message mark, and I’m coming danger- side of things, with interesting results. ously close to the 48 MB above which postfix re- fuses to storemessages. Also spent moretime working on the new system Fr iday, 23July2004 installation stuff. It’s getting better,but it’s still not done. This is a real pain. Spent some time debugging today, most of it spent debugging the debugging macros. Didn’t find the main bug I was looking for. Apart from that, decided that I should finally com- plete the transition to the new wantadilla. Yvonne brought back some hardwaretoday, no- tably a new hard disk for my laptop, so I can now install FreeBSD on the Inspiron 9100. Asurpris- AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 38 December 2004 ing amount of preparation is necessary for that. Managed to install Microsoft “XP Professional” on the new disk—hopefully moving to a new disk Sunday, 25July2004 doesn’t constitute breach of their EULA—which will free up the big disk for a real operating sys- Somehow got nothing done today. Continued in- tem or three. Installation was surprisingly easy, stalling FreeBSD on eucla,which went a little bet- and it didn’t even overwrite my FreeBSD parti- ter than yesterday, and by the evening had the tion, but at the end of it the only network inter- machine pretty much the way I wanted it. The face it could find was firewir e. big success story was the new X system from X.orgwhich installed without problem and started without a configuration file—this on a machine Saturday, 24July2004 with a 1680x1050 wide screen display. Very im- pr essive. Spent most of today playing around with hard- Spent some time burning CD-Rs for AUUGN. war e. We’ve decided that we can’t use the Dig- Given the failures we have had in the past, made itr ex DVD player any more, so spent some time two copies of each on differ ent bur ners and looking for alternatives involving our TiVobut be- checked that the other burner could read the re- yond finding a vserver alr eady installed on the sults. They could, but thereseems to be some- machine, didn’t make much progr ess. thing strange about the way they’rebur nt: Ican Most of the time was taking up building software use dd to read in a CD-R, and it reads in correct- on laptops. On the Microsoft front, discovered ly, but then it gets an I/O error trying to read be- that none of the Dell-specific drivers had been in- yond the end: stalled. The Micr osoft install procedur e doesn’t # dd if=/dev/acd0 of=fedora2.iso bs=128k cater for installing vendor-specific drivers; consid- dd: /dev/acd0: Input/output error ering that Microsoft itself is only half an operating 5093+0 records in 5093+0 records out system (native hardwaresupport is minimal), 667549696 bytes transferred in 241.148143 \ that’s particularly bad. At the end of the install, I secs (2768214 bytes/sec) had to install each driver individually from the Dell CD-ROM, requiring multiple key clicks per The same thing doesn’t happen with CD-Rs burnt driver,with almost no help as to whether I really on other systems. Iwonder what causes it. needed the driver or not. At the end, rebooted and discovered that, al- though I had asked Microsoft to install in “Drive Monday, 26July2004 D:”(the second partition on the disk), it had in- stalled in the first two partitions; the first is a Dell Somehow didn’t get much done again today. diagnostic partition, only 39 MB in size. Ther e Spent some time debugging allocation problems seemed to be no way past that. In the end, delet- on my program, and found a couple of bugs, but ed the partition (isn’t it nice to have a dd backup they weren’t the cause of the problem. Mañana. of the partitions?) and got it to work. In the pr ocess, discover ed that FreeBSD’s fdisk can also work on copies of MBRs. Tuesday, 27July2004 Ther e’s acopy of the output in the online diary. Mor e work on my program today, and found a Basically, it looks like normal fdisk output. number of bugs, including the one I was looking gdb In the meantime, also installed FreeBSD on the for.Using macr os certainly makes things new disk on the other laptop (eucla ), using the easier,but it also has its down side: at least one of system upgrade procedur e I’m working on. Had the incidences of corruption that I thought I saw afew additional hiccoughs, but it seems to work. was in fact due to a macromisinterpr eting data. Still, got past all the current problems and moved on to the next bug. December 2004 39 AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 Wednesday, 28July2004 Still moredebugging, and discovered moresup- Fr iday, 30July2004 posed bugs which wereinfact due to bugs in the Up at the crack of dawn today, helped by the in- debugging macros. If only the gdb macr o lan- clement temperatureinthe room, to start the guage weren’t so obscure! Found all bugs and board meeting at an atypical 8 am. As Immediate fixed all but one: there’s one remaining endian is- Past President, I’m taking a back seat this year. sue in the index pointers. That’s going to have to One thing that was agreed on (somewhat against wait until tomorrow. my will) was that AUUGN will cease publication Cr eating the CD-Rs for AUUGN proves to be more as a paper magazine, though we’ll continue with of a headache than I expected: this quarter, some electronic formatleast for a while. amongst other things, we’resupplying a CD-R of Fedora Core2Inthe past, we’ve always only sup- plied one the first CD of sets, and things have Saturday, 31July2004 worked well. Not so this time: the first CD appar- ently doesn’t even contain the base X window Another “new weekend” day, whereIdid no real system. Looks like we’ll have to supply CD 2 as work. Did spend some time looking for video well, which makes it look silly that we’renot also softwar e; it seems that most softwareismor e con- doing CD 3. Grrr. cer ned about silly-looking “skins” than functional- ity. mplayer seems to be the most popular one, but it doesn’t have slow motion play, let alone re- Thur sday, 29July2004 verse or slow reverse. After awhile started in- stalling xine,which at least promises slow mo- Finally finished download disk 2 of the Fedora tion, but I have this horrible premonition that I’m Cor e 2CD-Rs today, so burnt one and tried to in- going to have to hack mplayer to do what I want. stall it on eucla.The installation failed in the Somehow the free softwarescene is drifting off- middle: the installed system couldn’t read the sec- topic. ond CD-R, which I had burnt and tested on the same drive. The same thing happened with one bur nt on adelaide.Spent a lot of time checking, Sunday, 1 August 2004 without coming to any firmconclusion, but it looks as if theremight be something about the Took a look at the xine port I made yesterday. way FreeBSD burns CD-Rs that doesn’t appeal to It’s difficult to say whether it will do slow motion: Fedora’s kernel. An installation of Red Hat 9, al- all I got was three differ ent SIGBUS crashes in a most the same system, worked fine and was able couple of minutes. Not very promising. It also to read the CDs. It looks as if both Fedora and has a configuration screen that looks like it has a Fr eeBSD have to sharethe blame here: Fedora web site in its ancestry, to judge by the poor lay- should be able to read CD-Rs that other systems out: can read, and FreeBSD should not burnCDs that ar e less readable than the ISOs from which they wer e derived. Grrr.David Newall came to the rescue with the CDs he used to install Fedora, and sent them offtothe replicators. In the process, took a cursory look at Red Hat 9. Ihate it! This is a Microsoft lookalike. It took me several minutes just to find a way to start an xter m.When is the computer industry going to get out of sign language mode? Of f to Melbourne in the evening for an AUUG board meeting. Stayed at the Duxton Hotel not for the first time, but today had great trouble with the air conditioning, which seems to be a prob- lem with the system: the temperaturecontr ol is as good as useless. Why do people have so much tr ouble with thermostats? AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 40 December 2004 sent. Didn’t hear back from him. Phil from Mount Barker Air Conditioning came along in the evening and took a look at the air conditioner.Diagnosis: defective starter capacitor: Monday, 2 August 2004 Back to work today, and managed to get my pro- That was quickly changed, and the system was gram working as intended, moreorless. I have back up and running within 24 hours. Afar cry an important demo to do next week, requiring fr om the times we’ve had to endureinthe past. about 6 weeks of work to be done first, so spent some time looking at that. Also looked a little bit at mplayer to see what Wednesday, 4 August 2004 would be requir ed to do slow motion and frame advance. Very little, it seems. Within a couple of Just when I thought we finally had our CDs sorted minutes I was able to influence the frame rate and out! Got a CD in the mail from Multi-Tech: Chris do something approximating to a very poor slow had made a copy of the first Fedora CD I had motion. It seems that it should be relatively trivial sent, which had been OK in the first place, except (a couple of hours, as opposed to minutes) to get that, once it had installed itself from it, Fedora it to work properly. Why do people prefer to in- couldn’t read it. Confir med that the same applied vent “skins” rather than implement basic function- to the copy that Chris