As announced in the previous article, we now have a company blog. Best thing for you to do is
to monitor blog.bytemine.net as well as my private website. :)
I will keep this blog alive for a month, so that people have a chance of adjusting their feedreader.
Afterwards it will just redirect to my private site.
I’ve had my ThinkPad x60s for a few months now, but since the built-in 3G broadband device from Sierra Wireless was acting up a bit, I just got around now to actually set it up properly with OpenBSD. The device is a PCI MiniCard (in Germany the card is sim-locked to Vodafone. However, you can call IBM/Lenovo support and request the unlocking code, only effect will be, that you will not receive further support from Lenovo regarding the broadband device and configuration.).
Very common these days is, that these devices hold a USB hub behind the actual broadband chip sits:
[0:24] fkr(ripley):~ %> usbdevs -v
….
addr 1: full speed, self powered, config 1, UHCI root hub(0×0000), Intel(0×8086), rev 1.00 port 1
addr 2: full speed, self powered, config 1, Mini Card(0×6804), Sierra Wireless, Incorporated(0×1199), rev 0.01
The PCI Mini Card is a Sierra Wireless MC8755, in OpenBSD this device is driven by the umsm(4) driver that was initially written by Jonathan Grey. Since then I’ve added quite a few device ids (and have support for the Huawei E220 almost ready, but that is a different story ;)
From what I gathered, it will only work if you use a baudrate of either 115200 or 460800 when talking to it. All others yield a proper connection to the device, but ppp connections will fail.
My options file for pppd is linked here.
More interesting is actually the chat script:
ABORT BUSY
ABORT 'NO CARRIER'
ABORT VOICE
ABORT "NO DIALTONE"
'' AT
OK AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","web.vodafone.de"
OK AT+CGQREQ=1
OK ATD*99***1#
Until I added the AT+CGQREQ=1 the connection succeeded, but was rather slow. The Sierra Wireless MC8755 is capable of HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) that allows speeds up to 1.8 Mbit/s. Vodafone offers HSDPA in various cities in Germany and it is quite fast. The AT+CGQREQ= command sets the requested service profile. Since I added that, the connections are way better. (still not as fast as possible, but I have to digg further for that).
so, the only thing that is missing from the new soekris stuff we expected to be available in April are the SATA kits. Since today,we can actually ship the net5501-60 as well as the kerberos.si 19″ cases. For the dual cases, you can actually load them up with two 5501 plus two lan1621. Makes seven ethernet ports each :) Quite nice.
I will post pictures tomorrow. happy ordering!
The openbsd atheros (ath(4)) driver made it into the linux kernel. This is good news as apparently the linux people finally see again, that its good to have free drivers around. However, as undeadly reports, they also “changed” the license to GPLv2, while they were at it. (commit message). Oh wait, right, they can’t. Its Sam Leffler’s and Reyk’s Floeter’s code. While Sam originally released the code dual-licensed (BSD, GPLv2) the parts from Reyk (free HAL among them) are ISC-licensed. Judging from the questions on undeadly, quite few people seem to think, that BSD license does allow re-branding of the license. na, only the author can do that ;)
Anyways, unlike our (OpenBSD) own little mishap (see Slashdot covering te bc43xx incident) I’m sure, this was no accident.
Update:
KernelTrap as some coverage as well.
Finally we started to ship the new Soekris modell, net5501-70, with the small configuration modell, net5501-60 being on the horizon (not yet available). The new modell is quite a change from the 4801 line, more ram, four ethernet ports (yet still missing gigabit ethernet), way bigger cpu and crypto hardware.
Soon we will have rackmount cases for the new modell as well, currently only the standard case is available for ordering. Since Soekris still has issues with the SATA port and the current version of the Bios, there is no SATA Kit available for ordering as well.
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Tyrel from SitesCollide did an Interview with me during Confidence 2007. Here is a direct link to the mp3.
Our OpenBSD booth bunny goes undercover.
Planet Notebook is one of those places on the net where one can order hardware. More interestingly, you can order IBM replacement harddrives for notebooks, especially for X40/X41 and X41 tablet. Those modells have 1.8″ drives with ATA-44 PIN connector. These drives are fairly hard to find these days, since most 1.8″ drives on the market have a ZIF connector. Planet-Notebook has the 44-PIN variant: Order here. BUT BEWARE!
