iRiver hands over source code CD-ROM

Some time ago, I ran into GPL issues with the iRiver PMP-1xx series. For some reason, the Korean company chose to cease distributing their products in Germany, rather than making them GPL compliant.

Despite that, they've now sent me a CD-R with the source code. I've made it available to interested parties at ftp.gpl-devices.org. I did not yet have the time to do a full-scale analysis whether it is complete (as per gpl definition of "complete corresponding source code"). However, at least from a first quick look it seems fine (and even documented!).

One day of systems maintainance

Today I really felt like a systems administrator (which I've never been, at least never as daytime job).

On the software side, there were still a cuple of woody -> sarge upgrades to be made. Also, I finally have a running sparc64 setup at home again (all my other sparc's are hosted, and I recently crashed one during development).

On the hardware side, various pending repairs (broken fan's, bad memory, hard disk replacement0) lead to some shuffling of hardware pieces between my various machines.

As a result, I now have more storage capacity on my main NFS server, as well as on the main backup server. While planning the new backup strategy, I found out that all in all I own more than 4.6TB of hard disks. Sounds an awful lot, but most of it is lost due to various raid levels, and some 1.6TB of drives are only used for backups.

I wish tape drives with decent capacities were not all that expensive...

Tomorrow will be one day of accounting and taxes. So don't expect any further new netfilter stuff before I'm leaving for holidays in Scotland next week.

Gentoo is so broken

The next episode in my Gentoo rant.

Every time I do an "emerge -b -n world" to get the latest security fixes, I have several hours, if not days of cleanup.

A number of times glibc was somehow fucked up, so all dynamically linked applications would refuse to work.

This time, let me only pick the interesting examples:

• I don't have a "vi" anymore. It tells me "unresolved symbol: pthread_create".
• Proftpd doesn't start anymore ("unresolved symbol: setproctitle").
• spamd starts, but fails to do DNS lookups (missing dependency to Net::DNS)
• clamav regularly crashes (reason unknown)
• The linker/gcc (3.4.4) fails to detect unresolved symbols at runtime. This leads to the vi and proftpd issues described above

This is a _production server_. *sigh*.

I sincerely consider switching Debian-ppc (in 32bit mode) on that Dual G5 XServe now. If that wasn't such a terrible amount of work...