December 2016 – DragonFly BSD Digest

Last anything for the year!

Cohabiting FreeBSD and Gentoo Linux on a Common ZFS Pool (via)
Gave 9front a try under bhyve. It boots. (Restrictions Apply) (via)
Foxy's (mis)Adventures with NetBSD (via)
FreeBSD Foundation Announces New Uranium Level Donation (via)
Peter Hansteen on OpenBSD and you (slides)
So that's what water-cooling looks like.
FreeNAS Hard Drive Troubleshooting Guide. (via)
MWL’s 2016 wrap-up. One of his 2017 goals: "Be sufficiently flexible to kick Ray Percival in the head at BSDCan." Also more BSD books.

If you are using DragonFly under Hyper-V, Sepherosa Ziehau's been making additional commits to improve compatibility. What's it like? I don't know; I haven't tried Hyper-V yet.

BSDNow 174 this week presents a recap of the 2016 year, including chunks of interviews you may have missed.

The version of binutils used in DragonFly is now 2.27 by default. This will make the most difference to you if you want to work with Link Time Optimization.

Matthew Dillion mentioned his changed tutorial on secure web browsing on DragonFly, though I imagine it applies to other systems too. The trick is to use an isolated user account for running a web browser, and he includes the various steps to do so smoothly in the tutorial web page.

For anyone with a newer CPU - Broadwell, Skylake, etc. - there was a memory leak in the video driver. It would take several weeks of continuous operation to have an effect, but in any case, it's fixed. This only affected DragonFly 4.7 users with the appropriate CPUS and the Intel video driver.

If you were running DragonFly 4.7, for a short period you may have had trouble with shutting down, because of an ACPI bug. It's fixed now. It's actually been fixed for two weeks, but I'm going back and clearing things I hadn't had a chance to post, since we are in the Christmas-New Years lull time.

Merry Christmas! I piled up as many links as I could in the theory that many readers have the spare time for it today/tomorrow/next few days.

"So somebody is throwing HTML at your sshd. What to do?"
Because of weird traffic, I found this reference to an early occurrence of the Internet of Crap Things. The weird traffic is possibly another Mirai variant. Or Snapchat.
Punched Cards: A Brief Tutorial (2002) (via)
The Hi-Bit Era. (via)
Working on ENIAC: Rethinking Innovation Myths with Author Thomas Haigh. Video. (via)
Talk extract: Submarine cable systems 101 for AWS partners. Video. (via)
3D-printed Curta Calculator. One of the best mechanical calculators. (via)
Taking Back the DNS. "Most new domain names are malicious." From 2010, but unfortunately still relevant. (via)
Anecdote generator: Dwarf Fortress’s agents already sparking fun tales
Terminal Madness (A 1980 Documentary About Personal Computers). Video. (via)
Gitlabs going post-cloud with Metal
Colossal Genius: Tutte, Flowers, and a Bad Imitation of Turing (via)
v7x86 UNIX. (via)
exfiltration via request timing, exfiltration via receive timing
An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways (via)
17 Unix tricks for a happy 2017. Assumes bash but don't hold that against it.
Superintelligence (via)

Your unrelated game link of the week: Lode Runner. The whole thing in HTML5 as far as I can tell. (via) Your unrelated video of the week: AAAAAAAAAAAA

Merry almost Christmas!

OpenSSH 7.4 released. (via)
Configuring the FreeBSD automounter. I think this applies to DragonFly too. Thanks, Michael Wilson.
AsiaBSDCon 2017 paper proposals are I assume due by end of year, just like last year, though the 2017 AsiaBSDCon site does not appear to be up as I type this.
BSD Magazine has lessons 4 and 5 of FreeBSD and Chef up now.
Security and BSD tools (via)
Version SAT. Talks about package management in general - and what do you know, pkg seems to be the most advanced tool in this case. (via)
Bringing the scheduler saga to the finishing line
openbsd changes of note 4
OpenBSD laptops
Replacing Cisco ASA with PFSense. I did it, I ain't sad.
Using ZFS to Fight Data Rot by Kevin McAleer

Well, now there's a song stuck in your head if you are me. Anyway, BSDNow 173 has no interview but the usual news, plus some older UNIX history anecdotes I wish I had found first.

