If you were running DragonFly 4.7, for a short period you may have had trouble with shutting down, because of an ACPI bug. It’s fixed now. It’s actually been fixed for two weeks, but I’m going back and clearing things I hadn’t had a chance to post, since we are in the Christmas-New Years lull time.
Merry Christmas! I piled up as many links as I could in the theory that many readers have the spare time for it today/tomorrow/next few days.
- “So somebody is throwing HTML at your sshd. What to do?“
- Because of weird traffic, I found this reference to an early occurrence of the Internet of Crap Things. The weird traffic is possibly another Mirai variant. Or Snapchat.
- Punched Cards: A Brief Tutorial (2002) (via)
- The Hi-Bit Era. (via)
- Working on ENIAC: Rethinking Innovation Myths with Author Thomas Haigh. Video. (via)
- Talk extract: Submarine cable systems 101 for AWS partners. Video. (via)
- 3D-printed Curta Calculator. One of the best mechanical calculators. (via)
- Taking Back the DNS. “Most new domain names are malicious.” From 2010, but unfortunately still relevant. (via)
- Anecdote generator: Dwarf Fortress’s agents already sparking fun tales
- Terminal Madness (A 1980 Documentary About Personal Computers). Video. (via)
- Gitlabs going post-cloud with Metal
- Colossal Genius: Tutte, Flowers, and a Bad Imitation of Turing (via)
- v7x86 UNIX. (via)
- exfiltration via request timing, exfiltration via receive timing
- An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways (via)
- 17 Unix tricks for a happy 2017. Assumes bash but don’t hold that against it.
- Superintelligence (via)
Your unrelated game link of the week: Lode Runner. The whole thing in HTML5 as far as I can tell. (via)
Your unrelated video of the week: AAAAAAAAAAAA
Merry almost Christmas!
- OpenSSH 7.4 released. (via)
- Configuring the FreeBSD automounter. I think this applies to DragonFly too. Thanks, Michael Wilson.
- AsiaBSDCon 2017 paper proposals are I assume due by end of year, just like last year, though the 2017 AsiaBSDCon site does not appear to be up as I type this.
- BSD Magazine has lessons 4 and 5 of FreeBSD and Chef up now.
- Security and BSD tools (via)
- Version SAT. Talks about package management in general – and what do you know, pkg seems to be the most advanced tool in this case. (via)
- Bringing the scheduler saga to the finishing line
- openbsd changes of note 4
- OpenBSD laptops
- Replacing Cisco ASA with PFSense. I did it, I ain’t sad.
- Using ZFS to Fight Data Rot by Kevin McAleer
Well, now there’s a song stuck in your head if you are me. Anyway, BSDNow 173 has no interview but the usual news, plus some older UNIX history anecdotes I wish I had found first.
Don’t get too excited yet – clang import hasn’t happened. However, I want to draw attention to Rimvydas Jasinskas’ changes to alternate compiler handling, which would be for importing clang. His commit message goes into some of the rather thorny problems of transitioning between compilers and releases.
There’s been some updates to the AHCI driver. Matthew Dillon outlined the changes, with the biggest one being support for FIS Based Switching. FBS is the ability to send simultaneous streams of data to and from multiple drives on a port multiplier. Support for it is rare and quirky, but it should significantly improve throughput on a compatible port multipler. Read his writeup for details, including on how to back up your kernel.
Here’s your reminder: SemiBUG meets tomorrow, for any BSD users in the Detroit / Michigan area.
Typed early while contractors drill holes in my house.
- VimWiki – A personal wiki for Vim (via)
- RFC 7764 – Guidance on Markdown. Let’s take a moment to appreciate how successful Markdown has been, without anything pushing it but innate utility. If you don’t agree, try SGML for a while. (via)
- Related: note that code out of that RFC is considered BSD licensed? I don’t know if that’s the case for all RFCs, but it’s a ‘license win’ in any case.
- Also related: CommonMark.
- Where does 9600 bps come from? (via)
- Defending Accounts Against Common Attacks. Not using 2-factor auth seems to be a common theme in the various email disclosure events out there. (via)
- Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, and its discussion.
- EMPs and electronics.
- Unix tip: Cleaning up your files
- Dubious security vulnerability: Discovering the salt
- Another Git catastrophe cleaned up
Your unrelated link of the week: arguments over bread terminology.
Much better this week; I actually have links.
- Man, ‘splained: 40-Plus Years of Man Page History. Doesn’t mention it, but BSD is the place for original, and good, man pages. (via)
- “What’s stopping someone from writing a Cisco CLI shell for Linux or BSD?“
- who even calls link_ntoa? Multiple BSDs had this issue.
- Booting Android-x86 under FreeBSD bhyve (Work in progress) (via)
- New stable version: HardenedBSD-stable 10-STABLE v46.18 (via)
- “TIL the soviets made their own BSD” (via)
- “Which BSD is good for me?“
- OPNsense 16.7.11 released, OPNsense 17.1-BETA
- LibreSSL documentation status report
- watt time is left
- openbsd changes of note 3
- Disk I/O Performance Under Filesystem Journaling on FreeBSD 10.3
- LISA 2016 Recap. From a BSD vendor point of view.
- OpenBSD 6.0 VPN Endpoint for iOS and OSX (via)
- 802.11n MIMO support in OpenBSD -current (via)
BSDNow 172 has an interview with Rod Grimes, the usual news roundup, plus a feature on a tool called smenu.
You know about swapcache(8), the DragonFly-specific trick of caching disk data on an small SSD, meaning you get mostly the speed benefits of an SSD while still using a cheaper, slower drive? Whether you did or didn’t, Matthew Dillon’s updated the documentation for it to account for recent hardware changes.
I mention this because people don’t realize there’s a console screensaver: ‘vidcontrol -t XX’ will blank the console after XX seconds of inactivity. This way you aren’t lighting up your server closet with a terminal screen, forever.
The post-holiday rush of links has slowed.
- Getting smarter and faster with vi
- Escape key alternatives in Vim (via)
- Actually using ed (via)
- Advent calendars: Advent of Code, Perl Advent 2016, QEMUAdvent, SysAdvent, and more. (via and via)
- Eaten by a Grue: podcast on Infocom games, text adventures and interactive fiction (via)
- History of the Click of Death
- FreeDOS, still going
- How to get a C64 on WiFi and start BBSing again (via)
- NeTV2 FPGA Reference Design. Read the last paragraph and get irritated.
I have no BSD-themed links this week. Sorry! It’s been hectic. We return to normal tomorrow.
BSDNow 171 has no interview this week, but more in-depth news articles than normal, including something interesting about bsdiff.
I know the title’s not that helpful, but I like rhyming. The i915 driver in DragonFly now matches what’s in the Linux 4.5 kernel, for a more complete description. (Here’s the Linux changelog to match.) This is good news for anyone with Skylake, Broxton, or Kabylake processors.
This is another one of those events that’s coming up too soon to wait on my normal BSD Saturday summary post. FOSDEM 2017 is looking for ‘BSD devroom’ talks, with the suggested length being 45 minutes. The deadline is December 10th, in 3 days. Submit a proposal if you will be there.
This is a minor thing, but I bet someone will find it useful: Chromium in dports has been patched to remove the forced dependency on dbus, which will be useful to anyone using DragonFly and a ‘lighter’ window manager. You still need to specify this preference in your make.conf to have it happen.
Matthew Dillon has made a number of locking improvements, that speeds up performance on systems with multiple processor. Here’s his commit with some numbers. Note that he’s testing with these built-in utilities. This probably helps multiple cores too, and some attention is shown to Hammer, too.