Today’s movie: Rogue One

“We have hope. Rebellions are built on hope! ” – Jyn Erso

Now that’s a Star Wars I like to see!
Without hesitation the best Star Wars movie of the last decade (as of Jan. 2017). That’s not a hard feat though I must admit. But it brought far more to the cinematic universe of Star Wars than the last “Episode”. Not in the holes it fills, but more in the quality of the story, movie and its overall originality.

Now I can hear some of you screaming in the back, that’s not part of the main nonalogy (nonalogy? nonology? ennealogy?), it’s a standalone movie, it’s not really Star Wars. Well, tell you what, I don’t care. Disney decided to go non-canon anyway, so for me it’s just another movie in the alternate Star Wars universe.

Now that’s probably a targeting strategy for all of us who thought that Force Awakens was more of a disgrace than Ep. I, II, III. But it worked, I liked it, and now I want to see the next episodes. You got me Mickey Mouse!

Mike Mitchell‘s Mickey Mouse – $$$

The opinions were not undivided, but I liked it. There is something to this movie that is more human and makes it more plausible compared to the others in the series. It’s about small things. Like the stains and dust on spaceship windows, hyper-space light reflections during hyper-drive, the actual need of hyper-drive, the actual need of space travel, the reality of occupation by the Empire. In the end it made the movie much more believable to me.

But one of the things that I really liked was the way Jyn Erso character was developed throughout the movie. You could grasp her complicated views on the Rebellion and the Empire. You could feel her fears and doubts, you could see her think, understand her own awareness of the events and her place among them. She appeared as human as you can be. So it was really natural for me to attach to her character. And all that contributed to my realization that, in the end, she displayed real courage. See, you love people for what they really are, their inner self. And the movie tried to emphasize just that, what she really is.

It also presented the more hazy face of the Rebellion and the Empire by displaying both factions as more organic entities with their own internal political struggles, conflicting ambitions and ideals. This resulted in a story that had a bit more to offer by detaching itself slightly from the manichaean vision of the episodes.

It was also beautiful and thrilling. The pace was really good, and it contributed a lot to the intensity of the movie, especially in the latter parts. In the end all that contributed to a story that was most of the time really enjoyable.

Now that’s not to say that the movie was without flaws.

First, the most obvious, resurrecting dead actors with completely CGIed characters, just forget about it, seriously! It does not work yet, like not at all. Peter Cushing looks like some kind of evil puppet that suddenly became self aware but still has a really hard time figuring out what it is to behave, move and talk like an human being. Carrie Fisher was fine, but only for the fact that you see her for a couple of seconds.

“USE-THE-FORCE-LUKE”
A robotized version of Sir Alec Guinness plays Obi-Wan Kenobi in a future Star Wars installment.
– Robby the Robot portrait by Iain Claridge

The movie tries hard not to fall into the SixFlags camera shooting syndrome (where some scene look more like they were filmed from a rollercoaster than anything else) or the far too common InYourFace syndrome trying to abuse the sensational. Sure some scenes will make you cringe a little, but it’s still not as bad as The Hobbit for instance.

There are the obligatory two cents jokes and somewhat not-always-that-subtle cameos. But there are some who apparently think that you cannot make a movie without those nowadays. While I’m OK with nods to older episodes as long as they do not show up too frequently to feel like distractions, putting a stupid not funny at all joke at the end of a 30 seconds action scene can ruin not only the scene, but also the characters and butcher the story credibility.

Lastly I think that the movie really has one big flaw, it’s its non-homogeneous way of handling the characters. Like I said Jyn Erso character is well developed and this really adds to her credibility. Others like Cassian Andor or Cpt. Obvious (K-2SO) are also fine, and the latter makes a nice and funny support character.

On the other hand some characters were developed on a completely different dimension. I think in particular of Chirrut Imwe and Baze Malbus. They did not add that much to the plot, they got some of the worst and almost all clunky lines, and I couldn’t help but to see them as a dead weight couple that somehow found himself playing in the wrong movie.

I may seem a bit harsh but I really think you shouldn’t add characters just for the sake of it. Even so with the laudable intention of completing the story by the addition of new components. The story that the movie tries to convey must act as a coherent whole. And in this case it could have been much better articulated over fewer characters.

That being said I’m now eagerly waiting for the next episodes. With a bit of apprehension though considering Rian Johnson (Ep. VIII) and Colin Trevorrow (Ep. IX) filmography. Looper left me a bit unimpressed and that habit of throwing successful TV series directors or writers (even when that was only for a handful of episodes) in charge of tent poles movies never turned out well for me. And don’t even get me started on Jurassic World. But in the end only time will tell!

Linuxulator ist kaputt

Since a few weeks I’m running RELEASE on a custom kernel to use a patch that I made for a missing feature in the IPv6 stack (namely icmp_may_rst).

But a few minutes ago I had the surprise to find that the Linuxulator was no longer working. Trying to run a Linux binary failed with the following error:

ELF binary type "0" not known.
exec: test: Exec format error

Actually looking at kldstat, the Linux kernel module wasn’t even loaded. Trying to load it manually gave me the following error:

link_elf_obj: symbol kern_sched_setscheduler undefined
linker_load_file: Unsupported file type

OK so what is this sched_setscheduler you are talking about? Well there you go!
Now the Linuxulator depends on that syscall, but for some reason the necessary option disappeared from my custom kernel configuration. All I had to do was to add it again and recompile:

options _KPOSIX_PRIORITY_SCHEDULING # POSIX P1003_1B real-time extensions

And now I can run Linux binaries again!

