I’m in Baghdad now, where my only link to the ‘net is a high-latency satellite. Mozilla Thunderbird can’t hack the delays this introduces, and thus times out when attempting to fetch my IMAP mailbox on ender. Thus, rather than use one of the other shitty IMAP clients, I’ve decided to pull the trigger on SquirrelMail.

I have previously attempted to install RoundCube, but found it a bit too immature at this point, so I’ve decided to go with something tried and true: SquirrelMail.

Fortunately, the FreeBSD ports collection includes SM, and a pre-built package based on 1.4.5 is available. Unfortunately, the pre-built package uses Apache 1.3, while I run Apache 2 on bonzo. This leads to all sorts of fun:

Lately ender has taken to freezing hard every few days, requiring a reboot of the VM in which it resides. This sucks as ender is my mail server.

I hoped maybe the problem was some issue fixed in the latest -STABLE, so I updated to the latest -STABLE sources and rebuild the kernel and userland. Kernel built fine, but userland failed same as it did last time I tried:

/usr/src/gnu/usr.bin/binutils/gdb/infrun.c: In function `normal_stop':
/usr/src/gnu/usr.bin/binutils/gdb/infrun.c:3046: error: too many arguments to function `observer_notify_normal_stop'

Google doesn’t have anything to offer, nor do the OBSD mailing list archives. WTF is wrong and why am I the only one w/ the problem!?

I just upgraded ender to OpenBSD 3.8 using the same process I used in Upgrading Jane to OpenBSD 3.8. It was uneventful.

The next step, however, will be more complicated than it was on jane, because ender runs all my mail systems, including postfix, spamassassin, etc. I’ll need to update their ports packages accordingly.

Recently, I recounted my experience installing and running my qdb.pl script on OpenBSD 3.7. Though the backup runs worked fine from the console, they failed strangely when run from crontab. I encountered the following error message from ender:

OpenBSD 3.8 was just released. I want to upgrade Ender from 3.7 to 3.8, but first I want to back it up. I have a simple backup script, @qdb.pl@, which I use for machine backups. However, I'm lazy and haven't gotten around to putting it on ender. Right before a life-changing OBSD upgrade is a good time to do so. It is at this point that the yak stampede begins. To install OBSD3.8, I have to back up. To back up, I have to get my @qdb.pl@ script. To get @qdb.pl@, I need Subversion (actually I could use HTTP, but I'm trying to be thorough). So, I dutifully go to @/usr/ports/devel/subversion@ and fire off a @make@; no dice, as the subversion port's depenency chain ultimately extends to the X11 libraries.