Static in the Ether » FreeBSD

convert man pages to PDF

Barry Irwin — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 14:22:19 +0000

Recently I had need to produce pdf files of some man pages simple because the are far easier to print and review onscreen. The following snippet added to my .bash_profile does the trick.

# Convert man pages to pdf man2pdf() { m2pfile="/tmp/${1}-m2p.pdf" if [ ! -s $m2pfile ]; then # is it there and > zero bytes man -t "${1}" | ps2pdf - > "$m2pfile" fsize=`du -k $m2pfile | awk '{print $1}'` echo "Created PDF file in $m2pfile ($fsize KB)" fi }

It can trivially be extended to check for things like a $DISPLAY variable and pop up a viewer or request to print. The caching is admittedly crude, but works since /tmp is cleared out periodically. Output looks like:

[bvi@starburst ~]$ man2pdf ls Created PDF file in /tmp/ls-m2p.pdf (20 KB)

Cleaning up…

Barry Irwin — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:11:32 +0000

With the year almost half gone, and Winter Solstice almost a distant memory, its time to catch up with some of the systems related housekeeping. While conficker seems to still be rampaging around from my scan log inspections, the Conficker Working Group has been quite since late April. A far greater threat to civilization is that coming from North Korea. Some of the sysadmin type work done include:

migrating the host for this blog, along with pretty much all my other FreeBSD boxes to FreeBSD 7.2.
Trying out the new jail(8) features in 7.2 particularly the multip ip and ipv6 support
A move to wordpress 2.8, which while the upgrade was pretty painless Ive ruin into some hastles with plugins that break the nice widget selection system under the admin panel – most notable of the plugins I’ve notice d causing this is wp-recapcha. Along with this has been a migration to somethign alittle more elegant than the boring Kubric Theme.
A pilot version of my new squid external_acl filtering software is being tested by two sites, so far with positive results.

Progress on the phd is plodding on with growing collection of rather interesting images and plots generation that I now need to try fathom and write about. with the university now on vac I should be able to make good progress in this direction.

One of the most fascinating and gripping books I have read in a while is Ed Macy’s Apache, which is well worth a read if you are into military biographies.

RIP LT box

Barry Irwin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 11:43:15 +0000

This morning I move the last of the services and data off the system I’ve had at LayeredTech since November 2005. This little AMD XP 2400 has given great service over the years, but the hardware got increasingly flaky and the cost of hosting at LT just keeps increasing for old kit. These factors in combination with a change of datacenters prompted me to bid it a fond farewell and relocate much of my offshore stuff to a shiny new host at hetzner.de, along with the chance to move to FreeBSD7.x, and free myself of the cruft that accumulates with 4.x -> 5.x -> 6.x migrations without clean installs.

Stable builds

Barry Irwin — Wed, 21 May 2008 21:37:02 +0000

I was cleaning out some old notes the other day and came across a pile of work relating to the development of some custom FreeBSD firewall solutions that Neil and I developed while at Itouch Labs, many years back in 2002.

The majority of the code is completely out dated, given these were based on the the then bleeding edge 4.3 branch. The only thing thats probably of value, is to sometime dust off the extensions we did to natd to provide an interactive console and the ability to reload rules without dumping its state table. Possibly post PhD.

I also found a link to a post made by Arri when he decommissioned them some four and a bit years later, with some impressive uptimes:

4.3-RELEASE-p28 FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE-p28 #0
8:56AM up 1175 days, 14:25, 1 user, load averages: 0.01, 0.00, 0.00
4.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE #3: Thu Aug 9 08:24:10 SAST 2001
8:55AM up 1353 days, 13:07, 1 user, load averages: 0.07, 0.03, 0.004.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE #3: Thu Aug 9 08:24:10 SAST 2001
8:57AM up 1636 days, 12:16, 2 users, load averages: 0.01, 0.02, 0.00

BSD is great to work with! I see that the 2nd edition of Absolute FreeBSD is now finally available, and am eagerly awaiting for my copy to arrive.

Systems Administration Cheet Sheets

Barry Irwin — Sun, 18 May 2008 08:25:09 +0000

Colin Barschel has published a rather complete listing of how to perform common unix related tasks in Linux and FreeBSD, and even some Solaris examples. Even better hes got a booklet version as well for easy printing. Something to keep on the back burner/bookmarks for when you get stuck trying to remember just how broken ‹insert os of choice›’s fooblat command is.

Remote FreeBSD install – Depenguinator TNG

Barry Irwin — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 10:39:11 +0000

Daniel Gerzo, has recently published an article as part of the FreeBSD documentation project on how to install FreeBSD on a remote system, when one doesn’t have the luxury of a IP KVM or other remote console. Unfortunately most hosting providers seem to think Linux in its gazillions of flavors (really who would want to run Gentoo?) is the preferable option to windows.

The basic process is about creating a magic memory File System 9MFS) based mini FreeBSD install one can then ddover the base MBR on the system This gets you jsut enough of a Real OS to carry on with the rest of your install.

What this means for me is the possibility of doing some nice rmeote upgrade, or more acuratlye nuke and paves on some remorely hosted equipment. The big cath of course is your remote systems should have sufficient bandwidth (, or at least a local copy of the ISO or CD handy and mounted. Exploring other hosting providers may also now be feasible, now that I can run my favorite server OS without having to try persuade remotes upport to just put a BSD CD in and let me pay for a KVM access window :-)