Dullroar

You might have noticed that comments were broken on this blog for the last week or so. That's because of an upgrade at my webhost, Jtan. It seems that openbsd switched its binary format, and by default, all programs in the previous-format would no longer run.

I wish to try to tell you how stupid this is, but I fear that I won't do it justice. I'll try anyway. But let me begin by saying that Jtan's been a good home for Dullroar.org for the last few years, and they've been easy to deal with. And let me also say that breaking comments on my blog is about the most minor issue in the world, given how unimportant my blog is and how few comments get posted. And I can see how the war against spam and denial of service attacks probably leaves sysadmins with a lot less time for delivering other services. Still, the whole sad situation does give me pause. Is this the webhost I want to deal with on an ongoing basis? Now on to the details.

First, Openbsd changed their default binary format starting with version 3.4 of the OS. Linux went through something similar a while back as well. The difference is that starting in version 3.5, Openbsd by default no longer runs old binaries. Every new version of Windows can run programs built for old versions. Everyone expects that sort of behavior. But over at openbsd, they say that running other binary formats exposes the system to malicious programs. Because, you know, all the really malicious programs were written for openbsd 3.3, and the malicious program authors haven't bothered to recompile for 3.5 yet.

Second, Jtan, my hosting provider, installed the new version without turning on legacy binary support. That's putting the openbsd paranoia way ahead of Jtan's customers' needs. With a little extra configuration, Jtan could have avoided breaking every customer-compiled application. Instead, Jtan forced us all to observe that stuff had broken, find the source, recompile, and then reinstall. It took me an hour, and that's only for a tiny little perl module that I'd completely forgotten I ever installed in the first place.

Third, Jtan didn't give us a transition plan. The usual thing to do in a "break the world" situation is to configure a completely new machine with the new OS, and give everybody a few weeks to build and test programs on the new machine. Then the new machine should be swapped in for the old machine. What Jtan did was take down the old machine for a few hours and install the new OS over the old. In other words, Jtan maximized downtime and risk.

To sum up: the spam problem left my webhost too frazzled to do a proper upgrade, which would have been time and resource intensive. And the proper upgrade was mostly needed because the underlying OS, openbsd, didn't have reverse compatibility for its binaries turned on by default. Yuck.