July 2021 – DragonFly BSD Digest

No mini-theme, but I was also 'done' early.

Apparently a commit that I can't find ("e8de9e9"?) disabled acceleration for R5 240 Radeon cards, but causes an error for R7 models. If you've got an R5 and you want accelerated video, try taking it out - assuming it's not working already. Any other Radeon model, it may not make a difference. Update: Pierre Alain-TORET found the correct commit.

This week's BSD Now talks about some pro-BSD ideas, which may or may not include the idea of Linux with a BSD userland. I find it slightly upsetting.

If you think about the name, you'll realize what it does: libpasswdqc(8) does quality checks on passwords via PAM, and now it's in DragonFly.

The headline says almost everything, in this case. There's a HOWTO for DragonFly NVMM which should get most of what you want to do, and I'm sure it will be updated.

No mini-theme this week.

This bizarre bit of merchandise is a visible sign: shirts are being autoproduced with robots and text recognition these days.
Using Keybow to build custom keyboard functions.
PiStorm - Keeping the Amiga alive. An emulated hardware CPU. I struggle to describe this; it's blurring the line between hardware and software. (via)
50 Years of Text Games: 1996: So Far.
The Print Shop Club. Probably of interest if you actually used the original software. (via)
Embedded soap usage transmitters. Interesting for the conditions - no power, lots of moisture. Also oddly orwellian. (via)
The Untold Story of SQLite With Richard Hipp. (via)
Anatomy of the EICAR Antivirus Test File.
A History of Regular Expressions and Artificial Intelligence. No, wait, this is interesting. Come back!
Fontshare. Free fonts that don't suck. (via)
Connecting a Real IBM 3270 Terminal to an Emulated Mainframe with OEC. (via)
SQL LIMIT versus FETCH FIRST ROWS. I did not know this.
Simple scripts I made over time. I like the latency meter.
Building a Curve25519 Hardware Accelerator. In-depth.

The one good use of social media: jokes on an obscure theme. (via)

No theme this week; just catching up with all the links I didn't get to last week.

Valuable News – 2021/07/19.
VirtualBox with FreeBSD + KDE. VM-to-desktop.
Also VirtualBox guest additions in FreeBSD for that previous link.
Managing Boot Environments. (ZFS)
FreeBSD TCP Performance System Controls.
FreeBSD KGDB support in LLDB. A description of the work to do, not the end result.
A Look at Profiling: FreeBSD Sort.
dhcpleased(8) and resolvd(8) enabled in base, replacing dhclient(8). I am going to read that as "dhc pleased" no matter what I do.
Minecraft on BSD notes.
“$ git sync murder” is out, so: how many books have I written? The answer is via SNMP, believe it or not. (And includes some BSD volumes so I link it here.)
My Fanless OpenBSD Desktop. Notable for the case, and for linking to a USB Thinkpad keyboard, something I've always wanted.
Making two Unix permissions mistakes in one.

Here's something I just learned: If you are running dma(8), /etc/dma.conf will contain MAILNAME. If your email server is somewhere else, but you set MAILNAME as your domain - dma will deliver locally. I had /etc/dma.conf set with MAILNAME shiningsilence.com - so dma kept delivering overnight periodic results to root, which was aliased to justin@shiningsilence.com in /etc/mail/aliases and so it was delivered to 'justin' locally on the machine. Changing MAILNAME to www.shiningsilence.com - the host you are reading right now - fixed the problem. Now, whether this was an automatically set config or something I misconfigured some years ago... I can't tell.

This week's BSD Now covers different topics - you may think from the headline it's a "tips and tricks" link, but no, it's about confidential info.

Aaron LI's added NVMM, hardware acceleration for virtual machines, to DragonFly. The version of qemu in dports is not set up to support this, yet. Until then, you can download a prebuilt version. Since NVMM originated on NetBSD, the NetBSD documentation page for it describes how to use it quite well. There's a man page in DragonFly for it too, of course. There's even basic machines to try.

