As you can probably guess somewhat from the title, BSDNow 048 has an interview about LibreSSL, with Brent Cook. There's also the normal news roundup, and other recent events.
A frequent question people ask when trying Hammer is "How can I do software RAID to cover a disk failure?" Hammer provides for streaming one volume to another, so you can duplicate drives, but there isn't an automatic failover mechanism as there is with a RAID setup. The first answer is usually "get hardware RAID"; my preferred solution. The remaining software solutions are vinum, ccd, and lvm for DragonFly.
The July issue of BSD Magazine is out, and it contains several articles about pkg, for use on FreeBSD, PC-BSD, and DragonFly. The article on DragonFly and pkg was written by Siju George.
Rust has been ported to DragonFly by Michael Neumann. His blog has implementation details, and you can pull from his repo to get a buildable version. This may be useful, as he notes, for anyone wanting to build Rust on other BSDs.
I missed this last week because I was on the road: BSDNow 047 is up, titled DES Challenge IV, has some followup on recent topics like pf in FreeBSD and the recent OpenBSD hackathon, plus an interview of Dag-Erling Smørgrav.
It's all multimedia day here, as BSDTalk 243 is also out with 16 minutes of conversation with Ingo Schwarze about mandoc. Mandoc is the man replacement in OpenBSD and built-but-not-yet-used in DragonFly. 'man replacement' is probably an oversimplification.
I was low on time but I still brought the links!
- This is why software sucks. Many people get tech news by skimming headlines, and don't read details - so prominently writing an opinionated title is more effective sometimes than, say, reasoned argument.
- "selective disclosure" is a better term. (same author)
- The EFF's Open Wireless Router project. Can they get a 48-port one built?
- UNIX: knowing your memory commands.
- The Open Source Identity Crisis. I agree with the article - some people still think open source developers are the coders, and then there's everyone else... which is emphatically not the case any more. (via)
- Used/refurbished server sellers. This is going to be useful to someone.
- Programming with Punched Cards. (PDF, via)
- Escher: Choiceless programming. Weird. (via)
- Apparently I'll link to anything about Dwarf Fortress; it's a culturally distinct thing - so much so that it's being used as an art exhibit. (via)
Part of this was done while traveling, but still a decent week for links.
- A BSD-licensed timeout(1).
- DiscoverBSD roundup for 2014/07/21.
- NetBSD has a start of a radeon driver.
- FreeBSD has a Phabricator site, which is getting linked in some commits.
- The OpenBSD cvsweb was down but appears to be back now.
- Lua in NetBSD went from version 5.1 to 5.3.
- Yay cross-pollination, sorta?
- "*BSD on the desktop for an intermediate Linux user?"
- NetBSD got a slight binary loading speedup.
- OpenBSD + OSX/iOS and IPsec/l2tp setup, the thread and the followup.
- Trying to establish the longest trust chain possible for an OpenBSD install.
- OpenBSD's new httpd is now installed by default. Lynx is no longer. (partially via)
- ldapd/OpenBSD users may need this thread when upgrading.
- DIAGNOSTIC does not slow down NetBSD.
- Bitrig is nearing 1.0, according to an email on their tech@bitrig.org list. But I can't find a way to link to the summary of what they have done. There's the Bitrig roadmap, I guess?
- An early draft ("prerelease") of Michael Lucas's next book, "FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials", is available.
- Undeadly has a lot of articles written by recent OpenBSD Hackathon participants. Instead of linking to specific ones, I'll just point you at the site. (undeadly.org can't tag or search to a summary page.)
- BSD, the movie. (via).
Thanks to Zachary Crownover, rcreload is available in DragonFly. (It's always good to see a new contributor name.)
Nuno Antunes brought in a significant number of fixes for libradius. He's been doing other work recently on netgraph7 support, so I'm linking to this as a 'signpost' commit.
If you were looking for something to do, finishing Francois Tigeot's sound update would help a lot of people. He's currently tied up with i915 support work. The patches need device cloning to work with devfs, and midi removal.
As mentioned before, the mrsas(4) driver works best for 'Thunderbolt' RAID controllers. Now, the switch has happened.
