For whatever reason, I’ve seen several people in the last week or so have mouse problems on install, and they were often solved by running moused. So, there’s your little reminder.
Normally I’d hold this off until the In Other BSDs item on Saturday, but by then it will be too late: There’s a “Building redundant and transparent firewalls with OpenBSD” presentation happening at the Scottish Linux User’s Group meeting, Thursday night in Glasgow, Scotland.
Normally if I talk about a filesystem here, I talk about Hammer, which is not a surprise. However, I often read and review Michael W. Lucas’s BSD-oriented books, and he has written FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials. I’m reviewing it here because it’s obviously BSD-related, and some portions are directly relevant for other BSDs.
Disk setup and layout isn’t something that normally consumes much attention past the initial install – until something goes wrong, or until a system needs a new configuration. Installers tend to hide that initial layout, anyway.
Vendors take advantage of this. Much of the specialized storage vendors out there are selling you a computer with disks in it – something you can build yourself. You don’t (or at least I hope you don’t) buy a firewall when you can do the same with pf or ipfw; the same goes for disk management.
There’s plenty of coverage of GEOM, GELI, GDBE, and the other technologies specific to FreeBSD. I for one did not know how GEOM worked, with its consumer/producer model – and I imagine it’s complex to dive into when you’ve got a broken machine next to you. If you are administering FreeBSD systems, especially ones that deal with dedicated storage, you will find this useful. He doesn’t go into ZFS, but he does hint at a book on it later…
If you’re not a FreeBSD user, there’s also material that’s common to any BSD – an explanation of disk architecture, of UFS, RAID, and SMART. Knowing what SMART is and does is essential, in my opinion. You may be able to cobble this material together from other sources online, but it’s packaged nicely here, with Lucas’s easy writing style.
It’s a self-published book, and as such the download nets you three different formats. It’s currently $10 and DRM-free, directly from the author. You can also order physical versions, if you like paper.
Not sure how I ended up with so many interesting conference links. There’s some substantial reading here too, so clear your schedule.
- A long-overdue update of the Cluetrain Manifesto. (via)
- AWS Tips I Wish I’d Known Before I Started. (via)
- Secure Secure Shell. (via)
- Hacking a Gameboy with a speedrun bot to program new games. It’s hard to wrap my brain around. (via)
- Operating System development in Rust.
- Speaking of which, Rust just reached 1.0A. (via)
- Improving your PuTTY connections.
- The Intel Compute stick looks fun.
- RIPE70 is in Amsterdam in March; the Call for Papers is out.
- NANOG 63 is in Texas at the start of February; registration and the agenda are up.
- Vintage Computer Fest East 10 is in April in New Jersey. It’s hands-on – you get to run the old computers! (via)
- CiE 2015, a cross-disciple conference in late June in Bucharest, also may interest you. (via)
- The Millennial Literalist.
- Robots are starting to break the law and nobody knows what to do about it. (via)
- Event Notify Test Runner, or entr. Runs arbitrary commands when a file changes. It was also talked about at the NYCBUG meeting that just happened.
- Moving Beyond TCP/IP.
- This program is the equivalent of ENIAC. Really! They’re both for calculating ballistics. (also via)
- The Tears of Donald Knuth. (via multiple places)
- When The Sky Is Falling. DDOS mitigation, in slides. (via)
- The Morris Worm, as a physical artifact.
Lots of material this week.
- New Update GUI for PC-BSD / Automatic Updates.
- Lumina Desktop 0.8.0 Released.
- (side note) I see these PC-BSD items in src updates, but these published summaries are so complete it’s better to wait and post them instead. Other software orgs, take note.
- A week of pkgsrc, #6.
- Making the switch.
- Configuring X forwarding between BSD and Windows. (via)
- The 4th quarter 2014 FreeBSD report is out.
- Digital Ocean now supports FreeBSD.
- Using TrueOS as a IPFW based home router.
- Be your own VPN provider with OpenBSD. (via)
- pfSense University classes are available online.
- Jetpack, a FreeBSD-based app container, i.e. Docker, etc. (via)
- No more install floppies for NetBSD, at least on amd64.
- OpenBSD adds binary patching, at least on amd64.
- Lid suspension is now on by default in OpenBSD.
- OpenBSD on an Intel Galileo.
- Security: OpenBSD vs FreeBSD. (via)
- FreeBSD added Data Center TCP (DCTCP).
- FreeBSD’s new page clustering strategy.
- FreeBSD has a new MINIMAL kernel config.
- FreeBSD has multiboot support for Xen Dom0.
- Yay, cross-pollination!
