Vectra II

by

Today I post a history and a log of my oldest computer here.

When one of my employers (who works in IT) found out I wanted to run FreeBSD but my mom wouldn’t let me repartition her computer (which we shared). He gave me an old office computer, keyboard, and monitor and I bought a Microsoft Basic Optical mouse for it. It gave me my first expirences with FreeBSD 6.0 and PC-BSD 1.0RC1-2. After PC-BSD made it’s 1.0 release, breaking upgradeability (via easy install patches) with the beta releases. After I got a new computer which runs XP and BSD, the machine sat more or less just for a way to quickly check system files or man pages when I needed to look some thing up.

After some time I tried installing NetBSD 3.0 on it, nice system but it just felt wrong after using FreeBSD/PC-BSD so much. So I overwrote it with a large install of FreeBSD. Just incase I might need to fall back to it I setup Xorg and Windowmaker. I wanted to set it up with Samba/CUPS so I could print form it and store some files on it. I never got a chance to finish samba config and the install burned most of the HDD. A few weeks ago I reformated with a bare bone install of FreeBSD 6.1-Release with the intention of learning more about system administration and security. System Specifications:

Model: Hewlett Packared Vectra Vli8 500
Processor: Katmai core, 500Mhz Pentium 3
Memory: 384MB DDR RAM
Storage: 8GB Maxtor IDE drive
Extra: 1 x CD-ROM drive, 1 x 3.5 1.44MB Floppy drive

Source madness

by

I’ve been working on a logging program, it’s nothing much but it’s good learning fun, usually…

She basically deals with command line options like so:

while ((ch = getopt(argc, argv, "rchtf")) != -1)

        switch
(ch) {

        case 'r':

      
     rflag = 1;  
       
     /* read log, like tail */

      
     break;

      
     case 't':

      
     tflag = 1;  
       
     /* read top of log like head */

      
     break;

        case 'f':

      
     fflag = 1;  
       
     /* log to a diffrent file */

      
     break;

When ever a switch is “On” or “1” we perform an action. When no switches are given we fscanf stdin into a str[256] char array. This is more then enough space and shouldn’t be to memory hungry for right now. Input is taken until a new line is given then we store it in the char array and fprintf it into our logfile + a newline. I toyed around with trying to resize str to match stdin should str be to small, so we could avoid a segfault when trying to write huge entries. Yet allow no major limit on entry size. That nett’d me a good junk pointer warning I’m sure not able to find out all the details of.

Right now I’m working on trying to get the t switch working using the source for the head command as a reference. So far no real luck, we never get any output from it. It seems to break apart in the line of execuition so I know I’ve got to change things around.

I know I could just pass things along to head and tail via sh, but what is the fun in that? I’ll figure this out later must sleeeeeeeeeeeeppp!!!!

/* I don’t do HTML ! */

Day one

by

So far LJ seems a nice site, maybe I should replace my logging files with it. I’ll try to keep my blog orderly but I’m not the most structured person hehehehe.

Primary subjects: Computers, Programming, BSD and Unix like operating systems, trials and tribulations in my studies and learning of computers and technology. And life as a working schmuck and JNCO of one of the best Coop teams to ever play SWAT/R6.