Martin and Ion-Mihai have just been honored as the newest portmgrs. Congratulations, Martin and Ion-Mihai, and thank you for your help to me and all other port maintainers and committers as we learned (and continue to learn) the ropes!

I just got a message on the FreeBSD-hackers mailing list about a new mailing list where “works in progress” will be detailed: FreeBSD-wip-status.  By subscribing to this mailing list, you will keep up with the cutting edge of FreeBSD development and learn about the many ways that FreeBSD is used out in the world.

Here’s an excerpt from the announcement:

Hello everybody,

http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-wip-status
Subscribe today!!  Tell all your friends, co-workers and everybody you
know who’s interested in FreeBSD.  Post this on your blog!

LONG VERSION:

In order to improve this situation we have created a new mailing list that
should receive status reports from now on.
…
…

The full announcement can be found here: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2008-June/024836.html

I’m a bit late on posting to the blog, but I can explain! I took a vacation to Sedona, AZ last week (reason: here!) and didn’t have too much time to get online between marathon mountain-biking and hiking trips. I am planning some new posts for later this week, though.

In the mean time, I can show you a few pictures from the Sedona area. If you get a chance, definitely put this place on the list to visit. It is simply awe-inspiring!

Here’s a nice shot of the unnamed butte next to Soldier Pass that was lit with the evening sun as we climbed up to Devil’s Bridge:

(Topo map reference)

Hiking to the summit of Bear Mountain is an absolute must if you visit Sedona. This trip is the longest 5 mile hike I think I’ve ever been on. Bring tons of water and sunscreen, and make absolutely sure you follow the trail closely on the way down. Luckily, if you do get off-trail, it’s fairly easy to see where you should be going, i.e. not along the edge of Fay Canyon!

(Topo map reference)

Here’s a little trick I’ve been using for quick deployment of additional virtual disk space to the VMware VMs that comprise the SourceHosting.net service. The VMware Server installation includes the vmware-vdiskmanager tool for creating, renaming, expanding and generally messing about with virtual hard drives.

However, I don’t like running this tool to create a new 50Gb virtual disk in the middle of the day because it just slams the disk I/O channel. To get around the problem, I’ve created several disks of different sizes during off-hours and compressed them down for easy storage. Then when I need to provision a disk, I expand it, rename it and hook it to the virtual machine in Virtual Center:

So here are some compressed disk images for you (SCSI format):

• 10Gb (8391 byte download)
• 20Gb (16415 byte download)
• 50Gb (40373 byte download)
• 100Gb (80373 byte download)

Once downloaded, extract them as follows:

CAUTION: The resulting extracted files will be the actual size represented in the filename. They compress down so well because they are mostly empty space until they are hooked to a VM and a filesystem is created.

After I extract the files, I typically rename the virtual disk to something more meaningful, like the name of the mount point in my VM. This way, I can easily tell which virtual disk is used for what without consulting the VM config file. The disk rename command looks like this:

Simple!