Peter Avalos has added pam_passwdqc, a simple password quality checker (hence the ‘qc’) to DragonFly.
pcc appears to have had some significant updates due to funding; has anyone tried it on DragonFly recently?
The newest @Play column talks about yet another roguelike I’ve never heard of: Incursion. (Too much Zangband on my part.) Apparently it follows 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons rules quite carefully, which is different than the usual vague Tolkienish/D&Dish look that most roguelikes keep. Check the supplement at the bottom for some literary history.
Are you using any ISA-based network cards? Sepherosa Ziehau is planning to remove support very soon after the 2.2 release; speak up if this is a problem. Or, spend a few dollars and buy a card made in the last 10 years.
You get to hear me blather on for 22 minutes about this Digest and how important/easy it is to contribute to BSD projects, in BSDTalk 169.
If you feel frustrated that big (>100G) solid state disk drives are still relatively expensive, well… It has been much worse. (via)
Vincent Stemen posted a note about his homemade tool, called ‘partition’. It has some interesting features, though it would require some documentation and cleanup to use in DragonFly, where it could serve as a replacement for fdisk. If anyone’s interested in making that happen, contact Vincent.
Sepherosa Ziehau has also added age(4) support, a network chip common to Asus systems. Load the kernel module and report your results.
Two UNIX-centric items for end-of-week reading: “The History of Unix *dump programs” and “Roll your own toy UNIX-clone OS“. (via)
Thanks to Matthias Schmidt, the installer now supports Hammer, meaning you can install an all-Hammer DragonFly system. Well, almost.
Michael Neumann has replaced suser(9) with priv(9), taken from FreeBSD, for fine-grained priviledge control.
Sepherosa Ziehau has added OpenBSD’s in_addprefix() and in_scrubprefix() from OpenBSD, which makes it possible to add two addresses within the same subnet to two separate network interfaces. Read his post for a more descriptive synopsis. Hes also made some original fixes.
He’s also added support (from FreeBSD) for the Atheros AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 PCIe ethernet controller, via ale(4), prompted by some Eee PC 1000H issues that were highlighted here before.
The Winter version of the BSDA courseware DVD is now available. Everything on there is available (in parts) for free over the Internet, but paying the USD$40 for the DVD gets you convenience and a way to support bsdcertification.org. (via)
I need to note these faster; they’re piling up: the DCBSDCon blog has announced two more speakers for the convention: Richard Bejtlich (of Tao of Security), who will talking about network security monitoring with FreeBSD, and Marco Peereboom, of OpenBSD, who will be talking about epitome.
The most recent item on the DCBSDCon blog announces Kristaps Džonsons as a speaker; he will talk about his process isolation work on mult.
P.S. Who else thinks that it would be good to have man pages look as pretty as the web page for mult?
This recent Coding Horror column by Jeff Atwood expands on a Joel Spolsky discussion, where it’s pointed out good programmers program cause they love it, not because of the pay or anything else. I’d take that discussion a step farther and use open source programming as an example; people do it because they want to; because they don’t want to stop thinking about solving problems even when they aren’t at work.
There’s a parallel here that I’ll make between programming and ‘normal’ art; artists and designers do the same thing when they get home too.
So much that I’m doing bullet points:
- Peter Avalos brought in nsswitch and replaced portmap with rpcbind.
- Aggelos Economopoulos brought in his NETMP branch, where he is removing the BGL from socket code.
- Sepherosa Ziehau added support (from FreeBSD) for Attansic network chips.
- Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert brought in the remainder of Jordan Gordeev’s AMD64 work.
- Simon and other DragonFly developers are at 25C3 this week – say hi!
The ISC DHCP package in pkgsrc is changing as it moves from 4.0 to 4.1; the package names will be different, as will the rc flags. Keep an eye out for this if you use it for your internal network. (This may affect our install CD, too.)
If you didn’t make it to the 25th Chaos Communication Congress, there’s a number of ways it’s getting streamed via video and audio. (via)
Michael Neumann reported success booting DragonFly on his Eee PC 1000H, though the wireless/wired network drivers don’t work yet.
- Dru Lavigne mentioned that there are 2 different groups for BSD Certfication on LinkedIn, for those who use it. (Don’t forget, there’s a LinkedIn DragonFly BSD group, too.)
- The DCBSDCon Blog has announced annother speaker: Brooks Davis.