I ended up with this server rebooting as we were affected by Time Warner’s giant outage. In the process of rebooting, I found I must have done an upgrade and forgotten to reboot to make sure everything still worked, as mod_php had disappeared and mysql decided it didn’t want to work. Things appear to be OK now…
You should perform a full world and kernel install if on master.
Several people (including me) have been getting bit by a problem: when performing an installworld with a changed kernel, the vn kernel module is loaded, but it was built by the previous kernel and may cause problems when it doesn’t match up.
To fix that, vn is now built in, instead of being a separate module. The rescue initrd (which is what is being mounted when it has this problem) is now installed via a ‘make rescue‘ command that can wait until a successful installworld and reboot.
I hope you like your links eclectic!
- A Tale of Postmortems. As a work strategy, this strategy can restore trust that would otherwise be lost when people outside IT/Engineering experience problems. (via)
- Unix: Viewing your processes through the eyes of /proc.
- “Writing Aliens”, or, “Duchamp, Markov, Queneau: A Mostly Delightful Quilt” Data patterns as seen by a science fiction author, and how it comes out in history and twitter. Really, a good presentation just for the range it covers. More bits on the author’s blog. (via)
- A brief history of USB, what it replaced, and what has failed to replace it. I was just thinking the other day about how much I hated PS/2 connectors, especially because I encountered a KVM switch in a rack that didn’t do USB. (via)
- How Flash changes the design of database storage engines. It’s funny that when people say “Flash” nowadays, they mean the disk product, not the software.
- Tweetable Mathematical Art. (via)
- RGB LEDs that change color if a Server has a problem/is not responding. (via)
- Not Rocket Science. An astonishingly good idea. (also via)
- Years later, this image still gives me a mild jolt of panic.
- Halfassed implementations of SSH are no fun.
- Thursday, IRL. I just like the expression he makes.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: John Pound, one of the original Garbage Pail Kids artists, nowadays creates his art by coding it – mostly by writing out Postscript. He doesn’t draw sketchbooks – he generates them. (via)
Another long list. These are making my Friday nights take some extra effort.
- Oolite, an open source game based on Elite. Yes, it runs on BSD. I’m surprised I haven’t posted about it before. (via)
- My Experience Switching from Slackware Linux to FreeBSD.
- A week of pkgsrc, #3.
- DiscoverBSD for 2014/08/18.
- OpenBSD is gaining a rcctl(8) tool for automation.
- Phabricator on FreeBSD installation notes.
- 20 years of FreeBSD ports.
- “Does BSD perform disk caching less aggressively?” I bet the person asking was using two different machines at different times with different loads, which means he doesn’t know what he’s looking for.
- The FreeBSD Foundation’s August Update is out.
- Some people don’t like pkg.
- The EuroBSDCon 2014 travel grant has been extended, and Google has grants to bring more female computer scientists there.
- Spatializer support in NetBSD.
- NetBSD is keeping up with the gpl2 version of GNU Make.
- PC-BSD 10.0.3-RC1 has been tagged.
- FreeBSD has a new automounter.
- FreeBSD has a set of keymap conversion tools. Might be useful to someone?
- FreeBSD now goes up to 256 CPUs. (I thought this already happened?)
- Yay cross-pollination!
- Apparently people don’t pay attention to file contents.
- IPv6 tunneling on OpenBSD.
- OpenBSD has replaced BIND with unbound in the base system.
If you remember the earlier work to support DragonFly on An Acer c720 Chromebook, it’s been repeated for the c720p. The “p” means it’s a touchscreen.
DragonFly’s using pkg 1.3, at least on master, and I’ve seen a few people report an error message when performing ‘pkg upgrade’. The error message usually includes something like:
pkg: need to re-create repo Avalon to upgrade schema vers
If you get this, do ‘pkg update -f’ and it will complete.
I didn’t get the pun until I said the title out loud. BSDNow 051 has an interview with Eric Le Blan of Xinuos, a webserver-building tutorial, and of course more material.
DragonFly’s dhclient will now retry failed interfaces and handle being re-run gracefully. This is a blessing for anyone who has had a flaky link. Matthew Dillon’s made two other improvements for booting that will also improve boot time when networks go missing.
Here’s a nice advantage for dports and DragonFly: since it’s an overlay on FreeBSD ports, it’s possible to move to newer or different versions of software without waiting for it to happen in FreeBSD. For example: there’s a newer version of the xorg intel driver now in dports – newer than what’s in ports.
If you are tracking DragonFly master, your next kernel build should be full, not quick.
If you have a DragonFly system with an iwn wireless chipset, and you are having trouble connecting and running in the 5Ghz part of the spectrum only, here’s a tip: the -ht switch may fix it.
For once, a shorter week.
