Justin Sherrill – DragonFly BSD Digest

2019/04/212019/04/19

Lazy Reading for 2019/04/21

It’s bizarre links week this week. Well, more than usual, I mean.

The Infocom dump, via multiple places.
Related: What is ZIL anyway?
Techbros ruin eating, again.
The Very Mathematical History of a Perfect Color Combination. I’ve mentioned Solarized before. (via)
A fully reversible USB cable. (via)
Brix System, life size LEGOs. (via)
Useful/curious datasets. (also via)
Cut / Fold Templates. Neat paper, neat interface, neat animations. (via)
Quake is for everyone. (via)
A look at IBM S/360 core memory: In the 1960s, 128 kilobytes weighed 610 pounds.
One reason ed(1) was a good editor back in the days of V7 Unix.
The Failure of the Great Tip-Free Restaurant Experiment. Linked because of the eternal truth of that last paragraph.
Storage Performance Reference Guide: Interconnect Maximum Effective Data Rates. BSD site bit not BSD-related.
Dwarf Fortress diary: The Basement Of Curiosity episode eight – All Hail the War Mayor.
Dwarf Fortress diary: The Basement Of Curiosity episode nine – Titanfall.
Efficiency Machines: The Operating System Recontextualized. It’s about a game.
ArchiveBox. The open source self-hosted web archive. (via)
Avoiding the gravity well of webbiness in gopher. (via)
Retro web, simple web, and alternatives to the web. (via)
I like the whole “computers-in-wood” asthetic [sic].
Avalanche Noise Generator Notes.

2019/04/202019/04/19

In Other BSDs for 2019/04/20

Nicely mixed topics this week.

It’s several years old, but worth viewing: .ike’s presentation of “Shell Fu” from NYCBUG, as video. Also: May event speaker needed. (via)
The FreeBSD-12 support model.
“OpenVMS vs. Unix” (antagonists or sisters?).
Previous link via Nixers Newsletter 121.
Back in the Day: UNIX, Minix and Linux. The author rewrote wump(6) for 4.3 BSD.
Looking for a worm and encrypted storage solution. FreeNAS + Greentec.
OpenSSH 8.0 released. (via)
Create a dedicated user for ssh tunneling only. OpenBSD as the example platform.
Deploying munin-node with drist. Probably could be done on any BSD.
Valuable News – 2019/04/15.
Next Polish BSD user group meeting: April 25th. I’ll post a reminder.
Moving your IMAP server to a third party: FastMail. FastMail is a mail host I’ve heard recommendations for multiple times.
GhostBSD 19.04 Now Available. (via)
docbook2mdoc-1.0.0 released.
t2k19 Hackathon Report: On rsync, ssh, and ports cruft.
t2k19 Hackathon Report: unwinding in Taipei.
Setting up a new Dovecot server on FreeBSD with an OSX mail.app client.
Announcing the pkgsrc-2019Q1 release.
BSD Link Roundup 4.12.
battery consuming battery software.

2019/04/19

HAMMER2 snapshots, a story

It’s always helpful to see other people’s questions and answers; in this case it’s a conversation about HAMMER2 snapshots and how to manage them. (Follow the thread)

2019/04/18

BSD Now 294: The SSH Tarpit

BSD Now 294 is up, with (among other things) a link to the well-named Endlessh.

2019/04/172019/04/16

DragonFly on a terminal, for fun.

I managed to find an ancient Wyse-185 terminal at my workplace today, left in the corner of the server room. For entertainment purposes only, I booted DragonFly in VirtualBox and attached the physical terminal to the physical serial port on my Windows laptop docking station, mapped through to that virtual machine.

Rather dirty WYSE-185 terminal displaying a DragonFly terminal prompt.

I have already discovered that the character output will often pause until the keyboard is used, which may be a settings issue. Mash the keyboard enough and VirtualBox dies. I’d use different emulation but Hyper-V doesn’t support serial and Qemu I haven’t figured out.

