This week’s BSDNow talks with Baptiste Daroussin about developing and using pkg, for ports and for packaging the base FreeBSD system. (Baptiste has been seen on #dragonflybsd, since pkg is on DragonFly, so I’m sure there’s some relevant bits there, too.) There’s also the usual news summary.
I haven’t been drawing enough attention to it, but there’s been a bunch of HAMMER filesystem activity lately: First, Tomohiro Kusumi has been working on HAMMER – these posts are a small subset of his commits. Second, Matthew Dillon has been working full steam ahead on HAMMER2. The HAMMER2 design document has been updated (read this!), and he’s already accomplished master->slave disk syncing.
It’s not ready for production, of course, which you may already realize, so don’t install it unless you want to work on the code.
Happy Easter! It means chocolate for me.
- Everything is Made up and the Points Don’t Matter. Substitute “open source work” for “design” in this story. (via)
- The GNU Manifesto Turns Thirty. Quoted from the article: They would roll their eyes a bit, then hasten to add, as more than one did, “But he’s right about most things.” (via)
- COMPUTERS IN OUR LIVES.
- Where we went wrong, or, The one thing Philip Greenspun got right (in 1997).
- A Round Pie in a Square Box. I admit I read it at first just because it mentioned pie, but it is an interesting history. (via)
- istruecryptauditedyet.com. (via)
- How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT. I shall now be annoying: Should have used pfSense, and it’s not a doubling of speed, it’s a doubling of capacity. Any connection on either link is still limited to the speed of that link. (via)
- Oblique Strategies, the website. The Wikipedia entry on Oblique Strategies will tell you what that is, though I could have sworn I talked about it before. (via)
- How a bad RJ45 termination can ruin a cable. First time I’ve seen a check other than “It lights up the tester; must be fine.” (via)
- Some slick awk built-ins.
- Origins of the tilde.
- My Quantified Email Self Experiment: A failure. (via)
- free-for-dev, a list of ‘as-a-service’ items offered free, for development or whatever. (via)
- /dev/notrandom, an April Fools item I actually liked. (via)
- MISTAKES WERE MADE: COMPUTER HISTORY, DECOMPILED. April 17th in NYC.
- Vintage Computer Festival East, happening same day in New Jersey.
- The Interface Experience: Forty Years of Personal Computing. At Bard College now.
- (Last 3 links all via SIGCIS, an excellent resource.)
- Creating a BBS in 2015. (via)
- Dueling Unixes and the Unix Wars [pdf]. (via)
- Is BSD UNIX?
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Jason Shiga’s comics. It’s an article about the comics, not the comics themselves, so go to his site next. (via)
Also unrelated: tea is one of the topics I link here, and alert reader Jeff Ramnani pointed out Strand Tea as a good source. I also saw Deep Mills referenced in the UK. Anyone else have a favorite online vendor?
If you’re part of a BSD user group, please let me know your schedule. I’m able to catch NYCBUG announcements cause I’m on their announce@ mailing list – but I could use more.
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/03/30.
- Lumina 0.8.3 is released.
- Building PC-BSD Utilities From Source. (video)
- BSD Magazine for March.
- Directly building FreeBSD AMI images.
- FreeBSD daily status reports, a little more human-readable.
- 4 new commands in FreeBSD DDB.
- The FreeBSD boot loader can now take your GELI passphrase.
- A probably definitive answer on OpenBSD and clang.
- pf tables mean no reloading.
- BSD contributor Paul Schenkveld has died.
- If you are in the UK, there’s a mini OpenBSD ports hackathon happening now.
- NetBSD systems can now resize / on reboot, if space is available.
- LibreSSL in pkgsrc, soon.
- NYCBUG’s next meeting is April 8th, with Christos Zoulas presenting blacklistd.
Do you use info pages? Yeah, me neither. John Marino’s removed or converted the various info pages already in DragonFly, and removed texinfo since it’s no longer required. (I’ve linked to a few examples, but there were a number more commits than this.)
This week’s BSDNow has the usual roundup of news, including some… suspicious items, plus an interview of Kamila Soucková about conferences and Google Summer of Code. They note this Hammer2 proposal.
Today’s the annual Bad Tech Joke, also known as April Fools Day. I don’t do those here, cause I think of them like this. This is your public service announcement to ignore most of what you read for the next 24 hours or so.
The default .cshrc in DragonFly has had some changes, which shouldn’t be anything but handy… assuming you are using tcsh. Also: the loader menu defaults to a blue Fred, now.
In the process of committing binutils 2.25 to DragonFly, John Marino also broke its build into parallel parts and removed the build of the gold linker. Buildworlds should be noticeably faster now, though I don’t have a before/after.
John Marino’s written an extensive page about wireless and DragonFly, on dragonflybsd.org.
Pre-assembled over the week, since I have an odd weekend schedule this week. On the plus side, there’s lots to click here.
- How to Be a Good Open Source Community Member. (via)
- Reliable Cron across the Planet. (via)
- How to irritate people away from your website, example 1 and example 2. I hate being repeatedly asked to sign up for a newsletter I’m already on. Also, this.
