SSHFS on FreeBSD

The following ports are needed:

sysutils/fusefs-kmod
sysutils/fusefs-sshfs

They depend on sysutils/fusefs-libs, packages are available on each at the moment for 6.3-Release.

Enable FUSE for system start up via rc.conf (I’d suggest rc.conf.local for PC-BSD) by adding this:

# enable File System in User Space
fusefs_enable=”YES”

And fusefs will be ready op on reboot. As an alterntivie to rebooting one could load the module and start fusefs manually.

kldload /usr/local/modules/fuse.ko
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/fusefs start

After that, if you can ssh to the server you can at least mount your home directory via SSH 🙂

sshfs username@host ~/mount_point

Since UNIX uses a numerical user and group id (uid, gid) to check file ownership and what not.. And my user account on my laptop was created in the PC-BSD install my uid & guid are 1001, on my OpenBSD machine hosting the files my UID & GID are set to more ‘personal’ integers, so they have to be mapped for my local account

sshfs -o uid=1001 -o gid=1001 username@host ~/mount_point

the username@host syntax is the same as scp, which means the common $USER@$VECTRA:/what/ever notation I use can be used for this as well, if the :/where/ever part is ommited it will use ones home directly from the server.

I have the fusefs-smbnetfs port installed but I’m not exactly fond of microsoft networking. I’m also very tempted to test a little bit of NFS over SSH, but I don’t have much problem with using SSHFS from my laptop and SMB/CIFS from my desktop.

I’ve created a few SMB Shares on the OpenBSD machine that match up to parts of my home directory, tomorrow I’ll start transferring files over. My Music, Videos, and Pictures directories amount for 2.8GB of files alone. So I don’t have much problem with off loading them.

Since I always back crap up first and the files are non critical I can put up with being unable to use the ‘current’ set of them whenever my file servers off line, which is rare. It’ll also be possible for me to set up a few cron jobs that’ll backup my files more regularly: without needing to use the network (scp/ssh) directly! And I can always write a cronjob to seek and destroy those stupid Thumbs.db files Windows Explorer always makes.

I’m not sure about my ~/Documents and ~/code directories yet, that’s almost 400MB of files right there but I’d rather not have to deal with out of date copies if Vectra goes off line. Although I could always set up my laptop to scp over a compressed nihgtly backup… We’ll see where it goes after some live-testing.

In my ideal world, I think my entire home directory would be residing on the server but I’m not quite ready to trust the hardware here for that yet 0.o

All I see around me is hatred, anger, and cruelty…
This is not of me, but of the world that surrounds me.
I was once asked, “Will you be kind or will you be cruel?”
I had asked it of myself, and I chose not to be cruel…
There is little anger left in me, I do not wish to hate,
and I can not bear to be like that which surrounds me.
Man doesn’t live by bread alone, yet how we live on.
Even when there is nothing left but emptiness.
Just that same pain and sorrow
Just that same blackness of night
As they lash out at the nearest targets
I have gone thousands of miles for you out of love,
yet you could not go but one mile for my sake?
“Am I nothing more then an tool?”
Ends can never completely justify their means.
I have shouldered more then my fair share of things,
yet if I stop acting as they strike around me
I am surrounded with a fury… Stricken without regard, with no logic.
I fear, like a wild beast they will descend upon me
To the slightest sign of weakness, like wolfs unto fresh blood.
I will not be capitulated by the actions that causes my refusal.
And I am beatend down for it, even if I refuse in silent.
Only my GOD sees the cuts and scares across my heart
HE’s the one that walks beside me, pulling the blades from my sides.
HE sees what no one else sees, what even they do not see.

Once I sought a reason to live, it lay close at hand.
My memories haunt me, fore I have nothing else but memories.
Of what once was, of what may have been.
Even that has deserted me, I have but one strength..
The flesh is able but the spirit is weak LORD,
Oh how I long to feel again, even just for a moment…
That which was lost; did it truly exist?
My heart twisted, my guts rended, my mind cut.
for what ends?
To that sorrowful fate as the waves came crashing down
No one else by my side, set a drift across a river of pain.
YOU were there when I washed up on the other shore.
The ones that sent me, long gone…
I think I once may have known what it was.
Perhaps I was not meant to find it,
perhaps I am but a fool..
But there is only so much I can bear LORD, I don’t have your strength.