Don't get too excited yet - clang import hasn't happened. However, I want to draw attention to Rimvydas Jasinskas' changes to alternate compiler handling, which would be for importing clang. His commit message goes into some of the rather thorny problems of transitioning between compilers and releases.

There's been some updates to the AHCI driver. Matthew Dillon outlined the changes, with the biggest one being support for FIS Based Switching. FBS is the ability to send simultaneous streams of data to and from multiple drives on a port multiplier. Support for it is rare and quirky, but it should significantly improve throughput on a compatible port multipler. Read his writeup for details, including on how to back up your kernel.

Here's your reminder: SemiBUG meets tomorrow, for any BSD users in the Detroit / Michigan area.

Typed early while contractors drill holes in my house.

VimWiki – A personal wiki for Vim (via)
RFC 7764 – Guidance on Markdown. Let's take a moment to appreciate how successful Markdown has been, without anything pushing it but innate utility. If you don't agree, try SGML for a while. (via)
Related: note that code out of that RFC is considered BSD licensed? I don't know if that's the case for all RFCs, but it's a 'license win' in any case.
Also related: CommonMark.
Where does 9600 bps come from? (via)
Defending Accounts Against Common Attacks. Not using 2-factor auth seems to be a common theme in the various email disclosure events out there. (via)
Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, and its discussion.
EMPs and electronics.
Unix tip: Cleaning up your files
Dubious security vulnerability: Discovering the salt
Another Git catastrophe cleaned up

Your unrelated link of the week: arguments over bread terminology.

Much better this week; I actually have links.

Man, ‘splained: 40-Plus Years of Man Page History. Doesn't mention it, but BSD is the place for original, and good, man pages. (via)
"What's stopping someone from writing a Cisco CLI shell for Linux or BSD?"
who even calls link_ntoa? Multiple BSDs had this issue.
Booting Android-x86 under FreeBSD bhyve (Work in progress) (via)
New stable version: HardenedBSD-stable 10-STABLE v46.18 (via)
"TIL the soviets made their own BSD" (via)
"Which BSD is good for me?"
OPNsense 16.7.11 released, OPNsense 17.1-BETA
LibreSSL documentation status report
watt time is left
openbsd changes of note 3
Disk I/O Performance Under Filesystem Journaling on FreeBSD 10.3
LISA 2016 Recap. From a BSD vendor point of view.
OpenBSD 6.0 VPN Endpoint for iOS and OSX (via)
802.11n MIMO support in OpenBSD -current (via)

BSDNow 172 has an interview with Rod Grimes, the usual news roundup, plus a feature on a tool called smenu.

You know about swapcache(8), the DragonFly-specific trick of caching disk data on an small SSD, meaning you get mostly the speed benefits of an SSD while still using a cheaper, slower drive? Whether you did or didn't, Matthew Dillon's updated the documentation for it to account for recent hardware changes.

I mention this because people don't realize there's a console screensaver: 'vidcontrol -t XX' will blank the console after XX seconds of inactivity. This way you aren't lighting up your server closet with a terminal screen, forever.

The post-holiday rush of links has slowed.

Getting smarter and faster with vi
Escape key alternatives in Vim (via)
Actually using ed (via)
Advent calendars: Advent of Code, Perl Advent 2016, QEMUAdvent, SysAdvent, and more. (via and via)
Eaten by a Grue: podcast on Infocom games, text adventures and interactive fiction (via)
History of the Click of Death
FreeDOS, still going
How to get a C64 on WiFi and start BBSing again (via)
NeTV2 FPGA Reference Design. Read the last paragraph and get irritated.

I have no BSD-themed links this week. Sorry! It's been hectic. We return to normal tomorrow.