April 2017 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2017/04/302017/04/27

Lazy Reading for 2017/04/30

April over already?

Adventure Games and Eigenvalues. (via)
The fish shell is awesome. (via)
How SSH got port number 22. (via)
The web’s best hidden gems.
The real reason why UNIX commands are short.
The History of Computer RPGs. (via)
The beauty of links on Unix servers. Many don’t understand hard links.
Programming thought experiment. Anything that works its way up to Forth is definitely starting from scratch.
Three horrible Internet trends. “Rent-seeking” is the correct phrase. (via)
How Game Titles Work. Note that it’s part 1 of several. (via)
Glob Matching Can Be Simple And Fast Too.
Early Nintendo programmer worked without a keyboard. (via)
Bug in monitor.

2017/04/292017/04/27

In Other BSDs for 2017/04/29

It’s long article title week!

A PDF of the IPv6 handout, from the April SemiBUG meeting, is available.
Adventures in Time, part 1: Interfacing an Oven Controlled Crystal Oscillator to a Computer Running NetBSD. (via)
Replace the RC4 algorithm for generating in-kernel secure random numbers with Chacha20. (via)
9 lessons from 25 years of Linux kernel development. None of those lessons are specific to Linux; they apply to all the BSDs, for instance. (via)
pfsense for a small ISP in both router and firewall settings?
Rate your favorite BSD on…
(finally) investigating how to get dynamic WDS (DWDS) working in FreeBSD!
OPNsense 17.1.5 released.
The many ways of running firefox on OpenBSD.
Michael W. Lucas’s Penguicon 2017 Schedule.
iXsystems TrueNAS Certified with Veeam Backup.
OpenBSD 6.1 Song Released.

2017/04/28

Something for Apple dual-GPU users

Francois Tigeot has brought in the ‘apple_gmux’ driver. If you have a Macbook with both Intel and NVIDIA video hardware installed, this driver lets you switch to the Intel hardware, and I assume take advantage of DragonFly’s accelerated i915 driver.

2017/04/27

BSDNow 191: I Know 64 & A Bunch More

This week’s BSDNow covers a number of FreeBSD developments, Illumos network work, and an interesting in-depth discussion of the reasoning behind the transition from PC-BSD to TrueOS.

2017/04/26

DragonFly and bhyve

If you are using bhyve, and you want DragonFly on there as a ‘guest’ (not sure if that’s the right term), there’s a template available. (via)

2017/04/25

Minor module modifications

For those of you who build custom kernels, the if_sl, if_ppp, and if_faith devices are now built as modules, not in the kernel. This means you can remove references to them in your custom kernel config – if you have one.

2017/04/24

ASLR, PIE, NX, and other capital letters

As part of a larger conversation about security measures, NX bit capability was added to DragonFly. You can turn it on or off, and it’s off by default so it doesn’t cause any surprises. As the first link in this post points out, your installed third-party software is more of a security issue than processor features, in any case.

2017/04/232017/04/21

Lazy Reading for 2017/04/23

Eclectic! I cover everything this week: computer history, modern pessimistic computing, odd hardware, strange software stories, comics, and tea.

Tmux and Vim – better together. (via)
Free Fonts Are Getting Better, But What Does That Mean? Destruction of value!
vuln disclosure and risk equilibrium.
How Google eats a business whole. Google’s Featured Snippets are often not wrong but also not right.
Build a Better Monster. (via)
Binary Keyboard.
That time a customer reported an error in the map used by Flight Simulator.
Ireland and England’s ‘best’ teas, reviewed by an American.
“There are only 3 forms of bit storage, historically.” (via)
Operating In Obscurity. QNX, OS/2, and others.

Your sorta-a-comics-link of the week: Liartown USA, the book.

2017/04/222017/10/08

In Other BSDs for 2017/04/22

Several “how to do this” items this week, which I like.

2017/04/202017/04/20

BSDNow 190: The Moore You Know

This week’s BSDNow talks about a lot of OpenBSD news, gets into UNIX history, and interviews Kris Moore about FreeNAS/TrueNAS/TrueOS/etc.

2017/04/19

machdep.cpu_idle_hlt reminder

In my ongoing quest to actually catch up to all the DragonFly commits recently, here’s a recent update to machdep.cpu_idle_hlt. Set this to affect power usage. I’m linking to this list of the different settings because, like RAID levels, nobody can or should remember every one.

2017/04/172017/04/14

KnoxBUG tonight: Advanced BASH Scripting

If you are nearby, KnoxBUG is having a presentation from Caleb Cooper tomorrow night, titled “Advanced BASH Scripting“.

2017/04/172017/03/02

“IPv6 for the Vaguely Aware” at SemiBUG

I like it just for the title: Josh Grosse is presenting about IPv6 at the SemiBUG meeting scheduled for tomorrow. Go, if you are near.

2017/04/162017/04/15

Lazy Reading for 2017/04/16

A little heavy on the history this week. And no tea!

Commodore 64: For the Love of a Machine. (via)
Fun at the UNIX Terminal Part 1.
Exploring 3-Move – A LambdaMOO inspired environment. More places named in the source link comments.
A 1986 bulletin board system has brought the old Web back to life in 2017. (via)
A link at the same place brought me to the Telnet BBS Guide.
Hottest Editors.
Upgrading a Vectrex to 32 Bits. (via)
Taming Undefined Behavior in LLVM.
The secrets of password aging on Unix systems.
on the title of “git commit murder”
Dungeonfs: A FUSE filesystem and dungeon crawling adventure game engine

Your unrelated food link of the week: Eating In Translation. This person seeks out new places, eats there, and makes notes, and has been doing it for more than a decade. The result is the most in-depth informal food guide I’ve ever seen. It’s NYC focused, but not exclusively.

2017/04/152017/04/14

In Other BSDs for 2017/04/15

All done at the last minute!

OpenBSD imports new strstr() implementation from musl libc by Rich Felker. (via)
FreeNAS Corral is being relegated to “technology preview” status (via and via)
Free OSCON 2017 tickets from the FreeBSD Foundation.
The next KnoxBUG meeting on April 18th is “Caleb Cooper: Advanced BASH Scripting“. I’ll have a reminder.
1.3.0 Development Preview: New icon themes. (Lumina, via)
Linux user looking to try out BSD.
Media Server.
OpenBSD 6.1 Released.
openbsd changes of note 620.
Getting OpenBSD running on Raspberry Pi 3.
Update on NetBSD and Google’s Summer of Code 2017: student application period is over, ranking is in progress.
Let’s get meta: an interview with me (hubertf) about my NetBSD blog.

2017/04/13

BSDNow 189: Codified Summer

BSDNow 189 has a nice roundup of BSD projects in Google Summer of Code, along with an interview of Wendell of Level1Techs.com.

2017/04/13

HAMMER version 7

Continuing my catchup on recent commits, there’s now a ‘version 7’ internal to HAMMER 1. It changes the CRC code to a faster version, but since this instruction isn’t used (yet), there’s no real world impact. Remember this for next time you want to run ‘hammer version-upgrade’.

2017/04/12

Mount and HAMMER2 labels

If you’re mounting a HAMMER2 filesystem, you can refer to it by label instead of by device.

No, it’s not ready for use yet and I don’t have a date other than “when it’s done”, to preanswer the next questions.

2017/04/10

Hammer and PFS notes

There was some discussion about using Hammer (1) and NFS and general setup on the users@ mailing list. I’m linking to the start of the thread because there’s some useful hints in there.

2017/04/092017/04/07

Lazy Reading for 2017/04/09

A slightly UK-ish tilt this week, by accident of course.