John Marino has pointed out, with a number of examples, that gnat-aux is the best pkgsrc-based compiler for DragonFly right now, in terms of compatibility and support. It’s certainly good news if you are an Ada programmer. He lists some interesting numbers to demonstrate this superiority, though you can’t buildworld with it yet. (gcc 4.4, on DragonFly as part of the system, will do this normally.)
Matthew Dillon has the mailarchive working again. It pulled from the NNTP version of the DragonFly mailing lists, and when NNTP broke, so did the archive. NNTP isn’t working, but at least the mailing list archive is functional.
I’m hoping to try out Mailman (with NNTP) as a replacement soon…
There’s a Youtube video showing how to set up a virtual kernel on DragonFly. I don’t think I linked to this before. (via)
There’s a new Technology Innvation Management Review out, with Open Source Business as the theme. The guest editor for this issue is possibly known to you – Leslie Hawthorn, who was the coordinator for the first years of the Google Summer of Code project.
BSDCan 2012 is happening on the 11th and 12th of May, 2012, with 2 days of tutorials beforehand. It’s at the University of Ottawa. The call for papers is out. These are proposals for talks, not academic papers. The deadline for submissions is Jan 29th, unlike what the site says as of this writing.
Nuno Antunes has committed a large quantity of work on updating netgraph to version 7. His goal is to be able to run mpd5, though it’s not there yet. If you want to look at it, go to the monthly page and look around the 10th; there’s too much to link to individually.
It’s listed both as the December and the January issue, but either way, there’s a new issue of BSD Magazine.
(I’m way behind on posting news; I apologize. I’m working my way through several crises. Crisises? Not sure of the plural form of crisis.)
I said posting would be more regular now that the holiday’s over, didn’t I? I lied.
- Here’s a useful idea: a server that allows (Linux) systems with encrypted file systems to boot unattended. I’m not sure how that doesn’t defeat the concept, but actually reading the documentation may help with that. (via, via)
- While on the topic, the EFF says “Encrypt your disk!“. (via)
- The Commodore 64 is 30 years old, for those readers of a certain age who may have had one… I was a Apple ][ kid. (via)
- Aw, thanks.
- “What deduplicating file system should I use?” Well, I can think of an answer.
Your unrelated link for the day: The Restart Page. (via) Make your browser full-screen when trying any of them.
Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL to 1.0.0f; this is to fix 6 security issues identified in the OpenSSL changelog.
I just mentioned DNSSEC in last week’s Lazy Reading, and here’s a “How to get DNSSEC with BIND 9.8.1 working” article from Michael Lucas. It’s pretty simple… Conveniently, BIND 9.8.1 is available in pkgsrc as net/bind98.
You may want to update for this – a lockup bug with the re(4) (RealTek 8xxx series) driver has been fixed.
dma, which originated on DragonFly, is now at version 0.7, and so is the version in DragonFly.
If you’re running DragonFly on a very low-end system, you may be wondering about memory requirements for Hammer. Hammer is much less RAM-hungry than ZFS, so it looks like you can get away with 128M, as long as you don’t mind the occasional error message. You can manually tweak settings for it if you like. 256M is plenty.
It still strikes me as odd to consider systems with less than 1G of RAM as “low-memory”. What rich times we live in!
Happy new year! Regular posting should resume soon now that my holidays are over.
- I like the line, “Please note that BSD manpages are usually better as compare to Linux” [sic] found on this odd page of where to find documentation.
- Hey, this encryption of DNS requests is a good idea. Then again, so is DNSSEC. I’ve done neither.
- Stop using GoDaddy, if you can. There’s plenty of reasons, other than support for SOPA.
- There’s got to be at least one reader who gets this joke.
- If you don’t mind digging through all the comments in this Slashdot article about building a desktop environment, there’s some neat descriptions of different window managers and so on.
- A mild brain teaser to start the year: a regular expression to find prime numbers.
- This is a nice description of just what the Archive Team does. (via)
- The Coming War on General Purpose Computing. Sometimes the stuff on BoingBoing gives me the same irritated feeling as sensationalistic Wired articles, but this one is good to read if you happen to be working on your own operating system. Also, the similar thing with APIs.
- This “best tech writing of 2011” summary on Verge (via) led me to this excellent article: “The Web Is a Customer Service Medium“. There’s lots more reading in that summary.
- I’ve seen this mentioned before, but now it’s with a graph so it’s better! On the continuing decline of the GPL.
- OK, I admit graphs are not always a good idea. (via)
- Trivium, from which I yoinked that last link, also has an blog from its author, Chris Neukirchen. It’s not updated often but there’s some entertaining sysadmin tidbits on there, such as going all-ed, or zsh tips, or Why I use the MIT license.
Your completely unrelated link of the day: Tiny Legs of Fire. (video) Worth it for the origin of Beardslap.
(Sorry about the giant text block. This isn’t as readable as I’d like.)
John Marino updated libm, bringing a large quantity of functions. This may be a stopgap measure for now. As a positive side effect, buffer overflow attacks are a bit harder now.
Chris Turner got it working on i386, at least, and his post will help you do the same. I don’t know if these changes have made it through to pkgsrc or for x86_64 yet.
That’s Managed System Interrupts, for when your hardware is passing a lot of data and generating a lot of corresponding hardware interrupts. MSI is what deals with all that traffic. High-bandwidth (10G) network cards, for instance. Anyway, Sepherosa Ziehau’s made more commits than what I’m linking to here, for support with various devices.
There’s many other MSIs out there, oddly enough.
BSDTalk has 20 minutes of interview with James Nixon of iXsystems, from LISA 2011.
Are you going to Chaos Communication Congress 28? There’s going to be a number of DragonFly developers there, so it’s a good time to meet up. They’re in EFNet #dragonflybsd IRC, so speak up there if you want to find them.
The recently discovered telnetd vulnerability has been fixed in DragonFly, thanks to Peter Avalos. Apparently it’s been around everywhere forever. (last link via xhr) Hopefully there aren’t that many people that still need a telnet daemon; SSH has run it out of town for the most part.