Thanks to Michael Neumann, it’s now possible to remove a drive from a Hammer volume. It’s experimental, so all the standard warnings apply.
This can’t be done on a root volume, for hopefully obvious reasons.
Proposed changes in pkgsrc:
- JDK 1.4 and perhaps JDK 1.5 will be removed.
- Kerberos 4 also will be removed.
- There’s not too many packages without DESTDIR support left; please help if you can. (DESTDIR support means being able to install packages as non-root, to other directories.)
- Testers are needed to test the Perl upgrade to 5.10.1, and SpamAssassin 3.3.0beta1.
Please follow each thread; they’re still in progress, so some of those removals may get canceled, or testing completed by the time this is read.
I’ve been building this entry up for a while, so some of these entries are newer than others.
- From the howling void: OpenSolaris or FreeBSD. I’ll admit I haven’t tried OpenSolaris, but I’m also biased to BSD.
- cpdup, originally-on-DragonFly software, has had an update.
- This description of the Content Pyramid talks about web content and links, but it could be stretched to open source software. There’s always been an implicit value to being at the top of the pyramid – hence the prestige not always fairly attached to “the commit bit”.
- Old computer facts (storage sizes) presented in handy infographic form? Sign me up!
- vitunes, a curses-based playlist manager. OpenBSD-specific, but may work on DragonFly. I like the look. (via)
- Video4Linux support is being worked on for FreeBSD, as apparently the headers are available without having to accept the GPL. This makes it potentially available to all the BSDs, which is nice.
- FreeNAS is moving to Linux, which is a mistake bummer. Except iXsystems stepped in and now FreeNAS is continuing as a FreeBSD-based item. A story that seemed bad but came out well, thanks to iXsystems. (Quick, buy their hardware!)
- “If you know of surviving software on 1/2″ tape, paper tape, cards, DECtape, etc. from users groups or computer manufacturers, please contact us. Equipment is available to recover these bits, and in some cases can be brought on-site.” (via)
- 3 BSD-themed holiday gifts.
- what.
Did you know you a Hammer volume can span multiple disks? And that you can add extra disks later on? There’s no RAID-like features – it’s just a straight multiple-disk volume, but it works. The Hammer command to do it is now “hammer volume-add“
Some of the ikiwiki configuration files on dragonflybsd.org were accidentally overwritten during a software upgrade. Normally this would mean some work to locate and replace them from backups, but since it was a Hammer volume, a quick look in /var/hammer/usr/… found them for me.
I want to point out what Hammer does, here. Restoring from backup isn’t new – it is in fact probably one of the most basic and necessary of system administration duties. However, Hammer makes it so easy that the incremental work of using it falls to almost nothing. There’s no extra preparation or syntax to learn for retrieval, which is wonderful. Hammer’s easy fix has helped me out several times now, saving me time that, while probably still successful with any other backup system, would have been taken up just restoring things back to normal.
BSDTalk 181 has a 16 minute conversation with Dan Langille, mostly about the upcoming BSDCan and PGCon.
There’s more people showing up for DragonFly at the 26th Chaos Communication Congress, in Berlin December 27th-30th. I’ve posted about it before , but it’s worth mentioning as the end of the year draws close. Speak up if you can join in.
A number of recent changes will be important to you if you develop on DragonFly:
- Sascha Wildner has added a indent(1) profile that matches what is usually done in DragonFly.
- Also, there’s a dragonfly.el for emacs users.
- Now new, but worth mentioning again: there is an excellent development(7) man page.
- Alex Hornung has ported and modified FreeBSD’s minidumps, so crash dumps can now be kept smaller than your total physical memory size.
Matthew Dillon has made version 4 of Hammer the default; the upgrade is a relatively painless ‘hammer upgrade’ command. This new version cuts out a chunk of the disk syncs needed, speeding up Hammer disk operations.
Please welcome the newest committer for DragonFly: Jan Lentfer.
If you can produce an article on open source success factors by December 20th, the Open Source Business Resource would like to hear from you. Also, the audio of a recent NYCBUG meeting is available online. Both of those links come from Dru Lavigne’s excellent BSD Twitter feeds. It’s worth watching the BSDEvents one because there’s literally daily BSD-themed events coming up, and she seems to catch every one.
Alexander Polakov has imported OpenBSD’s hotplugd(8). It monitors for hotplug-style events, like disk additions and removals, and executes corresponding scripts to handles those events.
AsiaBSDCon, which is happening the 11th through 14th of March, 2010, has issued the normal call for papers. (and they nicely posted it to users@) This looks to be the 4th year of this convention – have any readers here been to it?
It’s now possible to boot a vkernel using an NFS share as the root. Now, you can have a networked virtual system!
Aggelos Economopoulos has committed Jan Lentfer’s update of BIND to 9.5.2-P1. It fixes CVE-2009-4022, though that bug never affected DragonFly by default.
The end of year shopping season is on many of us again. I did this last year, and it seemed useful, so here’s another geeky holiday shopping guide.
For DragonFly material, there’s a number of places that will ship you a CD/DVD.
If you want a computer hardware gift, but your friends/family don’t know that much about hardware, point them at Newegg. Tell them the general type of item you want, and the reviews can help them pick.
For general geek gifts, there’s the ever-popular ThinkGeek. Wandering farther off the beaten path, there’s American Science and Surplus, Ward’s Scientific, Carolina, and United Nuclear. Creepier: The Bone Room or Skulls Unlimited.
A good gift for the technically minded: a Leatherman Wave. I’ve tried Gerber multitools and Swiss Army Knives, but I’ve been carrying a Leatherman Wave for so long people turn to me whenever something needs to be cut or opened, because they know I’ll be able to do it.
I’m linking to this even though it’s completely unrelated to this blog’s normal content: The Comics Reporter Holiday Shopping Guide. It’s comics, through and through, and some wonderful stuff is noted there.
Unlike many other blogs, I don’t get kickbacks or commissions off this. You can ascribe this to me “keeping it real” or that I’m bad at monetization. You pick.
It’s a dry-sounding topic, but the articles are interesting: The December issue of the Open Source Business Resource is now available, with “Value Co-creation” for a theme. I’ll point out “A Social Vision for Value Co-creation in Design“, because it has charts!
BSDCan 2010, coming up the 13th-14th of May, has put out the call for papers. The website says proposals start December 19th, but I suppose that’s just the day you start handing them in.
BSDTalk episode 180 is a 25-minute conversation with Girish Venkatachalam about … stuff. (I am posting before listening.)