Even the U.S. holiday doesn’t stop the regular posting of BSDNow episodes. #169 is up now. I like the Let’s Encrypt vs. the FreeBSD cluster story, cause that’s an interesting and intricate problem.
UEFI, which I casually sum up as the replacement for BIOS, has been seeing some support in DragonFly, but not within the installer. Matthew Dillon and Sascha Wildner has ported over FreeBSD’s EFI ABI support, which I think means support for various EFI applications and features. I haven’t booted a machine using UEFI in any significant way, so I don’t have a good explanation – but I am sure this is useful for people with new hardware.
Update: some explanation plus a note that it’s experimental and you could brick your machine.
It took me three edits of this post to spell “Salvador” correctly.
- Dick Tracy Wrist-Mounted Lisp Machine. It segues into a link to Atari 2600 keyboard controllers, which look painful.
- Cataclysm DDA, a new dark future roguelike.
- After 20 years, the Toasters have returned. (via)
- A short history of shareware.
- “Guys it’s 2016, why are we still using mailing lists (listserv)?” No, forums are not a good replacement.
- A Magnetized Needle and a Steady Hand. (via)
- Manifesto for Responsible Software Development. (via)
- Related: Facebook: Still Literally The Worst. Related to that: irony.
- How We Knew It Was Time to Leave the Cloud. (via)
- 29 Bullets, about PowerPoint as a concept.
- Lost Car Key Puzzle. (via)
- The speed of light is unlikely to improve: consequences.
- i enter the web design class
Your unrelated food link of the week: Salvador Dali wrote a cookbook. (It’s getting reprinted.)
A much more well-rounded crop of BSD links this week.
- FreeBSD status report for 2016Q3.
- “Import (finally!) Tor Browser 6.0.5.” An obvious matchup. (via)
- “FreeBSD Flavors. Do We Need Them?“
- Next SemiBUG meeting: December 20th.
- “How to remote connect to BSD server behind double NAT?”
- Review of NAS4Free 10.3.0.3. I forgot about this… fork? (via)
- pycapsicum – sandbox your Python code on FreeBSD. (via)
- Iocage – A FreeBSD jail manager. (via)
- “What’s your favorite BSD jail administration software?“
- Build a FreeBSD 11.0-release Openstack Image with bsd-cloudinit. (via)
- OPNsense 16.7.8 released.
- b2k16 hackathon report: Landry Breuil, Jeremy Evans, Daniel Jakots.
- l2k16 hackathon report: LibreSSL manuals now in mdoc(7).
- openbsd changes of note
- Learning more about the NetBSD scheduler (… than I wanted to know)
- MeetBSD 2016 Report: Michael Dexter.
This week’s BSDNow episode is almost all FreeBSD, all the time. No interview subject this week. I’m going by the written summary because the video is showing as private… but maybe I’m catching it just before posting?
There’s a new version of re(4), the driver for Realtek network cards. Sepherosa Ziehau put it together for testing. He has it on a separate branch, so give it a try if you have appropriate hardware. This will hopefully fix some of that hardware’s quirkiness.
SemiBUG is meeting tomorrow; Joe Gidi will present on managing Android devices with BSD. My assumption is that it will be at Altair Engineering, in Troy, MI, again.
The January meeting will be Michael W. Lucas talking about Ansible. (Dunno if there’s a December meeting planned.)
Some of this is overflow from last week.
- “I don’t like computers.” Same reasons here, too. (via)
- Cheap IOT Threatens The Internet. ‘Cheap’ is almost the entire idea behind the Internet of Things.
- IoT Goes Nuclear: Creating a ZigBee Chain Reaction. A light worm. (via)
- 54 years old, COBOL gets Wheelchair, a web framework. (via)
- inks. From Ted Unangst, an OpenBSD developer, though not necessarily BSD-specific. (via)
- Coloring your world with LS_COLORS.
- The Possibly Russian Fingerprints on the Shadow Brokers’ Trick or Treat Package. Peter N. M. Hansteen, but not BSD-related.
- Aztec for the Apple ][ was my first desktop video game.
- Windows file system compression had to be dumbed down.
- The Lost Civilization of Dial-Up Bulletin Board Systems.
- TERM=aaa60 Mk.2.
- When Your Screen Breaks (In The Himalayas) (via)
- production ready
- LiveCode, a modern version of Hypercard. It is available as open source, though I haven’t seen if it runs on any BSD. (via)
Started out with a short list, but I managed to find some extra links by Friday.
