If you’re curious about the hardware being used for the colocated dragonflybsd.org servers (this includes the website, the repository, the mailing lists, dports build machines, etc.), here’s the ‘MicroCloud’ product page. DragonFly’s model was purchased from iXsystems. Apparently those Haswell processors have a fantastic power consumption to performance ratio. (via)
I’m running a bit behind because I’ve been on the road, but here they are:
- Daniel Flores: HAMMER2 compression feature
- Larisa Grigore: System V IPC in userspace
- Pawel Dziepak: Make vkernels checkpointable
- Joris GIOVANNANGELI: Capsicum
- Mihai Carabas: hardware nested page table support for vkernels
Had this one done before the last Lazy Reading. There are so many things to see and think and do in a day, and they’re not even all on the Internet. You get only the Internet ones here, though.
- Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won’t be another Hacker News. Found on Hacker News, of course, and I suspect the title was designed to get clicks from there. Some interesting thoughts on how people read.
- Facebook is like a television that monitors to see how much you are laughing and changes the channel if it decides you aren’t laughing hard enough.
- Unix routing. It’s actually Linux routing, but if you avoid the Linux-specific parts, it’s a useful introduction.
- ASCII cheat sheet.
- How to build a user-level CPU profiler. Followed by Hacking the OS X Kernel for Fun and Profiles.
- Mediagoblin. I haven’t tried it, but the idea is a good one. As long as we don’t have to call it GNU/Mediagoblin.
- I was going to make a joke about not using software I can’t name out loud without sounding incomprehensible, but then again, I’m using BSD. Too late for that joke.
- The Future of Programming. Take the time to watch this. The list of resource links is enough to fill several afternoons with reading. Also, it’s not yet another TED talk where someone is trying to communicate excitement rather then information. (via)
- If I’m going to link to Reggie Watts, why not look at one of his music videos? Normally that would be an Unrelated Link, but I just made it related from the previous item, yay! (link contains naughty language.)
- Go for system administrators. (via)
- Git + webcam = lulz. This could be fun or scary or both. (via)
- Retro video games, delivered. (via) I still hope to build a MAME box someday.
- 0.9999999999 repeating = 1.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Boulet’s Long Journey. Get ready for a lot of scrolling. I know there’s a lot of really good French comics that I don’t see just because I don’t speak the language. (This one’s in English, but the cartoonist is French.)
Not just source links, this week:
- OpenBSD no longer has the Y2038 problem.
- A head-mounted augmented reality display using FreeBSD?
- The 2013 EuroBSDCon is going to have a vendor summit (primarily FreeBSD, from the sounds of it).
- There’s a new BSD Certification Group training CD.
- NetBSD now supports the Sitecom N300 wifi adapter.
- Do you have an Amiga that runs NetBSD, and an X-Surf 100 network card? It’s supported.
- nvi now has multi-byte character support, at least on FreeBSD.
- The July FreeBSD Foundation newsletter has a “Strategic Planning” section that I can’t imagine anyone would disagree with. The goals expressed – experience, design, and documentation – are all things that each BSD project can do better than Linux or most any other open source system.
One of the most-requested items for the DragonFly mailing list archives is reverse sorting by date. Mailman, which is what’s being used now for archiving, doesn’t have a ‘native’ way to do that. Has anyone seen a trick/patch to get that to happen? I already patch Mailman to get the message date to show in listings.
Sepherosa Ziehau suggests this relatively easy task: adding a TSC cputimer to vkernels. Apparently most of the framework to do this is already in place.
Michael W. Lucas has a review up of Richard Bejtlich’s “The Practice of Network Security Monitoring“. Both of them are long-term BSD users, and Bejtlich, if I remember correctly, was part of the design of Capsicum, the security framework that is serving as a Summer of Code project for DragonFly right now. So it’s worth looking at his book. And/or looking at his blog, for those who want more.
BSDTalk episode 230 is out. It’s 12 minutes of conversation with Burt Kaliski, CTO of Verisign, about the upcoming newest BSD convention, vBSDCon.
Maybe the title of this post doesn’t rhyme, but it does in my head. Michael W. Lucas is looking for people with interesting sudo setups, for his upcoming book.
I’d be really surprised to find this affects anyone, but it’s possible: some kernel options specific to Cyrix processors have been removed, by Sascha Wildner.
Registration is open for vBSDCon, happening in Dulles, Virginia, USA, on October 25th through 27th. There’s some neat-sounding presentations listed.
I think that is the same location where I went to a rather spectacular pre-dotcom-crash presentation from Time Warner/Road Runner back in 1999. The hotel was great; the presenters were befuddled. An internal account manager ran up a $3,000 bar tab in one night on a company credit card… I still have the fancy Guinness glass he bought me. I don’t think this convention will work exactly the same way, but unlike my 1999 trip, the speakers at this one will actually know what they are talking about.