They say: It’s available. I ordered. They don’t have it. Amazingly the statement was “it suddenly ran out of stock. We will mark it non-available in the web shop”. mmmh. let’s wait and see, when it finally is marked to be not-in-stock. :(
It was my first time at the Confidence Conference. I was invited a long time ago and asked to give a talk. Confidence takes place in Krakow, Poland. I flew there from Hamburg on thursday, May 9th. On purpose I flew there a bit early, to have time to walk around in Krakow on friday. Andrzej, one of the organizers of Confidence, picked me up at the airport. The organizers booked an apartment right downtown at market square. It was an awesome idea to have an appartment right there, instead of staying at the conference hotel. First evening we went out for food and drinks with some of the other speakers. Of course the organizers introduced us to the nice vodka poland has :). We went to a Jazz Bar and once the band was done playing, one of the other speakers went up to the drummer and started talking to him. Before we knew it, we heard a short, but very nice drum solo played by one of the speakers of confidence. Dinis Cruz is one of the brains behind OWASP.Throughout the conference Dinis and I had various very interesting discussions. Dinis gave a talk on ASP.NET Security. Since I usually avoid Windows territory, it was a very interesting talk indeed. Dinis has fair clue about Security Design, Handling security issues and the associated politics with it. As I said, lots of interesting talks we had.
Friday was spent mostly with walking around and meeting with people I knew from previous conferences.
Saturday the conference started, it was a tad chaotic, yet it was obvious that the organizers put lots of effort into this their conference. The agenda had quite a few interesting items on it. One of the talks that I reallly did not want to miss, was the talk on VoIP Security by Shawn Merdinger. However, it seemed that Shawn was missing in action. Turned out, someone gave him a tad too much of the goooood polish vodka :)
The talk was moved to sunday, right after my talk. Sadly, I had to give an interview after my talk so I missed it :/
Wim gave a talk about OpenBSD deployed on Soekris, it was entitled “Calorie restricted OpenBSD”.
My talk was on “Secure Roaming for the modern Roadwarrior”. For some reasons, I was not really able to focus on my talk (too much of the polish vodka too?), yet the people seemed to have liked it. I’ve put the slides online.
All in all Confidence is a very nice conference to attend, the organizers are trying to move it to be more international, speaker- and attendee-wise.
I’m very much looking forward to Confidence 2008, I will definitly be there.
People that known me for a while know, that I’ve been fairly involved with the OpenDarwin project (which was shutdown a while ago). I’ve stopped hacking on darwin for various reasons. Two of the bigger ones were:
The first one does not need any further explanation.
Darwin is nice to play around for educational reasons, but for day-to-day use, nobody will use it. Whoever would use Darwin, might as well use Mac OS X. And as an open-source operating system Darwin does not make much sense either, since too many components of it have licensing issues, if you try to redistribute it. Despite the obnoxious GNU-Darwin project, there is now a new project trying to come to life: puredarwin.
Apparently these people are not even aware of the fact, that Darwin is everything but selfhosting (various parts of the source are so-called XCode Projects and as such need to be build on Mac OS X, there is no counter-part for that available for Darwin):
From a conversation on their irc-channel (#puredarwin on freenode network)
22:32 < vmlemon> Can we compile this stuff on Darwin itself?
23:00 < probono> vmlemon: not tried yet
23:01 < vmlemon> OK
00:22 < kvv> vmlemon: cannot compile Xcode projects on Darwin
00:32 < vmlemon> Back to the start of the perpetual problem cycle :(
00:32 < vmlemon> We really could do with an “OXCode” (Open XCode)
00:33 < vmlemon> Well, it’s not the best name, but you’ve got the idea
00:36 < vmlemon> A Free Software, XCode compatible environment on which the tricky XCode only components can be built
Well, we will see the outcome of this. ;)
I seriously doubt that Darwin will ever become a serious player in the BSD family. Too many constraints and too many nice-to-hack-on alternatives.
