Does it work? The answer is yes!
All you have to do is edit the sshd_config file on the OpenBSD machine and set X11Forwarding to yes, then fire up X (I’m using XQuartz 2.3.2 (xorg-server 1.4.2-apple18)) and in an xterm (or Terminal.app!) enter

ssh -Y user@openbsd_machine program

Voila!
P.S.: Actually, you don’t even have to start X on either end of this connection, it will still work. I just tried

Why can’t I just reboot? Why do I have to choose some option from a dropdown? I only wanted to reboot! Now I was tricked into shutting down a server that isn’t even in the same zipcode! What the hell Microsoft? Why couldn’t you make reboot the first choice? Now I’m stuck making calls and e-mailing people to say “sorry I was confused by the crazy windows shutdown options”. Shutting down should be easier. Instead, the first thing you have to do is click START, which makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER, then you have to choose from some silly dropdown to explain why. I’ll tell you why I was rebooting Microsoft! I’ll tell you why! It’s because you force me to reboot in order to get anything done! that’s why! That’s why I have to reboot the damned server! WTF?! You make my life miserable at every opportunity. Is it because you know I hate you? Is it because you know I’m using a mac and have a FreeBSD machine and OpenBSD machine at home? is that it? Is it because you know about my Ubuntu desktop machine? What is it? Why must you torture me this way?

I was just looking through my archives and remembered the Golden Apple Project. Ahhh yes. Well it turns out that the machine was so old it just stopped working altogether. OpenBSD was running just fine on it, but after a year the network card died and when I tried to add a netgear PCI NIC it caused kernel panics. I do have a new apple PPC machine that I have been prepping to handle light duties, her name is aphrodite and she’s a little red iMac. It’s my hope that I can keep at least one PPC box running unix in my little computer family…

Ever see this?

dhcpd: uid lease 192.168.1.150 for client xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx is duplicate on 192.168.1/24

or something like it, in your dhcp logs? Well I checked /var/log/messages today and saw that I had thousands of this message repeated over and over (so much so it was spamming my log  and making it harder to find what might be important stuff). I searched around the ‘net and found some hints but nothing conclusive. The hints pointed toward a duplicate lease (duh) but more specifically lead me to check my leases file. Mine was located in /var/db/dhcpd/dhcpd.leases.

It turns out that what caused this error for me was that I had started the machine in question (the MAC address has been altered to protect the innocent haha) before I had the time to create a reservation for it. Then after it already had an address leased to it, I created a reservation for it (for internal DNS purposes, nothing more). Apparently because duplicates are allowed by default in isc dhcpd, when the machine’s networking was restarted and it got it’s new reserved IP, the server kept the original lease (which was that .150 address) and also got a lease from it’s reservation (.80 on my network). Since the .150 lease was still present in the leases file it caused the warning message (over and over and over for a month).

So if you are using isc dhcpd, and you use reservations, and you’re getting these error messages, you might want to check your leases file and make sure that you don’t have a lease for something that also has a reservation under a different IP.

The other pages I found on my search also suggested that you might have a reservation that hands out an address that is within your dynamic scope. You definitely don’t want to do that, so you may need to check that out as well in your dhcpd.conf.

For the curious, I run FreeBSD 7 on a Pentium 4 Dell desktop (I think it’s a dimension series, I haven’t looked at it in a while haha) that sits in my kitchen as a headless DNS/DHCP/Web/Random Unix Fun server. It’s actually making lots of bad noise lately and I think one of it’s fans might be going I’ll check that out and report back

Ever heard of Paul Robeson?

I was listening to one of my favorite artists, Saul Willams, the other day - when it occurred to me that he speaks about some historical figures that I didn’t know much about.  One of these is Paul Robeson. Saul Williams has a song entitled Robeson, and also mentions the name in “Coded Language” which is on the same album (Amethyst Rockstar). I really enjoy learning, and Saul Williams is an artist whose lyrics have a lot to offer in terms of knowledge, so I took some time to do a little research.

It turns out that Paul Robeson’s life is really interesting. While wikipedia is generally not to be considered an absolute source of facts, the entry regarding Paul Robeson is more than enlightening. I’m not going to quote the page here, since you can just read it yourself, but I will say that if you want to read about an interesting figure in American history, particularly if you are interesting in African American history, it’s well worth the time to read. Also, with regards to wikipedia as a source of facts, this entry is chock full of real references and cited sources.