made. It’s looking more ality? and morelike a bug in Fedora and less and less like a bug in FreeBSD though I can’t completely Just when I thought the air conditioner problems exonerate FreeBSD. wer e over,the external unit failed completely this evening. Looks like the compressor has failed. Continued with tidy-up work today, and got some sigh. good results. Looks like things areingood shape. Tuesday, 3 August 2004 Thur sday, 5 August 2004 Mor e slog today. Came to the realization that my attempt to do 6 weeks’ work in one was not like- Mor e work on my program today, and compared ly to succeed, and gave up, spending time filing storage requir ements with an existing product. down rough edges instead, with what looked like The result: my program requir ed 30 times more good results. disk, and so of course was also a lot slower (though not by the same factor). Ther e’s obvious- Call from Chris Butler of Multi-Tech today: one of ly room for improvement there, which in the first the Fedora CDs David Newall sent him last week instance will involve reassessing tradeoffs. was marginal. This is a real pain! Asked him to recover it and compareitwith the first ones we Still moreproblems with the CDs. It seems that the one I sent offyesterday was marginal as well. December 2004 41 AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 About the only ones that are not marginal arethe ones I burnt on the CD-R burner on my Dell Insp- ir on 5150, but Fedora doesn’t want to know about Monday, 9 August 2004 them. What apain! Jim Johnson along today to look at the work I’ve been doing and to discuss wherethe company’s Fr iday, 6 August 2004 going. We’r e living in interesting times. At least the deadline is gone, and in a few days I can re- Still no confirmation that the CDs areOK. What a lax a bit. Maybe. pain. Received a brochur e for AUUG2004 in the mail today. Grrr.That was what I was going to pad AUUGN with. Now I need to find 11 morepages Saturday, 7 August 2004 by yesterday. Had to do some scanning this morning, so in- stalled the Canon softwareonmynew machine and did so. Then decided to try out the “work- Tuesday, 10August 2004 ar ound” that they had claimed that would allow Finally a breather! A good thing too: in the morn- reliable scanning of 6 slides every time (it should ing I has 10,000 mail messages in my inbox, and do 8): leave out top left and bottom right slides, it was threatening to overflow. By the evening I and the rest should be recognized correctly. Well, hadn’t quite made it below 1,000 (but it was be- they’r e not: low 1,023). Only one of the 6 slides is correctly framed; num- Finally also got AUUGN out of the way, after find- bers 1 and 3 have a black bar on the right, num- ing another article to print. Thank God for that! ber 4 has one at the bottom, and the software Now I have to start with the next one almost im- thinks that 5 and 6 arethe wrong way round. mediately. This is no exception: it gets most of them wrong. Still moreinter est in my perfor mance figur es. I I’ve had enough with this thing It’s clear that don’t understand myself why they’reso(compara- Canon arenot going to honour morethan their tively) good, but I suspect it’s not of my making. absolute minimum legal obligations—given the in- ability of this softwaretoscan slides and their continuing advertisements that it can, even this is in doubt—I’m going to retur n it. Now to find a Wednesday, 11August 2004 scanner worth using. Ross Williams out heretoday for a discussion of the work I’ve been doing and our futuredir ec- tion. A long discussion, but we came out with Sunday, 8 August 2004 some useful stuff. Exceptionally (for recent times, anyway) did some While talking, had a minor mail disaster.Five work today to fix up the problems in my program days ago, I tried to forward over 5,000 spam mes- ahead of a demo tomorrow. That was a resound- sages to [email protected]’ve ing success, so much so that I’m left wondering never seen anything but spam from ctbcnetsu- what I’ve forgotten: I exceeded my perfor mance per.com.br (and, in fact, in my experience the figur es by about 60%. Things arelooking good. Brasilians arecurr ently very heavy spam senders, pr obably not the impression that the country Ther e’s finally been a break in the rain, so we wants to make in the rest of the world), but this loaded our horses into the float and headed offto one was extreme: the messages came in in less Kuitpo Forest to go riding. We wer en’t fast than a day. Ishould have been morecar eful, enough; it started raining on the way, so we just though: this seems to be a send-only site, and tur ned ar ound and came back. It must dry up ther e’s no way to send mail to them. As a result, soon. Iended up with them all expiring today—and be- ing retur ned to me with multiple error messages. Took me over half an hour just to delete them all again. AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 42 December 2004 Thur sday, 12August 2004 16:22:35.753430 < 213.180.193.68.56911 > \ 192.109.197.80.27953: S 2706038967: \ 2706038967(0) win 3072 The results of yesterday’s mail crisis wereevident 16:22:35.770356 < 213.180.193.68.56911 > \ 192.109.197.80.48381: S 2706038967: \ today: 2706038967(0) win 1024 16:22:35.770439 < 213.180.193.68.56911 > \ On 11 August 2004 you received 35771 mail \ 192.109.197.80.2658: S 2706038967: \ messages and sent 28 mail messages. 2706038967(0) win 4096 16:22:35.770530 < 213.180.193.68.56911 > \ 192.109.197.80.2124: S 2706038967: \ Istill can’t dump a FreeBSD -CURRENT system, 2706038967(0) win 3072 but I now have the Fedora CDs back, the ones that David Newall sent in. They worked fine, and This carried on at a rate of about 50 probes per Iwas able to install Fedora on eucla with no par- second for nearly an hour,bywhich time I had ticular problem. Then decided to update Free- received (and firewalled) about 200,000 packets, BSD on a third partition, which proved very frus- or 10 MB. It was relatively easy to find out who trating: the disk partitioning tools seem to be bro- was doing it: ken, probably as a result of GEOM changes, and $ host 213.180.193.68 at one point I thought I would have to restor e the 68.193.180.213.IN-ADDR.ARPA domain name \ entir e existing FreeBSD partition. Installed Free- pointer proxychecker.yandex.net BSD 5.2.1 from CD-ROM onto the sparepartition, and miraculously the existing partition came back Send a message to [email protected] after to life. which the bombardment stopped. Some time lat- er I received a reply to my message stating (in Wasjust starting an installation of CURRENT on lines too wide for the screen, let alone for this the new partition when I got a message from jour nal): Br ett Lymn that a number of older SPARC ma- chines wereavailable for grabs from his compa- Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2004 12:58:31 +0400 (MSD) ny, so up to Edinburgh to take a look, and ended From: [email protected] Reply-To: [email protected] up coming back with 9 SPARC machines ranging X-Originating-IP: 213.180.211.108 fr om an IPX to a SPARCStation 20, as well as a X-FORWARDED-FOR: ????????????, Greg ’groggy’ Lehey couple of old DEC Alpha servers. None of them -----?????----- have disks, which makes things a little morecom- Dear sir, plicated, but they could be useful as diskless Your’ve detected activity of our corporate workstations. I’m pr epar ed to give some of them open proxy checker. It is being used to submit and validate entries to our away to anybody who’s interested and has an in- +corporate block list (insecure hosts part). ter esting use for them. Somebody of our users has sent spam complain related to affected hosts I guess. It’s a reason to schedule automatic +proxycheck. Pls note that further rechecks will be suppressed for a significant time. Though Fr iday, 13August 2004 full portscan is a little bit noisy (sorry), unfortunatly it is the only method to detect several modern kinds of +open proxy spam Testing went on in the background today, which sources (mainly trojaned and infected hosts). PS: Yandex LLC is a major russian was a good way to do it: I had some strangeness internet content provider. Spam is a real which only showed up after fifteen minutes of problem for millions users of our services. +That’s why we use any chance to detect and running; setting conditional breakpoints managed block spamsources. to get gdb to use twice as much CPU time as the Sincerely, pr ogram, making things even slower. Yandex customer support In the meantime, updated the kernel on eucla,in the process showing that my system upgrade pro- Some things leave me at a loss for words. cedur e (newsystem.html)works relatively well. Dumping a processor from ddb,however,doesn’t. at least not with the panic command; you need Sunday, 15August 2004 to use call doadump instead. It’s been like that for I don’t know how long. Mor e working on web pages today. In the lead- up to the AUUG 2004 national conference I tried Running a tcpdump on my right-hand monitor to find the photos (Photos-20020908.html)ofthe has proved useful on multiple occasions. This af- last conference in Melbourne, only to find that ter noon Isaw a whole line of this on the screen: they weren’t there. On further investigation dis- cover ed alarge number of photos that I hadn’t December 2004 43 AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 converted to web pages, so spent some time do- ing that; ended up uploading nearly 200 MB of images to the web site. Also