Due to high demand, I’ve set up a Debian GNU/Linux VM that I already operate for multiple other purposes, and which already carried a mirror of MirBSD CVS and downloads, to also mirror (per rsync-over-ssh) the website and expose all that as a publicly accessible web mirror complete with SSL certificate and all that. The server supports TLSv1.2 and TLSv1.3 but should also still work with TLSv1.0 and without SNI, and, of course, plain http also continues to work.

tl;dr: https://mbsd.evolvis.org/ with the usual URL paths.

Given that it’s not running on native MirBSD, there may be a few caveats; I’ve proxied the “give me entropy” CGIs to the main machine via https and made everything else work, but at least the diffs generated from CVSweb have slightly different hunk distribution. The static content (i.e. all those *.htm files as well as the /MirOS/** downloads) are of course bitwise identical, and, as I’ve patched rsync on MirBSD to account for leap seconds but convert to POSIX time_t on the wire as expected, the timestamps should also be identical (unless I do manage to release some software during a leap second, which so far I haven’t, but the Time::Local tests managed to hit one precisely *sigh…*).

I expect that URL to stay stable even across future planned migrations of the machine to a different setup and, possibly, provider; this is why this got a separate, specific hostname.

TLSv1.2 support in MirBSD, I’m afraid, still has no ETA, given that I have other construction sites open and do dayjob and stuff.

I’m sorry to miss FOSDEM, but huge events during a pandemic should be avoided, and given others do not mask, attending involves some danger. I’m sitting this out; maybe another time? I do miss it…

So, apparently, DNS names can only be up to 253 octets long in ASCII form. The label length octets need accounting. Thanks jschauma!
Consequently, my rfc822 library and tool version 0.7 was released.

Debian 11 “bullseye” was released today (it’s still the 14ᵗʰ for me…) as well. I switched all my unstable “sid” systems to bullseye to avoid systemd’s UsrMove, which (per Technical Committee) is mandatory to be supported in any subsequent release (gah!). Still, congratulations!

Due to RT’s porting efforts, I’m still not finished with the mksh things I wanted to do, but am continuing with others. I’ll release a new sleep(1) soon (but, maybe, we can test it on many platforms first?) and guess I’ll switch ed and jupp to mirtoconf as well when I find the time.

I also had fun with… ISO 3166, ccTLDs, etc. and wtf(1). Added lots, and also deduplicated, in the acronyms database. Not the 1300+ gTLDs though. They’re insane, ICAN’t doesn’t publish either which ones are still active or their meaning (corresponding to those already present). Anyway please enjoy! Submissions, as usual, welcome ☺

My contribution to Free Sheet Music is also growing. I slightly reorganised the index (left side) of the main website, only select subprojects are now shown, but all, including musical things, the Foundry etc. are listed in the page about subprojects, some just with a small link or placeholder, others with much more. I think there may be more to add… but this, and some hyperlinking (in all directions), could help.

Now off to sleep. Our cat is already sleeping again. Thankfully, this is (probably) the last really warm day.

After Garmin’s proprietary “opencaching.com” platform, which virtually nobody pined after, and ignoring that Navicache has not been more than a zombie for quite a while, I am regretting GPSgames.org (who offered just so much more than just geocaching — GeoDashing, GeoVexilla (I partook in both), Shutterspot (not for me), MinuteWar, GeoGolf and GeoPoker (which I never really got) — although I guess GeoHashing is the closest thing to, at least, GeoDashing) is no more. A month later, it doesn’t look it will ever be resurrected, even though this outage is unplanned; an archival was scheduled for later, which is quite a pity — I had renewed my interest in them due to the pandemic, but that was to be planned and keeping historic data intact.

This was the only platform which used a Free licence for its content (CC-BY-SA), even if, like all others, it required a more broad grant from contributors. Now, only nōn-free platforms (like the OpenCaching network) are left; only commercialising seems to save most. Pity.

Update 2022-10-22: navicache.com, having been mostly unusable due to bugs already for years, is now also gone: whoever operated this let the domain expire. The log and cache database is most likely also gone forever.

The server became unresponsible because the load went up due to idiotic web crawlers, not respecting robots.txt or ignoring CGIs, hammering httpd(8). After reboot and fsck(8) I’ve configured CGIs to use a rather harsh setrlimit(2) RLIMIT_TIME, a MirBSD speciality. This should prevent repeating this issue.

As a consequence, some requests, for example annotating in CVSweb on large files (acronyms DB for wtf(1)) will now fail or (diffing between revisions on that file) return incomplete results. SOL.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

ObOTRant: The W3C specification requires the XMLSerializer[sic!] shipped in ECMAscript-capable web browsers to produce invalid XML. (The underlying algorithm is permitted elsewhere to instead raise an exception but even though a (pretty bad, e.g. it suggests dropping instead of entity-escaping -- inside a comment node) specification for fixing up such DOM trees preparing for XML serialisation exists, the spec prevents using it. The whole “web world” is just a steaming PoS really…