If this is of concern for some reason, for the things that were under BSD license and no longer are, the version-controlled repositories still have older versions that are BSD-licensed.

• asLJCore is the primary component of the LiveJournal client asLJ, managing all communication with the server.
• YDDecode is a Cocoa class wrapped around some public-domain C code for decoding data encoded with YEnc.
• NCIDStatusBarMenu is a utility to help pull NCID-based callerID notifications and display them as Growl notifications (among other things).  I’d been meaning to update it for nearly 2 years with no success and the future isn’t looking much better, so I’m releasing the source instead.

(My musings on licensing below the cut.)Permissive BSD/MIT licenses because in writing asLJ among other things, I’ve had to work to find libraries, frameworks, components, classes, etc., that weren’t GPL-licensed so that I could continue to choose how I wanted to release my software.  I am also heavily influenced by the simplicity of the BSD and MIT licenses compared to the lengthy GPL (and while the LGPL ought to be workable for many libraries, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the language of it–the LGPL is several paragraphs of modification to the GPL).

(The song lyrics and commentary for OpenBSD4.3 have a lot to do with how I feel about GPL versus BSD/MIT.)

The “Oh, DUH!” moment came today when I realized (after much mucking about with pulling various programs I needed from other OpenBSD boxes with more complete installs and running into various issues with version differences) that I could just download base43.tgz from an OpenBSD ftp mirror onto my Mac, unzip it, and sftp what I needed over to the flashdist machine, no other OpenBSD box needed.  Once I’d copied ldd over to the flashdist machine, I could even find out what libs I needed to copy over, too.

This means, of course, that I now have dhcpd and BIND running on my Alix.

Since the point where both my parents and I had DSL, I’ve been fiddling with ideas of how to make it easier to share files across our two networks, easier for me to debug issues on their computers, and, well, just more technologically cool.  About a year and a half ago, I replaced the D-Link routers at both sites with a matched pair of used Dell business machines I’d bought on eBay, outfitted with OpenBSD (by far the best OS for trying to run a secure gateway).  This seemed to fit the bill, as it enabled me to more easily connect to my home network from elsewhere without opening up any of my internal machines directly to the outside world, it allowed me to similarly access my parents’ network without exposing any of their internal machines, and (at the peak of its working-ness) we had an encrypted VPN unifying the two sites so I could connect to shared drives on their machines and print to their color laser printer as if all those devices were on my own network.

But somewhere along the way, things started to go south.  A few months ago, the gateway router Dell box on my end died–just wouldn’t power up anymore.  I swapped in an old D-Link hardware router to keep my internet access up and I’ve been working on an Alix unit to replace it, but getting OpenBSD properly tweaked to run off a compact flash card took some time and I still haven’t quite gotten that install happy with PPPoE DSL connections, so it’s still not in place.

Now, making things worse, the machine at my parents’ place isn’t working quite right.  After an extended power failure that wore through the UPS, the machine appears to start up (even sounds right when I stood there and watched it “boot”), but it never shows up on the network, much less makes the DSL connection and joins the network to the DSL.  This led to a similar swap-in of a spare hardware router unit at their place.  Unfortunately, things got messier for them.

These OpenBSD machines I’d been using as routers on both ends had also been running DHCP and DNS for the internal networks and while my internal network had a second OpenBSD box that was able to step in and take over the DNS (it was already serving as a secondary DNS server) and the DHCP (it had been doing DHCP before I got the other machines), my parents’ network had no such machine.  Suddenly, lots of things stopped working correctly.  Printing over the network didn’t work because the IP printing port in Windows was trying to use the (former) FQDN of the printer, or maybe even its old IP address.  This is what got me looking at the slug.

Why do I want all these different facets?  Well, much as I hate to use it, damn near everyone in “the business world” uses Microsoft Office, and the Mac versions suck (I don’t know about 2008, but I’m not optimistic) and I’d rather use the PC version (2003, since 2007 is a disaster best described as MS openly giving the finger to all its customers).  Graphics work and page layout are in various Adobe Creative Suite products under OS X (I suppose that there exist PC versions, but really, who does graphics work on a PC?).  I also prefer web and email on the Mac side.  Then, when I have to deal with network/server/etc. stuff, I dive into terminal and I’m off.  For actual programming, while I love using WinSCP + TextPad under Windows, LOVE it, I tend more toward Transmit + Komodo Edit nowadays (this is largely a side effect of having a huge project hosted on a server that only supports FTP, not SFTP, and for whatever reason, WinSCP can’t seem to maintain a stable FTP connection with that server, so editing led to all sorts of nasty corruption and whatnot when the connection would drop mid-edit).

Oh, and it doesn’t hurt that my day job is in an all-Mac office.