Month: February 2012

  • The portreserve problem: is systemd the solution?

    Quite a while ago I wrote portreserve, a utility to prevent ports getting stolen at boot time by portmap. This would happen with CUPS, for example: portmap starts first (to allow for NFS-mounted filesystems), and calls bindresvport(). If the privileged (i.e. in the range 512-1023) port it allocates happens to be 631, when CUPS starts…

  • CUPS 1.6 changes ahead

    As I mentioned elsewhere, there are some changes ahead in CUPS 1.6. These changes are not imminent but give an indication of the direction the CUPS project is heading. Back in 2007 CUPS became an Apple project.  Now the parts that are not relevant on Mac OS are being dropped, with some of the Linux-relevant…