Thanks to Zachary Crownover, rcreload is available in DragonFly. (It’s always good to see a new contributor name.)
Nuno Antunes brought in a significant number of fixes for libradius. He’s been doing other work recently on netgraph7 support, so I’m linking to this as a ‘signpost’ commit.
If you were looking for something to do, finishing Francois Tigeot’s sound update would help a lot of people. He’s currently tied up with i915 support work. The patches need device cloning to work with devfs, and midi removal.
As mentioned before, the mrsas(4) driver works best for ‘Thunderbolt’ RAID controllers. Now, the switch has happened.
Tethering now works via the urndis(4) device, from a patch contributed by Sascha Wildner/tested by Yellow Rabbit.
(Updated for correct attribution)
I spent this week watching an older Cisco ASA slowly lose its ability to see parts of the Internet. How did I fix it? pfSense.
- Unix: How passwords can improve your life.
- Curated list of curated lists of awesome lists. I suppose this was inevitable. (via)
- Hooray for USB. Really, it’s so successful we don’t even think about it any more.
- A Game as Literary Tutorial. The influence of Dungeons and Dragons on writing. I’d describe it as a common nerd experience for people above 35 or so, similar to “your first computer”. (via)
- Computer virus catalog. Surprisingly pretty. (via)
- Why Outlook gets CTRL+F wrong.
- Open (source) for business. Why aren’t open source software interfaces more polished? (via)
- Cosmic rays: more likely a problem than you think. (via)
- Inside bit.ly’s Distributed Systems. (via)
- Huh, bzr appears to be dead, or as dead as any open source project can ever be. (via)
- Making sure software stays insecure. I had to remove a preinstalled antivirus program from a Windows laptop yesterday… It did nothing, but you’d think I was lighting the motherboard on fire from the warnings it put on screen. (via)
- The SIGCIS 2014 Workshop (on historical computing), happening in November in Michigan, has a call for papers out.
- Time Management with Tom Limoncelli. He wrote the definitive book on the subject. (via) There’s plenty more videos at his site; I suggest setting aside some time to watch it. (ha!)
Your unrelated link of the week: Avery Monsen’s Vines. Vines are an excellent way to make a very short comedy sketch. Infinite Waffles and Break the Silence are my favorites so far. (via)
More than the usual source commit messages this week.
- LibreSSL got another point release. And complaints. (via)
- NetBSD 7’s branch date is planned.
- FreeBSD 9.3 is released. EoL for 9.2 has been extended, too.
- Cloning a FreeBSD/ZFS Machine with ‘zfs send’.
- An OpenBSD hackathon means a lot of articles.
- Troubleshooting Large, Stalling git/ssh Transfers.
- pkg == systemd == government conspiracy. Surely, the writer can’t be real.
- Installing and Using TarSnap. A BSD-friendly service.
- DiscoverBSD’s 2014/07/14 roundup.
- OpenBSD has OpenSSH and put together LibreSSL. OpenSSL bought… libressh.org? Use whois libressh.org to see. (no link; use your own whois lookup.) (via)
- NetBSD has updated to dhcp 4.3.0.
- OpenBSD has imported ucpp. (hope that’s the right ucpp; there’s lots out there)
- One of those times it’s OK to store passwords in cleartext.
- PC-BSD is now using Samba 4.1 by default.
- OpenBSD has a new httpd(8). Bonus long-in-the-tooth joke, too.
- Yay, SSL library cross-pollination.
- Cross-cross-cross pollination, here. (someone do it in DragonFly, too)
- ssh (on OpenBSD) now supports Unix domain socket forwarding.
- EruoBSDCon 2014 is happening in Sofia, Bulgaria, in September. The FreeBSD Foundation is funding travelers.
- A FreeBSD 10 Desktop How-to.
While Matthew Dillon was testing the new up-to-256-processor support for DragonFly, he added a few sysctls, one of which helps qemu performance when emulating a lot of processors. I note it here in case it’s helpful to someone else.