processed Yvonne’s old cookbook which I had scanned in yesterday. Had some fun writing ashell script (scripts/makepages.html)tocreate a framework around the images; for such a simple thing, it worked surprisingly well, and left me wondering to what extent people have thrown out control in the sake of ease of use when creat- ing modernsoftwar e. Monday, 16August 2004 How slow this installation is! Things arestarting to little morenor mal again, but somehow I didn’t have much to show for today. Spent some time debugging my program; as sus- Tuesday, 17August 2004 pected, some of the blame was with the gdb de- bugging scripts. It’s a slow business. Finally got round to looking at the tutorial notes for the debugging tutorial I’m doing in two Also looked at the SPARC hardwarethat I got on weeks’ time. Hopefully by then I’ll get them fin- Thursday. It’s agood reminder of how quickly ished and in better shape than previously. hardwar e becomes obsolete. The SPARCStation 10, the fastest machine, only had 32 MB of memo- Carried on with my program debugging and ry, and the SPARCStation 20 only had 64 MB, but found another bug, interestingly apparently a day it also had 2 CPUs. The SS 10 had a defective one bug in code over 10 years old. It’ll take a bit power supply (well, at least it had been re- of thinking to fix it, not because it’s so difficult to moved), so took the memory out of it and put it find a solution (that’s obvious), but it’ll be difficult into the SS 20, making just enough memory to in- to prove that it’s fixed. stall Solaris 9. Also had to find a disk to install on. The disks from my Sun Disk Array (diskar- ray.html)have the correct connectors, but they’re Wednesday, 18August 2004 full height drives, and their construction means that they’ll only fit the top slot: the top slot ob- What a hectic day! It started offnor mally enough, structs the disk if you try to install into the bottom installing a new version of FreeBSD on sydney slot. That also means, of course, that I need to and NetBSD on the SPARCstation 20. The latter pr op it up, and that I won’t be able to put the pr oved to be almost impossible with the CDs I cover on. Finally I’ve found a use for my old Fu- had (1.5.2 from Wasabi), so downloaded an ISO. jitsu magneto-optical disks: In the meantime, Alan Kennington showed up for atechnical discussion about networking, about which I know nothing, so spent most of our time talking about file systems. That time was somewhat curtailed by a phone call fr om Ollivier Robert, who was due to arrive from Melbour ne by car this evening. He had discov- er ed that the distances in Australia werelarger than in Europe (he had expected the distance to be about 300 km, although Élodie told me had originally thought about 100 km; the real distance is about 750). As a result he had decided to fly instead, so he was arriving at 14:50. Reluctantly curtailed the discussion with Alan (which we wouldn’t have finished today anyway) and into town to pick them up. Back home, ran into moretrouble on multiple AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 44 December 2004 fr onts: updating DNS for Ollivier’s monster laptop didn’t update the secondary properly, building the softwar e for sydney failed, the disk I had put in Saturday, 21August 2004 the SPARCstation 20 proved (after significant checking) to be defective (wouldn’t even probe), Up early this morning and out to Clarendon with and sat-gw,mysatellite downlink and firewall Ollivier and Élodie to meet Michael Hickinboth- box, developed not one but at least three prob- am, who showed us round his Clarendon vine- lems: it wouldn’t let data through for Olliver’s IP,I yard. A nice place. They grow most of their fruit couldn’t get an ssh connection, couldn’t get a for big-name vintners, and I discovered that console display (the video board seemed to have they’r e the owner of the “Old vine” Grenache lost sync), and to add insult to injury the g key on vines (70 years old) from which Normans pro- the keyboard failed. Ended up crashing the ma- duced a wine of the same name some years ago, chine and rebooting, after which Ollivier’s ma- and which I had found particularly good. chine was on the net, but I still couldn’t get an ssh ;looks like that one is my fault, probably a Catchup time in the afternoon. Building aNetB- br oken fir ewall config. SD (http://www.NetBSD.or g/)ker nel for the SPARCstation 20 proves moredif ficult than I had expected: the kernel finally built, but crashed im- mediately on booting. Did some puzzling over Thur sday, 19August 2004 that, but given the speed of the machine, didn’t finish. Somehow another day whereIgot nothing done. The news of the day was the breaking of the MD5 algorithm, which we have been using. Looks like we’r e going to have to find something else. SHA1 Monday, 23August 2004 is a possibility, but the hashes areeven longer, and it’s marginally slower.Also fixed (hopefully) Ollivier and Élodie left for Kangaroo Island this the complicated program bug that I found last mor ning, leaving me to catch up on the work that week. has accumulated in the last couple of days. Somehow I didn’t have much to show for it. Apart from that, got NetBSD installed on the Made some progr ess on the tutorial notes for the SPARCstation 20, which I’ve decided to call dump- AUUG conference though not as much as I want- ty.Some day I must write a web page describing ed; it seems that the kernel debugger really is still the crazy ideas that lead to my system names. br oken, which is a real nuisance. Tried to repeat What I didn’t get done was any further work on the crashes I had experienced last month (12 Ju- my tutorial; that’s now becoming urgent. ly), without success. As I’ve noticed elsewhere, never rely on a bug. Even firewir e debugging wouldn’t work properly, which is disappointing. Fr iday, 20August 2004 ADUUG lunch today, with Ollivier and Élodie, of Tuesday, 24August 2004 course, but also with Andy Johnstone of the Aus- tralian Democrats for the first time; Andy’s the re- Into town this morning for the inaugural meeting al reason for Ian Gilfillan’s recent Open Source of the Board of Management of the IT Council of Bill (http://sa.democrats.or g.au/Media/2003/0625_ South Australia (http://www.itcouncil.asn.au/), a%20Open%20Sour ce.htm), and he aroused some again with Yana. There’s something strange inter ested discussion. about these board meetings: I’ve been to about ADUUG lunches arealways fun, and this time we six of them, and today for the third time we en- had a total of 13 people show up, morethan usu- counter ed kangar oos while bypassing Hahndorf. al; but somehow it cuts the day in half, and I It’s the second time Yana was with me but every didn’t get much done in the remainder of the day, time I was on the way to an IT council meeting. just enough to confirmthat, though I had fixed You’d think that therewould be some connection, the bug I had been dancing around all week, it but the only one I can think of is that Adelaide is wasn’t the one that was causing the corruption I atown not far from the bush. saw last week. sigh The changes have made a big differ ence in the size of the meetings, which makes them more manageable, especially since not all positions on the board have been filled. On the other hand, December 2004 45 AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 that leaves fewer people to do the work, and I day’s dump, on eucla to look at when I get to found myself chairing a membership subcommit- Melbour ne. Looks like there’s something happen- tee. That’ll be interesting. ing during the night to trigger it. In the afternoon, morework on my tutorial, but also found enough time to find the next bug in my program; possibly it, too, is a day-one bug, Sunday, 29August 2004 but I’ll have to investigate that morecar efully, pr obably after the AUUG conference. Got to the Duxton Hotel through very heavy traf- fic shortly before6pm. Out for dinner with Steve Bellovin, Jeffr ey Hsu and Carl Makin; Theo Der- aadt was theretoo, but declined to join us: he Wednesday, 25August 2004 had apparently already eaten. Mor e work on the tutorial notes today, and finally got something worth submitting. It’s really amaz- ing how much work they are. Hopefully they’r e Monday, 30August 2004 better than they have been. Didn’t get much else done. Even managed to miss an AUUG board Today was my all-day kernel debugging tutorial, teleconfer ence—the first time I’ve ever missed an which went smoothly enough. Five participants AUUG board meeting, which left me less than (got to remember that that corresponds to about happy. 