Few days ago, I registered a free domain name from No-IPβ„Ά Dynamic DNS provider. My router has an embedded dynamic dns client, but for some reason it didn’t update properly the No-IPβ„Ά servers each time it got disconnected, so I had to do it manually. Also it’s not configurable, so I couldn’t set various parameters such as update interval.
I decided to set up ddclient on one of my boxes to solve this problem. I installed it, but I really didn’t feel like reading the whole ddclient.conf file in order to configure it, so I decided to write my own client. It’s not rocket science, you just make requests to No-IPβ„Ά update servers with your credentials, your current ip and the domain name you want to associate with it.
[Update #1/Time Saver: As DbD pointed out in his comment, you can search for package names using pkg_info or the pkg front-end toΒ package management tools.]
As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, I installed OpenBSD, so I’m spending these days configuring it according to my needs.
One of the things that annoyed me, is that the OpenBSD’s default package management system doesn’t have a utility for searching packages. Every time I was about to install a package, I had to search the web or look for it in my preferred mirror’s directory listing. So I decided to write a utility for that -since I like writing my own shit and it was something trivial to do.
So today I decided to install OpenBSD on one of my boxes. It’s been years since the last time I messed with this OS. I intended to use it as a local server and move there most of the services I have distributed on other (virtual and not) machines.
Since I spend most of my time in GNU/Linux terminals, I found OpenBSD terminal pretty annoying -specifically, the fact that some keys (HOME, END, PAGE UP etc)Β for some fucking reason don’t work. I tried to find a workaround by changing terminal types, but the problem persisted. I read somewhere that in graphical terminals this problem does not occur, so I installed Xorg and XFCE, just in case I need to do some longer-than-usual administration tasks which require lots of typing. And indeed, in graphical environment everything worked smooth…
…Until after few minutes later, when I realized that there were some rendering problems. It was like the surface wasn’t redrawn properly. When I clicked on icons or opened windows, my desktop was full of glitches, which were annoying as hell. I have an old ATI Radeon 7500 on that box, by the way.
I noticed that there was a shitload of options for radeon-based cards commented out in my xorg.conf, so I started reading the manual for ATI Radeon video driver which comes with OpenBSD, to find out what they were all about.