It’s entertaining, though I am not sure what I will do, other than maybe run GRDC once I figure out the reason for output pausing.

2019/04/16

HAMMER2 fix in release

The aforementioned HAMMER2 fix is now in 5.4. You can update using the normal make buildworld/make buildkernel process to get it in place. I plan to roll a 5.4.2 release this weekend.

2019/04/15

Shutting up ACPI

If you want to hear nothing at all from ACPI, no matter what, set debug.acpi.silence_all to 1. In related news, DragonFly has just updated to Intel’s ACPICA version 20190329.

2019/04/142019/04/12

Lazy Reading for 2019/04/14

I hope you have some time on your hands today. There are hours of reading and watching linked below.

Before Adventure, Part 3: Caves (1973), Before Adventure, Part 4: Hunt the Wumpus (1973), and Before Adventure, Part 5: Wumpus 2 and 3.
The ultimate guide to analog control panels in sci-fi movies. (via)
Buster Keaton: Anarchitect. Linked because the use of animated gifs to illustrate a silent movie career works astonishingly well. (via multiple places)
How to Read More.
The Trove, possibly every RPG print volume ever? (via)
Mattel’s Dungeons and Dragons Computer Labyrinth. (via)
The Wu Tang Collection, all crazy older kung fu movies. (also via)
Raster CRT Typography (According to DEC). (thanks, Ben Collver)
Screen Share Disasters. I tell people, always close other apps when presenting. (via)
Some followups to the GPS rollover that happened last week. (via)
Leap-years and leap-seconds. Not only is time not constant, its rate of change is not constant – or predictable! (also via)
Trek Adventure, 1980.
Iconic consoles of the IBM System/360 mainframes, 55 years old. I like the pictures.
The 1973 Bourne shell in Unix version 5 was only 858 lines of C. I like the pictures here too.

Your unrelated Kickstarter of the week: Lancer, an RPG.

2019/04/132019/04/13

In Other BSDs for 2019/04/13

Straight open tab dump, again!

FreeBSD ARM64 AMIs are now available for Amazon EC2. (via)
Ubiquiti EdgeRouter and OpenBSD.
Small NAS questions. Follow the thread; there’s many suggestions.
Challenge accepted: OpenBSD on a laptop. (via)
Encrypted (LUKS) HAMMER1 master/slave NFS fileserver : 9 months later.
[packages] libreoffice and password-protected .od* files. Not strictly BSD but could surprise someone.
t2k19 Hackathon Report: Putting the hack(6) in hackathon, and other stories.
t2k19 Hackathon Report: Stefan Sperling on 802.11? progress, suspend/resume and more.
t2k19 Hackathon Report: Ken Westerback on dhclient, disklabel, and more.
Our plan for handling TRIM’ing our ZFS fileserver SSDs.
Playing Slay the Spire on OpenBSD.
From Zero to NVMM.
Introducing funlinkat.
Valuable News – 2019/04/08.
~~OPNsense 19.1.5 released~~ no wait OPNsense 19.1.6 released.
April Plugins Update.
Run S3 Object Storage on FreeNAS and TrueNAS.
“FreeBSD Mastery: Jails” Print Sponsor Gifts Threaten to Topple. The book is available to order now.
NOWBSD.

A late update: BSDCan 2019 registration, plus an update.

2019/04/12

HAMMER2 corruption bug and fix

It’s possible to have data corrupted on a HAMMER2 volume during a specific combination of a bulkfree operation and a lot of writing to disk. Matthew Dillon has a potential fix already. As he announced, it’s scheduled to go into 5.4 this weekend. It’s a rare bug, but if you want to check for it, look for CHECK FAIL entries in /var/log/messages.

And because every cloud has a silver lining: some not-yet-quantified performance improvements.

2019/04/11

BSD Now 293: Booking Jails

BSD Now 293 has an interview with Michael W. Lucas on his newest book in the BSD Mastery series: BSD Mastery: Jails. It’s available to purchase now.

