April 2018 – DragonFly BSD Digest

There's a social meeting for KnoxBUG tonight - go, if you are near.

No accidental theme this week.

Mermaid: Markdown-like generation of diagrams and flowcharts from text. (via)
Quarterstaff: The Infamous Puzzle and Quarterstaff: “Deathbots” vs. “Ordinary living things”.
Early days: the VIC-20 Programmer's Reference Guide. (via)
Encrypted Gopher. (via)
SSH Client Configuration Tricks. (via)
Computer historian job opening at the National Museum of American History. (via)
The Game of Everything, Part 7: Civilization and Government I (Despotism, Monarchy, and the Republic).
Flickr Commons, hopefully surviving the smugmug acquisition. (via)
Xenographics: Weird but (sometimes) useful charts. (via)

Some nice tech explanations this week.

OpenBSD on my fanless desktop computer. Read to find out more about the RUNBSD stickers. (via)
OpenBSD Community Goes Gold for 2018!
Hardware accelerated AES/HMAC-SHA on octeons.
Caddy Web Server on FreeBSD.
free command for OpenBSD. I'd love to see a deep dive into the various BSD *stat commands. (via)
Call for Papers | EuroBSDcon 2018. (via)
Towards Secure System Graphics: Arcan and OpenBSD. (via)
NetBSD 8.0RC1 is out.
Running my own git server. On OpenBSD. (via)
Perl @INC – customizing it for FreeBSD.

I did not encounter this at all, but if you did: there was an issue in DragonFly around the time of the 5.2 release where device duplication would lead to a machine locking up at boot. It's fixed.

BSDNow episode 243 has no interview but a bunch of release news. I like seeing a note from Dag-Erling Smørgrav about 2 decades as a committer. I also consider aarch64 support in NetBSD interesting.

The short answer: if you have an Areca card (in this case, a model 1222) and multi-terabyte drives, they will work on DragonFly.

IPSEC hasn't been maintained in basically forever in DragonFly, so it's been removed. It was only still mentioned in the VKERNEL configs, so if you have a custom VKERNEL config file, remove any mention of IPSEC, IPSEC_ESP, or IPSEC_DEBUG. Otherwise, nothing to worry about.

Reduce, the "second oldest computer algebra system", has been ported to DragonFly (and there's work on other BSDs). The post about this has lots of links to more information; if you're a Maple or Mathematica user, this will definitely interest you.

Accidental theme this week... video games, though not strongly.

Eaten by a Grue, the Infocom podcast. There's a lot to listen to here. (thanks, swildner)
Urbigenous Library. There's a lot to read here.
Modern-Day BBSing on an Epson CP/M-based Laptop from 1984. (via)
Jengo, a new point-and-click game.
Dwarf Fortress dwarves to be given memories, dev shows no remorse.
Home automation notes, not really BSD-related.
The Game of Everything, Part 6: Civilization and Religion.
"Why is the kernel community replacing iptables with BPF?" On Linux, where reinventing wheels in the system is a constant. (via)
Pinebook: An Affordable 64-bit ARM based Open Source Notebook. Linked for the source link commentary, not for the selling page.
Weekly Command: going over Git history with tig. (via)
Zulip, an open source team chat. (i.e. Slack and Teams category) (via)
What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Data Visualization. (via)

Opinion time: The Reddit / Hacker News forums have reached the anything/everything point where there's no longer a focus. Lobste.rs is worth visiting, though, for BSD content and in general.

MAP_STACK Stack Register Checking Committed to -current.
Nextcloud 13 on FreeBSD. (via)
Run OpenBSD on your web server. (via)
Introduction to HardenedBSD World. (via)
MirBSD Korn Shell on Jehanne. (via)
Distributed Object Storage with Minio on FreeBSD. (via)
Open vSwitch Overview.
How to do math on the Linux command line. Or BSD.
IKEV2 EAP User name/Password client on *BSD.
Taylor Campbell, new to netbsd-core.
[on sale] Bioware, FTL, System Shock, and more. (OpenBSD Gaming, though it may extend to other BSDs.)
BSD Magazine wants article feedback.
OpenBSD router/firewall?

BSDNow 242 has no interview and the normal wide range of topics: TrueOS, F-Stack, jails, SmartOS, and most interesting to me, open source business model development with iXSystems.

A 'dirty' vnode is a disk data reference that has changed but hasn't yet been committed to disk. This pair of commits adds a syncing threshold, useful for anyone with slower disk resources. Remember, disks lie.

I like code that travels through multiple BSDs.

There's a plugin for pkg, called pkg-provides, which will tell you what package(s) contain the filename you provide - installed or not. I didn't even know pkg had a plugin system. Anyway, it works on DragonFly, as the author notes.

No theme grew this week.

Conserve the Sound, "vanishing and endangered sounds". (via)
Why does Twitter allow third-party clients? Another walled garden approach winding to its end stage.
z, a tool for navigating by regex. Odd, but powerful. (via)
Ikea-style instructions for programming algorithms. Not sure if this makes them clearer, or not. (via)
Seashells, piping CLI output to the web in realtime. (via)
Why does"=" mean assignment? (via)
The Game of Everything, Part 5: Civilization and War.
Why SQLite Does Not Use Git. (via)
XScreenSaver 5.39 is out. New hacks!
The NES homebrew scene.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Belfry WebComics Index. Very 90s. (via I lost it, sorry)

Totally last-minute summary, but I'm hitting every BSD category.

Godot running on OpenBSD, though I didn't know what Godot was.
Finding what you’re looking for on Linux. BSD too. I link it because I always forget arguments to find(1).
OPNsense 18.1.6 released.
New M-Series storage devices from iXSystems.
How to write ATF tests for NetBSD. (via)
FreeBSD Desktop - Part 2 - Install. (via)
Using FreeBSD Text Dumps. (via)
Transparent network audio with mpd & sndiod. (via)
Michael W. Lucas's Penguicon 2018 Schedule. Several BSD presentations.
pkg vs. underlying OS upgrades.
The BSDCan 2018 schedule is posted.

This week's BSDNow interviews Kevin Bowling of Greenlight Networks, plus lots of filesystem conversation.

I haven't been able to say this in a while, but: I like cross-pollination.

For anyone wanting to try out ipfw3, there's now a rc script. Make sure to set up a rules file, or you'll kill all incoming traffic.

DragonFly 5.2.0 has been released. Spectre/Meltdown mitigations are in there, along with improvements for HAMMER2, accelerated video, and ipfw. My users@ post has the details on upgrading, as does the release notes.