If you have net/proftpd installed, and you installed it in the last week or so, you may want to upgrade. There’s been a security problem with the source files.
So, informal poll time: do people like these Lazy Reading roundups?
- Numbers everyone should know. (via) I link to this cause it’s interesting, and because it shows something else. If you understand what these numbers mean, congratulations. You speak a language that a limited number of people on this planet can understand. Think about that for a bit.
- The end of a faithful server. (via) I can sympathize. Run any computer for some number of years without any issues, and you’ll miss it when it’s gone.
- A simple explanation for ‘git reset –hard’. Some chunks of git are magical, in that I know they work but the internal behavior is still opaque to me. It may be best to keep it that way.
- I do gain a perverse sense of pride that DragonFly is an all-volunteer organization. Linux, on the other hand, is mostly a corporate product. (via) I realize this is not a legitimate thing, and I’d love having enough of a market that someone could be paid to work on DragonFly.
- Hey, the Economist Magazine’s Babbage blog is pretty good. I like this recent article about the Eye-Fi, a device I tell people about whenever I can. It essentially erases the need for storage on your camera. The last paragraph in the Babbage entry is also a little bit important.
Another Google Code-In task completed: passwords are now created using SHA256 (PDF link) by default, and libcrypt also now supports SHA512.
Courtesy of another Google Code-In project, bugs.dragonflybsd.org now matches the main Dragonfly website.
Sascha Wildner has added even more RAID controller support, from FreeBSD, this time in improvements to the amr(4) driver. Check the green lines in this man page diff to see what’s new.
The Google Code-In projects for DragonFly are bearing fruit, as there’s new pages in the new handbook, plus code commits from various finished projects. 14 tasks are done, and there’s 10 more in progress, out of… I think 50? This is a good rate, considering there’s more than a month left.
There’s a minute and a half of video up of NYCBSDCon 2010, showing off the nice facilities, food, and some of the talks. (via) You can see me shifting around in my seat at 1:28.
The December theme for the Open Source Business Resource is “Humanitarian Open Source”. It sounds somewhat ethereal, but the articles actually concentrate on achieving concrete targets. Plus, more microfinance!
Sascha Wildner has brought in the mfi(4) and mfiutil(8) drivers from FreeBSD, adding support for a number of different RAID controllers – including the Dell PERC 5 and PERC 6.
Rui-Xiang Guo has brought chromium, the base of Google’s speedy Chrome web browser, into pkgsrc, in the wip branch. He’s looking for testers of the work, especially on DragonFly. Please try it and report!
I did this last year and the year before, so why not make a habit of it? I get no commissions; these are mostly places I’ve shopped or plan to shop. It’s based on “This would be SO COOL to have”, and nothing else.
General:
Nerditry: Newegg, ThinkGeek, Leatherman Wave, ISC.org (see 9-layer OSI model shirt).
Science: American Science and Surplus, Ward’s Scientific, Carolina, and United Nuclear.
Creepy: Bone Room, Skulls Unlimited, or Skullduggery.
BSDs:
There are FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD stores, where money goes back to the project.
Bookwise, Jeremy C. Reed publishes a number of BSD–related books. Buy his stuff through Amazon. There’s also No Starch Press, which has a number of BSD publications. (and LEGO, too?) And of course O’Reilly, for a bunch of things.
Nice things to do:
The FreeBSD Foundation is having an end-of-year appeal for funds, so you can donate in someone’s name. The NetBSD Foundation probably accepts donations, though I don’t have a specific page to link to for that.
Donations to the Itojun Service Award fund are also a good thing.
Everything else I could think of:
- MAKE Magazine subscriptions
- SparkFun Electronics (I want one of their Port-O-Rotary phones),
- Topatoco shirts and books
- Klein bottles
- RLT.com (check out the many subsites linked there)
Further suggestions welcome, especially for European shoppers. I’ve been slowly growing this list year-to-year, and I can always use more interesting and unique places.
Update: George Rosamond pointed at DealExtreme.com. There are some crazy cheap prices there.
Also, and I can’t believe I didn’t link to this before: Brando. If you’re looking for something with a USB port, Brando has it. Even if it’s a jeweled scorpion necklace… USB drive.
DragonFly versions >=2.6 and ipfw don’t seem to get along for doing network address translations. I’ve posted about this before, but I’m linking again because this time I have the explicit config lines written out.
I should probably create a pf category…
Several Google Code-In tasks for DragonFly have already been claimed and finished – a regression test and desktop documentation, plus others I haven’t been involved in.
The contest runs through January and is open to anyone 13-18, with Google paying per task. Hopefully we’ll have enough tasks to make it the full time, as it’s more popular than I anticipated.
Alex Hornung has added the basic work for dmirror, a software RAID-1 implementation into the tree, along with a concept description from Matthew Dillon. It’s not ready for use yet; ready for development, though.
Siju George noticed that his mouse would stop working in X, perhaps every hour. Restarting X would fix it, but he didn’t have a clear cause. Antonio Huete Jimenez suggested turning the sysctl ‘debug.psm.loglevel’ to 9 to at least see what messages cropped up, and that seemed to fix it. I don’t think it’s a good long-term solution, but it’s worth mentioning in case this odd bug bites someone else.
Please welcome our newest committer: Ilya Dryomov. He’s already responsible for deduplication code for Hammer, so now he can work directly.
Tomas Bodzar found robotpkg, a pkgsrc-based collection of robotics-related software. Because of its pkgsrc origins, it should in theory work with DragonFly, or most anything.
APIC_IO is back as a kernel config option, though it just toggles the sysctl loader tunable default. This is so a kernel config file with that option still set won’t cause an error.
Matthew Dillon’s made several changes to improve support for AMD SB850 chipsets (for AHCI) and also for 880/890 chipsets. If you have one of these systems, it may be bootable/more reliable. Don’t start messing with the hot-plug capability yet, though.