Working for Linuxcare started with a bang, not a whimper. I went to Sydney with Dan
Shearer to meet most of the Australian team at the Linuxexpo. An interesting crowd, but it brought back
to me that I still need to find my feet. It's interesting to see machines that seem to be
running BSD, but with subtly different userland commands. I can see a big learning experience
coming, though my focus will continue to be BSD.
Went into town and picked up the SPARCstation 5 that Wes Peters sent me. Didn't have to
pay any duty. Got home and discovered it had a complete Solaris 2.7 (or is that 5.7? Or 7? I
wish these people would get their numbering sorted out) system installed on it. And of course
there was no way to find the root password, but I heard on a BSD IRC channel that I could
frob the shadow password file with the system booted from a NetBSD CD-ROM. I tried that, and
sure enough, I could access the Solaris partitions. Great stuff. After thinking about it, and
noting that the disk was only 1 GB in size, I backed up the disk to tape and wiped it. Nice
that the NetBSD boot image recognized the DDS-2 tape I plugged into the spare socket with no
trouble.
Since I had done the initial work with NetBSD, I decided to install the OpenBSD 2.5 CD-ROM
that I got at last year's USENIX in Monterey. The installation went smoothly enough, though
the choice of packages is rather hard to understand: the choice is by package name, and I
couldn't find a description anywhere. Still, I was able to install all the selections on the
drive: it only made up 165 MB. Now to learn something about the differences between OpenBSD
and FreeBSD. The first one was interesting: OpenBSD assigns PIDs at random, so attacks based
on guessing the next PID don't work. It makes a ps output look funny, though.
I suppose it's time to start getting down to work. The news of the day (maybe of the
month) is the merger of BSDI and Walnut Creek CDROM.
What a day! One of those where I spend all my time rotating and get nothing done. I spent
a lot of time talking about the BSDI takeover, and somehow I didn't get anything useful done.
I need to work out what equipment I need, what work I need to do, and how to improve my
network connectivity. A boring day, but it looks as if I'll be off to California next week,
and that will be anything but boring.
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