75 in America), all of whom wereprimarily inter- ested in Linux. It looks like I’m going to have to add moreLinux-r elated material. Deviated some- what from the course notes, and spent some time Thur sday, 26August 2004 looking at the zaphod dumps, which seem to be due to a vnode being marked VBAD and being Spent most of the day working on my tutorial caught in an INVARIANTS section because a slides. It’s dif ficult to know how to present this pointer hadn’t been recycled; possibly a harmless kind of material. In Taipei, as last year at AUUG omission. and BSDCon, I presented directly from the tutorial notes, but particularly in the large lecturetheatr e In the evening to Lygon Street for dinner,ata in Taipei that was a problem. On the other hand, place on the South-East corner of Lygon and Grat- slides don’t contain much information, and there tan Streets, wherewesomehow managed to get ar e so many details to consider here. all the drinks for free. Considering they charged $10.50 for a basket of garlic bread, I don’t think Finally got our Digitrex DVD recorder back from they suffer ed too much, though. “r epair”, after being away for nearly a month. Ac- cording to the service report they changed the fan, and indeed it’s a lot quieter.The other mat- ters areallegedly “USUAL FOR THIS MODEL”. Tuesday, 31August 2004 What now? Jef frey Hsu’s tutorial today, a Linux code walk- thr ough. I’ve been in this sort of thing before, but it seems that it’s a relatively unusual thing in Fr iday, 27August 2004 the Linux world. It was also Jeffr ey’s first tutorial of this nature, and he somewhat overestimated Relatively quiet day today, spent preparing for to- the time it took people to read and understand morr ow’s jour ney. It wasn’t made any easier by the code. Fr om my viewpoint, things weredif fer- the fact that zaphod paniced during the night; it’s ent. After the pain of the code reading I did in not clear whether the new replacement disk is not April and May, I found it refr eshingly easy to fol- in fact also defective. low. Jef frey also had a number of interesting tools and Saturday, 28August 2004 methods. He br ought anumber of books, most of which I had, though not Comaen, Leiserson zaphod paniced again during the night with some and Rivest: “Algorithms”,McGraw-Hill 1989, which file system consistency issue. Why do these Ithink I’m going to have to buy. In addition he things always happen when I’m leaving for a con- showed a new tool called Source Navigator fer ence? Took a dump and put all the information, (http://sour cenav.sour ceforge.net/), in the style of including the source and object trees and yester- cscope and etags,but ostensibly morepower ful. AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 46 December 2004 Spent quite some time trying to install the Free- The Annual General Meeting went fairly painless- BSD port, showing all the weaknesses of the Ports ly, though it’s clear that we still have two differ ent Collection in the process: pkg-add -r didn’t work gr oups of opinion about what to do with AU- (claimed it couldn’t find the URI), dependencies UGN. Frank Crawford’s prepar ed to get involved, wer e wr ong, and when I finally got everything in- which is a great idea. stalled, I didn’t know how to start it, and there Networking reception in the evening, then out to was no obvious documentation. When I finally the Indian Restaurant around the corner,which got it started, discovered that it would generate was better than I recall it, though it’s always a bit about 2 GB of cross-r efer ence data (TAGS is 1.3 of a waste after the snacks at the reception. Rela- MB), and I didn’t have space. Jef frey used it dur- tively early to bed. ing his talk, and I found I was consistently faster with etags than Jeffr ey was with Source Naviga- tor.It’s doubtless of use, but the menu pushing slows it down too much for a number of uses. Thur sday, 2 September 2004 Speakers’ drinks at the Royal Melbourne Hotel in Inter esting talk this morning by Theo de Raadt the evening, after which down to the other end of about the work they’ve been doing in OpenBSD Bourke St to a NetBSD beer drinking evening. to make buffer overflow exploits much moredif fi- Late to bed. cult. I had heard of much of it before, but it was well presented and made a lot of sense. Later in the morning Warr en Toomey talked about what Wednesday, 1 September they’r e doing now with TiVoIt’s interesting to think how much has happened since our first dis- 2004 cussions (diary-sep2000.html#28)ofthis topic. He and Luke Mewburnshowed me a few things First day of the conference today, and the first that I didn’t know. Overall, though, I still don’t time for some time that I’ve been herealmost like TiVotoo much, and much of the demonstra- pur ely as a participant. This year seems to be tions just went to confirmmyprejudices. particularly good; we’ve had the highest atten- dance for five years, and everything seem to be In the afternoon I was session chair for a keynote going smoothly. speech by Jess Healy the Democrats lead senate candidate for Victoria at only 19 years old. She Started offwith Senator Kate Lundy, shadow IT gave a good talk within the time constraints allo- minister (and possibly the real one in a couple of cated. After that Bdale Garbee with issues of trust months; today was also the start of the election in the Debian project; good food for thought for campaign). I heard her at the “Open Source in the BSD projects too. Gover nment” confer ence in January, but this one was a differ ent talk, and much better. In the evening the conference dinner with its usu- al madness. We got started earlier than usual, Then listened to a few talks on system configura- even beforethe entree, and we weredecidedly tion. Adrian Close’s talk on “Kara” was particular- flagging by the end. David Purdue had organized ly interesting, since it’s a differ ent appr oach to the awine tasting competition, unfortunately with a system configuration scripts I’ve been working on 1995 Lenswood Riesling which was so far beyond since the beginning of July. Isuppose I’m going its prime that all the “experts” thought it was very to have to look at that in moredetail. Then young. David Newall won, or,asheput it, was Michael Paddon, ostensibly talking about scalable the last one left sitting. remote firewalls—an interesting idea in them- selves—but in fact moreadiscussion of R-trees, which might be an interesting thing to look at in context of Monkey. He later gave me a link to Fr iday, 3 September 2004 some source code (http://www.rtr eeportal.org/) Up later this morning, as usual after the dinner which I must look at, though he says the code is last night, missing Steve Alford in the process. It’s not functional in that form. apity they put good talks on on Friday mornings. After lunch heard moreabout VoIP from Andrew Most of the good papers seemed to have been in Ruther ford; Istill need to look at that in morede- the first two days, and I didn’t go to anything of tail. Steve Bellovin did an interesting and particular interest; instead spent a lot of time in thought-pr ovoking talk on identity and privacy, the secretariat arranging photos and taking more pr obably the closest we came to the conference for people who wanted some. I’ve decided that theme “Who areyou?” December 2004 47 AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 this Nikon Coolpix 880 is not the best in the world for flesh tones, and it often leaves people looking as if they have been drinking all night (today was, admittedly, not a good day to test that). The conference wound down rather suddenly, as AUUG conferences tend to do, though we spent a bit of time in the bar talking about all sorts of fu- tur es. Pia Smith, president of Linux Australia, had tur ned up rather suddenly in the middle of the night, and we spent a bit of time talking. Then offwith David Newall, Ollivier and Élodie to the Indian restaurant we had visited on Wednesday, this time with a little moreappetite. Unfortunately from my perspective, it was aimed David was telling me that CSIRAC, Australia’s first towards predominantly non-technical people. computer,isnow on display in the Melbourne The drum was labelled “disk drive”, and though museum, and that it’s the oldest surviving com- the machine was not running (understandably; puter in the world. Changed my retur n plans to maintenance and power would have been a see that. nightmar e), the display lamps had been wired up to a random on/offgenerator of about 8 Hz. Ther e was almost no information about the tech- Saturday, 4 September 2004 nical details of the machine (I later discovered it was a 20 bit machine running at about 1 KIPS Intended to go to the museum with Ollivier and (0.001 MIPS), and that it had about 2,048 words of Élodie this morning, but their time schedules memory). I should have a chat with the people didn’t mesh too well (I keep forgetting how much who did the exhibition; I consider that this is the work a baby is), so offbymyself to the museum world’s most important old computer exhibition, in Russell Street. A good thing that they didn’t and I could imagine a lot of interest from techni- come with me: the museum moved to Carlton cal people world-wide. Also, it’s possible that we years ago, and I had to come back and get the could put some of Australia’s early UNIX history car. in theretoo; this needs discussion beforeIcan The new museum reminds me in concept of the give details. pyramid of the Louvre: it’s right next to a staid old building, and it’s ultra-modern. Both museum and Exhibition building don’t match up to their Sunday, 5 September 2004 Parisian equivalents, of course. The CSIRAC exhi- bition was interesting for a number of reasons: I Quiet day, spent getting back to “normal”, though had never seen a mercury delay line before: Ididn’t try too hard. The repair of the Digitrex DVD player was too good to hold. In the ten days after getting the machine back, it didn’t hang at all, a very long time by comparison with its prior behaviour.To- day it did, however—exactly the same symptoms as before. In combination with the service report Isuppose that this means that the machine is not repairable, and that this problem is a known (and evidently irreparable) fault. Ishall contact Dig- itr ex and ask for them to