May 2015 – DragonFly BSD Digest

Emulation is this week's accidental topic.

MAME and the New Emulation Reality. (via)
A Piece of Apple II History Cracks Open. (via)
Venture capital vs. community capital. An interesting view of history. (via)
Introduction to Keyboard Programming. (via)
#define __ENABEL_EPSPERAMENTLE_TAPDOLE_ORATORS (comment from this article.)
Apple][ in Javascript. Also, Apple][ in Javascript. Two different presentation styles, both fun. (both via)
Math Blaster Copy Protection. (via)
Rogue in Space.
Einstein, a NewtonOS emulator. (via)
SSH client suggestions.
Radio hams do battle with 'Russian Woodpecker' (1982). There's a lot of analog ghosts out there. (via)
An incomplete list of words that are now startups. (via)
"If something isn’t on the web ... I find it hard to get excited about it." (also via)
The SIGCIS Workshop 2015 call for papers is out.

Your comics link of the week: Behold! The Dinosaurs!

A short but more interesting list this week, I think.

ZFS Mastery is out in print and electronic versions.
BSD management with Puppet.
DiscoverBSD for 2015/05/25.
Dell Networking OS 9 powered by NetBSD.
Lumina Desktop Status Update/FAQ.
PC-BSD 10.1.2: an Interview with Kris Moore.
A FreeBSD Foundation visit to the (a?) NYI datacenter.
"Patrol Read" support in OpenBSD.
syslog-ng and ELK on OpenBSD.
Yay for compatibility!
The Linuxulator on FreeBSD now does 1:1 threads and x86_64.
See this "Low Cost 10G Router" post on NANOG? Follow the very long thread, and you'll notice a reoccurring theme: set up a BSD machine.
Bitrig at NYCBUG on 2015/05/06, video.

Your Not BSD link of the week: Never fix anything.

Hammer 2 now uses LZ4 compression by default. It also uses a new CRC algorithm that performs much better, and there's numbers to prove it. It helps iSCSI too. When I say new, it appears to be from the 1980s? I may be looking at the wrong place.

There's a new 'ifconsole' option for /etc/ttys on DragonFly that may help you if your serial output device is a bit strange.

I always try to guess the interview topic from the episode title, but I wasn't able to predict the several mini-interviews in this week's BSDNow episode.

Matthew Dillon has been doing a lot of Hammer 2 work lately. Well, he's been doing it for quite some time, but the recent commits contain the sort of things that are easier to link to, like deletion speedups, freemap changes, and stats tracking/compression results.

If you were running a version of DragonFly 4.1 (i.e. the master version, not release) built between the 20th and 25th, rebuild. There's a UFS bug introduced in that short timeframe. If you are running 4.0.x release or built your version of DragonFly-master outside of that date range - you are unaffected.

I guess the accidental theme this week is Unix.

The truth about Unix: The user interface is horrid. From 1981, which says something. (via)
Terminal: Beyond Ctrl + A and Ctrl + E. Linked because I needed to know what the nondestructive version of Ctrl-U was. (Ctrl-A)
Tools don’t solve the web’s problems, they ARE the problem. I've been considering a static generator for this site, for similar reasons. (via)
How to name things: the hardest problem in programming. A dry topic talked about in a very human way. (via)
Floppy Drive Organ.
Cold Weather, Gogol And The Rise Of The Russian Samovar. I don't need one, but I've always thought samovars are interesting.
Unix Shells: Bash, Fish, Ksh, Tcsh, Zsh. (via)
When Poll is Better than Interrupt. (PDF, via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution (via)
Backblaze hard drive stats for 2015Q1. (via)
Crystals and computer viruses. (via)
Inadvertent collection.
Bash history format.
Vim Tips For Intermediate Users. (via)
Why isn't our fax working? (Hint: a power issue.) (via)
The Problem with the Roguelike Metagame. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: svblm. Found via a link to Infinideer and Forest Ambassador.

A calmer week, probably because of the U.S. holiday.

FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS is out (eBook format).
DiscoverBSD for 2015/05/18.
PC-BSD 10.1.2 is out. (Update: hotfix)
freebsd-wifi-build (via)
bhyve on Pluribus, a platform I'm unfamiliar with. (via)
pkgSrcCon is happening July 4-5 in Berlin.
I like cross-pollination.
Diagnosing softraid failures on OpenBSD.
OpenBSD now has ntpd on by default.
OpenSMTPD vs. Logjam.
spamd/pf rule changes.
Various OpenBSD remote update methods.
FreeNAS status report.
iXSystems is gaining a dev blog.