You are like the mountains, strong and unchangeable.
I, like the worm whither and frail in the winds that come.
Nothing to lose but my future,
nothing to gain but a moments pleasure
That bitter sweet memory of what once was.
I once had a dream, but it is gone from me.

I didst fall into that trap, like a fly to the web.
Only to be ripped apart by the creature that lay within.
Yet I could not bring myself to leave, for that sorrowful fate…
That lay behind me.
Of what was, and what may have been.
Tis’ nothing more then to haunt me.
I let it go, I can’t hold on to it any longer.
Yet, I stand still…
I draw the breath you give me,
but what more is there for me?
How much longer can I endure…
YOU endured so much for me, how can I not continue?
LORD keep my feet moving along the path
Direct them along the right road
I no longer know my course
Be it to my destruction or my salvation
Lead the way, I have nothing left to fear.

— The world around me, myself, March 2008.

Some how I find the current track in my playlist ironic…

Oy…

Spent most of the evening moving furniture about. Lugging a couch out and two beds in, not much fun really. For much of the day my minds been some where between thinking about things I shouldn’t and trying not to think about them.

I suppose that is one of the problems with a long memory I guess, you remember things well…

The only highlight, Summer Rental was on, very good John Candy movie. My thought, “Take me home”, I ain’t been to the beach in so long… Maybe some day I’ll see one again.

Well, started about 0020 or some thing, now 0330 and I’ve got about 1GB of files installed…

Downloaded TeXLives DVD ISO and I’m nearing the end of a full install scheme to /usr/Programs/texlive/2007.

I dunno if it will work, even if I could get it to work in PBI format I’m not sure if I’d want to upload the mother but hey, it’s a shot !

So far all of the libs needed by the freebsd binaries seem to be found installed, that’s good.. The system is so freaking huge I’d probably need an army of TeX masters just to write unit tests to find out what works and doesn’t.

So far most of the bulk seems to be the omni-lingual nature

I expect that it will work as far as the tests outlighted in the TeXLive guide, probably build the various TeX documents I’ve got.. My Vi-User-HOWTO, my novel, new [SAS] Trooper Tryout SOP, a few sections of the SOP Rewrites, etc.

I also have a porting doc handy about the OpenBSD port written by the guy that seems to have done most of the work on OpenBSD.

First, I’ll try a PBI but I expect short of stripping it down to English only files or maybe even the big 6 that it’ll be to huge to move around easy. I want to see how I can compact this because there is about 1.1GB of files installed right now out of the 1.7GB of ISO which I unzipped from a 935MB Archive :-). Any way you slice it that is pretty freaking big to PBI… be it build, upload, or download lol.

If I can, I’d like to try a port for FreeBSD but assuming even the install I just did _works_, I’m not sure if I would like the best way of installing it from ports… We’ll see what happens.

Depending on how work’n or broke’n it is I suppose depends on how a port would work out.

 ===================> TeX Live installation procedure <==================

===> Note: Letters/digits in indicate menu items <===
===> for commands or configurable options <===

TeX Live can be used on multiple systems
as a separate subdirectory is used for each
installed binary package in /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/bin.

Preparing list of files to be installed...
Intel x86 with FreeBSD

Essential programs and files
Extra BibTeX styles
TeX auxiliary programs
ConTeXt format
Base documentation
Bulgarian documentation
Chinese documentation
Czechslovak documentation
Dutch documentation
English documentation
Finnish documentation
French documentation
German documentation
Greek documentation
Italian documentation
Japanese documentation
Korean documentation
Mongolian documentation
Polish documentation
Portuguese documentation
Russian documentation
Spanish documentation
Thai documentation
Turkish documentation
Ukrainian documentation
Vietnamese documentation
TeX font-related programs
Extra fonts
Recommended fonts
Extra formats
Games typesetting (chess, etc)
Miscellaneous extra generic macros
Miscellaneous generic macros
Graphics tools
HTML/SGML/XML support
LaTeX support for the humanities
Basic LaTeX packages
LaTeX3 packages
LaTeX supplementary packages
LaTeX recommended packages
Advanced math typesetting
MetaPost (and Metafont) drawing packages
Music typesetting
Omega
Packages for drawings graphics
Plain TeX supplementary packages
PSTricks packages
PostScript and Truetype utilities
Support for publishers
Typesetting for natural and computer sciences
GNU Texinfo
TrueType font manipulation
XeTeX macros