Today’s movie: Personal Shopper

Lewis ?

At last, a nice movie on the fringe of supernatural!

Personal Shopper by Olivier Assayas, not your classical ghost movie. It is sometimes difficult to see where the movie is going, but it reveals itself fully in the end. Also if you thought you knew Kristen Stewart, think again! She delivers a great performance which really adds to the mood of the movie.

Display WiFi RSSI on FreeBSD

On FreeBSD we also use the ifconfig command to configure wireless interfaces. The command ifconfig wlan0 list scan lists available AP along with their SNR. However the ifconfig command does not display the RSSI/SNR on the current link. To do so we need another command, wlanstats. It is not included in base system but you can find it in the source tree under /usr/src/tools/tools/net80211/wlanstats. This command also shows you the signal level (in dBm) and current transmit rate among other things.

I wonder why the RSSI is not visible with the ifconfig command. I suppose they wanted to regroup all those stats with another command. But again I wonder why this command is not part of the base system.

Dedibox serial shell access

If you cannot access the shell on a FreeBSD dedibox from the online.net console, here is a quick tip. Create an alternate root account with csh or tcsh and access ttyu1 on this account instead. That’s almost precisely what the toor account is made for, except that we generally leave the default shell on root.

No idea why sh, bash and zsh are not working through the serial connection, more doesn’t work either, but vi does. Probably a termcap thingy ? If anyone has a clue…

Install FreeBSD 11 with ZFS on Dedibox XC 2016

Online.net’s Dedibox XC 2016 comes with 16 GB DDR3 and 1 To SATA or 250 GB SSD on a 8 cores Atom CPU. This is a very nice entry-level dedicated box for anyone who want to upgrade from a small VPS (yes, there is some upgrade in the air). There is only one HDD and no RAID though. But they offer (for free) a 100 GB FTP storage space which is more than enough to backup the base system and bootstrap it again in case of disk failure.

An advantage of dedicated over VPS is that you can install almost any OS you want. The management console comes with an easy install for FreeBSD 11 on UFS. But I thought it would be nice to use ZFS instead. Yeah, I hear you, why using ZFS with only one HDD and non-ECC memory? But with 16 GB it still comes as a viable alternative.

The method I used was adapted from a post on Online.net’s forum. So here we go. First, reboot in rescue mode from the console. Choose FreeBSD 10.2 (or higher) as the rescue OS. Once you are logged on the rescue, switch to root and bootstrap FreeBSD:


SWAP_SIZE=4g
TEMP_ROOT_PASSWORD="1337rul35"

# Create partitions table
gpart destroy -F ada0
gpart create -s gpt ada0
gpart add -t freebsd-boot -l boot -s 512K ada0
gpart add -t freebsd-swap -l swap -s $SWAP_SIZE -a 1m ada0
gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -l zfs0 ada0

# Install MBR
dd if=/dev/zero of=ada0p3 count=560 bs=512
gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptzfsboot -i 1 ada0

# Create ZFS pool and FS
zpool create -f -m none -o altroot=/mnt -o cachefile=/tmp/zpool.cache -O compress=lz4 -O atime=off zroot gpt/zfs0
zfs create -o mountpoint=/ zroot/ROOT
zfs create -o mountpoint=/usr zroot/usr
zfs create -o mountpoint=/var zroot/var
zfs create -o mountpoint=/tmp zroot/tmp
zfs create -o mountpoint=/www zroot/www
zfs create -o mountpoint=/usr/home zroot/usr/home
zpool set bootfs=zroot/ROOT zroot

# Bootstrap
cd /mnt
fetch ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/amd64/11.0-RELEASE/base.txz
fetch ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/amd64/11.0-RELEASE/kernel.txz
tar --unlink -Jxpf base.txz -C /mnt
tar --unlink -Jxpf kernel.txz -C /mnt
rm base.txz kernel.txz

# Configuration
# 1) fstab and swap
cat << EOF > /mnt/etc/fstab
ada0p2 none swap sw 0 0
EOF

# 2) rc.conf
cat << EOF > /mnt/etc/rc.conf
keymap="fr.acc"
ifconfig_igb0="DHCP"
ifconfig_igb1="DHCP"
fsck_y_enable="YES"
background_fsck="YES"
zfs_enable="YES"
sshd_enable="YES"
EOF

# 3) loader.conf
cat << EOF > /mnt/boot/loader.conf
zfs_load="YES"
vfs.root.mountfrom="zfs:zroot/ROOT"
boot_multicons="YES"
boot_serial="YES"
comconsole_speed="9600"
console="comconsole"
comconsole_port="0x2F8"
EOF

# 4) TTY for serial console
cat << EOF >> /mnt/etc/ttys
ttyu1 "/usr/libexec/getty std.9600" vt100 on secure
EOF

# 5) Temporary root password
echo "$TEMP_ROOT_PASSWORD" | pw -R /mnt user mod -n root -h 0

# Last step
cd ~
zpool export zroot
zpool import -o altroot=/mnt -o cachefile=/tmp/zpool.cache zroot
cp /tmp/zpool.cache /mnt/boot/zfs

# Terminated!
halt

Now from the management console, reboot in normal mode and connect to your box using serial connection. You should be able to login with root and continue the configuration from there.