Pystar’s Hax4u a bit overpriced

Here we go again with the open computer scam mac clone. Ars has some more coverage, but what’s really interesting there are the comments imo.

Oh, and there’s some photos too, but the guy posting it might be someone from pystar, so beware.

So, the deal it’s this: you get more or less 200€ worth of hardware, with a copy of Leopard. You got osx already hacked and runing, but to reinstall it you need to re-hack it too (or download the hacked images you find floating on the net). In your Country the Apple eula might not be legally binding, so it could even be legal, but given the number of people installing osx everywhere (including on the eepc and on the OQO) you’re probably better off buying the pieces wherever you want and assemble your own mac clone.

Apple, P.A. Semi and the Alpha

Apple bought P.A. Semi, it’s making the rounds everywhere.
Why? Dunno, but even if wired has four credible reasons to explain the move, they did mention just in passing that behind an unknown chipmaker there’s Daniel Dobberpuhl, i.e.: one of the fathers of the ALPHA. (man, how I liked that architecture… pity it’s gone down the drain)

I doubt the chip is for the iphones, not Right Now^TM at least, but it’s a good excuse for Apple to build a blade server, or to bring back the Newton from the dead.

(many thanks CHIPNIT for the wired link)

Google summer of code 2008

Here we go again, let’s see what picks my fancy this time.

• well, surely all the FreeBSD projects are worth mentioning, and they put up a wiki for this year too
• omg! battle for wesnoth got some projects in!
• USB support for GRUB, woha, that would really be outstanding for homebrew blackboxes (something I really like to build btw)
• a DragonflyBSD live cd. until it’s actually useable for clustering, of course, there’s clusterknoppix
• improved wine support for FreeBSD, eh, they might as well get in touch with codeweavers
• TCP anomaly detector for FreeBSD. This I really want to see… oh, there are an 802.11 fuzzing&testing suite and improved layer2 filtering too
• ext3 support for NetBSD (soon to be found everywhere else if they manage a robust bsd-licensed implementation) and some ssl-secure implementation of syslogd (see above for bsdiness). I’m not too sure about the last one, a log aggregator that sniffs out traffic and compares it to the legit syslog is a pretty neat trick as tripwires go.
• ncat and nping development. I’m already happy with socat and hping2, but the more the merrier.

Zfs versions feature madness

Feature creep? This is feature madness! This is SpartaZFS!
just go to http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/version/1/ and increment the last number (or, read on, might as well write it down as I read) for all the goodies [thet keep gettin] added to zfs.

1. This is the initial ZFS on-disk format as integrated on 10/31/05
2. Support for “Ditto Blocks”, or replicated metadata. Metadata can be replicated up to 3 times for each block, independently on the underlying redundancy. (i.e.: if you have a raid1 on two disk, you get 6 copies of the blocks you deem important) So even if your user data get corrupted everything (fingers crossed) will still be discoverable and the pool will be useable.
3. Hot spares, improved RAID-Z accounting (does not mention how it get improved however), and support for double-parity RAID-Z (aka raidz2, aka suspiciously-looks-alot-like-raid6).
4. zpool history. A log of whatever happens to your pools
5. gzip compression for zfs datasets. Your /usr/ports is now very happy (remember to mount /usr/ports/distfiles elsewhere however)
6. ‘bootfs’ pool property. (yes, it does what it looks like it does)
7. With the ZFS Intent Log (ZIL) an application (a database usually) does know that whatever it did just wrote to disk will stay written even if a power failure occurs. Instead of waiting a second or two for the zfs to do all its magik, there’s a transaction log in which fsync(fd)s are stored, so the database can churn away happily without having to wait. If power failure occurs between zfs disk commits, this log is read and committed to disk as well.
8. Administrative tasks (such as creation/of descendent datasets) can be assigned to non-administrative users. While this is a bit scary, remember we can assign quotas to the parent dataset
9. Dataset quotas and reservation can be configured not to include descendent datasets (such as snapshots/clones) in the space consumption cap. And there’s support for the sun cifs server as well
10. You can specify a device in the zfs pool to act as cache. “These devices provide an additional layer of caching between main memory and disk. Using cache devices provides the greatest performance improvement for random read-workloads of mostly static content.” You know what a cache is, and there’s way too much math for me to go look at the detailed performance improvement.

interesting links:
nice recap of avaiable solaris filesystems

easy introduction to zfs, and way-too-much-math introduction to zfs2

zfs cheat sheet

introduction to ZIL and more in-depth stuff as well

List of zfs administrative tasks which can be delegated, along with a nice primer

configuring the cifs server to use zfs datasets, for workgroups and with active directory

edit: a very interesting blog about building an home fileserver using ZFS, and the ZFS Evil Tuning Guide.

Crossover Games for FreeBSD

A beta of Crossover Games (it’s a version of wine if you’re not into this stuff) has been announced for FreeBSD.

Currently there’s one crossover developer porting/building it, and he asks for community support on their pledges page (i.e.: if you do buy it, even if not very functional, and go on their website saying “hey, make it work”, they’re going to try and make it work)

edit: there’s an RSS feed for FreeBSD support

Is wetware such a misunderstood asset?

