Yesterday I put my friend Girish Venkatachalam in the blog with authoring privileges. I see where he’s already entered one posting. We’ve been corresponding for about a year now since he ran across some of my Christmas and New Year ascii art last year in a post to the OpenBSD misc mailing list, liked it, and contacted me. He’s a prolific C programmer and has been involved in BSD and Linux for around 11 years now, I believe. He ported IPSEC to BSD previously. Currently he’s involved in putting together a firewall appliance which he’s been working on for some time now and is almost ready for production. His web site is at http://sirsasana.org . Looking forward to some good tips and tricks from him for newbies when he gets caught up with his work. He’s helped me a lot over the past year. I recall I was trying to figure out how use mplayer to stream in and save one of my favorite radio programs, doing it out of a cronjob and then, at the appropriate time, killing the process using pkill from another cronjob. I told him I’d been killing myself, trying to figure out a good way to do it. He wrote a small C program for me that interfaced with mplayer and also accepted an integer for how long it would run, appropriately naming it killmyself.c in his witty way. 
Naturally, as with all his programs, it’s open source. I’ve put it up on the web site on the fun page for anyone who would like to try it out.
December 30, 2007
Nice tips
I found the pages neatly designed and the content relevant and crisp.
Please include more content on newbie topics like installation, pf administration,
ipsec setup and so on.
Thanks. I look forward to visiting your blog often.
December 29, 2007
Packages
Updated the site a little tonight. I put a new page up about working with packages and added the link to the tips and tricks page. Also installed a counter on that page just out of curiosity, to see if it was getting any hits. Found a misspelling in one of the fortune files, fixed it, and uploaded the new file. Added BSDTalk to the news feeds page and added a link to a talk on PF Peter N. M. Hansteen did with Will Blackman on BSDTalk in the news section on the home page.
December 21, 2007
New Tips and Some Fun, Too!
Been trying to get some content up on the site. I finished a few more tips pages. The newest one is about backing with dump and some tricks using restore and a boot cd. Another has a bunch of tips for mutt, my favorite email program. Also did a fun page with some stuff about different ways to use fortune files besides just in your profile for when you’re logging into a terminal. And, I uploaded about fifteen of my own home made fortune files.
December 19, 2007
Everyday Vim
I finally got time and gumption to get another tip up, this one on using vim not just to edit but with other day to day tasks, like syncing directories, encrypting files, and so on. I had an excellent file I’d picked up somewhere with tons of vim tips, but I just couldn’t get it to validate. It was full of code and apparently the validator just didn’t like it. I tried using <pre> and <code> but it didn’t help. The validator continued to take it as though I was trying to enter an element, I believe it termed it. Anyway, at least there’s some new content up in the help section.
December 14, 2007
Slow but Sure
Been plugging away at getting the web site up and running. Have a new contact page which got a bit thorny but it’s working now, too. Test it out and drop me a line.
December 9, 2007
First Entry
First entry on this blog. I had originally started my first BSD related blog way back in 2003. It’s been a real roller-coaster ride, but I’ve managed to survive. The owner of this domain read some of my entries, saw where I’d said I wished I could have my own domain again, and kindly offered to give me a sub domain. And, here I am! I’m currently running OpenBSD 4.1 on two old boxes, a PIII 800 and a bit newer Dell Dimension. Originally the Dell was a 2.2. Celeron, but a friend had upgraded his box and gave me a Pentium IV 2.6 processor which worked out nicely. I also upgraded the memory from 384MB to 1.5GB. Big difference.
My main reason for creating this web site is to help ‘newbies’ avoid some of the traps and pitfalls I’ve met with while trying to learn OpenBSD. I think the hardest part was all the searching I had to do to find information on things I wanted to do. The documentation and man pages are excellent, but, oftentimes, they are, at best, cryptic and hard to understand for new users, especially those coming from a DOS/Windows background. As with so many sites, my disclaimer is, USE AT YOUR OWN RISK for the tips and tricks which I’ll be putting up on my site. That being said, I will say that not one will be put there that I didn’t test beforehand.