- “If you build your business on top of someone else’s system, eventually they’re going to notice.“
- Explorable Explanations. I’ve seen at least one of them before and it really stuck with me. (via)
- “Gee, this is a lot of microfiche material. Better build my own high-volume scanner!” (via)
- Also at that last link: DECbox, BlinkenBone, and other projects.
- How I introduced a 27-year-old computer to the web. The author says “It’s very slow”, but so was everything back then. (via)
- The HP-01, found indirectly through the last link. Think of that when next reading about wearables.
- The Days They Changed The Gauge. Heck of an outage window. (via)
- What’s the oldest/weirdest thing you’ve found on your network? An ancient Catalyst switch, running inside an enclosure 1400 ft underground, crammed between a wooden structure and a rock wall. I have a picture of the space.
- Slack is quietly, unintentionally killing IRC. Not scientifically studied, and anything dependent on a single company and not a standard can have longevity problems. (via I lost track, sorry)
- sslh, two services on one port, for when most everything gets blocked. (via NANOG)
- UNIX: Making Computers Easier To Use — 1982, Bell Laboratories. (via)
- The Shut-In Economy, or how to dedicate your life to a workplace. Also, how to ignore the temping nature of all these new jobs. (via)
- O’Reilly’s running a Top 25 sale.
- Andrew W.K. is the Kibo (see site) of Instagram: his name + nosebleed is all it takes. (via)
Unrelated link of the week: Tea. Contains strong language.
It’s been a quiet week in BSD-land, at least in terms of me finding links.
- “I know BSD isn’t secure because I can’t install Norton.“
- “Oops” and there’s D-Link DIR-655 support in FreeBSD.
- The ata driver in FreeBSD is
removedmodified. (see comments) - Steam available on PC-BSD. Old news, but always good.
- service(8) now available in NetBSD too.
- How to check out older revisions of pkgsrc packages.
- Tips on a DB9-RJ45 serial cable for Sun hardware, from OpenBSD.
- URL blacklisting in OpenBSD.
- lmc(4) and san(4), removed from OpenBSD.
- RFC7427 support in OpenBSD.
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/03/23.
If you’re looking to change your DragonFly system’s keymapping to support a non-US character set, use this users@ post from Adolf Augustin as a cheat sheet to make all the right changes.
Matthew Dillon answered some mailing list questions on how clustering and data copies will work in HAMMER2 – no due date, of course, because this is very complex. If you’re really into it, there’s always watching the recent commits.
BSDNow 082 is up, talking with Bernard Spil about LibreSSL adoption in FreeBSD ports. There’s lots of other material listed – see the BSDTalk page for a summary of all the topics covered.
Matthew Dillon has rewritten the Locking and Synchronization documentation for DragonFly. Keep this in mind the next time you say “Which lock should I use for this new software/ported software?” There’s also locking(9).
BSDTalk 252 has 18 minutes of conversation with Brian Callahan, who runs devio.us, an OpenBSD-based shell provider.
The other day, I updated some packages using pkg. The default version of PHP went from 5.4 to 5.6. I ended up doing what /usr/dports/UPGRADING says and making a list of all PHP packages on my system, before removing PHP and its dependencies. I then reinstalled the packages that used PHP, bringing the needed packages back in at the right version. pkg 1.4 didn’t handle the transition cleanly, unfortunately. I also had to specify mod_php56 because pkg was trying to get the 5.4 version despite it not being default.
None of these are insurmountable problems, but it never hurts to be forewarned. pkg 1.5 is on the horizon and may have an easier time with sorting these types of dependency/version changes. This may apply to FreeBSD in addition to DragonFly.
I’ve tagged version 4.0.5 of DragonFly, and it’s available at your nearest mirror. This revision is mostly to incorporate the newest OpenSSL security bump.
As you read this, I am probably watching a storage processor reboot.
- Another worthy cause for donation/sponsorship: the Network Time Foundation.
- Really making sure the data’s gone. (via)
- Sirius, for talking to computers like all the big companies are doing – but open source! (via many places)
- Smart City.
- “Everybody“. The section on a car rebooting gave me pause.
- int3.cc, hardware hacking. (via)
- USB Type C.
- y = -x^3.
- The Worst Internet Things. Seems like a cheesy list, but these things are really quite awful. (via)
- The Humble Roguelike Bundle. Dunno if any of it runs on BSD… but that is far more likely these days.
- 17 years of curl. Same developer the whole time, which is neat. fetch(1) is 18.75 years old, for contrast. (via)
- The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers. (via)
- Single-page non-Javascript web apps, a proposal. (via)
- A software engineer’s role traversal. Linking for the end part: Ask your employer not for free food, but for the chance to create something that lasts outside of your employer’s operations.
I’d love to see fewer developers demanding superficial perks, and more of them asking to have more time to contribute to the open source products we use, mentor young developers, and learning more about the space they occupy. All of those result in us growing as developers in more than just our coding skills.
Your unrelated link of the week: National Corndog Day. Has audio. (via)