Update on Beta3

As many of you know I promised a new beta, with both 32 and 64 bit versions, in time for Bsides Delaware.  For those of you not in the know, that conference starts on Friday this week.  Well, I have good news and bad news.  I've spent the last few months very busy trying to kick out some special things to improve beta2 enough to call it beta3.

The first thing I realized that to accomplish anything worth doing, I was going to have to compile on something a little faster than my i5 laptop.  So, I spoke to a few friends about options, and finally settled on a a set of specs that DigitalPsyko wrote up for me.

After roughing out the plans for the computer I had to take a quick break and shoot down to Louisville Kentucky for Derbycon 2012.  If you have never been, it truly is the best conference ever and worth every bit of your time...and not just because they are silly enough to let me talk about whatever I want to.

This year I spoke about how the hacker community needs to get off their asses and contribute instead of just leaching, you can watch here and share with your favorite people who are always working on cool stuff and not sharing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3bpN9eHe5o

After Derbycon finished, I got home and spent a few $$'s to build this:

The blue led fans came with the case and have been removed for better anti-gamer styling.

So once I had a cool little build box I started getting to work, only to find the incredibly crappy OCZ Revodrive PCI-e SSD failed. I've since replaced it twice and still have no working ssd for the box. Don't buy SSDs from OCZ, Newegg won't even refund my money because OCZ is such garbage they refuse to do anything at all now. Fortunately 64GB of RAM means I can put enough things in RAM that the old hdd I'm running off of for now.  A little embarassing to build a 32 core box and drop a random crappy spare 250GB hdd in it, but at least it got me building.

It's been a few weeks now with the new box, and let's just saying being able to build this many parallel processes means not only is it way faster to build, it's also way faster to fail... and boy how does it fail quickly.  So many parallel make bugs found, and bad dependencies, I've even managed to find a few filesystem bugs.

The good news is that this morning I tested a very functional amd64 build that I was going to call beta3, the bad news is that the corresponding x86 build couldn't even boot. In a day or two hopefully I'll resolve the issue with the 32 bit build and drop beta3 on all of you.  Until then enjoy my Derbycon 2.0 talk, and wish me luck.

Thanks,
Zero_Chaos

PS> Please don't try to comment on the blog, I really don't read it much.  We have a bug tracker and IRC where I and the rest of the team are very responsive.