Peter: Awesome! Award money for what? Research for what? I can help with the networking. Long time no talk, anyway.

Having an all-personal-geekery weekend for the first time in a long while, and it feels great. So far, I've:

  • Failed to install NetBSD 2.0_BETA on my venerable Power Mac G3. It can't quite load the install kernel from floppy, making a bootable CD is annoyingly difficult, and I didn't feel like setting up a netboot server (yet). So I installed 1.6.2 from the CD set I got in Vienna, booted into it, got on the network, copied the 2.0_BETA install kernel into /, and attempted to boot it. It hung just before autodetecting the root device and launching sysinst. Grrr! And this trick worked last time I installed NetBSD on a G3, when I had only a 1.5 CD and wanted to install 1.6…
  • Installed NetBSD on a hand-me-down Power Mac 6500. Open Firmware hack to loop until the IDE drive spins up, then auto-load the first-stage boot works; Comm Slot Ethernet works (it's a tlp(4)); an extra USB card I had lying around works; sound probably works; now I “only” need a working XF86Config and this computer will have reached its apex of usefulness.
  • Committed a tweak to the macppc second-stage bootblocks so boot -c works. With this feature, just after loading and displaying the copyright, the kernel stops and lets you disable troublesome drivers before going through the usual hardware detection. Inspired by my travails with the G3, but I haven't gone back and tried it there yet.
  • Determined that qmail-qfilter provides all the API I need to implement greylisting myself. (I haven't found an implementation for qmail that looks attractive.) My naive version, in progress, is a shell script that uses cdb (the knee-jerk choice). The fact that cdb isn't designed for frequent updates might make performance suck, or it might not be a problem under my mail load. Of course, database operations are factored out so I can easily reimplement them some other way.

Today I plan to learn all about TMDA and set it up on my mail server. I've been meaning to do this for years.