African scripts
Arabic
Armenian
Chinese, Japanese, Korean
Croatian
Cyrillic
Czech/Slovak
Danish
Dutch
Finnish
French
German
Greek typesetting
Hebrew
Hungarian
Indic
Italian
Latin
Manju
Mongolian
Norwegian
Other hyphenation files
Polish
Portuguese
Spanish
Swedish
Tibetan
UK English
Vietnamese

Now copying selected files
PKGONLY collection-basic collection-bibtexextra collection-binextra
collection-context collection-documentation-base
collection-documentation-bulgarian collection-documentation-chinese
collection-documentation-czechslovak collection-documentation-dutch
collection-documentation-english collection-documentation-finnish
collection-documentation-french collection-documentation-german
collection-documentation-greek collection-documentation-italian
collection-documentation-japanese collection-documentation-korean
collection-documentation-mongolian collection-documentation-polish
collection-documentation-portuguese collection-documentation-russian
collection-documentation-spanish collection-documentation-thai
collection-documentation-turkish collection-documentation-ukrainian
collection-documentation-vietnamese collection-fontbin collection-fontsextra
collection-fontsrecommended collection-formatsextra collection-games
collection-genericextra collection-genericrecommended collection-graphicstools
collection-htmlxml collection-humanities collection-langafrican
collection-langarab collection-langarmenian collection-langcjk
collection-langcroatian collection-langcyrillic collection-langczechslovak
collection-langdanish collection-langdutch collection-langfinnish
collection-langfrench collection-langgerman collection-langgreek
collection-langhebrew collection-langhungarian collection-langindic
collection-langitalian collection-langlatin collection-langmanju
collection-langmongolian collection-langnorwegian collection-langother
collection-langpolish collection-langportuguese collection-langspanish
collection-langswedish collection-langtibetan collection-langukenglish
collection-langvietnamese collection-latex collection-latex3 collection-latexextra
collection-latexrecommended collection-mathextra collection-metapost
collection-music collection-omega collection-pictures collection-plainextra
collection-pstricks collection-psutils collection-publishers collection-science
collection-texinfo collection-ttfutils collection-xetex

Done copying.
Testing for /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/bin/i386-freebsd/texconfig....
Making language.dat in /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/texmf-var/tex/generic/config
from your language selections...
Updating filename database with mktexlsr...
mktexlsr: Updating /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/texmf/ls-R...
mktexlsr: Updating /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/ls-R...
mktexlsr: Updating /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/texmf-local/ls-R...
mktexlsr: Updating /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/texmf-var/ls-R...
mktexlsr: Done.
Doing post-install jobs from the packages...
... snip ...
Making map files for dvips, pdftex, dvipdfm with updmap...
Re-updating filename database with mktexlsr...
mktexlsr: Updating /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/texmf/ls-R...
mktexlsr: Updating /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/ls-R...
mktexlsr: Updating /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/texmf-local/ls-R...
mktexlsr: Updating /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/texmf-var/ls-R...
mktexlsr: Done.

=========================
Installation is finished. (Wed Mar 26 03:43:06 EDT 2008)

Formats will be built for each user as needed. If you wish to install
all formats at once, for everyone on your system, run fmtutil-sys --all.

For future global configuration, edit files in /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/texmf-var
(or run texconfig or texconfig-sys).

Add /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/texmf/doc/man to MANPATH.
Add /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/texmf/doc/info to INFOPATH.
Most importantly, add /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/bin/i386-freebsd
to your PATH for current and future sessions.

See ./index.html for links to documentation.
The TeX Live web site (http://tug.org/texlive/)
contains any updates and corrections.

TeX Live is a joint project of the TeX user groups around the world;
please consider supporting it by joining the group best for you.
The list of groups is available on the web at
http://tug.org/usergroups.html.

Welcome to TeX Live!

Cross ya fingers and hang on for a wild ride… ‘cuz here we go baby.

Personal forum signature

A little thing I’ve wanted to do for awhile now… Make myself a decent signature. Generally on [SAS] forums I just use my XFire block (required) and a link to my live journal. Other places, gaming wise I usually clone my sigblock from my E-Mail and convert the 22nd [SAS] EVR part to a link to our home page.

