SemiBUG is having the monthly meeting tonight. The presenter is Nick Holland, talking about SPECTRE mitigations in OpenBSD, and similar mechanisms. If you are near, go.
Virtual DragonFly: memory balloon
If you are running DragonFly in a virtual environment, ‘ddegroot’ has put together a virtio_balloon driver for handling memory usage. (An explanation of the term) Try it if you can; he wants testers.
MeetBSD happening soon
Here’s your reminder: MeetBSD is happening October 19-20 in Santa Clara, CA. That’s the end of this week. Go, if you are near.
Lazy Reading for 2018/10/14
A good, oddball week.
- Happy #CIDRDay!
- Exploring OmniOS in a VM.
- Endless amounts of Commodore 64 games, in-browser. (via many places)
- Dangit, I missed posting about the Roguelike Celebration. (via)
- Software Heritage, archiving code. (thanks, Siju)
- Classic computers in Lego. Cuter than I thought possible. (via)
- Spleen – Monospaced bitmap fonts. A teeny terminal font, working down to 5×8. Designed on OpenBSD? I don’t know the tools used. (thanks, Frederic)
- Engineered Arts, a company that builds robots for interaction. What a fun job to have! (via)
- Bellingcat’s Online Investigation Toolkit. (via)
- 2018 IFComp entries. (via)
- everything you ever wanted to know about terminals (via)
- Oddness: the zoneinfo file on your computer right now could be affected by Earth speeding up.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Draculagate, a book funded by Kickstarter. Watch the video.
In Other BSDs for 2018/10/13
Still playing catchup with links.
- FreeBSD and OpenBSD fundraisers from Michael W. Lucas.
- One-liners for submitting your dmesg to NYCBUG. There’s other versions in that thread; I linked to the last described.
- Configuration of OpenSMTPD to relay mails to outbound smtp server.
- Let’s Try on OpenBSD: CrossCode and Stardew Valley Multiplayer.
- Port for endless sky submitted to ports@. I’ve linked this game once before; it resembles Escape Velocity, which resembles Taipan, my historic favorite game.
- MidnightBSD reaches 1.0. (via)
- pfSense and Google Cloud Identity.
- iXSystems and the Chinese hardware hack.
- Process title and missing memory space.
- Valuable News – 2018/10/07.
- Running FreeBSD on OSX using xhyve, a port of bhyve.
- AF3e ship date and next FreeBSD talk.
- FreeNAS 11.2-BETA2 is available!
- EuroBSDCon 2018 Recap.
- September 2018 FreeBSD Foundation Update. (via)
- GhostBSD tested on ThinkPad T410. (via)
- What is ZFS? Why are People Crazy About it? (via)
- Login_duress: A BSD authentication module for duress passwords. Password as command. (via)
- Porting Keybase to NetBSD. (via)
- pkgsrc on SmartOS by Jonathan Perkin. (via)
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 17 – Automount Removable Media.
- unixpackages.com – a commercial service for packaged software. It’s ports or pkg or pkgsrc, but just for Solaris 2.5+, and it costs money. Technically not a BSD, but the contrast with what we get for free is interesting.
- Installing Hugo and hosting website. On OpenBSD. (via)
Laptop recommendations for DragonFly
In case it’s useful to you, here’s several laptop recommendations for DragonFly.
BSDNow 267: Absolute FreeBSD
BSDNow 267 is posted a bit early this week, with an interview of Michael W. Lucas, about his upcoming Absolute FreeBSD 3rd edition and local BUG.
Polish BSD User Group meeting tomorrow
I’m posting a day early cause of time zone difference: there’s a meeting of the Polish BSD User Group tomorrow.
Michael W. Lucas talks at mug
Michael W. Lucas is giving a talk at mug.org tonight; he may have physical copies of his new Absolute FreeBSD, 3rd edition available. Go, if you are near. Pro tip: If you are late but still want to catch up to Michael, look for the nearest gelato shop.
OverTRIMmed
Matthew Dillon recently fixed a TRIM bug, where a TRIM command was being issued unconditionally, regardless of the mount flag, and duplicating the action if it was set normally. It’s fixed now. This would only have any significant slowdown on UFS, which means it would only affect installworld – the rest of your mounted volumes are HAMMER, right?
