My FreeBSD Adventure With Thebeast

Warning: not for the faint of heart. This is a pretty long chronicle, full of technical jargon, but it might prove useful/entertaining to Linux/BSD users.

A while ago I bought a computer from the surplus store. There were a couple of things that were noticeable about this computer: the first was that when I turned it on, the hard drives inside were exceptionally loud, and the second was its identification:

Behold, the mark of thebeast!

The hard drive noise turned out to be an old SCSI hard drive that had been hooked up to the power supply, but as there is no SCSI support, not to the motherboard. I took it out, obviously, but because of its roar, and the markings on the case, I decided that this computer's name would be known on the network as thebeast (not to be eschatologically confused with the Antichrist).

Another beast-like quality of this computer is its chimera-like nature: there are four different operating systems installed in a quad-boot configuration. An interesting thing about the hard drive that came with this computer is that it's a 20GB hard drive, but Windows thinks it's a 7.8GB hard drive. There apparently are some contradictory drive geometry settings programmed onto the drive. I suspect that this was done in order to keep the same standard part number and specs, while upgrading to newer, more often-produced hardware: it's been a while since they've made 8GB desktop hard drives in quantity.

This of course means that if ever Windows tries to install on the drive, it totally screws up the partition table. I initially tried to install it on a 4 GB partition at the beginning of the disk, but it insisted on writing its own. "Fine," I said, and I let it write its own table. This worked, but as soon as I tried to partition the rest of the disk on the same table, Windows wouldn't boot anymore. What I ended up doing was taking a 3GB hard drive that I had around and installing Windows 2000 Pro on that. Of course, to do this, I had to set it as the primary drive, install it, and then switch it back to the secondary drive (so that I could use Grub, a boot loader, to pick an operating system at boot time). Windows doesn't play nice with other operating systems. It thinks it owns the disk. To get it to boot off of the second disk, you even have to trick it into thinking that its disk is really first. Here's my grub.conf file:

default 0
fallback 1
timeout 15
splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz

title Gentoo Linux 2.6.20-r8
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/gentoo/kernel-linux-2.6.20-gentoo-r6 root=/dev/hda6 video=i810fb:accel
savedefault

title Gentoo Linux 2.6.20-r8 (rescue)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/gentoo/kernel-linux-2.6.20-gentoo-r8 root=/dev/hda6 init=/bin/bb

title Gentoo/FreeBSD 6.2
root (hd0,1,d)
kernel /boot/loader
savedefault

title FreeBSD 6.2
root (hd0,2,d)
kernel /boot/loader
savedefault

title Windows 2000 Professional
# Make Windows think its disk is first
map (hd1) (hd0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
savedefault

As you may be able to tell, when the system boots from the BIOS, it gets a menu screen with the following choices:

• Gentoo Linux 2.6.20-r8
• Gentoo Linux 2.6.20-r8 (rescue)
• Gentoo/FreeBSD 6.2
• FreeBSD 6.2
• Windows 2000 Professional

Whichever option is chosen is the operating system that will boot. Each of the operating systems sits on its own partition, but they can all see each other's files, with the exception of Windows, which can't properly read the partition table/disk geometry of the first hard drive. If not for that limitation, I would be able to see the Ext2 and Ext3 partitions (in this case Linux's /boot and /home) after installing a driver in Windows. I typically use ReiserFS for the other Linux partitions (/, /usr, and /var), for which there might be a read-only Windows driver, and FreeBSD uses the UFS file system, which as far as I know has no Windows driver.

Getting FreeBSD and Linux to see Windows' NTFS partition was pretty easy. In Linux the line in /etc/fstab looks like this:

/dev/hdb1       /mnt/win2k      ntfs            ro,nosuid,nls=utf8      0 0 # ~3.0GiB

and in FreeBSD it looks like this:

/dev/ad1s1      /mnt/win2k      ntfs            ro                      0 0 # ~3.0GiB

They're essentially the same. Linux uses "hd" (for an IDE hard drive), "b" meaning the second drive (the first drive is "hda"), and "1" denoting the first (and in this case, only) partition on that drive. FreeBSD identifies devices by the name of the driver used to access them in stead of their function as in Linux. "ad" refers to the disk driver, "1" refers to the second disk (ad0 is the first disk), "s" is for 'slice' which is the BSD word for a what Linux and Windows call primary partitions, and "1" refers to the first slice. This is, by the way, distinct from the way that Grub refers to hard drives. Grub calls your first hard drive (hd0), and its first partition is (hd0,0). If that partition has sub-partitions, as BSD or Solaris UFS slices are wont to have, then your root slice on a second partition on a third disk would be: (hd2,1,a).

