The default .cshrc in DragonFly has had some changes, which shouldn’t be anything but handy… assuming you are using tcsh. Also: the loader menu defaults to a blue Fred, now.
In the process of committing binutils 2.25 to DragonFly, John Marino also broke its build into parallel parts and removed the build of the gold linker. Buildworlds should be noticeably faster now, though I don’t have a before/after.
John Marino’s written an extensive page about wireless and DragonFly, on dragonflybsd.org.
Pre-assembled over the week, since I have an odd weekend schedule this week. On the plus side, there’s lots to click here.
- How to Be a Good Open Source Community Member. (via)
- Reliable Cron across the Planet. (via)
- How to irritate people away from your website, example 1 and example 2. I hate being repeatedly asked to sign up for a newsletter I’m already on. Also, this.
- “If you build your business on top of someone else’s system, eventually they’re going to notice.“
- Explorable Explanations. I’ve seen at least one of them before and it really stuck with me. (via)
- “Gee, this is a lot of microfiche material. Better build my own high-volume scanner!” (via)
- Also at that last link: DECbox, BlinkenBone, and other projects.
- How I introduced a 27-year-old computer to the web. The author says “It’s very slow”, but so was everything back then. (via)
- The HP-01, found indirectly through the last link. Think of that when next reading about wearables.
- The Days They Changed The Gauge. Heck of an outage window. (via)
- What’s the oldest/weirdest thing you’ve found on your network? An ancient Catalyst switch, running inside an enclosure 1400 ft underground, crammed between a wooden structure and a rock wall. I have a picture of the space.
- Slack is quietly, unintentionally killing IRC. Not scientifically studied, and anything dependent on a single company and not a standard can have longevity problems. (via I lost track, sorry)
- sslh, two services on one port, for when most everything gets blocked. (via NANOG)
- UNIX: Making Computers Easier To Use — 1982, Bell Laboratories. (via)
- The Shut-In Economy, or how to dedicate your life to a workplace. Also, how to ignore the temping nature of all these new jobs. (via)
- O’Reilly’s running a Top 25 sale.
- Andrew W.K. is the Kibo (see site) of Instagram: his name + nosebleed is all it takes. (via)
Unrelated link of the week: Tea. Contains strong language.
It’s been a quiet week in BSD-land, at least in terms of me finding links.
- “I know BSD isn’t secure because I can’t install Norton.“
- “Oops” and there’s D-Link DIR-655 support in FreeBSD.
- The ata driver in FreeBSD is
removedmodified. (see comments) - Steam available on PC-BSD. Old news, but always good.
- service(8) now available in NetBSD too.
- How to check out older revisions of pkgsrc packages.
- Tips on a DB9-RJ45 serial cable for Sun hardware, from OpenBSD.
- URL blacklisting in OpenBSD.
- lmc(4) and san(4), removed from OpenBSD.
- RFC7427 support in OpenBSD.
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/03/23.
If you’re looking to change your DragonFly system’s keymapping to support a non-US character set, use this users@ post from Adolf Augustin as a cheat sheet to make all the right changes.
Matthew Dillon answered some mailing list questions on how clustering and data copies will work in HAMMER2 – no due date, of course, because this is very complex. If you’re really into it, there’s always watching the recent commits.
BSDNow 082 is up, talking with Bernard Spil about LibreSSL adoption in FreeBSD ports. There’s lots of other material listed – see the BSDTalk page for a summary of all the topics covered.
Matthew Dillon has rewritten the Locking and Synchronization documentation for DragonFly. Keep this in mind the next time you say “Which lock should I use for this new software/ported software?” There’s also locking(9).
BSDTalk 252 has 18 minutes of conversation with Brian Callahan, who runs devio.us, an OpenBSD-based shell provider.
The other day, I updated some packages using pkg. The default version of PHP went from 5.4 to 5.6. I ended up doing what /usr/dports/UPGRADING says and making a list of all PHP packages on my system, before removing PHP and its dependencies. I then reinstalled the packages that used PHP, bringing the needed packages back in at the right version. pkg 1.4 didn’t handle the transition cleanly, unfortunately. I also had to specify mod_php56 because pkg was trying to get the 5.4 version despite it not being default.
None of these are insurmountable problems, but it never hurts to be forewarned. pkg 1.5 is on the horizon and may have an easier time with sorting these types of dependency/version changes. This may apply to FreeBSD in addition to DragonFly.
