Anatiferous blog | Move every zig.

Howdy! This is my (William Reading's) webpage. At the moment, I only have this blog script and my gallery up, but I hope to get more stuff on this page at some point, or so I thought when I created this site years ago. Updates and shiny new copy to eventually go here. If you'd like to contact me to point out that I've done something to break XHTML/CSS standards or heaven forbid--look at my Vita--drop me a line at my e-mail address bill +spam @ [ELEPHANT] aggienerds.org. Simply remove "+spam", the spaces and the pachyderm along with its brackets and that address will reach me. I'm also available on Jabber/GChat/AIM/MSN with the same address above.

Well, I finally did get BeServed acting about as it should, but I’m slightly disappointed in the fact that the configuration files *must* go in /etc, instead of /usr/local/etc on FreeBSD. This is kind of an oversight on their part. The other bit is that they didn’t take the effort to make a console based configuration tool for the users on Non-BeOS systems, forcing me to use BeOS to set it up. One last bone to pick is that their installer doesn’t create the correct directories to store users in by default. This means that their GUI configuration tool doesn’t even work! After talking to someone over there, I was handed the following information:

DomainManager, as you noticed, can be used to create user accounts. Each account is represented by a single configuration file. Unfortunately, sometimes during installation, the directories that store these user account files do not get created properly. On FreeBSD, they should be:

mkdir /etc/domains
mkdir /etc/domains/default
mkdir /etc/domains/default/groups
mkdir /etc/domains/default/groups/everyone
mkdir /etc/domains/default/servers
mkdir /etc/domains/default/users

and on BeOS they should be:

mkdir /boot/home/config/domains
mkdir /boot/home/config/domains/default
mkdir /boot/home/config/domains/default/groups
mkdir /boot/home/config/domains/default/groups/everyone
mkdir /boot/home/config/domains/default/servers
mkdir /boot/home/config/domains/default/users

You can create these manually if necessary to ensure that the files can be properly created. That should prevent the user accounts you create from disappearing. You can create the files manually on FreeBSD, although MD5 encoding of the password will be an issue without a tool for doing it. The easiest approach is to create the files using DomainManager and then move them to your FreeBSD machine. When adding a user to a group, you simply create a directory for the group name, such as “salespeople", as in /etc/domains/default/groups/salespeople. Then within that directory you create symbolic links to each of the user files that should belong to that group. Removing a user from a group is then done by removing the symbolic link.

So after making the directories and creating my user, I copied over the domain tree to /etc on my FreeBSD box, copied besure_server to /usr/local/sbin (it’s not installed by their script), then fixed their lackluster init script to start besure_server. Their script is no better than putting it in rc.local, so I might redo it later on, but it works for now. I haven’t been disappointed by the file transferring part of the software, but the fact that I had to do these things to get the user authentication to work with the almost nonexistant documantation is really unacceptable. On the other hand, they only charge $5 for the FreeBSD license and $15 for the BeOS one, so it’s not as bad of a deal as it might seem. I guess you do get what you pay for though.

Augh! BeOS crashed again! At this rate, the windows machines are certainly winning the reboot race. Given that BeOS starts waay quicker than windows possibly could, this still isn’t all that good. It may have something to do with the hacked up BeOS Max kernel. I might just try out doing this again with the stock BeOS 5 Personal install.

BeServed is a wonderful application that lets you run a BeOS fileserver on say, a Linux or FreeBSD box and access your files on a BeOS Machine. This is all fine and dandy, but the authors apparently overlooked one small detail in their initial design: security. Given that they have alleviated this fact by adding on an authentication daemon, which would be great except for the fact that it has zero documentation for FreeBSD and the GUI configuration tool doesn’t appear to work at all in BeOS. So I can share files, but I’m not guaranteed that someone else can’t come along and screw with my files. Oh well, I hope the author will reply to the e-mail I sent fairly quickly.

I do have a tendency to try out different esoteric operating systems every now and then, the last of which was Rhapsody. It’s a shame that the Rhapsody entry was lost after my hard drive crashed, but I’m now trying out BeOS. I haven’t used BeOS since I was in high school, but was plesantly surprised by BeOS Max. BeOS Max is a repackaged version of BeOS 5 Personal Edition–released not very long before Be went under and was acquired by Palm.

The funny thing I noticed was that it’s surprisingly usable, much like Mac OS X. While it isn’t quite Unix, it’s surprisingly similar to it in many ways. I’ve got a shell and a terminal, even though there aren’t tools such as ifconfig, but I can use it for stuff like wget and gcc. I was also able to find fairly recent copies of FireFox and Thunderbird, along with a fairly recent terminal emlator and was pretty happy with that. VLC plays the latest anime just fine. It’s looking like this could actually be as usable as your typical linux distribution, though I’d probably need to add more things, such as some sort of X server.

In fact, the only thing that has been annoying the hell out of me is the fact that I can’t figure out how to take screenshots of it. I found a nifty app that will make movies of stuff you’re doing, but not screenshots. When I figure it out, I might just post some .

Update: Okay, so who would have known that taking a screenshot was as easy as hitting “print screen” ?