Tethering now works via the urndis(4) device, from a patch contributed by Sascha Wildner/tested by Yellow Rabbit.
(Updated for correct attribution)
I spent this week watching an older Cisco ASA slowly lose its ability to see parts of the Internet. How did I fix it? pfSense.
- Unix: How passwords can improve your life.
- Curated list of curated lists of awesome lists. I suppose this was inevitable. (via)
- Hooray for USB. Really, it's so successful we don't even think about it any more.
- A Game as Literary Tutorial. The influence of Dungeons and Dragons on writing. I'd describe it as a common nerd experience for people above 35 or so, similar to "your first computer". (via)
- Computer virus catalog. Surprisingly pretty. (via)
- Why Outlook gets CTRL+F wrong.
- Open (source) for business. Why aren't open source software interfaces more polished? (via)
- Cosmic rays: more likely a problem than you think. (via)
- Inside bit.ly's Distributed Systems. (via)
- Huh, bzr appears to be dead, or as dead as any open source project can ever be. (via)
- Making sure software stays insecure. I had to remove a preinstalled antivirus program from a Windows laptop yesterday... It did nothing, but you'd think I was lighting the motherboard on fire from the warnings it put on screen. (via)
- The SIGCIS 2014 Workshop (on historical computing), happening in November in Michigan, has a call for papers out.
- Time Management with Tom Limoncelli. He wrote the definitive book on the subject. (via) There's plenty more videos at his site; I suggest setting aside some time to watch it. (ha!)
More than the usual source commit messages this week.
- LibreSSL got another point release. And complaints. (via)
- NetBSD 7's branch date is planned.
- FreeBSD 9.3 is released. EoL for 9.2 has been extended, too.
- Cloning a FreeBSD/ZFS Machine with ‘zfs send’.
- An OpenBSD hackathon means a lot of articles.
- Troubleshooting Large, Stalling git/ssh Transfers.
- pkg == systemd == government conspiracy. Surely, the writer can't be real.
- Installing and Using TarSnap. A BSD-friendly service.
- DiscoverBSD's 2014/07/14 roundup.
- OpenBSD has OpenSSH and put together LibreSSL. OpenSSL bought... libressh.org? Use whois libressh.org to see. (no link; use your own whois lookup.) (via)
- NetBSD has updated to dhcp 4.3.0.
- OpenBSD has imported ucpp. (hope that's the right ucpp; there's lots out there)
- One of those times it's OK to store passwords in cleartext.
- PC-BSD is now using Samba 4.1 by default.
- OpenBSD has a new httpd(8). Bonus long-in-the-tooth joke, too.
- Yay, SSL library cross-pollination.
- Cross-cross-cross pollination, here. (someone do it in DragonFly, too)
- ssh (on OpenBSD) now supports Unix domain socket forwarding.
- EruoBSDCon 2014 is happening in Sofia, Bulgaria, in September. The FreeBSD Foundation is funding travelers.
- A FreeBSD 10 Desktop How-to.
While Matthew Dillon was testing the new up-to-256-processor support for DragonFly, he added a few sysctls, one of which helps qemu performance when emulating a lot of processors. I note it here in case it's helpful to someone else.
There's an open source meetup at a hackerspace near me, happening tomorrow. Well, today by the time most people read this. Anyway, it's at Interlock, starting at noon. I don't think I'll make it, but I'm always happy to see this stuff happen in my own town.
BSDNow 046 interviews Brian Drewery, talks about tunneling through DNS ports (an useful trick to get around network paywalls, if it's what I think it is), and of course more general discussion of BSD topics.
HOPE X starts tomorrow in New York City and runs through the weekend. There will be some BSD people there. (see first line of link.)
DRM (Direct Rendering, not Digital Rights) on DragonFly will normally eat all the memory it thinks it needs. However, vm.dma_reserved can now be set to a fixed limit in /boot/loader.conf. By default, vm.dma_reserved on DragonFly is set to 16M, and can be set higher. I think this is necessary when running higher-resolution screens... Don't quote me on that, though.