If you look at the reports from students this week, they are mostly “I had bugs and I fixed them and there’s not much to do other than test”, which is the sign of well-planned projects. Here’s the status reports:
- Daniel Flores: HAMMER2 compression feature
- Larisa Grigore: System V IPC in userspace
- Pawel Dziepak: Make vkernels checkpointable
- Joris GIOVANNANGELI: Capsicum
- Mihai Carabas: hardware nested page table support for vkernels
If you missed Michael W. Lucas’s talk about DNSSEC, it’s recorded and available on Youtube. Or buy his book.
shiningsilence.com suffered a disk failure early this morning. I’ll take the opportunity to set up a new machine, given that my local backup drive hasn’t been mounted and my remote backup went offline, in a horrible coincidence.
The disk is up and limping, which is why you can read this, but I’m still rebuilding. What motherboard/CPU/RAID/etc. parts do people recommend?
Again, lots of links. Some of these are overflow from previous weeks where I just said “That’s enough; let’s work on the next Lazy Reading.”
- Perl, the Detroit of scripting languages. The slides are entertaining, but it’s also interesting for the discussion of how to handle a very old code base and a community. (which are BSD issues too) (via)
- Ruins of Forgotten Empires: APL languages. “APL uses one thread per CPU, which is how sane people do things.” (via)
- Remember when we used mega- prefixes to measure disk and memory, and not bandwidth?
- Ian Lance Taylor’s 20-part series on ELF linkers and linking. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- PDF compression formats. Incidentally, here’s an answer on the Xerox number alternation issue, where compression means one number gets misidentified and substituted for another. The Economist has a not-crazy take on it. It’s not a Xerox problem but rather a JBIG2 compression issue. I have a number of Xerox models at work and have not seen this issue, but also haven’t checked for it.
- OSI, the Internet That Wasn’t. People only ever care about levels 1, 2, 3, and 7 in the OSI model. And this joke. (via)
- The Toshiba Libretto. You can get more powerful, smaller computers now, but they’re cheap netbooks and totally uncool.
- A crash course in tmux. (via)
- Whatever room you keep your primary computer in – clean it, please.
- Robots for destroying buildings. This is not some speculative article; these are robots you can buy right now. Screw the flying cars joke everyone makes; the future is now. (via)
- How to shutdown computer under Linux? A rough summary of how Linux can be a moving target for actual usage.
- Vim 7.4 out, mostly so there isn’t so many patches to apply.
- Goto is making a comeback. (via Eric Radman)
Your unrelated link of the week: Mighty Taco radio ads. Mighty Taco is a Mexican fast food place from Buffalo, New York, USA. It’s about as authentically Mexican as fast food from a city on the edge of Canada can be, which is ‘not much’. I’ve always loved the food, though, and the commercials are just the right mix of amateur joke and commercial advertising.
Bonus unrelated: If you enjoy imgur/fukung but it’s not youtubey enough, hit ‘Random’ on IWantMoar.com a few times. You may want to turn down your volume.
Or at least scheduled to happen now, since I’m posting this and postdating it for everyone as a reminder. I hope I have the time right.
The mailing list archives for DragonFly (lists.dragonflybsd.org) have been moved to new hardware. (Yay!) The patch that actually shows date in the listings needs to reapplied, cause Mailman is somewhat stale. (Boo!) I applied the patch and I’m regenerating all the archives now. (Yay!) There’s some garbled messages in the archives that cause a bunch of “no subject” partial messages to be dumped at the end. (Boo!) I’ll manually fix them if I can, someday. (Yay?)
Definitely Saturdays for this summary. In other BSDs this week:
- It’s FreeBSD, but it can apply to any BSD where a personal attribution license is used: Julian Elischer’s name comes with every iPhone.
- cxgbe(4) cards can now display their temperature under FreeBSD.
- ciss(4) supports additional HP RAID controllers under FreeBSD.
- Bind has been updated to 9.8.5-P2 in FreeBSD.
- FreeBSD has initial support for the Cubieboard 2.
- FreeBSD now has a USB test program.
- NetBSD supports some additional ZTE modem devices.
- NetBSD has cgram, a substitution-cipher solver. For amusement purposes?
- NetBSD supports the Nuvoton W83795G monitoring device.
- OpenBSD now supports wireless devices using the Ralink RT3060.
Wired has an article up about Jordan Hubbard and his move from Apple to iXsystems. It’s not a bad article, though it doesn’t delve into the why of BSD very much. In any case, iXsystems has been really bulking up lately to be more than a generic hardware provider.
Speaking of which, that blade system going in now for dragonflybsd.org was sold by iXsystems.