/var/log/irl

Installing Gophernicus on OpenBSD

Installing Gophernicus on OpenBSD was actually rather simple. It is packaged so a simple:

doas pkg_add gophernicus

will install the necessary files. According to the pkg-readme the preferred way to run it is through inetd so that’s what I set up. The exact line I added to /etc/inetd.conf was:

gopher stream tcp nowait _gophernicus /usr/local/libexec/in.gophernicus in.gophernicus -h irl.xyz

In the example, the hostname is in double quotes but the quotes ended up appearing in gophermap outputs so I removed them and testing with lynx everything is working now.

OpenBSD Worrying RAID

I wanted to move a couple of USB hard drives from one OpenBSD machine to another. They are configured with softraid(4) as RAID 1 (mirrored). When I plugged the drives into the new machine though, nothing happened with softraid. This was pretty worrying.

Both the drives showed in dmesg output so the issue was specifically to do with softraid. The man page for bioctl(8) talks about -c creating a “new” RAID device which sounded a little too destructive. I asked for help in #openbsd and apparently the language in the man page is misleading. The -d flag has recently been updated to say “detach” rather than “delete” to try to address this.

Multicast IPTV

For almost a decade, I’ve been very slowly making progress on a multicast IPTV system. Recently I’ve made a significant leap forward in this project, and I wanted to write a little on the topic so I’ll have something to look at when I pick this up next. I was aspiring to have a useable system by the end of today, but for a couple of reasons, it wasn’t possible.

Contact

• iain@learmonth.me
• irlxyz
• irlxyz