I’m really not a sig crazed person lol. I was looking through the Sigs folder in my saved images. I have all of the ones I’ve used, mostly made by two of my friends that used to be heavy into that stuff. And a few of their own that I thought worth saving as mementos.

So I set out to create one myself:

Prototype #7

My first self-made signature

Prototype #9

After friends comments

I had screwed up and couldn’t get it as I wanted it, so I over laid parts of the background on top of the face. Although I thought it made sense to it that way, I really think #9 looks better.

The solider is Big Boss from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and the woman is “Ivy” Valentine from Soul Calibur.

Both game series and the characters have meaning to me, and I think for my mind this is a good combination. I don’t really expect any one but me to understand it, if I did I probably wouldn’t have bothered making it.

Whoever wins, the battle does not end.
The loser is set free from the battlefield,
while the winner must remain there.
And the survivor will live out his life
as the warrior until the day he dies.

— Big Boss, 1990, in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake.

A specter of this past…

SOPs and the screaming running dashing SNCO team

A relatively full day…

I’ve spent most of the day working on the SOP rewrites with my peers, I wish we could have them done in days… but I don’t know if we could pull that off.. or if I’d still be standing afterwards.

We got a major section done, I’ll read about what the other SNCOs have to say tomorrow. I need to get the Preface, Intro, and RoE fixed tonight and we got maybe 5 sections done today. Tomorrow, I guess a review of the next two parts with there assoicated (~6) sections.

Rasa and I spent most of the day in my office, when he dropped for the night he said it had been 5 hours… I barely could tell :

I only know two ways of doing things, sit on my duff or work till I drop… No in between. I guess maybe I do tend to take things to extremes but how else to get’em done?

And Ma hasn’t been feeling good so I’ve been hoping, skipping, and jumping a lot whenever she needed something. Next time I say I’m going to do some thing all day even if I get a sore ass — I’ll keep my mouth shut lool. Despite the hyper business, headaches, and multitasking (~5 chat windows, 3 browser tabs, music, etc) it’s been quite productive.

My family generally knows my own SOP, if I love you I’ll do *almost* any thing short of breaking most of the Ten Commandments. So nothing I can do on that matter lol.

At least I’ve been sleeping… Instead of going to bed like 0700 in the morning it’s been more like 0430 which is a lot better. Honestly I’m not sure what is worse, knowing it’s an all-nighter when a British radio station is in the middle of the morning Zoo or your own regular radio station starts doing the morning on the way to work stuff !!!

And I did eventually make it into TG#1 for a little Rvs, The Baroness got me in and being the [SAS] Magnet she seems to be. We soon had a nice couple of rounds, JB, Random, Spawn, the pubs and I think even Valroe joined the fray after I left.

Writer’s Block: Stolen Goods

What is the most valuable thing you’ve ever had stolen from you?

Live Journals Writer’s Block

My ability to think clearly !!!

Some times my family has me to pushed to such a point that I think if I tried adding 2 + 2 together that it would come out 6 instead of 4 !

Grrr….

3MByte aDSL is to slow.

You know your internet connection sucks when you are only…

  • downloading two files over ftp, maybe 150mb in all
  • streaming music from a server probably 20-30 klicks away
  • browsing 8-12 web pages in tabs in flock
  • connected to AIM, MSN, YIM, ICQ, and LJTalk through Pidgin
  • On irc.freenode.com in 4 #channels (using konversation for the client)

And the music keeps stuttering LOL.

Either that or you just multi task to dang much…. HAHAHA !

Oh baby where have you been all my life?

I just found the mixer(8) command on my BSD powered laptop when looking through the handbook.

This rocks !

Every now and then I like to adjust my sound volume, on the laptop I usually have music going all of the time. I’ve got kmix docked iso I can open and adjust it but that kind of sucks. Because I have to swap from keyboard to mouse or worse mouse-jet around to go from what I was doing to adjusting the sound. Some times the volume slider in my systray really is the best way for that.

Now when I could just suspend Vim and use mixer to adjust it without leaving my shell, that is perfect!