There’s an open source meetup at a hackerspace near me, happening tomorrow. Well, today by the time most people read this. Anyway, it’s at Interlock, starting at noon. I don’t think I’ll make it, but I’m always happy to see this stuff happen in my own town.
BSDNow 046 interviews Brian Drewery, talks about tunneling through DNS ports (an useful trick to get around network paywalls, if it’s what I think it is), and of course more general discussion of BSD topics.
HOPE X starts tomorrow in New York City and runs through the weekend. There will be some BSD people there. (see first line of link.)
DRM (Direct Rendering, not Digital Rights) on DragonFly will normally eat all the memory it thinks it needs. However, vm.dma_reserved can now be set to a fixed limit in /boot/loader.conf. By default, vm.dma_reserved on DragonFly is set to 16M, and can be set higher. I think this is necessary when running higher-resolution screens… Don’t quote me on that, though.
Thanks to Nicolas Thery, there’s a POSIX semaphore test suite on DragonFly, ported from FreeBSD. Anyone want to integrate it into dfregress?
There’s a recently talked about bug in SYSRET that apparently affects a lot of operating systems, including Linux and several BSDs. It looks like DragonFly is not affected, but Matthew Dillon has put in changes just in case.
Francois Tigeot has been working on making i915 video support work better; with his latest update, it’s worth trying the Intel-specific driver instead of vesa if you have both the 915 chipset and are running X.
Matthew Dillon changed powerd on DragonFly so that the system is set to max performance if powerd is killed. Now you’ll know why your fans turned on!
Alex Hornung has added a ChaCha algorithms and Fortuna-based CSPRNG to DragonFly’s random device. You can pick what runs with the sysctl kern.rand_mode, and some other changes.
It’s a manageable list this week.
- Markov Chains Explained. It’s useful to at least know what Markov chains are, because there are some silly text tricks that can be done, and it’s a good term to use so that you sound smart. (via)
- Rob Pike’s 5 rules of programming. (via)
- Similar: Epigrams in programming. (via)
- snowdrift.coop, a new funding service for open source projects. It’s not launched yet, but it appears to be using a ‘shares’ approach which could be interesting. (via IRC)
- Unix: never go topless.
- On the cruelty of really teaching computing science. Good quote where I found it, too.
- Don’t tell people to use VIM (because) You’re Using It Wrong. Notes how trendy “use Vim!” articles have become. (via)
- The levels of Emacs proficiency. (via)
- The genre-defining video games we forgot. A surprisingly in-depth documentary.
- Eulerian Video Magnification. Heartbeat reading with common cameras. (via a newsletter)
- Sometimes you think of something that should exist, and then you immediately find out it does exist – foot switches for emacs.
- Explaining X11 for the rest of us. (via)
- Awesome-awesomeness. Curated lists of resources for various languages. Two things struck me: one is that Github is being used more like a document repository than a code repository, sometimes, and the other is that this is such a huge list, it almost overwhelms the original purpose of showing what to use next. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Formicapunk. Boulet’s version of analog technology.
Finally, a much more eventful week. I already noted LibreSSL’s release.
- DiscoverBSD’s news summary for 2014/07/07.
- PC-BSD Digest 31 – there’s now a PC-BSD IRC channel.
- Your server can probably tell you the temperature.
- Future of pf in FreeBSD? Follow the thread. (via)
- DragonFly’s pf alterations discussed for OpenBSD. It wouldn’t be easy without some of the underlying DragonFly architecture, but something for everyone to remember: Henning Brauer is generous with his time and will help people updating pf.
- mfiutil on FreeBSD.
- ia64 processor support is gone from FreeBSD.
- NetBSD now has BIND 9.10.0-P2.
- FreeBSD now has bmake-20140620.
- OpenBSD now has lynx 2.8.8rel2.
- OpenBSD’s relayd now has a new filter language.
- pkgsrc 2014Q2 binaries are out now for several platforms.
- FreeBSD has a new core team.
- More cross-pollination – also from Android?
- OpenBSD-current users will need to update their kernel.
The portable (meaning ready to be brought into other operating systems) version of LibreSSL is out.