refund my money. Just the presence of the machine was imposing: AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 48 December 2004 Monday, 6 September 2004 zaphod is still crashing regularly every night—in Thur sday, 9 September 2004 fact, twice a night, as Yvonne discovered. Debug- Ther e’s another project coming up at work, and ging isn’t helped by various bugs in gdb that stop I’ve been asked to review. I’ve been putting the me from finding the name of the file: it’s passed matter offfor nearly a month now, so it was time to namei as a pointer into userland, and the new to do something about it. Today was the day, version of gdb in -CURRENT refuses to descend and it kept me busy nearly all day. into userland. The development version gdb6 simply crashes trying to derefer ence it. Looked at Also looking at the zaphod panic issue, which is it with ddb and discovered a relative pathname still puzzling me, not helped by problems getting (sample3.bz2.uu,FWIW;ther e must be about 30 fir ewir e debugging to work. Iwonder if the soft- of them on the disk) and no associated directory war e is too old; since it’s development software, name, which is puzzling. Looks like morework ther e’s no particular requir ement for interoperabil- with firewir e. ity. Apart from that, spent some time catching up and investigating userland exits to implement file sys- tems. Linux has a “loopback file system”, but it Fr iday, 10September 2004 seems that there’s nothing equivalent in the BSDs. Looks like another diversion ahead. Some days I seem to get nothing done, and today was one of them. It’s not that I didn’t do any- thing; I worked all day long. But at the end of the day, therewas nothing to show for it, except Tuesday, 7 September 2004 maybe a few loose ends tidied up. Isuppose it comes back to the question of mail: “reading Another day spent mostly in catchup mode. Man- mail” is only part of the equation: a large propor- aged to get my mail down to moremanageable tion of my work goes into mail, but I look on it as pr oportions, but wasn’t very successful in finding mail, not work. Time to reconsider things. useful userland file system stuff. Thereare a sur- prising number of strange file systems in /usr/sr c/sys/fs/.Things like nullfs and portalfs seemed to be possibilities, but they’renot really Sunday, 12September 2004 what I’m looking for.Didn’t find anything very useful on the web either.It’s amazing how much In the afternoon, moreinvestigating the zaphod time you can spend looking. panics, which aregetting moreand moreconfus- ing as I investigate them. This may end up being arace condition and not a hardwareproblem af- Wednesday, 8 September ter all. 2004 Monday, 13September 2004 It’s looking moreand morelike I need to create a VFS loopback layer,not something I’m looking Mor e work on my crashing zaphod today. This is forward to. Ineed to learnmor e about the struc- really quite a fascinating panic, and though I sus- tur es, so what better way than to kill three birds pect I could fix it faster if I didn’t document what with one stone? zaphod has been panicking daily I’m doing, I think that it’s an excellent example of for nearly two weeks now with the panic message aker nel bug. Since the system only crashes at cleaned vnode isn’t.Spent most of the day night and doesn’t seem to do itself any harmin investigating that and documenting the paths the process, theredoesn’t seem to be any priority thr ough the VFS layer,which will also be useful in fixing the problem. both for my understanding of the code and also Confer ence call in the afternoon. Looks like I’ll for the next iteration of my kernel debugging tu- be implementing (or finding) a userland file sys- torial. As was to be expected, I ended up in a tem callout. number of dead ends, but it’s probably instructive to document how I got thereand why. As a re- sult, didn’t find the bug: in particular,itlooks as if VBAD is the correct type for an unused vnode. December 2004 49 AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 In the evening, put together the TV equipment I Tuesday, 14September bought yesterday. Given the fact that it all comes 2004 with softwarefor Microsoft, it seemed reasonable to use one of the Microsoft licenses that I have Gradually I’m making some headway about user- had forced on me to try it like that first. How I land file systems, paradoxically after replying to a hate Microsoft! It didn’t work properly. The DVD message about Vinum in a DragonFlyBSD mailing playing softwareIhave only works if the display list. It seems that Matt is very keen on the idea, card is set to output to monitor only; as soon as I and is even thinking of migrating less important set it to dual head (including TV), it hangs hard file systems, such as cd9660, to userland—once and needs to be restarted. What kind of use is the interface works, of course. Also heard that that? Also, once again everything is done with toy ARLA (http://www.stacken.kth.se/pr ojekt/arla/) “skins” like the ones I commented on a couple of does this, and that it’s very portable. Unfortunate- months ago (11 July). To stop the program, for ly, the site was down, but there’s still plenty to example, you need to find and click on the but- chew on. ton marked POWER on the toy display. Even the skins themselves suggest some teenager having fun with developing his own fantasy boxes rather than anything you’d ever see in a HiFi shop. Am Wednesday, 15September Ithe only person thoroughly put offbythese 2004 toys? Mor e investigation of the file system layer today. The ARLA site was back up, and I spent some Saturday, 18September time looking at the code, which of course doesn’t compile. sigh.Isuppose it’s worth the trouble to 2004 fix things first. Spent most of the day investigating the issues sur- rounding computer TV.They took a surprisingly long time, not the least because of the old issues Thur sday, 16September with installing new versions of FreeBSD. Still, TV 2004 out works, for a minimal definition of “work”. It seems that the output is made by dithering the Into town today and to North Terrace to meet image, and the resultant quality is pretty terrible. John Sanders, the new executive director of the IT Hopefully—when I get that far—an X display will Council of South Australia Interesting person; he be much cleaner. certainly has a lot of energy, and I can see a num- ber of changes coming. Digitr ex has finally approved a refund for my Sunday, 19September 2004 abortive purchase of the GKX-9000 DVD recorder Mor e work on the video recorder (video- That’s mainly good news, but it means that I need recor der.html)today. What apain! Installing to find some alternative. While in town, pur- MythTV (http://www.mythtv.or g/)was complicated chased a DVD+RWbur ner,acouple of tuner by some of the strangest code I’ve seen in a cards and a TV out card, then home to try them while: out and discover that an old version of -CURRENT recognizes one of the tuner cards and the TV out /* ci must be 0 */ card out of the box. That’s morethan I expected, if( bitoff == 0 ) { (uint8_t)strm[co]= bitten; but I still fear that I’m going to have a lot of work co++; ahead of me. } goto BAUCHWEH; HIRNWEH: Fr iday, 17September 2004 (uint8_t)strm[co]= bitten; co++; Mor e work on ARLA today: looks like I have just become maintainer,though it looks as if there’s a The (uint8_t) casts (of which thereare sever- non-committer out therewho really uses it. Mor e al) areillegal, of course, but the comments seem administrative stuff. appr opriate. Fixed that, and at least got it to compile. AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 50 December 2004 Investigating the Nvidia display board I had Finally got through to my father on another pr oved to be useful: rather to my surprise, I was phone line. I’m beginning to wonder whether it’s actually able to get it to run two displays under X. not just a very poor user interface to a voice mail system. Later installed mplayer on teevee.Installation went OK, but getting it to run is a differ ent mat- Federal elections arecoming up in Australia (on 9 ter.Asinthe past, I had trouble. Display acr oss October). We’ve heard the slanging matches in the network is impossibly broken, and for some the media (summary: “Who’s the bigger liar?”), reason I couldn’t get it to work at all on the local but I thought that was probably not a good basis (monitor) display :0.0.The message was: for a vote, so I spent some time investigating the web sites of the parties. The results weren’t very SwScaler: using unscaled Planar YV12 -> \ BGR 8-bit special converter helpful: BGR not supported, please contact the developers FATAL: Cannot initialize video driver. • Ican’t find anything on http://www.liber- FATAL: Could not initialize video filters \ al.or g.au/.They have a link “Election Policies (-vf) or video output (-vo). which looks promising, but it’s a collection of large PDFs, totalling hundreds of pages and After a fair amount of discussion on IRC, and with with misleading titles like “Supporting the Ter- help from google found out the problem: this is ritory” (it turns out they mean the Northern mplayer ’s inimitable way of saying “I can’t use an Territory; though this is an accepted abbrevia- 8bit display”. After setting the default depth for tion, in this context it suggests that they don’t the display to 24 bits, it worked fine. What a know that Australia has other territories, nor pain! indeed that it is itself a