A recent commit from Matthew Dillon means users of Intel Haswell or later CPUs will see reduced power usage, if I'm reading this commit correctly.

This week's BSDNow episode talks with Jed Reynolds about ZFS on Linux and FreeBSD, and includes other news bits including about DragonFly's swap encryption, OpenBSD defaulting to having openntpd on by default, and plenty more.

Hammer will perform daily housekeeping tasks each night. If you're up late enough, it may kick off while you are working. If you want to stop the process after it's already started (since it's disk-intensive), John Marino has added the 'abort-cleanup' command.

If you want to use a scanner on DragonFly, install SANE. That is apparently all you need to do.

Experimental automatic crypting of swap is now available in DragonFly-master. Recently added, though it may have been possible another way.

Get clicking!

The Rise and Fall of Japan’s PC-98. I always wondered what PC-98 was. (pdf, via)
Beyond the PDP-11: Processor support for a memory-safe C abstract machine. Written this year, despite the title. (pdf, via)
Gonix – Unix tools written in Go. (via)
Without Systemd (via several places)
Your cyberpunk games are dangerous.
Web Mandlebrot. (via)
Which SSD should you buy?
A Tmux crash course: tips and tweaks. Different from the last tmux crash course I posted. (via)
Drinking Myself To Permadeath In Brogue.
Eventually everyone hates computers. (via)
wego, command-line based weather report - with ASCII graphics!
The programming talent myth. (via)
A Tiny Orchestra in the Living Room. I like the graphics. Also, I am nostalgic for the smell of audio equipment. (via)
On the Taxonomy of Spaceships. (via)

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Finished page at the Toronto Comic Jam. I missed TCAF this year, dangit. It is awesome. (via)

This includes all the BSD material I didn't have time to get posted last week. I hope you have some time for reading today; there is a lot here.

Royal activity affecting your open source files.
Windows guest support (or at least the start of it) in bhyve.
Bad memory blacklisting in FreeBSD. I'd be worried about keeping partially bad RAM in place, but this is probably being used on a larger scale.
25 year old col bug, fixed.
The start of NUMA support in FreeBSD.
Alpine POC and Routerboard support in FreeBSD.
FreeBSD now supports more than 8 audio channels.
NetBSD is starting to gain EdgeRouter support.
NetBSD gains in-kernel splash screen support.
Openresolv 3.7 is in both FreeBSD and NetBSD.
EU study recommends OpenBSD. (Thanks, PCTF)
Now, sshd in OpenBSD defaults to 'PermitRootLogin=no' (like in DragonFly!)
Device Developer's Conference, happening in the UK over the next month or so. (via openbsd-misc)
OpenBSD has released, shipped, and there's some discs with errors being replaced, though there's a workaround.
From 0 to an OpenBSD install, with no hands and a custom disk layout. (via)
Livingston County, Michigan has a BSD user group starting up.
PC-BSD 10.2.1-RC1 comments.
BSDCon Brazil 2015 has a call for papers out.
New to BSD, Questions about Firewall configuration.
DiscoverBSD for 2015/05/11.
A week of pkgsrc #10.
PC-BSD 11.0-CURRENTMAY2015 images now available
Yes, You Can Virtualize FreeNAS
pfSense is now available as a "VMware Ready Virtual Firewall Appliance".
Michael W. Lucas's Tarsnap talk is online.
As is the cover to his upcoming FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS book.
BSDTalk 253 has 30 minutes of conversation with George Neville-Neil about "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System", 2nd edition.

leaf.dragonflybsd.org, where the DragonFly website is hosted, is temporarily down while a disk is replaced. Images and binary packages are still available.

This week's BSDNow episode talks with Mike Larkin about memory protection in OpenBSD, along with the normal news summary.

This may not be a huge surprise, but the Minnowboard MAX can run DragonFly just fine, modulo some dmesg complaints.

Sepherosa Ziehau has introduced a new sysctl:

net.link.ether.inet.log_arp_creation_failure

Set this to zero and you won't get endless ARP events from networks you aren't on. For example, I'm hooked up to a cable modem. I only get a public routable IP address, but the network used for the cable modem network itself bleeds ARP packets out where my DragonFly machine can see it. Since it's on a different network segment than the address I receive through DHCP, it always fails and the system logs it. For example:

May 11 05:20:52 www kernel: arplookup 100.68.112.145 failed: host is not on local network

I can't do much about it since that layer 2 leakiness is going to happen, but I can shut it up with this sysctl - and thank goodness, cause I've been seeing these messages since first using a DOCSIS modem in... 2001 or so?