- b2k16 hackathon report: Antoine Jacoutot.
- NetBSD 7.0/xen scheduling mystery, and how to fix it with processor sets.
- Looking at the scheduler issue again. Part 2 from previous link.
- TrueOS Launch message. Might be time to retire the PC-BSD tag.
- Lynis – Security auditing tool for Linux, macOS, and UNIX-based systems. (via)
- Exit from Hell? Reducing the Impact of Amplification DDoS Attacks. Also as a paper. I’d like to compare the number of systems found as amplifiers vs. systems in general. e.g. are BSD less likely to create reflectors? (via)
- “PAM is Un-American” talk now online. Buy the PAM Mastery book!
- Devops with Chef on FreeBSD, an online course from BSD Magazine.
- SemiBUG is meeting Tuesday. Joe Gidi will talk about ‘managing Android devices with BSD‘.
Imre Vadasz is working on full-offload scan support for wlan, imported from FreeBSD. That doesn’t change much from a user point of view, other that (I assume) reducing load and power usage a tiny amount. I’m reinforcing something most people don’t think about: there’s tiny computers inside your computer with their own firmware and processors, that you don’t directly control.
I’ve been on the road all week, so it seems like I just posted about the last episode. BSDNow 167 is online, and it returns to the interview format. Scott Long of Netflix is interviewed. He’s part of the reason most of the Internet runs through BSD.
If you are using nvme(4), it’s no longer necessary to load the module. Update your configs accordingly, if you are on DragonFly 4.7.
Because of libressl, nc(1) is now available in the base DragonFly system. It was already available through dports, but it’s such a flexible tool that this is worth mentioning.
If you’re wondering about the new Braswell-series systems from Intel, Matthew Dillon has already run two with DragonFly. He reported on the results.
There’s got to be something surprising and/or useful for you in this week’s links; they are gloriously eclectic.
- This list is for discussions related to managing voice networks, both traditional and IP. (via)
- “These videos are not real; they are hallucinated by a generative video model.” (via)
- Ask HN: Is Bash for Windows good enough to replace a Linux/Mac terminal? It bugs me that people sometimes don’t care about what’s under their shell. Microsoft is counting on that.
- A Quick Look at the Attack on Dyn. RIPE is a good authority for something like this, I daresay. (via)
- Stuff a recurrent neural network full of old sci-fi stories, attach it to a text editor, start sentences, and let the neural network finish them for you. It is a real thing. (via)
- Early History of Unix: Unix Is Born and the Introduction of Pipes. (via)
- Lawrence Public Library Modular Synthesizer, a performance. (via).
- They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo.
- CFP: SIGCIS meeting @ CHM, March 18-19, 2017.
- How to find all of an ISP’s ASNs. (via)
- History of Mechanical Keyboards. (via)
- C64-808.
Your unrelated browser game of the week: Epitaph. (via)
Several pfSense links this week, which by complete coincidence is the same week that I’ve been adding network cards to my older pfSense devices at work to create radio links.
- 24/7 support plans for pfSense.
- Vendor in NYC with pfSense xg-2758 in stock
- Converting Pix 6.3 to pfsense – stuck on some rules
- I’ve found that Windows 10 seems to perform better in VirtualBox than FreeBSD.
- The October issue of BSD Magazine is out.
- Unable to run Windows programs after reinstalling wine.
- mksh on FreeBSD – custom PS1 help?
- zfs-snap-diff: compare / restore files from zfs snapshots. (via)
- A very valuable vulnerability. Discovered by a BSD-based company.
- One More Week Until MeetBSD California 2016!
- A char device which implements an Enigma machine (FreeBSD & Linux) (via)
- garbage episode 39, Provenance. Might not have any BSD content? I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet.
One of my favorite things: when someone just appears out of nowhere and says, “I needed a change to my software so I did it and here it is to share”. Harald Brinkhof wandered into DragonFly and the first thing he did was update support for trackpads.
BSDNow 166: pot jokes! No interview, but lots of topics.
It’s now possible to put the /boot of your DragonFly system in the ‘a’ partition of a disklabel. It’s perhaps not major, but it’s another step in EFI support. EFI installs are possible now – if you do it manually.
Reminder: Isaac (.ike) Levy’s “Infrastructure in a Post-Cloud Era” presentation is tonight, at NYCBUG’s November meeting. Go, see.