territory). The Liberals also expect me to use specific software, which Idon’t have, so I suppose I’m not welcome Monday, 20September 2004 anyway. • http://www.labor.or g.au/ doesn’t seem to be Mor e work on the ARLA stufftoday. I got a mes- inter ested in the election. Apart from using it sage from one of the people involved in the Free- as a way to slate the Liberals (“Liberal’s IR BSD port, which is currently broken as the result Lies”). the only policy they mention (indirect- of recent changes in the FreeBSD bio layer.So ly) is the “Indigenous Policies”. The word what do I do? I’m not married to FreeBSD. It’s “election” does not appear on their home supposed to run on NetBSD and Linux as well. page. Consider ed the options and decided that running it on NetBSD would have some advantages (Linux • http://campaign.democrats.or g.au/index.asp is too differ ent at this stage, and the NetBSD port get it almost right. They have a link to would help me fix the FreeBSD port), so down- http://campaign.democrats.or g.au/minifesto.ht loaded an ISO and started installing it. Toolate, I ml at the top of the front page, and apart realised I had installed it on a SCSI drive whose fr om being somewhat unsureofitself (“Please contr oller has no boot ROM, so I won’t be able to take the time to consider this short version of boot from it. Sigh. the Australian Democrats? election platform”) gives the kind of overview (not necessarily the Also reading about AFS, which I’ve never really content) that I was looking for.The looked at before. It’s quite interesting. Democrats arealso the only party I’ve looked at that didn’t try to slate one of the other par- Tuesday, 21September ties. About the only downside is that they don’t eat 2004 their own dog food: after bringing through an Open Source Bill in the government of the Still working on getting test equipment set up to- Territory (another one), their web page ap- day. For some reason, a NetBSD i386 CD-R of pears to expect us to use a Microsoft non-stan- the latest release (1.6.2) doesn’t install cleanly: it dard character set. Not surprisingly, their web seems to contain the wrong kind of binaries. page doesn’t validate, not even after guessing Spent a lot of time installing over the network the character set (“Windows” 1252). It’s also (the first time I’ve ever done that), and then build- sad to note that the Democrats don’t mention ing the rest locally. Iwish this didn’t take so IT policy on their policies page. much time. December 2004 51 AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 • http://www.gr eens.org.au/ have moreincom- mon with the Liberals than I think they’d like to admit: they have a policies page with lots of Thur sday, 23September PDFs, but no overview. 2004 It looks as if we have a long way to go before Australian politics really enters the Information Awhole day filled with meetings! Left at 7:30 am Age. for Adelaide, wherewehad a meeting of the Board of Management of the IT Council of South Australia. For me the big issue was the member- Wednesday, 22September ship committee, which met after the board meet- ing (not immediately after,asIshould have liked; 2004 we ran short of time as a result). Discussed lots of things, but didn’t get as far as we would have Feedback from the Australian Labor Party today: liked. the web site http://www.labor.or g.au/ is not the of ficial web site of the Labor party. For that, you Lunch with David Newall in the “Corner Bistrot“ need to look at http://www.alp.or g.au/,not an im- in Bank St. Nice enough food, but I got the (in- mediately obvious name. So I did that and did corr ect) impr ession that they’repretty new, and find a number of policies, nicely marked “Election they need morepractice. Spent the time dis- Policy”. Makes you wonder what the differ ence cussing the upcoming UNIX Developer’s Sympo- between an Election Policy and a non-Election sium that we’retrying to put together.Itlooks Policy is. Unfortunately, it’s still too detailed: I like it could be a real success. still can’t find an overall statement of Labor’s poli- Then back to the Radisson Playford for a meeting cy and values. Iasked the web master why they of the full IT Council; I get the impression that the didn’t have a link at http://www.labor.or g.au/ and ef fort was showing, and we finished early. With he replied that they wereseparate organizations the current membership figures, the meeting (he did, though, admit that it wasn’t much of a looked a little superfluous. All that will change reason). when we have our projected sharp increase in Fewer concurrent things to do today; the big one membership, of course. was to get ARLA up and running on NetBSD, Didn’t get home until 18:30, to discover that my which requir ed an all-day build to get to NetBSD- NetBSD build had crashed, probably as a result of CURRENT.Took advantage of the time to finally the nightly crash of zaphod.High time to sort migrate wantadilla,atask I had begun over two that out. months ago I still don’t have my instructions for system upgrade (newsystem.html)complete, but the time was ripe, so swapped things around. Fr iday, 24September 2004 It would be nice to say that things went smoothly, but of course they did not. Ihad a lot of trouble Yetanother occasion whereIfind that simply starting X. First, I had forgotten that USB was dis- building an updated version of the system takes abled, so I couldn’t get the mouse to work until I for ever. chili,the NetBSD-CURRENT system I realized what the problem was, shut down, re- started earlier in the week, has been running a configur ed the BIOS and then rebooted. Then I 2.0H kernel since Wednesday, but building user- still had a lot of trouble getting the X displays to land keeps causing problems. Yesterday it was work. Given my X configuration (har d- because of the daily zaphod crash, and today NFS war e.html#x2x), that’s a little advanced, but in the kept hanging. Finally decided to build it on the end had to give up the attempt to move to new local disk (filling up a partition in the process), display cards (SiS) and revert to the cards I was and experienced further hangs. I’d really expect using in old wantadilla.All in all, I was down Ether net networking to be morereliable. for about three hours. The good news is that al- most none of this had to do with upgrading the On the other hand, moving to the new wantadil- softwar e: it was new hardwarethat (without good la was less harrowing than I had expected. It reason) caused me the headaches. seems that postfix ’s pseudo-sendmail pr ogram has changed its syntax and now requir es the names of the recipients on the invocation line (pr eviously it was happy to find them in the headers). Possibly ther e’s acommand line option AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 52 December 2004 to do it, but for now I just added the names to the command line: #!/bin/sh Sunday, 26September 2004 #$Id: tv-programme,v 1.3 2004/04/04 \ 22:13:54 grog Exp grog $ As expected, the new zaphod machine crashed as #Get today’s TV program PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin befor e this morning. I really must get round to D=‘date +%e | sed ’s: ::’‘ finding out what’s wrong here. TVP=/tmp/tv-programme TVPH=/tmp/tv-programme.html #ebroadcast films Spent most of the day working on AUUGN. Last fetch -o $TVP ‘date +"http://www...."‘ time round seemed so easy, but this time it’s cat < didn’t power on. The lack of manual didn’t help, for this disk: and I spent over an hour beforeIdecided that it #Device Mountpoint FStype Options Dump Pass# wasn’t going to work. Grrrr.The relationship be- #echunga:/src /src nfs rw 00 tween hardwareprice and the cost of time is /dev/ad1h /src ufs rw 00 changing to the point whereIdon’t know why I bother. The commented out line is the clue: this was orig- inally an NFS file system, which doesn’t need fsck, On a morepositive tack, managed to finally get and when changing it I forgot to set the fsck pass ARLA to compile and “run” on NetBSD. Idon’t number (should be 2). As a result, I have now really know how to use it. Tried to build the doc- had significant directory corruption, probably umentation, but that seems to be broken too: it since a month or so. Icould fix it, of course, and tries to refer ence an undefined file. I’m surethat the problem would go away, but In the evening, just beforebed, came in to find then I’d no longer have a case study. wantadilla dead. Further investigation showed it to have been overheating: when I rebooted it, the CPU temperaturewas still over 60°. Still further Thur sday, 30September investigation linked that with this morning’s well- intended replacement of the chassis covers. Took 2004 them offagain, and the temperaturedropped rapidly. The following screen shot was taken Into Adelaide today for a couple of meetings. I some minutes after it was back up and running had originally planned them around a renewed ago. It shows the CPU temperaturedropping attempt to have an ADUUG lunch, but once again fr om about 57° to under 50°: it had been cancelled. As a result to an interest- ing discussion with Jim Johnson in the morning, then had a bit of time on my hands which I spent with Tim Aslat. He had sold me a dual CPU motherboard on Monday, but I hadn’t been able to get it to power on. Br ought it and the old za- phod in with me, and of course it powered up with no problems doing exactly what I had done on Tuesday. I hate looking like a fool, but at