Erich Beyrent :: Beyrent.net

Please call your Senators and urge them to vote against invoking the nuclear option to end judicial filibusters. Let them know that if they vote to invoke this option, they’re making a mistake that will be remembered when they come up for re-election. This removal of checks and balances between the majority and minority parties cannot be tolerated.

Senator Judd Gregg (R)
393 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510-2904
Phone: (202) 224-3324
Official website

Senator John Sununu (R)
111 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510-2903
Phone: (202) 224-2841
Official website

In yet another showing of America’s sense of humor, member of our Armed Services serving in Iraq have anonymously released pictures of Saddam Hussein in his underwear to the British press. As if the US military didn’t already have enough problems with following the rules set forth by the Geneva Convention, here is one more example of our troops degrading prisoners.

On the other hand, Saddam needs a little degradation, in my opinion. The man in charge of thousands of murders, rapes, and other human rights abuses ought to be publicly humiliated for the rest of his life. If nothing else, this serves as a potent reminder to the other tyrants and dictators of the world that they are not as safe and powerful as they think they are.

I sincerely hope that this image gets beamed across the global news networks into the living rooms of every dictator’s residence. I just wish the image hadn’t come from our military…

As it turns out, upgrading FreeBSD is not as difficult as I thought it would be.  The process is downright simple for the most part.  The trickiest part is running mergemaster, and upgrading the contents of /etc.  The risk is somewhat mitigated if you backup /etc before you run the mergemaster command.

Here is how I upgraded my system from FreeBSD 5.3.

The first thing to do is to create a file for updating the FreeBSD source tree.  I called this file “standard-supfile”, and placed it in /etc.  The file looks like this:

*default host=cvsup2.FreeBSD.org
*default base=/usr
*default prefix=/usr
*default release=cvs tag=RELENG_5_4
*default delete use-rel-suffix
*default compress
src-all

To update the source, run the following command:

onion# cvsup -g -L 2 /etc/standard-supfile

This takes a while, so get some coffee and get to work on that programming project you’ve been putting off…  Once the source has been updated, it’s time to rebuild the system.

onion#  cd /usr/src/sys/i386/conf
onion#  cp -p GENERIC MYKERNAL
onion#  config MYKERNAL; cd ../compile/MYKERNAL; make depend; make;
onion#  make install;
onion#  tar cf /tmp/etc.tar /etc
onion#  mergemaster

I like to make a copy of the GENERIC file, because any changes I may make to it will get wiped out next time I update the source.  By making a copy of the file and adding my changes to the copy, those changes are preserved.

After running mergemaster, reboot and /etc/motd should be updated to display the current version of the system.