MidnightBSD Developer Journal

The browser port has been updated.  The new version needs further testing and some options aren't quite right yet.  We need to get dbus support working and ogg.  SVG has been enabled and it's up to 3.5.8 which includes all current security updates. 

I'm trying to get the mports tree back in line as it used to be.  I just indexed a magus run.  It will be the first since January 24th.  Several fetch errors and dependancies have been fixed since the last run.  It will be interesting.  This does not use the new "jail" index setup that the January run went on.  I haven't had time to set that back up on the new server yet.  A few failures may be the result of that, particluarly with perl related ports.  We'll see.

Yesterday, I updated over 70 ports.  mports/audio ports have all been updated if needed and several in multimedia.  I also updated browser3 to 3.0.18 this weekend. 

Our status on gnome2 is that many of the core systems including gstreamer related ports are now working, but we have some issues with gnome-desktop preventing a gnome2-lite build from working.

kde3-base is blocked on a depends against mDNSresponder and avahi.  I'm trying to figure out what's pulling in avahi.  These ports do effectively the same thing and they conflict with each other.

The FTP server is back online.  45GB of data copied.  I've also posted the new snapshot for i386 tonight.  

Mirmon is now getting updated again with FTP history.  Most sites haven't tried to sync for a week.  Of course there was nothing to sync.   I'm going to verify that rsync is working properly tomorrow.  

A few CGI scripts and portions of the site including viewvc and the wiki are still down.  cvsupd is also not operational due to problems on amd64.  (i switched architectures in the move)  Once the port is fixed, I'll get it back online.  Patches are welcome to speed up the process :)

The news script should be rotating again on midnightbsd.org. 

I'm pleased to announce a new i386 snapshot for MidnightBSD.  This is the first snap in some time and a big improvement over our previous snapshot.  It does not contain mports, but is a fully functioning installer.  I've tested it on VMWare Fusion with great success.  

This version includes this weekends work on ata(4), re(4), and rl(4).  

I'm going to upload it as soon as the FTP is in place. 

The MidnightBSD FTP server has been down since the server migration.  I'm working on getting it back into place.  It's over 32GB in size currently.   

I've made several changes to the Apache 2.2 port.  mod_proxy_connect should now work properly and scgi has been added to the list.  I've also added support for BDB 4.x 

 Tip: If you're using MidnightBSD current, you can try out the netpgp utility as part of the base system.  It allows you to do PGP operations without installing a port. 

There's also the new unzip utility which works for basic unzip operations but doesn't always work as a replacement for the port version.

There's also been some recent improvements to several periodic scripts; be sure to mergemaster if you upgrade to recent current.

 Magus website and bugzilla are back up.  I also committed a fix for the seg faulting sftp problem on some systems.  I've noticed it on amd64.

Several perl prots were updated today and I found a bug in XML:Parser.  Don't give it two single ticks in a row.

I have the new server setup, but several services still need some TLC including Bugzilla and magus.  I probably wont' get to them until Saturday. 

I just wanted to point out that bsd magazine is now free and online. 

The most recent magus run looked much better.  We had 2150 packages pass.  Both KDE and Gnome have a few packages that need work.

We've been running the MidnightBSD website on a Dell Precision 650 workstation for several years.  It's a dual xeon 2.0Ghz with 3GB PC2700 ECC ram, intel nic (gigabit), 500GB IDE HDD + 2 x 160GB RAID1 IDE on 32bit MidnightBSD.

Today, we bought a new server.  It's a HP Proliant ML110 G6 with Intel Xeon X3430.   It should be a nice little upgrade.  

QT4 has been updated to qt 4.5.2 this weekend.  We've also begun the work to update KDE 4 to 4.3.1.  Work on Gnome 2.26 has been progressing as well.  We need to fix a few dependancies (gstreamer plugins and fuse). 

MidnightBSD now has support for posix_spawn(3) related functions in libc.  We've also made changes to kqueue(2) to support libdispatch (Apple's GCD).  libdispatch does not work yet as there are other change that must be made to support it.   

A vulnerability has been reported in Sendmail, which can be exploited
by malicious people to conduct spoofing attacks.

The vulnerability is caused due to an error when processing
certificate fields containing NULL characters. This can be
exploited to e.g. conduct Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks via
specially crafted certificates.

Our latest magus run was significantly better than the previous run.  With the previous run, we had roughly 700 ports pass, mostly due to bugs with our Perl environment.  The new Magus run had 1904 ports pass.  Several of the failures were in Java ports and due to a problem with the chroot tarball used during the run.  It contained JAVA_HOME in the environment.   This is the first amd64 current run to use the system perl correctly.  

Yesterday, I updated the Python 2.6 port to 2.6.4.  This seems to work as expected on i386, but there are some issues on amd64 related to libffi and _ctypes.  I'm working on the problem.