least it works. In the afternoon had a face-to-face status meeting Iwonder how much effort has really gone into in- instead of the usual teleconference. We’ve hired vestigating air flow in computer cabinets. awhole lot of new people, and one of them, Pe- ter Pham, is going to be working in the storage systems area for a while. Wednesday, 29September 2004 Spent the day chasing up ARLA; somebody in the Fr eeBSD pr oject had assigned a problem report to me yesterday, and I thought it was a new version of the port. but it’s one I’ve seen already, and it doesn’t build. Didn’t have the stomach to try to debug it, so read some of the documentation in- stead; that could certainly do with improvement. In any case, it doesn’t look as if I can do much with only a single system running ARLA. Also continued on the panicking zaphod pr ob- lem; it looks like I bit offmor e than I could chew her e, though if I get it finished it will certainly be agood one. It’s now fairly clear that the bug is related to corruption on the disk. Ihad suspected this all along, but now I have evidence. It seems that I had put a “do not fsck ”entry into /etc/fstab AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 54 December 2004 DP made a call to all members to participate Minutes of AUUG Annual in the events and movement ahead of AUUG General Meeting, 1 Septem- in the future. Members do not need to be on the board to participate or help out in events. ber 2004 Mentioned that CodeCon was being organised and run by Peter Miller on the Central Coast this month. AUUG will support that effort, but Location: Duxton Hotel, Melbourne it will be run by a standard member.Any sug- • Apologies: gestions or proposals, write to auugex- Mark White, Kevin Sutton [email protected]. • Acceptance of minutes 2003. Question: AC commented on the case of small events. • Dp mentioned that the acceptance of the Question: minutes could not be done as usual since Asked about methods of addressing the debt they had been lost in transit last year after and how it could be reversed. the AGM. Answer: • It was agreed that Adrian Close will try and DP pointed out that AUUG was not deeply in reconstruct the minutes based on memory debt. The answer was deferred until the trea- and other people’s input. sur er’s report which would address the ques- tion morespecifically. • Pr esident’s Report Motion to accept the President’s Report: DP mentioned that he had discussed his report Moved: ED with the AUUG executive to put forward the Seconded: Peter Gray right ideals to the members. He started with saying “Hello”. Carried.... Mentioned that AUUG faces challenges, but • Secr etary’s Report they arenot fatal challenges. Interest in AUUG Anumber of events run by AUUG were has been increasing shown by the increase in missed over the last number of years and this sponsors and the success of this year’s confer- seems to have impacted on the AUUG’s mem- ence. Used the Olympic tag-line “Best confer- bership. This correlation seems to suggest that ence ever!”, certainly the best in five years. AUUG’s members appreciate the events that AUUG is focusing on its strengths and has to ar e run by AUUG. With AUUG’s new board, change with the times based around these ther e is an emphasis on having moreevents str engths. AUUG is looking at re-igniting ef- that our members will enjoy. forts for moresmall events around Australia. The number of attendees at AUUG2004 this AUUG is currently working with Linux Aus- year was in excess of 160 people. This num- tralia for Open Computing in Government ber exceeded AUUG’s expectations and is up (OCG) conference in April 2005, plus other on the previous five years. The number of available co-operative events. new members signing up at this years confer- ence arealmost double that of the previous Announcement of the promotion of Liz to ex- year. ecutive director.This will allow Liz to delegate alot of the secretarial work to others. Liz’s The total membership for this year based at work will now focus on sponsorships, promo- time of the conference is approximately 350 tion and the organisation of events within AU- members and over 800 subscribers to our AU- UG. UG mailing lists. These figures arenot exact due to the organisation of the conference with AUUG is moving away from a paper-based changing memberships. AUUGN. This was not a decision justified by costs, but rather focusing on a sense of com- JC mentioned that membership had improved munity and high quality content. It will be de- with this year’s conference and with an in- signed to make content available in a way that cr ease events, should see an improvement in is cost-effective and timely. The web portal the membership rates all up as well. model that is going ahead offers advantages to Moved: Peter Gray allow for membership price reductions and Seconded: Paul Haesler other cost savings. Carried... December 2004 55 AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 • Tr easur er’s Report the current needs of the members and the technologies available. GH mentioned that some previous years are still being done. The 2003 year shows losses Comment: of around $8000 and approximately $4000 for Look at it as a temporary move with re-intr o- 2002. GH listed figures (shown in the official duction later. report). GH offer ed the full reports to be avail- able for public scrutiny if people requir ed. GH mentioned the option of having PDF files to be printed. GH mentioned that a failed forecast made him wary of doing another for the futureyear.He This was acknowledged as being included. A does however expect a similar loss to that of comment was raised that the PDF should be last year.Pointed out that the income from printer friendly for members who wish to print the conference is up this year. AUUGN. Question: Comment: If losses, whereisour balance? AUUGN is not for announcements. Answer: $180K standing, $160K expenditure. This included an amount of approximately DP mentioned the option for letters for legal $100K which is untouched by AUUG. This reasons in making announcements. This shows that AUUG can go on for many years, would make it legal, and still save AUUG but want to turnthe problem around to im- costs. pr ove. Comment: DP mentioned that AUUG is not insolvent. GH mentioned the option for previous AU- The $8000 loss was around 3-4%. UGN material. GL mentioned that he is already Question: following up on the archived material in previ- What is the problem with accounting holdups? ous AUUGN’s. SL mentioned that the archives Answer: would be online in an archived format. Timing and accounts make it difficult. Goal is Motion to accept Treasur er’s Report: to get to a stage of good reports for AGM. Moved: Peter Next year should have them all ready. Still playing catchup with the past accounts. Seconded: Susie Close DP mentioned a compatible system with the Carried... accountant was being done. • Retur ning Of ficer’s Report. Question: Savings on the paper version of AU- Done by DP as Michael Tuke was absent. DP UGN going electronic? pointed out that insufficient nominations were Answer: made to be addressed by the retur ning of ficer. $20K. Main costs was with contributions. This meant that the whole board was elected un-opposed. GL, the acting editor,stated that the reasons for the delay was not organisation or prepara- ED and AfC wereco-opted to the board. This tion, but printing and cdrom stamping. requir es ratification from the members. DP raised the vote for ratification. Question: Moved: Frank Crawford Seconded: Michael Any drop in membership pricing coming up? Paddon Answer: Carried... DP mentioned that it has been discussed, but Accepting the report: not disclosed at this point in time. GL men- tioned the discussion and addressed follow-up Moved: Susie Close question about printing AUUGN and willing- Seconded: Steve Lynch ness to pay for it. Carried AfC mentioned that AUUGN was originally de- DP offer ed the position of retur ning of ficer. signed in a dead-tree world. Now thereisthe Inter net. Want to find quality information in a timely manner.Getting the ball rolling to fit AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 56 December 2004 • Other Business. No other business was raised. Letter s to AUUG • Meeting Closed: 5:40pm This column contains selected messages from the AUUG-talk mailing lists. To sign up for this mailing list, visit the mailman pages at AUUG Corporate Members http://www.auug.or g.au/mailman/listinfo/talk. As of 1 June 2004 • Apple Computer Australia Pty Ltd Fr om: Greg Black panel topics. Tutorials provide a morethor ough AUUG 2005 an- pr esentation, of either a half-day or full-day dura- tion. They may be of either a technical or man- nual conference agement orientation. The AUUG’2005 conference offers an unparalleled Sydne y,9–14 opportunity to present your ideas and experi- October 2005 ences to an audience with a major influence on A U U G the direction of computing in Australia. Inc Call for papers Submission Guidelines If you areinter ested in submitting a paper you AUUG invites proposals for papers and tutorials should send an extended abstract (1-3 pages) and relating to: abrief biography, and clearly indicate their pre- ferr ed pr esentation for mat. • Standards based computing • Open source projects If submitting a tutorial proposal you should send • Business cases for open source an outline of the tutorial and a brief biography, • Open source in government and clearly