The first partition of the first disk:
Linux: /dev/hda1
Grub: (hd0,0)
BSD: /dev/ad0s0

The first sub-partition in the first slice of the first disk:
Grub: (hd0,0,a)
BSD: /dev/ad0s0a

Simple, right? It took a fair amount of searching and sifting to find all that out.

Getting FreeBSD to recognize Linux partitions is as easy as identifying the partitions and filesystem:

# Gentoo Linux
/dev/ad0s6      /mnt/linux      reiserfs        rw,noatime,nodev        0 0
/dev/ad0s1      /mnt/linux/boot ext2fs          rw,noatime,nodev        0 0
/dev/ad0s7      /mnt/linux/usr  reiserfs        ro,noatime,nodev        0 0
/dev/ad0s8      /mnt/linux/var  reiserfs        ro,noatime,nodev        0 0
/dev/ad0s9      /mnt/linux/home ext3            rw,noatime,nodev        0 0

Getting Linux to see my Gentoo/FreeBSD partition was equally straight-forward, since there were no sub-partitions, though I did have to specify the ufstype attribute:

/dev/hda2       /mnt/gfbsd      ufs             ro,ufstype=ufs2,nosuid,nodev    0 0 # 3586MiB

Getting Linux to see UFS sub-partitions was a bit trickier. Doing an "fdisk -l" only showed the main slice (/dev/hda3), not the sub-partitions, but entering "cat /proc/partitions" revealed the device names of the missing sub-partitions. (I suppose ls /dev/hd*) would have revealed the names, too). It was a bit tricky to figure out which device went with which. The extended partition with the Linux partitions on it began at hda5, and where those left off was where the UFS sub-partitions began, but they weren't in the order in which they were created. UFS apparently assigned the first sub-partition I had created within this slice (which was a swap partition, shared with the Gentoo/FreeBSD install) as ad0s3b, reserving the "a" slot for my / partition, and making the /var and /usr partitions "d" and "e" respectively. Therefore, this is how I mapped my drives from Linux:

# First Hard Drive
/dev/hda1       /boot           ext2            noauto,noatime                  1 2 #   16MiB
/dev/hda2       /mnt/gfbsd      ufs             ro,ufstype=ufs2,nosuid,nodev    0 0 # 3586MiB
#/dev/hda3 is the freebsd slice: hda10,11,12,13                                     # 7680MiB
#/dev/hda4 is the extended partition: hda5,6,7,8,9
/dev/hda5       none            swap            sw                              0 0 # 1024MiB
/dev/hda6       /               reiserfs        noatime,user_xattr              0 1 #  256MiB
/dev/hda7       /usr            reiserfs        noatime,user_xattr              0 1 # 3586MiB
/dev/hda8       /var            reiserfs        noatime,user_xattr              0 1 #  256MiB
/dev/hda9       /home           ext3            noatime,user_xattr              0 1 #  ~3.8GB
/dev/hda10      /mnt/freebsd    ufs             ro,ufstype=ufs2,nosuid,nodev    0 0 # 7680MiB
#/dev/hda11     /mnt/freebsd    is the FreeBSD swap partition                       #  512MiB
/dev/hda12      /mnt/freebsd/var ufs            ro,ufstype=ufs2,nosuid,nodev    0 0 # 1024MiB
/dev/hda13      /mnt/freebsd/usr ufs            ro,ufstype=ufs2,nosuid,nodev    0 0 #  ~5.3GB

# Second Hard Drive
/dev/hdb1       /mnt/win2k      ntfs            ro,nosuid,nls=utf8              0 0 #  ~3.0GB

After I had Windows and Linux up and running (Gentoo is my favorite flavor of Linux, so that's what I used), I set my sights on FreeBSD. This was done for a number of reasons:

1. With a chimera machine called thebeast, one must, must have a BSD install. I mean, have you seen their 'Beastie the BSD daemon' mascot? BSD is the essence of geeky hotness, and with that "E280666" sticker on the box, who could resist? It was a sign.
   
