michaelanthoni.com

OpenBSD 4.3 was publicly released on schedule last week with astonishing amount of improvements, new features, and bug fixes. Hats off to the OpenBSD Developers that are putting out some great work to make a stable and reliable product.

However, I must say, I did notice some bug fixes in the changelogs that I’ve actually came across and been caught up on that were fixed in this release. These issues had been referenced in the openbsd mailing lists by other users but were never acknowledged by the developers leaving me frustrated and at a dead end without getting into the code. Its good to see these issues finally acknowledged in the changelog.

As I stated in my About page I am not a programmer by trade but I can and do code when the need arises. One of my favorite languages to code in is Perl as it provides a ton of functionality thanks to CPAN, is platform-indepandant, and at times very natural and easy going for most tasks I need to accomplish. The thing about Perl though is its Perl and it can be very intimidating at times. Luckily what I needed to do earlier today was not one of those times. Theres always something new to discover using Perl and I’m always glad when I find something new in Perl that is useful or any other language for that matter and today I came across a module that I had never used before so I’d figured I’d share even though it may be a household module for the hardcore perl monks out there.

So my problem was I needed to diff two files and determine if they were identical in order to apply logic based on the output of the diff. Now I do this all the time on the command line using the GNU diff utility but I needed its functionality within Perl. At first I was thinking I could execute a system or exec function but I figured there has to be a better way right? This is Perl after all surely this functionality is available. Well it wasn’t hard to find Text::Diff with a simple search and and after a few minutes of reading the documentation it is exactly what I needed. First things first though. I need to install the module first either via CPAN or my package manager.

Installing on OpenBSD via pkg manager was a snap as long as you have exported the PKG_PATH first.

#export PKG_PATH="ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/pub/4.2/packages/i386/"
#pkg_add -v p5-Text-Diff

If your on Debian it should be as simple as
#apt-get install libtext-diff-perl

…or from the CPAN shell

cpan>install Text::Diff

With that installed now I just needed the code in my script…

use Text::Diff

if($diff) {
#files are different
...
}
else{
# files are the same.
...
}

…and there it is. I will be sharing the script where I needed this functionality in the near future as part of a feature article I plan to write once my project is near completion. I hope someone may find this to be useful in the meantime.

Well Openbsd 4.2 has been out for about two months now and I wanted to post this a little sooner but with all the holidays I havent had a chance.

If you’ve upgraded to 4.2 then you have probably ran into the libexpat dependency issue like the rest of us. For those of you who have not upgraded yet, I hope you would read the Upgrade guide as one would expect as this issue is described here.

If you havent read the “gotchas” section, the issue is that the libexpat library has been moved from the base set to the xbase set. Now this presents a problem for people such as myself who do not install the xbase on firewalls and routers. The main problem is that this library is a dependancy to many other packages and is acknowledged with the following statement:

This will impact a large number of users! This was an unfortunate decision whose ramifications were not recognized earlier in the process. For 4.3, libexpat will be part of base43.tgz, solving this problem.

I believe this issue has already been resolved in the -current tree but for those of us who are only running stable we cannot wait the 4 months until the next release cycle and we sure as hell are not installing the xbase set. So what are we to do. I’m sure this is completely unsupported by the OpenBSD folk but this worked fine for me.

Workaround:

Download the xbase set at ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/4.2/i386/xbase42.tar.gz

Extract the xbase42.tar.gz to a temporary location, say /tmp

#mv xbase42.tar.gz /tmp
#cd /tmp
#tar -zxvf xbase42.tar.gz

There are 3 files in which you need inside the ./xbase42/usr/X11R6/lib directory.

#cd ./xbase42/usr/X11R6/lib
#ls -al libe*

-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 153436 Aug 8 23:03 libexpat.a
-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 157767 Aug 8 23:03 libexpat.so.8.0
-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 183510 Aug 8 23:03 libexpat_pic.a

Copy these 3 files to your /usr/lib directory.

#cp libe* /usr/lib

And whala! A stupid simple solution to a really annoying issue. Now you should be able to install/upgrade your packages as you need without hitting this dependency issue. Other then this little bug the Openbsd 4.2 release has worked great for me.

With that said… (see previous post)

I use Windows XP Pro as my desktop operating system of choice and haven’t seen the reason to make the move to Vista yet, although I will be investigating more in the near future with Windows Server 2008 looming around the corner. I find myself to be more efficient and comfortable, in a windows desktop environment than I do in either GNOME or KDE, although I feel right at home in a GNOME enviornment. Although Mac was probably the first OS I ever used, I grew up using W indows and it feels like home to me. However, I do tend to run unix-like virtual machines on top of my desktop to allow me some flexibility. Also, I run a dual booting, Windows XP/linux configuration on my laptops. Never know when your gonna need what. I like to keep my options open.

I have run a MacOSX laptop in the past but at the present I have not had the luxury.

On the server side of things, I run both Windows and Unix-Like, depending on the situation, client, customer, requirements, etc. On the Windows side I run Windows Server 2003, of course, in its different flavors. On the Unix-Like side my Linux OS of choice for production is Debian, however I am a linux hobbyist and have ran most major Linux flavors including Ubuntu, Slackware, Gentoo, Suse, and Redhat based operating systems at one point or another. My BSD of choice for servers is FreeBSD, but I use OpenBSD for the network infrastructure such as routers and firewalls.

Again, I have closed commenting on this page as to not insite a flame war. This is what I run.