indicate whether the tutorial is of half- • Technical aspects of Unix, Linux or BSD day or full-day duration. • Per formance measurement and management • Softwar e development Speaker Incentives • Networking, Internet and the World Wide Web Pr esenters of papers receive free registration to • Identification, authentication and authorisation the conference (12–14 October), including social • Applications of cyptography and cryptographic functions, but excluding tutorials. Tutorial presen- pr otocols ters may select 25% of the profit of their session • Maintaining privacy OR free conference registration. Past experience • Achieving anonymity on the Internet suggests that a successful tutorial session generate • Inter net security areasonable retur n to the presenter. • Other aspects of computer security Please note that in accordance with GST tax legis- Pr esentations may be given as tutorials, technical lation, we will requir e the presentation of a tax papers, research papers, or management studies. invoice containing an ABN for your payment, or Technical papers aredesigned for those who an appropriate exempting government form. If need in-depth knowledge, whereas management neither is provided then tax will have to be with- studies present case studies of real-life experi- held from your payment. ences in the conference’s fields of interest. Awritten paper,for inclusion in the conference Impor tant Dates pr oceedings, must accompany all presentations. Abstracts/Proposals Due: 2June 2005 Speaker s mayselect one of twopre- Author s notified: 3July 2005 sentation for mats: Final copydue: 1August 2005 Tutor ials: 9-11 October Technical presentation: a 30-minute talk, with 10 Conference: 12-14 October 2005 minutes for questions. Research papers: a 30-minute talk, with 10 min- Proposals should be sent to: utes for questions. Research papers must present AUUG Inc. original contributions to the field and will be peer PO Box 7071 reviewed by at least two reviewers. Each research Baulkham Hills BC NSW 2153 paper will be judged on its originality, signifi- Australia cance, relevance and presentation. Email: Management presentation: a 25-30 minute talk, [email protected] Phone: 1800 625 655 or +61 2 8824 9511 with 10-15 minutes for questions (i.e. a total 40 Fax: +61 2 8824 9522 minutes). Please refer to the AUUG website for further in- Panel sessions will also be timetabled in the con- for mation and up-to-date details: http://www.au- fer ence and speakers should indicate their will- ug.or g.au/ ingness to participate, and may like to suggest December 2004 59 AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 • Shells and scripting languages FirstAustralian • Editors UNIX Develop- • Pr ogramming languages er’sSymposium • Build tools (e.g. make) Call for partici- • Version control A U U G • Debugging programs Inc pation • Writing graphical programs • Integrated development environments AUUG is proud to announce the 2005 UNIX De- Ker nel pr ogramming and debugging velopers’ Conference, to be held in Adelaide on 3 • and 4 June, 2005. Attendees will be accom- • Network programming plished programmers who wish to develop soft- This is an opportunity for you to help foster and war e for UNIX-like systems using open source str engthen the open source developers communi- tools. Weare planning two concurrent streams. ty in Australia. One stream will be aimed at programmers who have little or no experience with UNIX, and wish Tutorials can be 90 or 180 minutes long, and pa- to learnthe UNIX philosophy, environment and pers should be 45 minutes, including time for tools; the other will be aimed at developers who questions. Wewould prefer a written paper or alr eady have significant experience programming tutorial notes, for inclusion in the conference pro- for UNIX, and wish to learnnew or advanced ceedings, for all presentations. tools and techniques. The tutorial programme for the Newcomers str eam will comprise four 90 minute presenta- Submission Guidelines tions, which will give attendees a solid under- standing of the mechanics of developing for Those proposing to submit papers should submit UNIX: an abstract and a brief biography, and indicate whether their paper is intended for the Newcom- • Intr oduction to the UNIX environment ers or the Advanced stream. Those submitting tu- • Shells and scripting torial proposals should submit an outline of the tutorial and a brief biography, should indicate • Make and gcc whether their paper is intended for the Newcom- • Debugging with GDB ers or the Advanced stream, and should clearly in- dicate the duration of their presentation. The Programme Committee invites proposals for tutorials and papers. In order to ensurecomplete Pr oposals should be sent in electronic formtothe coverage, the programme for the "newcomers" Pr ogramme Committee at develop- str eam is a little morerigid. Our intention is to [email protected]. have four 1½ hour tutorials roughly covering the following topics: Impor tant Dates • Intr oduction to the unix environment • Shells and scripting Abstracts/Pr oposals Due 18 February 2005 • Make and gcc Authors notified 18 March 2005 • Debugging with GDB Final copy due 20 May 2005 Confer ence 3and 4 June 2005 We invite proposals that don’t disrupt this frame- work. For the advanced tutorials and the papers, Please refer to the AUUG website for further in- the following list of topics is intended to illustrate for mation and up-to-date details. In particular,it the direction of the conference, but papers on is still possible that the date may change slightly. other related topics will be considered: • Intr oduction to the UNIX environment AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 60 December 2004 FirstDig ital Pest Symposium Call For Par ticipation Please send abstracts (around 100 words) or ex- pr essions of interest by close of business on Fri- Melbour ne, 8 day, 17 December 2004. Afor mal paper is desir- Febr uary2005 able, but consideration will be given to presenta- A U U G tions without a paper if of sufficient quality or in- Inc ter est. Likewise, shorter presentations than 45 minutes will also be considered. The inaugural Digital Pest Symposium (DPS1) will be held in Melbourne on Tuesday, 8 February 2004. Reg istration The Digital Pest Symposium is a one-day event, focussing on the twin global scourges of “spam” Registration costs areasfollows: email and malicious software(including, but not • $99 for full AUUG members, limited to, viruses, worms, trojans and spyware). Just about anyone who uses a computer these • $125 for associate members, and days (and that’s most of us) has to deal with these • $150 for non-members. in some way, so all arewelcome and encouraged to attend, and indeed participate. Please contact AUUG to register. Goals • to promote the sharing of information and ex- perience relating to digital pest countermea- sur es, • to raise awareness of the role of good soft- war e and systems design in controlling digital pests, • to raise the awareness of open-source counter- measur es within the broader ICT community. Format The event is made up of 45 minute talks, compris- ing mostly speaking time and an allowance for questions. Weencourage both technical and non- technical presentations, on topics including: • anti-virus and anti-spam solutions • anti-virus and anti-spam softwareinter nals • methodology—vulnerabilities exploited by spammers and virus authors • user education • legalities (e.g. fighting spam in the courts) • ISP strategies • the role of government All speakers receive free registration December 2004 61 AUUGN Volume 25 Number 4 About AUUGN Disclaimer Opinions expressed by the authors and reviewers ar e not necessarily those of AUUG Inc., its Jour- AUUGN Editorial Committee nal, or its editorial committee. The AUUGN Editorial Committee consists of: Cop yright Infor mation • Frank Crawford Copyright © 2004 by AUUG Inc. AUUG Chapter Meetings and Contact Details City Location Other Adelaide Marcellinas Pizza Bar Meetings areheld at 7 pm on the second Wednes- 273 Hindley Street day of each month. Adelaide Br isbane Inn on the Park For further information, contact the QAUUG Execu- 507 Coronation Drive tive Committee via email (qauug-exec@au- Toowong ug.org.au). The technologically deprived can contact Rick Stevenson on (07) 5578-8933. Canber ra Australian National University For updated information, see http://www.canb.au- ug.or g.au/cauug/ Hobar t University of Tasmania Chapter appears to be dormant. The last known URL for updated information was http://www.tas.auug.or g.au/ Melbour ne Various. For updated information The meetings alternate between technical presenta- see http://www.vic.auug.or g.au/ tions in the even numbered months and purely so- cial occasions in the odd numbered months. Some attempt is made to fit other AUUG activities into the schedule with minimum disruption. Perth The Victoria League For updated information, see http://www.au- 276 Onslow Road ug.or g.au/wauug/waug.html. Shenton Park Sydne y Sun Microsystems The NSW Chapter of AUUG holds meetings once a Gr ound Floor,33Berry Street (cnr quarter in North Sydney in rooms generously pro- Pacific Hwy) vided by Sun Microsystems. Moreinfor mation at North Sydney. http://www.auug.or g.au/nswauug/. For up-to-date details on chapters and meetings, including those in all other Australian cities, please check the AUUG website at http://www.auug.or g.au/ or call the AUUG office on 1-800-625655.