To go on from there, I found that my NetBSD VM's only disk was too small to do anything useful. Options for enlarging that came to mind:

1. NFS - see 'panic' above, no go.
2. Adding another (virtual) disk - easily doable, but I felt like not adding one
3. Extending the existing disk - adventure time!

1. Enlarge the last file system on disk
2. Fix the partition table to add another partition for the new space

For those in a similar situation, here are the steps to use the newly gained space on an enlarged (virtual) disk:

1. Prepare: save the old output of "dmesg" (/var/run/dmesg.boot is OK)

2. Enlarge - VMware Fusion wants a shutdown for that, you cannot suspend the machine

3. After booting, run a diff on the saved "dmesg" output, to learn what the old and new size of the disk is, in sectors. My diff looks like this, note the size change in sectors:

   -wd0: 10240 MB, 22192 cyl, 15 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 20971520 sectors
   +wd0: 20480 MB, 44384 cyl, 15 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 41943040 sectors 

4. Backup the existing/old disklabel, just in case: disklabel wd0 >disklabel.BAK

5. Edit the disklabel: disklabel -e wd0

6. In the editor, adjust the disk size in sectors from 20971520 to 41943040:

   total sectors: 41943040 

7. Partition 'd' is the full disk on i386/amd64, it starts at sector 0 and is 41943040 sectors big

   #        size    offset     fstype [fsize bsize cpg/sgs]
    d:  41943040         0     unused      0     0        # (Cyl.      0 -  44384*)
   

8. Partition 'c' is the NetBSD part of the disk. As this VM only has NetBSD, all the usable space is used. Note that "usable" space excludes the first 63 sectors of the disk (mbr etc.), i.e. it is 41943040 - 63 = 41942977 sectors:

   #        size    offset     fstype [fsize bsize cpg/sgs]
    c:  41942977        63     unused      0     0        # (Cyl.      0*-  44384*)
   

9. After this everything is in sync with the new disk again, and the remaining/new space can be used for new partition 'e'. As the new space starts where the disk used to end, its offset is the old size, 20971520 sectors.

   The size of the new partition expands from the offset sector 20971520 to the end of the disk at sector 41943040, i.e. the partition size is:

   % expr 41943040 - 20971520
   20971520
   

   In total, this gives for the new partition:

   #        size    offset     fstype [fsize bsize cpg/sgs]
    e:  20971520  20971520     4.2BSD   2048 16384     0  # (Cyl.  22192*-  44384*)
   

10. Last, create file system, mount and populate:

    # newfs /dev/rwd0e
    # mkdir /disk2
    # echo '/dev/wd0e /disk2 ffs rw,log 2 2' >>/etc/fstab
    # mount /disk2
    # cd /usr ; pax -rw -pe -v stuff /disk2
    # rm -fr stuff ; ln -s /disk2/stuff .
    

P.S.: I'm offering choccolate to anyone fixing crossbuilding of NetBSD-current from Mac OS X. Any takers?

[Tags: disklabel, fusion, g4u, vmware]

• There was some progress on puffs, the userland filesystem stemming from last year's Google SoC, some time ago. More example userland filesystems are now available with sysctlfs and ssshfs, see src/share/examples/puffs.

  Rumours say that ssshfs works pretty well, which is a final reason to ditch the (abandoned first cut of the) netbsd-4 branch and make a -current kernel to play with this. BTW, for those wondering what ssshfs is, see ssshfs.c:

   * simple sshfs
   * (silly sshfs?  stupid sshfs?  snappy sshfs?  sucky sshfs?  seven sshfs???)
   * (sante sshfs?  severed (dreams) sshfs?  saucy sshfs?  sauerkraut sshfs?) 

• People complained that there's no ready-made VMware image with NetBSD available, and this has changed now. The #NetBSD blog points at a NAMP (NetBSD + Apache + MySQL + PostgreSQL + PHP) image that has quite a lot of software installed in 187MB size. See the arudius homepage for more information on NAMP.

• Elad, chief security hacker of NetBSD's infrastructure has proposed to add PaX Segvguard as yet another building stone in NetBSD's security architecture:

       PaX Segvguard monitors the number of segfaults in a program
       per-user, in an attempt to detect on-going exploitation attempts
       and possibly prevent them.  One common attack PaX Segvguard can
       help mitigate is when an attacker tries to brute-force a function
       return address, when wanting to perform a return-to-lib attack.  