ChiBUG meeting is at 6 PM at the normal place, which means you should go if you are near, and vaccinated.

boot and libstand directories are moved to src/stand/boot on DragonFly. This won't affect most people, as you'll upgrade and build the same way as always, but if you were specifically looking for it in the old locations of sys/boot and lib/libstand, you'd be surprised.

RPG subtheme this week.

MICROS~1 launches automated license-laundering system. Incendiary.
The Internet Is Rotting. (via)
Architecture of LISP Machines. (via)
The Thermal Printer Project: How I Print Events.
Probably Bad RPG ideas. (via)
Full Throttle, a deep dive into the Lucasfilm game.
808 Cube. (via)
The Greatest Regex Trick Ever. (via)
Vim is actually worth it. (via)
Using IceWM and a Raspberry Pi as my main PC, sharing my theme, config and some tips and tricks. (via)
Uxn is a portable 8-bit virtual computer. Specifically designed to survive platform death, which is a new idea to me. (via)
Entish is a declarative Datalog-like language implemented in Typescript. Language and RPGs, truly together at last. (via)
Food for thought concerning MegaDungeons.
The tiny gang of web outfits that don’t compete on their spying abilities. Bookmark these.

More BUG meetings are happening, which is great.

Next ChiBUG meeting: in person, July 20th. I'll post a reminder.
The slides from the most recent NYCBUG meeting.
The historical significance of DEC and the PDP-7, -8, -11 & VAX. The article itself is not about BSD, specifically, but some of the comments at the source link are.
A Glimpse of the Canon object.station 41. A NeXT iteration I didn't know about. (via)
Meet the Summer 2021 [FreeBSD] Foundation Interns.
Status of Online Conference Software on FreeBSD.
Valuable News – 2021/07/05 and 2021/07/12.
Using youtube-dl on FreeBSD. Or any BSD, probably.
Repairing Akonadi on FreeBSD.
Filtering spam using Rspamd and OpenSMTPD on OpenBSD.
NetBSD/Desktop: Scalable Workstation Systems. Old but interesting. (via)
[Semibug] RAID 0 or 1 for OpenBSD. Follow the thread for more info.
Total Mastery, the bundle. Includes multiple FreeBSD Mastery books.

I didn't know about this, but there's a daily/weekly/monthly/security_show_badconfig option in periodic.conf that is now defaulting to "yes" in DragonFly. This I assume means you'll get the output of erroring periodic scripts sent to you. Useful, especially if you find out about an error you hadn't seen before.

This week's BSD Now goes into structure and progress, judging from the titles on display. Also, I did not link last week's "410: OpenBSD Consumer Gateway" because I was on the road - look at it too if you haven't yet.

covid(1), the program, from NetBSD and now in DragonFly.

ndis(4) is removed from DragonFly; it's probably been years since it was applicable to any hardware. I don't think it will affect anyone - but it's an interesting tool from a historical perspective; for a while it was possible to use Windows XP drivers to create a BSD network driver, effectively.

Many, many times over the years I have tried answering problems with "... and maybe something's wrong with the RAM?", which is always possible but not always probable. For once, it's really what happened in this story of strange HAMMER2 errors.

Mini-theme: maintenance.

Rethinking Repair. (PDF, via)
Maintenance and Care. Same topic, but with interesting pictures. (also via)
Ise Jingu and the pyramid of enabling technologies. About process knowledge.
AnyDice, dice probability calculator. (via)
PAGNIs: Probably Are Gonna Need Its.
50 Years of Text Games: Intermission. A little behind-the-scenes.
Ethernet network cables can go bad over time, with odd symptoms.
The Age of Software: An introduction.
New Old Game: Gravi-o-roids!
Research First.
Bonkers app compatibility work. (via)
DMGPlus. Runs Doom?
Hardware Memory Models.