2. Operating systems are a hobby of mine, and I've never worked with a BSD before. Caleb had mentioned that I should look at BSD, because Mac OS X is based on it.
   
3. I hear Gentoo is a very BSD-like Linux, so it wouldn't be totally foreign, and there's even a project to get Gentoo's Portage on BSD.
   

I had once before tried to install FreeBSD on this computer, but I kept running into problems during the install. Once I finally had it installed, I had no idea how to get X working, let alone any actual user software. This time, I decided I would try the Gentoo/FreeBSD approach. I chose FreeBSD over NetBSD and OpenBSD because there seems to be a better community and support around FreeBSD. Along with that, (and probably having to do with that) it was the most supported (read 'least experimental') in the Gentoo-Alt *BSD project, and that was my stepping stone of choice from Linux.

Installing Gentoo/FreeBSD was as simple as following the provided online instructions. They were written by Gentoo/Linux developers who mess with FreeBSD, not FreeBSD developers, which means I could follow them more naturally: they basically gloss over the similarities, while slowing down to explain the differences.

I went with the LiveCD option for installing, since I had no existing installation: I downloaded and burned a FreeSBIE CD, and followed the guide, deviating where necessary. My biggest BSD-related installation issue was getting the right Ethernet driver configured in /etc/conf.d/net. In Linux, you don't care what the driver is called, you just configure it as net.eth0, but in BSD, I had to know that I was using the xl driver, so my init script was called net.xl0.

Also, I ran into trouble with the /etc/conf.d/net config file. In Linux, I had this:

dhcpcd_eth0="-t 15 -N"
dhcp_eth0=( "nontp nonis" )
config_eth0=( "192.168.5.16/24 brd 192.168.5.255" )
routes_eth0=( "default gateway 192.168.5.1" )
fallback_eth0=( "dhcp" )

but in FreeBSD, I needed to remove the parentheses, and I also discovered that I should use "via" in stead of "gw" or "gateway" to specify the default route to the Internet.

dhcpcd_xl0="-t 15 -N"
dhcp_xl0=" 'nontp nonis' "
config_xl0=" '192.168.5.16/24 broadcast 192.168.5.255' "
routes_xl0=" 'default via 192.168.5.1' "
fallback_xl0=" 'dhcp' "

One thing that was nice about doing Gentoo/FreeBSD before the actual FreeBSD install was that in Gentoo/FreeBSD, the init script layout is the same, and you install all of your userland applications through portage, which with I'm very familiar, and so I was tweaking use flags, configuring daemons and services, and using package.keywords without so much as batting an eye.

Configuring and compiling the kernel was relatively straight-forward, FreeBSD's handbook is an excellent resource, and I used it extensively later on in the actual installation.

When I got to /etc/fstab, I was accustomed to having the /tmp directory (as well as some others) on its own virtual memory disk, so I looked up how to do that. Here's the line from /etc/fstab:
In Linux:

tmpfs   /tmp            tmpfs   size=512M,nr_inodes=1M,mode=1777,noexec 0 0

In BSD:

md      /tmp            mfs     rw,-s100m               0 0

Unfortunatley, the Gentoo/FreeBSD project doesn't enable you to easily install just anything. I was able to install X with gnome-light, and firefox, as well as a few other things, but the majority of ebuilds in the portage tree aren't ready for installation on FreeBSD out of the box. To get a real FreeBSD installation, I was going to have to do it the right way. One program that I annoyingly could not install was fortune-mod. An earlier installation of Gentoo/FreeBSD had successfully installed with it, but then the ebuild had been updated to a new version (and all older versions removed), and I was left without a viable fortune program. A tragedy, I know. Anyway, onward.