Lazy Reading for 2018/10/07
Old computer theme this week. That may be more of a constant.
- PiDP-11: Recreating the PDP-11/70. (via)
- Fonts on Unix. (via) The source comments mention Go Mono a number of times; new to me.
- Commodore 64 left outside for over a decade! Could it still work?? Of course the answer is eventually yes or why link to it? (via)
- Standard Notes, an open source alternative to other notes apps. (via)
- Two Bit History, computer history by decade. I’ve linked to some of the individual articles before.
- The Story of the Polysynth, video. (via)
- Colour Without Colour: Apple II Computer Graphics. (via)
- The Apple II Source Code for the LOGO Language Found. (via)
- STAR, an Arduino Robot Recreation. Creepy crawler.
- Full Table. Down the rabbit hole of images. (via)
- Rules for Online Sanity, a PDF. (via)
- SGI collectors.
- Bad relay: Fixing the card reader for a vintage IBM 1401 mainframe.
- Inform: Past, Present, Future. (via)
In Other BSDs for 2018/10/06
Still catching up on links.
- garbage 43. The RSS feed may have changed? I should have seen this directly. (via)
- EuroBSDCon 2018 and NetBSD sanitizers. (via)
- EuroBSDCon 2018 travel report and obligatory pics. (via)
- NetBSD curses ripoffline improvements. (via)
- Installing Hugo and publishing Hugo web-pages on OpenBSD server. (via)
- NetBSD8.0 on UEFI Bootloader and Windows Tablet. (via)
- NetBSD/arm64 on QEMU. (via)
- A Brief History of the BSD Fast Filesystem. (via)
- Old xcb libraries removed in OpenBSD.
- EuroBSDCon 2018 report.
- Announcing the pkgsrc-2018Q3 release. (via)
- Debian on OpenBSD vmd (without qemu or another debian system) (via)
- Installing Gophernicus in OpenBSD. I just like the name. (via)
- Valuable News – 2018/09/29.
- Polish BSD User Group, a summary. There’s a meeting soon, too.
- Manage ”nice” priority of daemons on OpenBSD.
virtio_random in DragonFly
Something I didn’t know existed but makes sense now that I do: a virtualized randomness device, added to DragonFly. Entropy is usually provided through hardware, so of course you’d need something for it in a VM.
BSDNow 266: File Type History
BSDNow 266 is up, and while the title is “File Type History”, there’s a number of “this is how I use BSD” stories on there, which I always find interesting.
NYCBUG tonight
6:30 tonight: NYCBUG’s monthly meeting, with the topic of Subdo. I don’t know what that is, but we all can find out: tonight’s meeting will be streamed.
DragonFly, Cygwin, and PuTTY
To add to my ongoing slow fiddle with DragonFly: I’ve noted how to install in Hyper-V, and how to use Cygwin to connect to run X. Here’s another step: if you are using PuTTY/Pageant, as I am, and want to connect, Cygwin/X needs to be told to listen on TCP. Find your /usr/bin/startxwin file in Cygwin and change serverargs to:
serverargs=”-listen tcp”
And then in PuTTY, under Connection -> Session -> X11, check “Enable X11 forwarding”, set X display location to “:0.0”, and locate your .Xauthority file. It will be in your user’s Cygwin home directory. (tips found here)
plink can be used to create shortcuts – open an xterm directly into your DragonFly VM from your Windows desktop, for instance, with a shortcut that runs ‘plink <sessionname> xterm’.
If you are running a slightly newer version of Windows and aren’t trying to accommodate a ‘legacy’ PuTTY install, using Windows Subsystem for Linux may work better; I have not yet tried.
KnoxBUG, tonight
There’s a KnoxBUG BSD user group meeting in Knoxville, Tennessee, with the topic of “Real-world Performance Advantages of NVDIMM and NVMe: A Case Study with OpenZFS“, presented by Nick Principe. It’s happening at 6 PM, tonight. They have the prettiest logo of any BUG that I’ve seen.
Lazy Reading for 2018/09/30
I cleared my tab backlog, but I still have a RSS backlog to work through here. Please be patient as I post a crapton of links and still don’t make it to the end.