- One of the better telemarketer things I’ve ever read… and I realized what he was trying halfway through, cause I maintain the same models. (via)
- Password Gropers Take the Spamtrap Bait. Peter Hansteen is the same person who found the Hail Mary Cloud.
- Pseudo Automata, Fakes & Robot costumes. (via a Kickstarter email)
- Input, a non-monospaced coding font, with a preview. (via)
- Unix: Gaining network insights with tcpdump.
- Are you near Shenzen? This hacker camp may interest you.
- UNIX Wildcards Gone Wild. (via joris on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Continuous Integration and Delivery Illustrated. Sometimes drawn versions are better than any text. (via)
- Ten Years of OpenStreetMap. OSM is one of those things that I’m happy it just exists.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Wrenchies. I like Farel Dalrymple’s style.
Bonus unrelated: New Cyriak video!
A calm week, for once.
- mandoc 1.13.1 is out.
- The July/August issue of the FreeBSD Journal is out.
- A week of pkgsrc #2.
- Thinking about coming to FreeBSD from Arch.
- Steam client on FreeBSD?
- NetBSD sysinst now supports extended partitions, from an older GSoC project.
- NetBSD has a nouveau importing script.
- NetBSD has Embedded Kermit.
- NetBSD 7 has been branched.
- FreeBSD xen can now manage physical hardware.
- OpenBSD distribution is moving, so last chance on some of the merch.
- If you just want to donate to OpenBSD, here’s a conversation about it. (hint: CDs)
- tcpdump on OpenBSD is ancient; if you need circular logfiles, there’s manual ways to do that.
- Now’s a good time to check on the roadmap for Lumina, PC-BSD’s desktop environment.
- A video conversation about FreeNAS and TrueNAS.
It took me a little while, but DragonFly 3.8.2 images are uploaded now to the main site. Check the 3.8.2 changelog if you didn’t before. This is a recommended upgrade for the newer OpenSSL, and should otherwise have little impact on the programs you have installed.
BSDNow has reached the milestone of 50 episodes, and this week’s show has VPN setup as a tutorial, Robert Watson interviewed, and of course more discussion on most every flavor.
There’s been good progress in Francois Tigeot’s work on Haswell graphics support in DragonFly. If you have one of those newer units, you should be able to use the i915 driver with it now – as long as you keep acceleration off. (You won’t notice any difference in 2D anyway.)
This week’s Lazy Reading started as overflow from last week.
- Cron checker. Cron commands to English. (via)
- Unboxing the Magnus supercomputer. Aw, Crays don’t look as cool as they used to. (via)
- OpenVMS gets a new lease on life. (via) Also, there are public OpenVMS installations like deathrow (via) and pub1 (via).
- Unix: Controlling privileged access.
- Unix: Top networking commands and what they tell you.
- runit instead of systemd, on Void Linux. A ray of hope. (via)
- The future of iced coffee. Why can’t someone put the same treatment into tea? (via)
- What ORMS have taught me: just learn SQL. (via)
- Docker security with SELinux. Containerization, which is all the rage these days, does not enforce the same security wall as with a virtual machine – containers can ‘leak’ to their parent operating system. I’m not sure enough people realize this. (via)
- A very tiny, monospace, bitmap font. Check the screenshot of it being used on a 320×200 screen. (via)
- lowRISC. Open source System on a Chip.
- The Worst API Ever Made. I can’t judge if that’s really so, but it’s always fun to watch trainwrecks. (via)
- My history with Forth & stack machines. Forth is a crazy language, in a good way. (via)
- Lawless Legends, an Apple][ FRPG – in development. (via)
- A Mac IIci
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Quantum & Pixel. Another Boulet comic, this time exploring 2D physics.
A relatively short week; I’m on the move today.
- DiscoverBSD’s roundup for 2014/08/04.
- FreeBSD installed. Your next 5 moves should be… (via)
- switched from arch linux to openbsd, reference advice?
- “make the Linux network stack as good as FreeBSD’s“. I’m leery of that statement. This comment may lead to more useful data.
- FreeBSD ZFS snapshots with zfstools.
- An old Macintosh IIci 25Mhz running Apache under NetBSD. Link was down when I checked it… probably from everyone else hitting it. (via)
- MeetBSD 2014 is happening November 1-2 in San Jose, California. (via)
- *NIX programming survey. (via)
I’ve tagged DragonFly 3.8.2, which exists mostly to accommodate the latest release of OpenSSL. (Security fixes, which should not be a surprise.) I will build images as soon as I get a chance.
If you have a i915 video chipset (which appears to be most every recent laptop), Francois Tigeot would like you to try his huge patch. It doesn’t support Haswell chips yet, though it lays some of the groundwork for it.