On Aug 28, 2004 at 23:57, Steve I. Peterson sip@shopip.com wrote:

SER bugs found under OpenBSD 3.5:

Thanks for the bug report, see comments inline.

ser 0.8.14 binary:

The ser-0.8.14_openbsd_i386.tar.gz binary will not work since the executable is in the obsolete a.out format instead of ELF.

Yes, from the README (ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/ser/latest/README): bin/ - contains compiled ser versions for various arhitectures: ser-0.8.14_freebsd_i386.tar.gz (freebsd 4.9) ser-0.8.14_linux_i386.tar.gz (linux libc6) ser-0.8.14_netbsd_sparc64.tar.gz (netbsd 1.6) ser-0.8.14_openbsd_i386.tar.gz (openbsd 3.2) ^^^^^^^^^^^ ser-0.8.14_solaris_sparc64.tar.gz (solaris 8.0) ser-0.8.14_darwin_ppc.tar.gz (mac os x)

Yes, I do know I have an obsolete openbsd version :-)

ser 0.8.14 source:

make produced syntax errors, so I used gmake.

Yes, this is documented in INSTALL.

It runs! Strangely, it doesn't emit an error or warning even when there is no ser.cfg file at all. It doesn't seem to find /etc/ser/ser.cfg or /etc/ser.cfg when I put one there

By default if you build ser, it will load the config from /usr/local/etc/ser/ser.cfg.

Upon run it reports WARNING: could not read from /dev/random. Under OpenBSD, /dev/random is reserved for hardware RNG's. Use /dev/arandom (or /dev/urandom) instead.

Yes, I consider switching to /dev/urandom on all archs.

There is confusion over whether the config file is /etc/ser.cfg or /etc/ser/ser.cfg. The ser man page erroneously says the -f default is ./ser.cfg instead of /etc/...

The default config file is /usr/local/etc/ser/ser.cfg on solaris, *bsd or linux (if you build it by hand). If you use a linux package (deb or rpm) the config is in /etc/ser/ser.cfg and ser is installed directly in /usr.

man page errors: Under FILES: it lists /etc/ser/ser.cfg instead of /etc/ser.cfg -which is correct? Also, /usr/sbin/ser should be /usr/local/sbin/ser Also, /usr/lib/ser/modules/* is really /usr/local/lib/ser/modules/*

Well this is because the path is different depending on how you install it. Since most people use pre-packaged versions, or compile the package themselves this works for them. Some on-man-page install sed script would be needed to fix this.

Missing: There is no man page for serctl.

Also, /usr/share/doc/ser/README.cfg should be /usr/local/share/doc/ser/README.cfg

I couldn't find this mentioned anywhere in the man page.

The file /usr/local/share/examples/ser/ser.cfg should be mentioned by the man page.

Installation: The example ser.cfg should be copied to /etc/ser.cfg

Under OpenBSD, /usr/sbin and /usr/local/bin are in the path, but /usr/local/sbin is not (go figure). This means ser will no execute directly since it is not in the path. This may be a reason to use /usr/sbin instead of /usr/local/sbin.

Personally, I don't care whether ser and it's files go in .../local/... or not, as long as the documentation reflects this accurately.

We do accept patches :-)

Andrei