- Close Your Open Tabs. Linked because I didn’t know about tab pinning, and it’s super handy.
- BINAC: A Brief Look Back. (video) Mercury delay line memory, which provoked a “how does that even work” reaction in me. (via)
- “So you want to make a TUI…”
TerminalText User Interface, if you didn’t realize. (via) - Explaining the ‘mystery’ of numbers stations. (via)
- Wizards, Moomins and pirates: the magic and mystery of literary maps. (via)
- Exhibiting The Hobbit: A tale of memories and microcomputers. (via)
- The Hobbit, via a comment on the previous link source.
- De-google-ify Internet: List of Alternatives. Even if you are not specifically trying to avoid Google, it’s a handy mapping of application to need. (via)
- A brief history of the numeric keypad. (via)
- Myst, 25 years old.
- Mailing lists vs Github. People view Github somewhat benignly, but it’s still a company with diverging interests from the people who use it for free hosting.
- The printer that wouldn’t print: Fixing an IBM 1401 mainframe from the 1960s.
- These Books. Vintage books and posters, modified.
- Haiku R1/beta1 has been released. (via)
- Most common ingredients by cuisine. Graphs! (via)
- Your Calendrical Fallacy Is… (via)
- “UNIX is a disaster…” (via)
Your unrelated listening of the week: The Best Metal on Bandcamp: September 2018. Witch Ripper and Pig Destroyer are pretty fun, both to listen to and to say.
In Other BSDs for 2018/09/29
EuroBSDCon 2018 unfortunately had no video, but the presentations are showing up online.
- FreeBSD bhyve live migration coming soon. (thanks, subbsd)
- Removing ROP Gadgets from OpenBSD. (via)
- OpenBSD netcat demystified. (via)
- OpenBSD and Diving. The SCUBA kind. (via)
- Spoiler alert for BSD packet filter profiling.
- r/openbsd_gaming’s Game of the Year 2018 Contest: Call for Nominations.
- Advances in OpenBSD packages [pdf] (via)
- What’s in store for NetBSD 9.0. (via)
- NetBSD machines at Open Source Conference 2018 Hiroshima. (via)
- Deploying Anycast DNS using OpenBSD and BGP. (via)
- “My FreeBSD Story“.
- Display the size of installed packages ordered by size. Should work on any BSD with minor modification.
- Add an new OpenBSD partition from unused space.
- Ghost in the Shell – Part 3.
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 16 – Configuration – Pause Any Application.
- Valuable News – 2018/09/08, 2018/09/15, and 2018/09/22. There’s probably another one today.
- The 2018Q3 pkgsrc freeze has started. (via)
- pfSense 2.4.4 is out; 2.3.x is almost EOL. (via and via)
- OPNSense
18.7.218.7.318.7.4 released. - FreeBSD Bootonly ISO failures PXE booting under UEFI.
- Oh wait, all the EuroBSDCon 2018 OpenBSD slides are in one spot. (via)
- Using acme.sh for Let’s Encrypt certificates on pkgsrc.org servers. (via)
DragonFly on Hyper-V, locally
For the future edification of others: I mentioned I installed DragonFly under Hyper-V on a Windows 10 laptop. I wanted to be able to open a terminal on DragonFly while in my Windows environment. I have that now; here’s what I did:
- Installed DragonFly in Hyper-V (see my prior install notes)
- Installed xorg on DragonFly. (pkg install xorg)
- Installed Cygwin/X on Windows 10 – specifically, the xauth, xorg, xterm, xclock, cygutils-x11, and openssh packages.
- In DragonFly, set these items in /etc/ssh/sshd_config :
- X11Forwarding Yes
- X11DisplayOffset 0
- XAuthLocation /usr/local/bin/xauth
- Run XWin Server on Windows 10.
- Run CygWin64 Terminal on Windows 10
- export DISPLAY=:0.0
- ssh -Y (address of DragonFly host)
- Once logged in, type ‘xterm’.
At this point, a terminal window should pop up on your Windows machine, showing your DragonFly username@hostname as the prompt. You are set!
Next steps – getting this working with PuTTY, Pageant, and Plink.