While surfing for some clustering news I came across this post on scalability.org (it’s their take on this other article, go read ’em both, they’re interesting.)

What tends to remain behind is the ‘residue’ the least talented and effective IT engineers. They tend to be grateful they have a job and make fewer demands on management; even if they find the workplace unpleasant, they are the least likely to be able to find a job elsewhere. They tend to entrench themselves, becoming maintenance experts on critical systems, assuming responsibilities that no one else wants so that the organization can’t afford to let them go.

Well, what can I say? Sometimes I just think I really do need to jump ship, stop bothering with the technicalities and apply for work at HR somewhere.

Of course you end up with “dead wood”, and of course wetware is the trickier asset to manage. Educating users is often more difficult than educating clients [that is: people or companies to wich you serve, we’re talking just wetware here], it’s an ongoing battle, like against spammers.

However I do believe there’s much that can be done to avoid that, even in a cost-effective manner. What you provide to an employee isn’t just money, there’s a cartolad of fringes you can throw in, and if you do manage to know your people (which you should do if you’re hr) you can be more effective giving away perks than simply throwing money at the problem.

(This of course holds true for it as well) (not the perks, the analysis of the problem and the thowing money at things)

Mac clones a moving target

Well, it seems the whole mac clone story is shadierthan I tought.
The guardian tracked down Pystar’s movements, both on the web and on the map.
Yep, on the map. Not only their website appeared out of nowhere a couple of weeks ago, but their physical address is moving around too, seems they’re changin it every few days.
Maybe it’s to escape the wrath of netkas, who claims pystar stole his v8 efi emulator.

Scam or no scam? Well, they promised Ars they’ll send them a unit for review, so we just have to sit back and wait.

VirtualBox For Teh Win (on FreeBSD)

Lately I was snooping around for a good virtual machine solution, there’s a lot more stuff than just a few years ago (and qemu got really better on linux), when I came across some nice BSD news (yes, it’s BSD news, buried as usual but still there).

It seems VirtualBox (aquired by sun recently btw) is being ported to FreeBSD. Well, that would make the number of reliable vm avaiable … one (no, serenity virtual does not count, it was crappier than qemu without the kernel extensions).

Oh, and btw, there’s (obviously) a port for opensolaris too, and the usual unix nutcasgeniuses at sun are putting it through some really tight loops. (that does mean I must urgently find some excuses not to buy me an ultra. Either that or manage to build a nuclear reactor in the backyard to power up all my junk)

The only big downside of virtualbox is that it cannot give the guest os access to actual hard disk drives, on the other hand it’s got a builtin iscsi initiator (the €100 version only, mind you), so you can probably work around that limitation.

The BIG upside compared to vmware it’s a builtin rdp server to the guestos, and I have a pile of junk sitting somewhere that will probably be converted into a thinstation. (assuming I can still find the right ac/dc adapter of course)

edit: it seems some FreeBSD developers have picked up the ball, and are developing the initial port effort done by innotek.
See also innotek’s forum and freebsd-ports, also a first patch against the current svn and this post from Sander van Leeuwen (of sun).

edit2: FreeBSD build instructions, solaris 10 installation instructions, workaround for a nic problem in FreeBSD 7.0, a repository of virtualbox images

Buy an already-hacked mac clone

There’s people buying apple hardware because it is quality stuff, people with a ton of hardware already around hacking macosx to run on their iron.

And then there’s people offering you a pre-hacked mac minitower for sale at 400 bucks, yep, that’s right. Those soon-to-be-sued-to-hell guys at psystar offer you a mac clone with osx already installed.

If you want it, do get it fast, this box is making the rounds on the net and I doubt it will be avaiable for long.

List of hard disk ata master passwords

Ferreted this out after some hours of web searching, guess I can spare you the same trouble

If you find this stuff useful, please do leave a comment, “hi, it worked” is enough.

(nb: see my previous post for unlocking instructions)

SEAGATE -> “Seagate” +25 spaces

MAXTOR
series N40P -> “Maxtor INIT SECURITY TEST STEP ” +1 or +2 spaces
series N40P -> “Maxtor INIT SECURITY TEST STEP F”
series 541DX -> “Maxtor” +24 spaces
series Athena (D541X model 2B) and diamondmax80 -> “Maxtor”

WESTERN DIGITAL -> “WDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWD”

FUJITSU -> 32 spaces

SAMSUNG -> “ttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt” (32 times t)

IBM
series DTTA -> “CED79IJUFNATIT” +18 spaces
series DJNA -> “VON89IJUFSUNAJ” +18 spaces
series DPTA -> “VON89IJUFSUNAJ” +18 spaces
series DTLA -> “RAM00IJUFOTSELET” +16 spaces
series DADA-26480 (6,4gb) -> “BEF89IJUF__AIDACA” +15 spaces

HITACHI series DK23AA, DK23BA and DK23CA -> 32 spaces

TOSHIBA -> 32 spaces

For xbox hdds try “XBOXSCENE” or “TEAMASSEMBLY” too