I’ve tagged version 4.0.5 of DragonFly, and it’s available at your nearest mirror. This revision is mostly to incorporate the newest OpenSSL security bump.
As you read this, I am probably watching a storage processor reboot.
- Another worthy cause for donation/sponsorship: the Network Time Foundation.
- Really making sure the data’s gone. (via)
- Sirius, for talking to computers like all the big companies are doing – but open source! (via many places)
- Smart City.
- “Everybody“. The section on a car rebooting gave me pause.
- int3.cc, hardware hacking. (via)
- USB Type C.
- y = -x^3.
- The Worst Internet Things. Seems like a cheesy list, but these things are really quite awful. (via)
- The Humble Roguelike Bundle. Dunno if any of it runs on BSD… but that is far more likely these days.
- 17 years of curl. Same developer the whole time, which is neat. fetch(1) is 18.75 years old, for contrast. (via)
- The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers. (via)
- Single-page non-Javascript web apps, a proposal. (via)
- A software engineer’s role traversal. Linking for the end part: Ask your employer not for free food, but for the chance to create something that lasts outside of your employer’s operations.
I’d love to see fewer developers demanding superficial perks, and more of them asking to have more time to contribute to the open source products we use, mentor young developers, and learning more about the space they occupy. All of those result in us growing as developers in more than just our coding skills.
Your unrelated link of the week: National Corndog Day. Has audio. (via)
Not done in a last-minute rush before the weekend, yay! Done early cause I have to work over the weekend, boo!
- Tarsnap Mastery is out in print form. (as is author Michael Lucas’s newest sci-fi)
- Active Directory and FreeBSD. Might apply to all BSDs? (via)
- GhostBSD 10.1-alpha1 is out. (via)
- pfSense 2.2.1 is out.
- making security sausage. “Even if most users will just run yummi-gummi-belli-rubrub or whatever to install binary fixes, they should be able to inspect the changes.” I just like that package manager name.
- What differences would I notice when using BSD?
- Suggestions for honeypotting on BSD?
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/03/16.
- virtio on FreeBSD now works asynchronously.
- OpenBSD papers from AsiaBSDCon 2015 are up.
- Martin Pieuchot could use some OpenBSD hardware.
- OpenSSH 6.8 is out.
- Home server rack suggestions. Includes perennial favorite, the LackRack.
- How to format your diffs for OpenBSD.
- Good; they’re talking to each other.
- The pkgsrc-2015Q1 freeze is on.
OpenSSL has yet another security update, and Sascha Wildner has added it to DragonFly. It probably justifies a 4.0.5 release, so I’ll be working on that.
As a side effect of the new ipfw3 import, the sshlockout script included with DragonFly now has -pf and -ipfw options.
Some recent users threads pointed at SSD wear stats, along with what Matthew Dillon has seen on dragonflybsd.org machines, and good filesystem books.
Bill Yuan’s work on a new ipfw has been committed, and for clarity, called “ipfw3“.
Happy (almost) St. Patrick’s Day! An excuse in the U.S. to wear green things and drink beer.
- VimGolf. (via Rolinh on #dragonflybsd)
- Operating system research – 16 years perspective. (via)
- A bad day for your network infrastructure.
- Unix best practices.
- 8 Unix networking commands and what they tell you.
- Open computing progress. (via)
- Extracting content without the hassle.
- gvim-to-xcolors.
- A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge. I remember Visicalc. (via)
- Google Code is shutting down. There’s DragonFly Summer of Code stuff in there.
- Oxford is celebrating the 200th anniversary of Ada Lovelace’s birth. (via)
- What’s your great-great-great-grandmother’s maiden name?
I goofed up and didn’t complete last weeks’ In Other BSDs before it published, so you get some extra this week.
- DiscoverBSD news for 2015/03/09.
- FreeBSD Flame Graphs. (via)
- pkgsrc-2014Q4 binaries for illumos/SmartOS, plus support policy.
- 15 years of FreeBSD Foundation.
- autofs(5) on FreeBSD.
- DisplayLink adapters now work on FreeBSD.
- USB now consistently works on Raspberry Pi devices with FreeBSD.
- W^X in your browser, via the OpenBSD Foundation.
- OpenBSD and Summer of Code.
- Pre-orders for OpenBSD 5.7 are possible.
- Encrypted replication in PC-BSD.
- Better i386 NetBSD radeon support.
- The pkgsrc-2015Q1 freeze starts in a few days.
- 3-way cross-pollination.