2019/04/09

Need a new top

top(1) is no longer in DragonFly contrib/ directory, for a number of reasons. It’s still present in the system, of course, and I think needs to have someone re-add as a vendor branch – a relatively easy project for a volunteer, hint hint.

2019/04/08

Callout debugging in DragonFly

There’s some code changes for callout, where the actual lines of code that trigger it are stored in the callout structure. It’s a little thing, but it’s a big thing if you need it.

2019/04/072019/04/06

Lazy Reading for 2019/04/07

Some old-school RPG and miniatures links mixed in this week.

Modder Superior: The many free descendants of Doom.
Opinion: We Built A Broken Internet. Now We Need To Burn It To The Ground. Complicated systems replicate the social structure of the groups that build them. (via)
OpenTTD Compiled to WebAssembly. (via)
Ampere EMAG 64bit Arm Workstation. I don’t know if this is particularly good; I just like the growth in the ecosystem. (via)
Tinytetris – 80 x 23 Terminal Tetris. (via)
Archives for IT; UK computer history. (via)
The National Security Agency technical journal Cryptologs. (via)
93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs. (via)
Rustic Fantasy – With a Hey Nonny No. Linked for the further reading suggestions within the text.
Rolling Up Some Inspiration: An RPG Conversation with Kieron Gillen & Tim Se.
Edible Games Book: about to print.
The wait is over. 28 is here. Minatures modification. (via)
Darklands.

Your unrelated music of the week: Principleasure: I. Eighties sound, but modernized.

2019/04/062019/04/05

In Other BSDs for 2019/04/06

Lots of BUG news this week; thank you all for the leads on groups to watch.

Talking Jails at Semibug, 9 April 2019. Note the meeting has been moved up a week.
“FreeBSD Mastery: Jails” and a new novella.
April 9th Meetup. ChiBUG.
Rusted ravens: Ravenports march 2019 status update. There’s some DragonFly stuff in there I haven’t had a chance to link to.
How to use NetBSD on a Raspberry Pi. (via)
Serenity: x86 Unix-like operating system for IBM PC-compatibles. Almost UNIX, almost BSD. (via)
Before Unix: An Early History of Timesharing Systems. Influences on BSD.(via)
OpenRA imported – game engine recreation for RTS games of the Command & Conquer family. (via)
Project Trident 18.12-U8 Available. (via)
Removing PF. (via)
Silent Fanless FreeBSD Server – Redundant Backup. (via)
LLDB/LLVM report for March 2019. NetBSD.
Continuation of signal semantics improvements. NetBSD.
iked curve25519 group number change. OpenBSD.
Valuable News – 2019/04/01.
Sega Dreamcast Running NetBSD. (via)
UNIX and BSD Discord/Matrix Servers.
BSD Router Project 1.92 is now available. (via)

2019/04/042019/04/04

BSD Now 292: AsiaBSDCon 2019

BSD Now 292 has a nice recap from attending AsiaBSDCon 2019, along with the normal news roundup. I advise everyone to go to a BSD convention if possible; they are always fun.

2019/04/03

‘gpt show’ improvements

The show subcommand for gpt(8) has had some improvements including a way to connect it to the device UUID; I link to it cause depending on the age of your machine, you may have never even needed to use gpt yet.

2019/04/032019/03/29

NYCBUG tonight: Verification As Code of Infrastructure As Code

“Verification As Code of Infrastructure As Code” is being presented tonight at 6:45 PM at NYCBUG by Raul Cuza. Go, if you are near.

2019/04/02

ixgbe(4) updates

If you are so lucky as to have an ixgbe(4) card, the version 3.3.6 driver (from Intel) are in DragonFly.

Note that I’ve managed to catch up to March commits! There’s been a lot.

2019/04/01

Unrelated: GPS Rollover soon

Unrelated to BSD: GPS rollover is happening a few days from now. This affects most people very little, and a few people a lot, but I mention it also to make you think about the systems that underpin our technology.