I should have linked this with yesterday’s post: Sepherosa Ziehau put together some extended benchmarks on his changes between DragonFly 4.8 and 5.0, and their effects on latency using nginx to serve a lot of requests.
An optimization that applies to you only if you are on DragonFly, running nginx, and dealing with many requests: there’s a sysctl that specifically increases available sockets, which will decrease latency; Sepherosa Ziehau’s commit message gives stats.
Some overflow, some new.
- books chapter thirteen, books chapter fourteen
- Why I’m Using Bitmarks on my Products.
- The 68000 Wars, Part 5: The Age of Multimedia.
- Star Control 2 creators finally making sequel. Don’t forget the original game is effectively free and available.
- Comprehensive Guide about Vim. (via)
- Gameboy hello world. (via)
- Connector Alignment Chart.
- Inside the vintage Xerox Alto’s display, a tiny lightbulb keeps it working. (via)
- The PorPor Books Blog: SF and Fantasy Books 1968 – 1988.
- Termination of Transfer tool. (via)
- Web Audio Modem. (via)
- Retro Pi Cases. Put a Pi in a teeny Amiga 500. (via)
- Technology that is perfect despite being obsolete? (via)
Your unrelated shirt design of the week: Mickey Mouth.
Cobbled together Friday night because my new job oddly has less hours of work but less time to screw around. That’s for the best.
- OpenBSD Jumpstart. (via)
- dtrace and ZFS update (for NetBSD, via)
- syspatch(8) Binary Updates Now for the Latest Release Only.
- Monitoring OpenBSD router.
- Sneaking in two threads (wait, more) about the DragonFly 5 release.
- FreeBSD 11.0 EOL.
- Why did OpenBSD silently release a patch before the embargo? Scroll to the end of the link for this item. Here’s the explanation. (via)
- FreeBSD: Building software from ports (2/2).
- Syspatch for one release only. (via)
This week’s BSDNow has David Carlier of Afilias interviewed, plus a EuroBSDCon travel report and more.
SSH in DragonFly 5, by default, does not make a password authentication request on outgoing ssh sessions. You can manually add the option or change the config. Or use public keys, which is really the best idea if at all possible.
Because of the major version number change, there’s no packages built for DragonFly 4.9. Your options are to either update to 5.1 (which you probably meant to do anyway if you are running current) or manually point to the newest packages. Or just build from dports.
For clarity, this does not affect you at all if you are running 5.0 release. It only affects you if you are running DragonFly-current and have not updated in a while.
Michael W. Lucas is talking tonight at SemiBUG’s monthly meeting, and will be presenting on Tarsnap. Go, if you are near Michigan.
DragonFly 5.0.0 has been released. HAMMER2 is available in the installer. Multi-volume/clustering support isn’t in there yet, but support for deduplication/snapshots/booting and so on all are. My post to users@ has upgrade instructions.
I have more links to post but I just plain ran out of time.
- The /bin/true Command and Copyright. (via)
- Pencil and Paper Games. (via)
- A Little Story About the `yes` Unix Command. (via)
- Open Source Game Clones. I linked this years ago, but it’s updated. Still iffy on it. (via)
- Pixels camp 2017. (slides)
- Who implemented the Windows NT blue screen of death?
- Apple2fpga: Reconstructing an Apple II+ on an FPGA. (via)
- A Eulogy for Eudora.
- The Scrolling Orbs. Trackballs predated mice – significantly.
- The Balanced Ternary Machines of Soviet Russia. (via)
- A DDoS threat that didn’t happen.
Your crazy update of the week: The Beacon Project.
Less crazy/better idea: The Church of the SubGenius | A Documentary. Pledging.
All at the last minute, this.
- rcmds removed from FreeBSD. (Thanks, Jeremie)
- Michael W. Lucas will be presenting on Tarsnap at the next SemiBUG meeting – the 17th.
- There may be a OpenBSD porting workshop with NYCBUG in early December.
- The anatomy of ldd program on OpenBSD.
- How to create BSD bootable USB Stick ?
- EuroBSDcon 2017: “travel notes” after the conference. (via)
- pfSense 2.4.0-RELEASE Now Available! (comments)
- OpenBSD 6.2 released.
- openbsd changes of note 629.
- FreeBSD and APRS, or “hm what happens when none of this is well documented..”
- I’m thinking about OpenBSD again. (via)
- Transition to Zstandard-compressed packages has begun.
There’s no in-reference in this week’s BSDNow, but I think they already did the “it goes to 11” reference. Among other news items, they’ve caught ClonOS, which I did not know about.
Tomohiro Kusumi has made the userspace tools for HAMMER1 compilable on Linux, so you could create a HAMMER1 volume on a Linux system. No, it’s not the ability to read/write HAMMER1 in Linux, unfortunately – just some manipulation of volumes. I don’t know what his future plans are for HAMMER1|2 on Linux, if any.
DragonFly has also gained the vmx(4) virtual network driver. This is in DragonFly-current now and will be in the 5.0 release.
If for some reason smartmontools seems to think your disks aren’t SMART-capable, force smartd to use SCSI ioctls. has a snippet to use in your smartd.conf for just that.
I am all over this week.
- On Being Operationally Incompetent. Harsh but true. (via)
- Floating Point Visually Explained. (via)
- Unapplied Linguistics. (via I lost it, sorry)
- CORE (Curriculum Open-access Resources in Economics). A free economics textbook, which I find oddly interesting both for the topic and because it’s a specific effort to produce a freely available comprehensive textbook.
- A Program from a 35 Year Old Magazine for BASIC Month and a Chat with Its Author. (via)
- The Librem 5 Development Roadmap and Progress. Miiiight be able to run a BSD. (via)
- The Golden Age of the Video Game Arcade: 1981. (via)
- Practical Self-Defense against the Scourge of Dot-Files.
- Computer – Journal of the IEEE Computer Society. Circa 1970s.
- Retro ThinkPad announcement.
Assembled all on Thursday!
- No Plan Survives Contact with the Internet. pfSense 2.4.0 delay, related to recent dnsmasq discoveries.
- pfsense rant.
- Exploring BSD for my CDN.
- Ohio LinuxFest 2017 Recap.
- First draft of “Absolute FreeBSD, 3rd Edition” finished! Related: Michael W. Lucas has a Patreon.
- OPNsense 17.7.5 released.
- autoconf/clang (No) Fun and Games.
- FreeBSD 10.4-RELEASE out.
- Upgrading from FreeBSD 10.3 to 11.1 via freebsd-update and beadm.
- ClonOS offers web-based container/VM management on FreeBSD base. (via)
- LibertyBSD 6.1 released. (via)
- Anybody interested in taking over my Emacs front-end to (Free)BSD pkg?
- How to blank laptop screen?
- Any way to control the battery charge levels (thinkpad)
- Serving 100 Gbps from an Open Connect Appliance. (via multiple places)
- pkgsrc-2017Q3 is out.
BSDNow 214 has no interview, but does get into a convention report and a number of other topics, including the history of man pages. Is there a help format that has lasted as long as man pages? I don’t think so.
Sepherosa Ziehau has implemented direct input support for polling, which will affect you most directly if you have an 10G ix(4) card. His commit message lists the performance improvements.
Here’s your heads-up: NYCBUG is having an TOR installation party tomorrow. Go, if you are near.