FYI, 419 scams should be forwarded to er-waoc afp.gov.au.

We are arranging a mini-conf for PostgreSQL before Linux.conf.au in Perth in January. Please email chriskl at familyhealth dot com dot au if you are interested. Thanks.

I got nominated for an award for co-founding pandaemonium! http://www.auug.org.au/aosa/vote.html Sorry Deece! I didn't know they'd just put me down for community...

I've just finished the preliminary port of LegOS, as well as the cross compiler for the Hitachi H8/300 CPU used in the Lego RCX.

If anyone wants to test it it would be appreciated - I'll be submitting it in a week. The ports can be downloaded from New Millennium Networking. Simply cd /usr/ports && tar yxf /legos.tar.gz, then cd /usr/ports/devel/legos && make install clean (warning: gcc and binutils is about a 17Mb download).

Currently, the C++ demo does not compile under BSD. Also, LNPD is severly Linux oriented, and may require a complete rewrite to get it working under BSD.

Feel free to post your comments on the port below this article.

The FreeBSD Foundation is now able to accept donations via PayPal: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/

You can actually configure FreeBSD 4.4 to automatically sort the mirror sites in a port's Makefile to put the one closest to you at the top of the list.

Just edit your /etc/make.conf and add this line:

MASTER_SORT_REGEX?= ^file: ^ftp://ftp\.FreeBSD\.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/local-distfiles/ ://[^/]*\.au/ ://[^/]*\.au\.

Just substitute the 'au's for another ISO country code to use this elsewhere.

For more information, just read your /etc/defaults/make.conf and search for 'REGEX'.

Have you ever put up a live server, only to realise later that you need/want to enable softupdates?

Since enabling softupdates requires an unmounted filesystem, this is trouble. Here's how to do it.

Thanks to Adrian Chadd (adrian@freebsd.org) for this idea.

This article uses RedHat Linux as its example, but otherwise it applies quite well to *BSD. This is a fantastic article to print out and give to a boss who's thinking of converting to *BSD workstations over Win2K http://www.robval.com/linux/desktop/index.asp

Tired of waiting for Zend Cache to come out? Try Afterburner Cache instead.

We have been running PHP 4.0.2 with the Zend Optimizer 4.0.2 for the last few weeks here at work.

There have been no problems whatsoever, and it seems to be a free performance upgrade for any PHP enabled webserver!

You can download the Zend Optimizer from http://www.zend.com/