Rumko came up with some changes for vkernel(7) that, among other things, made it possible to run them diskless; almost like booting a thin workstation.
Found via a random Google search: SSHGuard. It’s not available in pkgsrc, but it’s in other BSD packaging systems, and it lists DragonFly on the site as a possible host. It monitors various services and blocks access to overly aggressive connections using (on DragonFly) pf. This is similar to scripts discussed here in the past. It also may be useful in light of the recent FTPd problem.
OpenSSL on DragonFly can now dynamically load engines (cryptographic support modules) at runtime, thanks to Peter Avalos.
Something that always got with with Linux binary support was that I couldn’t get the Linux /proc filesystem to automatically mount on boot. I’d end up doing it by hand later, right after I tried to start a Linux binary and had all sorts of issues. Pierre Abbat had this same problem, and Sascha Wildner has the answer: “linux_load=yes” in /boot/loader.conf.
If you were thinking of buying a Western Digital Passport USB drive, it’s supported on DragonFly, thanks to Dylan Reinhold and Alex Hornung.
For those using the release version of DragonFly, the new C-based loader in 2.8 will look like this. Well, not exactly. This is from a proposal from Alex Hornung that removes some extra lines, but I expect this is what you’ll see.
The newest issue of BSD Magazine is all about VPNs and BSD. It’s free to read in PDF form.
The 200th (yay!) episode of BSDTalk has 14 minutes of conversation with Kjell Wooding, talking about mg, a sort of teeny emacs included with OpenBSD.
Here’s something: Pratyush Kshirsagar came along, saw the proportional RSS project idea, and did it. It’s nice to have a completed project just sort of fall out of the sky.
If you run any flavor of BSD, you should make sure your ftpd is off, as Mathias Schmidt points out based on this recent security advisory.
I’m going. Venkatesh Srinivas is going. Who else is interested? (See the site.)
When compiling software on DragonFly but outside of pkgsrc, and you have trouble with configure, remember you can always manually pull down new versions. You’re welcome, future me.
I’m linking to this commit message from Matthias Schmidt simply because it has the correct invocation for installing a vkernel, and I know this will come in handy, someday.
Chris Turner wrote some notes about building pkgsrc packages in a chroot, including the handy tip of using
DISPLAY=:0
to run and display a GUI-using app under the chroot.
The almost-to-200 expisode of BSDTalk has 14 minutes of conversation with John Hixson about PC-Sysinstall and what it could replace.
This Lazy Reading post actually has some good lengthy reading in it.
- Modern Perl: The Book: (actually a pre-print draft) Even if you don’t know Perl, I’ve always liked the way the author, chromatic, writes. Many articles about a language or other technical subject tend to either wander about loosely or become a ‘shopping list’ of actions, but chromatic’s work retains focus.
- Robert Watson presents Capsicum; a recent USENIX talk on Youtube. (via a number of places)
- 12 Forgotten Games – the slideshow is of most interest. (via) Online games that predate the vast swarm of today’s titles. MUDs, MUSHs, roguelikes, etc. The nice thing about the slideshow is the link on each slide to a still-running, still-accessible online version of that game.
- Kieron Gillen‘s moving away from Rock, Paper, Shotgun, a gaming review site that has some honest to goodness decent writing. (My Lazy Reading posts are similar to their Sunday Papers for a reason.) One of his articles was all about ZangbandTK. I was all set to link to that in pkgsrc, but it’s not there – just games/angband-tty and games/angband-x11. Darnit. Anyway, read his article and then go play something roguelike.
Based on a recent project list entry for “changing the vm_map lookup” (currently last item on the page), Venkatesh Srinivas wrote up a bit more information on it, linking to different strategies for arranging the data. Good reading for those who like data structures.
Matthias Schmidt has set up a x86_64 DragonFly machine at uther.dragonflybsd.org. Anyone wanting to try 64-bit testing can use a vkernel on that machine. Mail him for an account.
Hasso Tepper posted a link to something I had only heard about when it didn’t exist in physical form: the Open Graphics Device v1. It’s possible to get one if you’re going to write support for it.