$ mixer
Mixer vol is currently set to 50:50
Mixer pcm is currently set to 25:25
Mixer speaker is currently set to 81:81
Mixer line is currently set to 75:75
Mixer mic is currently set to 0:0
Mixer cd is currently set to 75:75
Mixer rec is currently set to 0:0
Mixer igain is currently set to 0:0
Mixer ogain is currently set to 50:50
Recording source: mic
$ mixer -s
vol 50:50 pcm 25:25 speaker 81:81 line 75:75 mic 0:0 cd 75:75 rec 0:0 igain 0:0 ogain 50:50 =rec mic%
$ mixer pcm 0:0
Setting the mixer pcm from 25:25 to 0:0.
$ mixer pcm 25:25
Setting the mixer pcm from 0:0 to 25:25.
$

I set the PCM/Wave to 0 and then back to 25% left and right effectively muting an unmuting my sound. Since some programs will modify the PCM/Wave setting when changing the volume, like MPlayer and XMMS do by default. While others like Xine based stuff (Kaffeine and Amarok for example) are poilite enough not to dick with the system sound settings.

I’ve come to setting my Volume to 50% and adjusting the PCM setting at will. I could probably make most programs use there own virtual channel and not screw with the overall sound but on my laptop I rarely have a need for it.

I would rather like it if I could do some thing like that on my Windows machine though, so I could for example adjust volumes independently for some applications that don’t support software mixing on windows. Which means all of there sounds run at the settings in windows control center… Like XFires message beeps (ugh) but with how the sound works on my desktop with the Audigy 4…. I’m just happy if I can play Raven Shield and listen to music in any thing _other_ then WMP and not get a BSOD quite often when using the server browser in Rvs!

sshfs?

Hmm could this be the solution to my problems ?

sshfs -o uid=MyLocalUID -o gid=MyLocalGID $USER@$VECTRA: /tmp/mnt

$VECTRA is an environment variable that expands to the address of my file server.

I was able to access my remote users home directory (the one on $VECTRA) through the /tmp/mnt folder on my laptop ($DIXIE)

My local User ID and Group ID #’s on this system are the defaults setup when I installed PC-BSD, don’t recall if I had an option to set them. On my file server where I used adduser my UID/GID reflect my DOB so they needed to be remapped. Once I did that I was able to work on the files through a mount point I own, and

as expected the trusty umount command worked (of course you can’t be using the files while trying to un mount them)

fusefs-smbnetfs in ports is another thing I want to look at, because SMB is suitable for the windows clients just as much as sshfs is for my lapto… Only I care more about my laptop having *good* integration 🙂

On windows I don’t have a problem with SMB shares because it’s fairly integrated with the system, and I use a file manager for manipulating files… The cmd.exe is just to wasteful, it is the worst terminal emulator slash shell I have ever seen! Heck I’d rather confine my self to /bin/sh lol.

On my laptop, I usually do file management through my shell. I don’t use an external mouse, just the touch pad so you could say it’s in my best interests to make use of keyboard friendly designs ;-). I spend most of my time using a shell and utils for file management… So KDE’s integration with SMB Shares (almost as good as Windows and without the lockups).

mount_smbfs requires running as root because of what it has to do, that’s not acceptible to me although possibly I could rig my laptop for a passwordless sudo mount_smbfs but I don’t consider that an acceptable method whether it would work or not.

I’d like to be able to move parts of my home directories to the server. That way I can offload the current versions of my Music, Video, and Image files. I could even move my Documents and code directories which would be nice, right now I’ve been in a bit of a pesky situation.

tar -cf /tmp/foo.tar foo && scp /tmp/foo.tar $USER@$VECTRA:/srv/smb/Files/

So I can work on files from my windows machine, and just tar them back up and scp them over on the laptop later. A poor work around…

I need to test the fusefs-smbnetfs port, either way I know what I want. And to be honest I don’t have a problem with using sshfs for my laptop and smb for my desktop as long as I can get every thing working properly. Using sshfs on the laptop instead would also mean no need to change my laptops firewall configuration.

I just need to see how they handle a network failure….

My file server is usually online but not always, so I’d be hesitant to put my entire home directory on it. And even then, because of my shitty internet connection I often have to do a power cycle on the modem and some times the router every few weeks… So that is a factor that needs to be considered.

And actually, that might be a good way to _test_ it out !

Just not on my laptops home directory xD