Sepherosa Ziehau has added netblast, a tool originally from FreeBSD that, if I'm reading the commit right, flings packets of a given size at an IP/port of your choosing, for as long as you want.
It's possible to accidentally truncate your password when using DES encryption and 0x80 in UTF-8 encoding. It's fixed.
BSDCan 2012 spawned a lot of interviews. We all benefit from that. For example, another BSDTalk interview, talking with Kris Moore of iXSystems about what's in the next version of PC-BSD.
There were some benchmarks of DragonFly 3.0 some time ago on Phoronix. (You may recall it being mentioned here previously.) The disk numbers always seemed weird to me, so I repeated that part of the test, and here's my writeup.
Sepherosa Ziehau has made some changes to SIOCGIFDATA, so if you are using DragonFly-master and pf, you will need a full rebuild. Also pftop, if you use it.
Three more weekly status updates from DragonFly/GSoC students: Mihai Carabas, Vishesh Yadav, and Ivan Sichmann Freitas. That's all for the past/first week.
Let's get right down to it:
- Hey, Nmap 6 is out. It's one of those always-useful tools, similar to wireshark.
- Biculturalism, a fair assessment. (via) The generalizations are a little extreme (1 Unix-based author who Got Religion, vs. a diffused Windows developer stereotype) but still has value.
- A Git Horror Story. (via) Not a true story, but useful for describing how git commits can be GPG-signed.
- A recent Google Doodle, a playable Moog synthesizer, done for Bob Moog's birthday. The Moog Music site has instructions. I happened to notice they're using FreeBSD as the server - cool! Maybe it's just the hosting org? Anyway, I link to it because Bob Moog's cousin was for a while my father's employer.
- "Google is transitive, whereas Facebook is reflexive." (via) This sums up the practical difference between Google and Facebook rather well.
- I did not know this existed: OpenBSD Network Shell. (via) Interface like a Cisco-ish router, internals are OpenBSD.
- There's been recent news articles about how programmers over 35 tend to not get hired. Here's one of the reasons: younger programmers discount the value of their own time. Anything where all the benefits (cheaper labor, more products) accrue to the company, and all the costs go to the employee (time lost, extra work) is not a good idea in the long run.
- "Now I've met the other DragonFly BSD user, too." That's two more than I expected for any given project, really.
- Undeadly.org has an extensive interview/article about OpenSMTPd. It's OpenBSD's implementation of a SMTP daemon, which is something I haven't heard much about before. Compare with DragonFly's much-smaller-in-scope dma.
- Van Jacobsen Saved the Internet. Or just fixed a timing bug. Depends on whether you listen to Wired or to him. The interesting part is that he had to build the tools to troubleshoot the problem.
- Here's something I don't think anyone's noticed yet: Microsoft is responsible for half of Google's DMCA notices last month. My employer recently was audited by Microsoft (technically by Accenture contractors for Microsoft) for license compliance. My Dell sales representative, when I asked him for a list of what Microsoft-licensed OEM devices we had bought, said many of his customers were asking for the same thing. He joked that Microsoft was trying to improve its profitability numbers for the quarter. Given that they are trying to push to Windows 8, that might just be true, and they are trying to enforce their way to it, not sell their way to it.
Loganaden Velvindron posted a terse update on the state of his Summer of Code work for DragonFly. I'm still waiting on the other students.
The presentations from BSDCan 2012 are up in video form. I was going to link to this in a Lazy Reading post, but there's a lot of video there. (via) Of interest: Intro to DNSSEC and FreeBSD's new package manager. Check the list, cause there's a lot more.
BSDTalk 215 is out, with several NetBSD folks being interviewed at BSDCan 2012 about NetBSD 6.
If you have a i386 DragonFly machine, emulators/wine-devel should now work.
John Marino proposed cutting several game demos from pkgsrc. I don't think they are playable at this point, even if you have the missing source files.
Thanks to Magliano Andrea Andrea Magliano, a new version of ACPI has been added to DragonFly, acpica-unix 20110527.
If you are running bleeding-edge DragonFly, libpthread was broken for a short period. If you built anything in the last ... 12 hours? You may want to rebuild it. If that doesn't describe you, it's a nonevent.
It's funny that I'm reporting a short-term break in bleeding-edge operating system code as any sort of surprise. It shows something about how stable DragonFly-master is most of the time.
Sepherosa Ziehau has added igb(4) version 2.2.3 direct from Intel, for support of their 82575 and 82576 Ethernet controller chips. It now shares a hardware abstraction layer with the em(4) driver, too.
John Marino posted a report of pkgsrc-currentbuilding on DragonFly i386. The success rate for package building is so good that the "top" package break was security/libpreludedb, with only 9 dependencies. Everything else was less than that. I have never seen a pkgsrc build report before with only single-digit figures for dependent breakage; this is fantastic.
There's been so much activity this week in DragonFly that I'm having a hard time keeping up. There's always time for Lazy Reading, though.
- The March of Progress. (via)
- My Third Attempt at Vim. Follow the link to pathogen, if you haven't heard of it.
- From the same article, Destroy All Software screencasts. They look interesting, though I've found the web has eradicated my ability to watch videos over a minute in length, unless they contain squeaking guinea pigs or running bunnies.
- How Pixar Almost Lost Toy Story 2 to a Bad Backup. (via) You can nitpick details (rm * isn't recursive) but it's funny in a nearly catastrophic disaster kind of way. Also, now is a good time to check your backups.
- Here's a video trailer for that WIZZYWIG comic I mentioned in a previous Lazy Reading.
- This post about ROFLCon 3 makes a good point: Much of what we expect to do on the Internet, from installing your own operating system to captioning pictures of kittens, requires a computer. Increased phone and tablet use kills that, cause it's not convenient. As the article notes by way of Chris Poole, things like Facebook are friend-based, not interest-based. Think about that for a bit. It's important to me because that's exactly what this site is - interest-based, rather than a social app.
- The truth about system bottlenecks.
As noted in a recent commit, it's possible to set up a HAMMER2 /usr/obj and survive a buildworld. That's good progress.
Note that this is basic work, so features like multi-master and deduplication are not present yet, and it's still work in progress, so don't try HAMMER2 unless you like losing data. Watch the branch for changes, though.
(I'm going with "HAMMER2" for the name.)
Takahiro Kambe is bringing PHP 5.4 into pkgsrc, probably as lang/php54. Follow the whole thread for a discussion of version numbering. As a side effect of this, PHP 5.2 will leave pkgsrc by the next quarterly pkgsrc release. If you're using that older flavor, you'll want to upgrade.
Sepherosa Ziehau has been making various updates that conform to standards lately, including "RFC4653 Non-Congestion Robustness (NCR)" and "RFC3517bis". I'm not familiar with what they do, but you can follow the links and read the RFCs if you are curious.
(Not sure if I got that 3517 one correct...)