Tomohiro Kusumi has been working on a port of autofs to DragonFly. If you aren’t familiar with it, autofs is an automatic file system mounter, so when you access a network file system at its local mount point, autofs kicks in and makes sure the remote file system is automatically mounted. He has an initial report on his progress, and expects it to be in DragonFly master in the next month.
This week’s BSDNow is the normal news roundup, plus an interview of Samy Al Bahra, about ‘backtrace‘.
I’m talking multiple times a week about BSD-themed podcasts/video/whatever these days. This is great! 5-6 years ago I was probably the only BSD source posting more than weekly.
If you’ve ever wondered how having multiple swap devices can work, here’s your DragonFly-specific answer.
NYCBUG is meeting tonight, and Thomas Levine will be there to talk about Urchin, a shell-based test framework. The announcement also has future meeting/speaker dates noted.
If you happen to be testing kernel modules, DragonFly can now load them from a modules.local directory. This keeps modules that aren’t part of the base system, separate. This is probably of most use to developers. It’s controlled by local_modules being set in /boot/loader.conf, and defaults to on.
(Updated for correct file location – thanks, swildner)
BSDTalk 264 is out, and rather than an interview, it talks about a topic I’ve always enjoyed: Gopher, including ways to access Gopher resources even now.
Cinco De Mayo is coming up.
- Why I run my business like an open source project. The contractors I use at work that take this approach are much easier to work with. (via)
- Detecting the use of “curl | bash” server side. Even more evidence of what a bad idea that strategy can be. (via)
- Developer Certificate of Origin versus Contributor License Agreements. Boring, but I understand the reasoning. (also via)
- Creating Magnetic Disk Storage at IBM. (via)
- The Sad History of the Microsoft Posix Subsystem. Displaced by Winbuntu. (via)
- What happened to _why.
- Email Isn’t The Thing You’re Bad At. I see so many people with this problem. (via)
- Baby UNIX.
- Dyson’s Maps & Cartography. Hand-drawn D&D maps. (via)
- Related: The Dice You Never Knew You Needed. Buy here. (via)
- 5 Magical Beasts And How To Replace Them With A Shell Script.
- GEOS, an operating system I never really knew about.
- when i wore a younger fool’s cap. GitHub uber alles.
- O Reader! My Reader. I’ve gotten used to tt-rss.
Your unrelated link of the week: What was the weirdest 911 call ever received? (via)
I think I manage to link at least one story for every BSD type this week, or close to it.
- FreeBSD GPIO Benchmark. (via)
- ASLR now on by default in amd64. (via)
- anti-ROP mechanism in libc.
- The p2k16 hackathon has begun.
- DiscoverBSD for 2016/04/25.
- Rethinking Unix: A New Apropos Implementation from NetBSD. (via)
- BSD at LinuxFest Northwest 2016.
- UPnP on Pfsense: security risks and alternatives. (via)
- OpenSMTPD, spamd, SpamAssassin and Dovecot on OpenBSD – part 1 (via)
- a prog by any other name. Some BSD history.
- OPNsense 16.1.12 released
The garbage podcast for this week is up, with discussion of OpenBSD and TRIM, and, well, a very wide range of topics, going by the summary.
If you’re on DragonFly, or maybe even if you aren’t, and you are using NFS, here’s some tips on how to wring the best performance out of it.
This week’s BSDNow has some news catchup, since they’ve been on the road, and an interview with Brooks Davis of FreeBSD-on-Cheri. (CheriBSD?)
Not older people that use DragonFly, but people of any age using an older release of DragonFly: Bezitopo is Pierre Abbat’s topographical program, and he needs testers on versions 4.4 of DragonFly or before. Please give his open-source program a run if you are on the appropriate versions. Trying other BSDs, even though not requested, can’t hurt.
Posting it now, because it’ll be too late by this weekend’s In Other BSDs: The inaugural meeting of KnoxBUG is tomorrow night. That’s Knoxville, Tennessee, USA. The speaker is Kris Moore, of PC-BSD. The website has directions.
If you’re using qemu and DragonFly, the latest update of ACPICA to version 20160422 may fix some issues introduced in a previous update. (I don’t have a specific bug report to point you at; sorry!)
This week filled up fast, despite me having an exam to take in the middle of it.
- Site Reliability Engineering, the book and the notes on the book. (via)
- Related: O’Reilly has a significant discount right now on the ebook version.
- How to recover lost files added to Git but not committed.
- How to make a minimalist stereo with an old phone and a $20 amp. This works with an old BSD machine too.
- Fun, distracting websites for down-time.
- THE 64 – Computer and Handheld Console. In a keyboard, and in a handheld.
- Classic Programmer Paintings. (via)
- What Dwarf Fortress Taught Me About Startups. (via)
- A Crypt-Crawling Tactical Roguelike: Ananias. Plays in browser.
- There is no cloud. I need one of those. (via)
- A Notable Omission. Related to the previous link. Also, there’s going to be some panicked selling over the next few weeks, I bet. (via)
- Curing Our Slack Addiction. An old business rule: Increase communication, people ask questions instead of making decisions. Increase available data, people make decisions instead of asking questions. (via)
- TEXT-MODE, ASCII/ANSI images. (via)
- Why is there a screen that says “It is now safe to turn off your computer”?
- The story behind NetHack’s first update since 2003. (via)
- ZALGO RLY.
- Next generation UNIX shell. Never improve, just reinvent! See also: CADT.(via)
- Fred Brooks’ The Mythical Man Month, free to read. One of the better books ever written about software development or even just knowledge projects. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: HOW TO OPERATE YOUR FROG. (via)
I apologize for ending with a question.
- Why Linux can’t be distributed with ZFS included. “Because it’s not BSD” is the facile answer. (via)
- pkgsrcCon2016 call for presentations. (via)
- HardenedBSD delivers security PIE. (via)
- NetBSD machines at AsiaBSDCon 2016. (via)
- OPNsense 1.16.11 released.
- Build a FreeBSD 10.3-release Openstack Image with bsd-cloudinit. (via)
- libressl – more vague promises.
- The BSD family of operating systems.
- Does BSD distributions contain any GNU software?
- DiscoverBSD for 2016/04/18.
- Question about NetBSD — How to update Compiled Binaries
- BSD at LinuxFest Northwest
- Year of the OpenBSD desktop
- Installing ElectroBSD by exploiting “HardenedBSD”. (via)
- FreeBSD and NetBSD Google Summer of Code projects. (via multiple places)
- This may be a facetious question, but: are the new hyperconverged servers just… servers for people that don’t know what their operating system can do?
Garbage 23 is up cause it’s Friday and the content is initially summarized like this: “Brandon tries not to use Google for a week”. It’s apparently not that bad?
BSDNow 138, “Rushing into BSD”, has an interview with Benedict Reuschling, about the FreeBSD Foundation and Europe. There’s the usual news roundup, plus some notes about upcoming conventions.
The DragonFly 4.4.3 point release is out. There’s a commit page listing the changes between 4.4.2 and 4.4.3. Nobody will be surprised that there’s an OpenSSL update in there.
If you want a complete image, it’s available for download at your nearest mirror. If you want to upgrade an existing install:
cd /usr; make src-update
(or src-create-shallow if you don't already have source)
make buildworld && make buildkernel
make installkernel && make installworld
make upgrade
reboot
I’d save this for an In Other BSDs note, but that’s a whole week away: FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS is published, available in electronic and printed editions. I suspect this would be interesting to non-BSD users, too.