  See Elad's proposal for more details! Note that a start of the implementation is already in NetBSD-current, but that this is still work-in-progress.

• BSDtalk did an interview with pkgsrc developer Johnny Lam (jlam@), it's available in mp3 and ogg.

• Last, if you don't know what to wish for Xmas, there's something for the average BSD geek: a daemon-themed bag (which is probably not really authorized by the Daemon owner, but well).

• The Newsforge article "Which distro should I choose?" refers us to a Comparison between NetBSD and OpenBSD, the website apparently allows other comparisons.

• Parallels is a ``powerful, easy to use, cost effective desktop virtualization solution that empowers PC users with the ability to create completely networked, fully portable, entirely independent virtual machines on a single physical machine.'' In other words "something like VMware". In contrast to the leading(?) product in that area, Parallels supports NetBSD as guest OS officially.

• PC-98 is a PC-like computer from NEC that has a Intel CPU and that was only sold in Japan. Due to some subtle differences from the "original" (IBMesque) PC architecture, it can't run NetBSD/i386 and was so far supported e.g. by FreeBSD/PC98. Now, Kiyohara Takashi has made patches and a floppy image available for a NetBSD/pc98 port - see Kiyohara's mail to tech-kern for more details, and also some discussion about further abstraction of the current x86 architecture to support machines with Intel CPUs that can't run NetBSD/i386.

• Staying on the technical side, David Young has a need to tunnel packets through consumer-grade (and consumer-intelligence) devices, which are unlikely to cope with anything outside of the IP protocol. As such, he has posted patches to tunnel gre(4) over UDP.

  Now let's hope this works as a foundation for Teredo (tunneling IPv6 over UDP)... :-)

• Verified Exec is a security subsystem inside NetBSD that verified fingerprints of binaries before loading them. This prevents binaries from being changed unnoticed, e.g. by trojan horses. Now when NetBSD runs such a system and memory becomes tight, only the process' data is paged to disk, the executables text is simply discarded with the assumption that it can be paged in from the disk again when needed. Of course this assumes that the binary won't change, which may not be true in a networked scenario with NFS or a disk on a fiber channel SAN that may be beyond control of the local system administrator. To prevent attacks of this kind, Brett Lymn has worked to generate per-page fingerprints that are kept in memory even when the executable pages are freed, for later verification when they are paged in from storage again.

  The code is currently under review and available as a patch set - see Brett's mail to tech-kern for all the details!

• While talking about security subsystems, Elad Efrat, who also worked on veriexec previously continued his work to factor out authentication inside the kernel: After introducing the kauth(9) framework and replacing all manual checks for "am I running as root" or "does the current secure level allow this operating" with calls to it, the next step is to seperate the the place where those calls are made from a back-end implementation that will determine what is allowed and what is not, who is privileged and what is not, etc. While these questions are traditionally answered via special user ids (0, root), group membership or secure levels, other methods like capability databases could be imagined.

  Elad has been working along these lines, and he has posted the next step in his work, outlining the upcoming security model abstraction - see Elad's mail to tech-security for details & code references.

• NetBSD 3.1 is around the corner, which will be an update to NetBSD 3.0 with lots of bugfixes and some minor feature enhancements like new drivers and also support for Xen 3 DomainU. There's a NetBSD 3.1 Release Candidate 1 available - be sure to have a look!

• FWIW, I've also updated the overview of NetBSD release branches a few days ago, as I still see a lot of people that are confused over NetBSD's three lines of release branches (well, counting the development branch NetBSD-current as release branch :), and the differences between what a branch and what a release is. With NetBSD 3.0, 3.0.1 and 3.1 this sure makes my little head spin...

• But there's more than NetBSD 3.x! If you've watched the above link, you will understand that the next release after the NetBSD 3.x set of releases is NetBSD 4.x. The release cycle for NetBSD 4.0 has started a few days ago, and there's also an announcement about the start of the NetBSD 4.0 release process by the NetBSD 4.0 release engineer Jef Rizzo which has information on schedule, how YOU can help and getting beta binaries and sources.

• The working period of the Google Summer of Code is over, and while mentors are still evaluating the code submitted by students, there are some public status reports: Alwe MainD'argent about the status of the 'ipsec6' project and Sumantra Kundu about the 'congest' project

• Sysjail 1.0 has been released! Includes some interesting overhead benchmarks.

• As reported in the #NetBSD Community Blog, an alpha version of sBSD was released: It's a NetBSD-based system for easy installation on USB sticks and CF cards.