The fact that a security hole is widely available is not a justification for implementing it.
- peter@bonkers.taronga.com

Das folgende habe ich einfach aus meinen alten Webseiten per cut & paste raus- und hier reinkopiert. Vielleicht hilfts mal jemandem.

Warning: dead links ahead ! (06.04.2023)

January 2010 - connecting the virtual serial port of a vmware machine to a terminal

I've got an iso-image of a more or less embedded system, which i wanted to get up and runnung on my Apple Mac VMWare Fusion. When the OS on this image is started in Fusion, it immediately switched console output to the serial port. The challenge was to connect the VMWare Fusion emulated serial port to some terminal program to be able to "install" the image inside VMWare Fusion.

When Fusion installs a serial port, it wants to get a filename where to store output. I tried to connect this to a tty/pty or a named pipe, this did not work at all because VMWare overwrites anything generated by "hand".

OK, so i tried to find information about the possibilities of configuring the VMWare serial port by editing the .vmx file - the contents of this file are not documented by VMWare (this is really a mess, Mr. Vmware !!) but this Link (http://sanbarrow.com/vmx.html) has the required information. The .vmx file of the virtual machine has to be edited , the file type of the serial0 port has to be changed from "file" to "pipe".

The next part of the solution was a utility named socat http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/ which allows to connect the socket created by VMWare Fusion to a pty by issuing the command

     socat unix-connect:"Virtual Machines.localized/com1" pty,link=/tmp/com1-pty

After starting the virtual machine, i'm now able to start my favorite terminal program (kermit) in another iterm window and use /tmp/com1-pty for the serial port.

November 2009 - asterisk + avm b1/c2/c4 + chan_capi on FreeBSD 7.2

I've had a hard time upgrading my old hacked-together and never quite satisfying working asterisk1.2 installation to  FreeBSD 7.2 and Asterisk 1.4. To make a long story short: it works now, asterisk 1.4 from the ports, C4B from Thomas Wintergerst, liblinuxcapi and chan_capi from the net and an AVM C2 active ISDN card. Works. Stable.

From the result i have made a kit, it is available from here, enjoy and have fun!

September 2009 - getting ipv6 up and running

After reading Benedikt Stockebrand's (highly recommended) book, i have started (a month or so ago) to establish an IPv6 tunnel to the Internet - which runs smoothly in the meantime - and have begun to convert my complete home-lab network to IPv6. Currently i'm running a mixed environment (i.e. testing the new squid 3.1 IPv6 enabled web-proxy).

For test purposes kts.org is now reachable in IPv6 space as http://www.ipv6.kts.org


April 2009 - getting Debian Linux onto an HP9000/D380

Installing Debian 5.0.1 onto a HPPA PA-RISC HP9000/D380. Works fine, but after the installation, there is no login prompt on the console, so there is no access to the box. The solution is to get a shell right as the last step in the installer and modify /target/etc/inittab so the line:

#T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyS0 9600 vt100

is changed to:

T0:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyB0 9600 vt100

In words, remove the # at the beginning of the line and change ttyS0 to ttyB0.

Serial port assignments: access port / console port = /dev/ttyB0, serial port 2 = /dev/ttyS0

Accessing port ttyB1 immediately hangs machine, cause currently unknown ...

Since there is no graphics console, comment out gettys for tty1... tty6 in /etc/inittab


February 2009

Due to demand, released a new version of setnetparm for contemporary FreeBSD versions.


November 2008

Bought a Mac. I got so tired of the yearly updating  to the current FreeBSD version and the troubles going with it, that i finally wanted to have a platform where everything worked out of the box. And it does. And the best: below all this i've got my beloved BSD ...

January 2006

It was time to make nifmon run again under FreeBSD 7.0: nifmon-1.6.tar.gz

December 2005

Fiddling with the USB driver in FreeBSD, making my shiny new Microsoft Wireless Notebokk Mouse running. You'll find the patch at PR90162

June 2004

Together with some other nice people we founded our own company.

January 2004

After more than 20 years working for my former employer i have started my own company on January 1, 2004.

December 2003

Setting up a courier imap server to consolidate my mail accesses.

Fighting with mod_ssl for apache and certificates.

October 2003

Trying to get my HP9000/K220 working with OpenBSD 3.4-current. Docs and patches to get it working can be found here.

March 2003

Worked on the freevrrpd daemon. Added, corrected and updated manual pages and adding functionality. Patches can be found here.

February 2003

Playing with an USB camera and the vid port. Enhanced image quality by enabling some more "hidden" features of the chipset. Patches can be found here.