Installing FreeBSD
I burned the FreeBSD CD ISOs that I had downloaded via Bittorrent, pulled up the handbook, and dove in. This time I was able to follow the handbook much better than the last time I had done the installation, and thanks to the copious amount of poking around the system I had done during my Gentoo/FreeBSD install, I was up and running in no time. I customized the kernel to exclude hardware I didn't have, and also to build my sound driver. To build it, I added the following to my kernel config file:

# Sound card support customized to this machine
device          sound
device          snd_ich

and the following line to the /boot/loader.conf file to have the module automatically loaded:

snd_ich_load="YES"              # Intel ICH

Then I ran into a bit of a problem. In my previous installations, my mouse had worked just fine. I had been successfully using a 2-port Iogear KVM switch between a small Linux box (minix) and thebeast, but I had since switched to using a 4-port LinksKey KVM (with audio support) between four different boxes, and the mouse wouldn't work in BSD. It worked in Windows and Linux just fine, but in FreeBSD, no matter what kernel I used, and even if I used the FreeSBIE LiveCD, the mouse pointer would be there on the screen in X, but it wouldn't move or click. What was more, I discovered that the mouse device was absent from /dev. It was quite frustrating to finally have a fancy graphical environment up and running on BSD, and not be able to use it, except by keyboard shortcuts and tabbing.

I searched the forums online to see if others had had similar problems with the FreeBSD psm driver. I found quite a few people who had issues with touchpads, and a few who had trouble with KVMs. I found solutions to the touchpad issues by adjusting the flags passed into the driver from the kernel configuration device.hints file, but those flags were specific to touchpad initialization and waking up from a laptop's suspended state. No one that I could find had fixed the KVM issue in a way that was helpful for me. What worked for most people was recompiling the kernel with

options       KBD_RESETDELAY=200
options       KBD_MAXWAIT=5

adjusted to higher values, but this didn't help me. What I found to be the most help was the psm man page and the dmesg output. Adjusting the KBD_RESETDELAY didn't help at all, even at ridiculously high values, because I found that the mouse was failing to reset, or at least not properly responding, no matter how long the driver waited for a response. Increasing the logging threshold using the kernel following kernel config options:

options       PSM_DEBUG=2
options       KBDIO_DEBUG=2

...yielded the following in dmesg:

psm0: current command byte:0065
psm0: failed to reset the aux device.

This combined with the psm man page led me to a flag in /boot/device.hints that disables the initialization attempt at boot time:

hint.psm.0.flags="0x400"

This gave me the following in dmesg (and /var/log/messages) with PSM_DEBUG still at 2:

psm0: current command byte:0065
psm0: found IntelliMouse Explorer
psm0:  flags 0x400 irq 12 on atkbdc0
psm0: [GIANT-LOCKED]
psm0: model IntelliMouse Explorer, device ID 4-00, 5 buttons
psm0: config:00000400, flags:00000008, packet size:4
psm0: syncmask:08, syncbits:00

...but I still had no mouse movement in X, whereas before, I had been able to use this mouse just fine. A few hardware options presented themselves: I could use a serial mouse that I have stuffed in a drawer in my room; I could use an adapter to make the PS/2 keyboard and mouse plug into a USB port in stead, and thus use a different driver, or at least a different initialization routine; I could get an extra mouse, or a different mouse, but that defeats the purpose. This should work. It occurred to me finally to specify the mouse device directly in xorg.conf; in stead of /dev/sysmouse, to use /dev/psm0:

Section "InputDevice"
     Identifier  "Mouse0"
     Driver      "mouse"
     Option      "Protocol" "auto"
#       Option      "Device" "/dev/sysmouse"
     Option      "Device" "/dev/psm0"
     Option      "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
     Option      "Buttons" "6"
EndSection

And it worked. Yay!

I installed ports (FreeBSD's package management system), and thus far I've only installed packages using the "pkg_add -r name" method, although I do hear you can install directly from source if you so desire. In my experience, it's been pretty slick with just binary packages, and I'm content for now. I'm not nearly as adept at ports' intricacies as I am with Gentoo's portage.