Can someone with experience on Google Compute Engine try out running DragonFly on it? There’s FreeBSD instructions, so it might work.
DragonFly no longer has SCTP. Nobody minds, I think – I had to look up what it is.
The short answer is ath(4) and iwn(4), via this post. There’s an update coming for the wireless infrastructure in DragonFly; Matthew Dillon and Adrian Chadd (on the FreeBSD side) are working together for improvements.
While I’m mentioning recommendations, the Silicon Image 3132 chipset is apparently excellent for eSATA drives on DragonFly.
As promised last week, the BSDNow show has an interview with Jos Schellevis of OPNSense, along with the normal array of stories and links.
Matthew Dillon’s added a sshlockout utility, to temporarily block SSH traffic from repeated brute force SSH login attempts. It’s been mentioned before, but it’s in the system now. It’s been refashioned to work with pf.
Francois Tigeot has performed a major upgrade of DragonFly’s sound system. If you had sound problems or unsupported hardware before, this may fix them. It will require a full buildworld+buildkernel.
Romick posted some more tips on setting up various special keys on an Acer c720 Chromebook, running DragonFly of course, and Matthew Dillon also has backlight key configuration. I wish I had a spare $200 right now for one of these.
I managed to miss this last week because of issues with my RSS feeds, but the 71st episode of BSDNow is/has been up. It’s “systemd isaster”, cause the interview is with Ian Sutton talking about BSD replacements for systemd dependencies. There’s a number of at-least-slightly DragonFly-related things in there, including OPNSense, pkgng, and Hammer mentions.
Historical links are the accidental theme this week.
- RFC Reader. For those uncomfortable with plaintext? (via)
- The truth about C & Unix history. An oldie but goodie. (via)
- After several decades, there’s still no standard for querying registration data, surprisingly. There’s something coming together, though.
- Plan-55A, store and forward messaging – on paper. (via)
- 1980s sci-fi show openings. No fancy House of Hobbit Thrones catering to nerds back then… this was as good as it got. (via)
- Who named Silicon Valley? (via)
- Unix people cards. (via)
- Big Boring System, a text only online community, and another sort of throwback like tilde.club. (via)
- The Cryptographic Doom Principle. A clear explanation. (via)
- TL;DR-ify, a One Thing Well item. Happens to contain a paragraph-sized 40-year history of hypertext on the bottom of that page.
- Ping stories. I’ve linked to other versions before. (via)
- The history of grep. (via)
- The little book about OS development. (via)
- Decentralize All the Things! (via)
- That previous link took me to Gary Bernhardt’s Twitter feed, where I saw this pun. Also this truth.
- His site is destroyallsoftware.com. I like the ‘screencasts’ idea; much easier to watch than some person in a room staring into a camera.
- Also also found through that link: Sandstorm, a personal server setup. My initial impression is that it’s similar to Owncloud. I wish more people did this.
- Also also also: from Justin Cormack through Twitter: Unhosted.
I got this done early, for once.
- Dissecting OpenBSD’s divert(4). (via)
- Running ownCloud with httpd on OpenBSD (via)
- OpenBSD 2014 by the numbers. (via)
- Code rot & OpenBSD. Many comments at the original link. (via)
- Accessing radio hardware switches in NetBSD.
- What does this Etherswitch framework do?
- FreeBSD now has Elf Tool Chain utilities, which appears to be BSD-licensed versions of binutils; possibly more?
- FreeBSD is now on Gnome 3.
- BSDCan 2015’s Call For Papers is out.
- NYCBUG is meeting January 13th at a new location for “Designing Versatile Unix Utilities“, presented by Eric Radman.
- There’s a new BSD user group in the Albany, NY area.
- BSD Magazine for December 2014 is out. (via)
I’m breaking my normal weekend posting schedule to note that DragonFly 4.0.2 images are now linked on the main site and on mirrors now/soon.
DragonFly 4.0.2 has been tagged. I’m building the release images now. If you’re already running 4.0.1 it’ll be easy enough to upgrade to; you will want to catch up to this commit fixing a quiet memory issue.
The CAM layer in DragonFly has had its big lock removed/been marked MPSAFE, so you will notice a performance increase when using multiple disks. (assuming you aren’t throughput-limited, of course.)
That’s Virtual Private Server, if you don’t know the term. I mentioned VPSs and BSD before in a In Other BSDs article, but “Ed” found an article specifically about installing DragonFly on Vultr.
There’s a FreeBSD Forums thread about ZFS and Hammer, as several people have pointed out to me. It’s interesting to see, but there isn’t a lot of quantitative discussion. (It’s a forum post, not a white paper, though.)