,,, jmcunx OCC 6
Old Computer Challenge # 6 (OCC6) which is known as
"Make Something".
HTML OCC6, On the WEB
HTML OCC6, On the WEB (mirror)
HTML OCC WEB page, (temporary mirror)
OCC6 will run from July 5 -- 12, 2026. I believe "Make
Something" is to prove you do not need AI to create something
new. Since I am a software guy, I will create a program instead
of build a hardware device.
With this challenge I decided to take a demo program I created
at work many years ago and convert it to a Library (archive)
which anyone can use and easy to call.
The prototype was created to show management a method of hashing
personal information using ssl instead of storing it as raw text
in the database. But at the time nothing was done. Later on it
was decided this type data would not be stored for now.
The object I made for OCC6 is complete. It is a wraparound
Library of OpenSSL/LibreSSL that has functions that are easy to
call. The functions will allow you to hash a string for storage
in a database or for other reasons. Repositories of the
Library:
HTML gitlab Repository
DIR sdf gopher repo, look for file jhash.tar.gz
Epilogue:
=========
I thought doing this would be easier than it really was.
Since NetBSD 11.0 RC5/6 uses OpenSSL 3, that caused a few
issues, but I'm glad I used NetBSD since the other systems
have LibreSSL or OpenSSL v2. Due to NetBSD, the Library will
also support OpenSSL v3. This was Tested on NetBSD 11.0 RC6
amd64/i386, NetBSD 9.3 on sdf, OpenBSD 7.9 amd64/i386,
Slackware 15.0 64 bit and Debian on sdf. Hardware R51e,
T420, T430 and W541. But all in all it was a fun time and
maybe I created something useful for a few people.
Activities:
===========
* Day 8, July 12, updated my OCC 6 pages, perused other people's
pages.
* Day 7, July 11: Nothing of note today, just a little bit of
Nethack, hang out side and naps :)
* Day 6, July 10: I upgraded an old R51e from OpenBSD 7.8 to
7.9. This allowed me to test on a 32 bit OpenBSD system.
That test discovered an issue with the Makefile. The file was
fixed and pushed. This is something I run across a lot. By
testing on Linux, NetBSD and OpenBSD I can find lots of issues
:)
* Day 5, July 9: Testing went well, it works on NetBSD, OpenBSD
and Linux, so I added links to the repositories above. Most
of the day I was away, but NetBSD 11.0 RC6 was released, so I
upgraded to RC6 using sysupgrade(8) from pkgsrc. Since I use
cgd(4), sysupgrade(8) is the only option for me. The upgrade
went well and RC6 is working great.
* Day 4, July 8: pretty much done, now I am testing the
objects to make sure the install and work correctly.
* Day 3, July 7: Close to being complete. I created the
git-repo and all that is really needed is to create the
manuals and readmes.
* Day 2, July 6: I made good progress, but found out MD5
functions were deprecated in OpenSSL v3. LibreSSL still has
those functions. When using OpenSSL, you can examine define
"OPENSSL_VERSION_MAJOR" to avoid compile failures with MD5.
Before committing, I will need to test on OpenBSD with
LibreSSL. BTW, my IDE is Emacs :)
* Day 1, July 5: Did not really do that much. But I got the
prototype ready for changes. Plus played some nethack on
"nethack@alt.org" and watched a video about the Hudson River
Sloop Clearwater.
Hardware
========
I decided to use my Thinkpad T430 (~14 years old) Running
NetBSD 11.0 RC5 amd64 as my main system. I also used
a T61 (~20 years old) also on NetBSD 11.0 RC5 i386.
These allowed be to make sure these objects will work
on 64 and 32 bit systems.
Using the T430 will also prove you can view Youtube,
stream music and develop objects without having to buy
a new expensive system just to run the spyware called
Microsoft Windows 11. I can do anything on this system
that I can do on a brand new system.
Back:
=====
DIR Back to my OCC Page
DIR Back to my Gopher Hole
$Id: gophermap,v 1.17 2026/07/21 01:44:39 jmccue Exp $