Here's what I ended up doing with the graphical interfaces:

• Since Gentoo/FreeBSD doesn't work with KDE yet, and Gnome is minimal, I went with Xfce4, which is an excellent desktop environment (although I'm using GDM as the login manager: Gentoo has an excellent gdm-themes package, which I unmasked with the x86 keyword in order to install). I'm also using Xfce4 on a 200MHz Pentium-MMX machine that I'm tinkering with (it's called crunchy, and I paid a whopping $5 for it). The Gentoo/FreeBSD partition is also relatively small, so I don't think I'm ever going to install a full Gnome on it, and certainly not KDE.
  
• My usual desktop environment for Linux has been Gnome. I also use KDE occasionally, but I prefer Gnome, so in order to be consistent, the Linux install uses GDM and Gnome by default.
  
• I installed GDM, Gnome, Fluxbox, Xfce, and some others, but I decided that my FreeBSD system would use KDM for graphical login and KDE as the default desktop.
  

Wordpress

When I switched from the old Blogger to the New Blogger beta, I posted about some of the changes that they had made, and also touched on some of the things I liked and didn't like about the changes. Since then, I've had some time to work with the new Blogger, and I've noticed some annoyances. Recently, I was (slightly) involved in beck switching her blog from Typepad to Wordpress. In researching Wordpress' features, I noticed a few things that I liked, and I also recently noticed that it is possible to move an entire blog, comments and all, from Blogger to Wordpress without much trouble. So the question arises, should I switch to Wordpress? Here are some things that I like about blogging with Wordpress over Blogger:

• Big Brother: Google gets to corrolate my blog with my search history, e-mail, my Google Checkout purchase history, etc. There are some parts of "the world's information" that I would like to keep unorganized and inaccessible, thank-you-very-much.
• Login issues: whenever I log in to my e-mail account and the session expires, I get logged out of my blog. This is annoying, and it didn't happen before my Blogger account was absorbed into my Google account.
• Web Statistics: Wordpress gives you excellent statistics, not only on traffic to your blog, but also on how many people are subscribed to your feeds. I use Webalizer and ClustrMaps to get something similar in nature, but I have no idea how many people are subscribed to my feeds or where else they come from.

At the same time, there are things that I still like about Blogger over Wordpress:

• It requires no change: I'm already doing it.
• Uploading pictures to Blogger posts with Picasa: it's easy, and the hosting is free (to a point).
• Wordpress makes labels (tags/categories) as I use them less convenient, or at least so I hear. This is one feature that Blogger does quite well.

So far, I'm not annoyed enough to switch. If Google fixed the login/logout issues, I would be a lot less annoyed. If Wordpress were to start supporting the OpenID specification, it would be even more appealing, especially if Google didn't.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Ansible

I hate sensationalist newspeddling, especially when it's scientific news. Reporters say the silliest things. No, Doc won't be able to get that flux capacitor working in his De Lorain, but that doesn't mean that the experiment described in this article is any less cool.

It all has to do with the speed of light. Nothing, incuding information, can travel faster than the speed of light, but apparently, some scientists are going to try to get information to travel backwards in time along a beam of light.

The reason this might work is that according to Einstein's Relativity, from the perspective of a photon, no time ever passes. Photons don't experience time, because they are travelling at the absolute speed limit of the universe. Absolute speed means infinite time dilation. From the perspective of a photon, zero time passes between the time it is emitted and absorbed. In fact, from the perspective of a photon, the photon doesn't travel any distance either: it's just a bit of energy that doesn't happen to be matter. It hops from its emitter to its final destination in a single moment. If its destination forces its spin to be a certain direction in order to be absorbed, then that's what the spin will be throughout its entire existence: no matter how far or long from our inertial reference frame we think that photon travels.

So, if we can affect the properties of the entire existence of the photon at the absorption point, and if we can entangle a pair of photons so that they share properties, then it is possible to construct an experiment where we cause entangled photons to follow different paths. If the path from which we cause the property to be fixed is longer than the path from which we observe the effects of the property, then it is possible for an event to be caused by an event in its objective future, at least, from our reference frame. (From the reference frame of the pair of photons, everything will be happening simultaniously.)

So, what's it good for?

