Lazy Reading for 2014/03/30

I suddenly can’t remember if I pad my dates with zeros.

Your unrelated link of the week: The creepiest animatronic work I’ve seen yet.  (via Orbital Operations)

 

In Other BSDs for 2014/03/29

A quiet week this week.

BSDNow 030: Documentation is King

BSDNow episode 030 is out with an interview of Warren Block about FreeBSD documentation, along with a conversation on a number of other topics, including setting up a BSD machine as your access point (highly recommended, along with home router setup) and setting up a BSD (FreeNAS) as a Synology replacement.  They also totally scooped me on Michael W. Lucas giving an OpenBSD talk – which might be because I forgot to sign up for his announcement mailing list.

NSS/LDAP and DragonFly

One of the requirements to get NSS/LDAP working on (most) any unixlike system is to have dynamic binaries; meaning they are dependent on various libraries to run.  Since you’re talking about programs for login when you’re talking about NSS/LDAP, that means if the libraries aren’t available, you can’t log in.  DragonFly has static binaries just to avoid that problem.

Francois Tigeot proposed switching to dynamic binaries and building a /rescue directory with static backups, as is the case with I think FreeBSD and NetBSD.  If you follow the thread, it looks like the best path is to use initrd instead.  Initrd stands for INITial Ram Disk, and is the first volume the computer sets up to boot from BIOS.  Since initrd gives the computer enough space to load all the needed modules (like Hammer2…), it works without making the computer dependent on various libraries or having a bloated /rescue directory.

(Someone correct me if I have the details wrong.)  As long as we’re talking about things that would help DragonFly in a larger environment, can someone work on a VM balloon memory driver, too?

Lazy Reading for 2014/03/23

Aaaaaaaaa link overflow!

Your unrelated link of the week: Space Replay.  A very good use of an Arduino board.  (via)

In Other BSDs for 2014/03/22

I have a list of commits I’ve saved between the various BSDs of licenses getting corrected to the 2-clause BSD license; that would definitely be a good cross-BSD project to sync.

Lazy Reading for 2014/03/16

A lot of this was done early; last week had a lot of interesting stuff turn up.  Maybe because we’re coming out of a extreme winter in the northern hemisphere, and people are feeling a bit more energetic?

Your unrelated link of the week: The Conet Project, recordings of numbers stations, at the Internet Archive. (via the Orbital Operations newsletter)

Bonus timewaster: 2048.  (via multiple places)

In Other BSDs for 2014/03/15

Another week with lots of links.