One thing it's not good for is changing events in the past. At best, what you would get is a way for information to be passed instantaniously over great distances, or to place-times in the past that couldn't have affected you with the information yet. It takes several seconds for light to travel the distance between Earth and Mars. Imagine being able to control and monitor a Mars Rover in real time from Earth. Imagine being able to teleconference with your friend on a planet orbiting a star dozens of light-years away. What you'll be doing is monitoring the state of photons that were emitted decades ago by a waystation roughly half way between the two of you, but the state of which was fixed moments ago on the other end. The beam would have had to have started transmitting decades before it reached you, but you would be able to effect the states of the photons received on the other end in the present.

Imagine getting WoW ping times in the 100 millisecond range on an overseas server. Oh, so now I have your attention!

Vista Ultimate

Yes, it's finally here: the pinnacle of Microsoft's manifold glory. It's mostly the same as the pre-release versions that I've been running since last August, so there's not much new to report.

It still runs my favorite free and open source programs just fine.

I had become quite adept at transferring the necessary settings and files from one install to another through the process of repeatedly installing beta versions, so I had no trouble doing that, with the help of my external drive to hold the files, and Athena, my trusty Linux server, still had all of my install files. I upgraded where there was a new version of a program that I use.

Vista's fancy-shmancy window-switching: if you have a graphics card that can handle it, you can use it with Win+Tab (in stead of Alt+Tab).



For all the hum-drum of the final release, I don't want to give anyone the impression that Vista is not pretty. Vista is very pretty, and I think they've done a fine job. The User Account Control feature isn't annoying anymore.



They seemed to have made some minor UI tweaks. I noticed some of the sounds had changed. Also, the file folders used to be open just a crack, so that you could hardly see what was inside them, and they've opened them up a bit.



Vista still doesn't behave quite right with the taskbar on the top of the screen (which is not standard). I still get windows opening underneath it, and two of my icons at the bottom of the screen (Firefox and Opera) keep migrating up one notch.

I haven't yet explored the differences between Home Premium, which is what I had for the beta test, and Ultimate.

I've Moved from Israel to Poland!

Well, technically speaking, my server, athena has moved its DNS listing from athena.gentoo.org.il (Israel) to athena.gentoo.ltd.pl (Poland). This occured because apparently the "Israili society for Free Open Source Software," which had registered gentoo.org.il, originally as a site to host a discussion board and support for users of the Gentoo Linux distribution, had apparently not gotten off the ground, and had donated their DNS listing to the FreeDNS pool at freedns.afraid.org, but that domain was now expiring or changing hands, so it was leaving the pool I've had to move before. Over the past year-and-a-half, I've been at:

• athena.homelinux.net
• athena.gentoofreaks.org
• athena.gentoolinux.be
• athena.gentoo-server.be
• athena.gentoo.org.il

As you can see, my method of chosing names has typically been to search for something with "gentoo" in it, and then add the hostname "athena" to the beginning of it. Changing domains for me involves the following:

• Setting up a new DNS entry with the domain server
• Changing the update URL in the cron script that updates the listing whenever my IP address changes
• Updating the PuTTY saved sessions on Windows boxes that I use to access Athena via SSH from outside the home network.
• Updating the links in my blog templates that point to Athena
• Updating all the links in all of my blog posts that point to content hosted on Athana (mostly pictures)--this one is time-consuming, and has the unfortunate side-effect of re-shuffling my blogs' RSS and Atom feeds.

It's those last two that are the problem. So, why do I put myself through this? It's getting to be pretty inconvenient to have to change all of this every few months in order to keep my links to hosted pictures unbroken. I know one thing I could do would be to pick a more stable domain to subdomain off of. Free DNS entries with "gentoo" in them tend to be unreliable for piggy-backing off of because they tend to belong to failed websites that are simply waiting for their registrations to expire. If I were to choose something more stable, it would last longer, and I wouldn't have to change all of the time. But I like having "gentoo" prominently in the name. It's part of Athena's identity: Gentoo is what makes her tick. I could register my own domain name, of course. It's something I've considered, and something I will probably end up doing eventually. Part of my reluctance is the fact that hacked-up, free DNS is very much in the spirit of Linux, especially Gentoo, which is geared toward customization and tweaking. Yep, I'm just another one of those free software hippies.