I didn’t know this existed: there’s an official OpenBSD non-profit that’s been created to handle donations. (via) There’s one for FreeBSD and NetBSD, so perhaps DragonFly should follow suit?
The first BSDTalk of the new year is here, with Marten Vijn about Open Community Camp, a camping/geekout event in the Netherlands being held August 2008.
For your entertainment: (some of these require Flash; all are off-topic)
- Why geeks are a handy weapon
- 10 minutes of awesome
- Working on short attention spans (last two via)
- Oldie but goodie: the Electronic Music Guide
- A nice open-source payback story
The call for papers for CONFidence 2008 is out, with papers due February 1st. (via undeadly)
FOSDEM 2008, the “Free and Open Source software Developers’ European Meeting”, is happening February 23-24th, in Brussels, Belgium. There will be a BSD-specific room, for which we could use a DragonFly presence. Also: beer. (via FreeBSD-announce)
The Best of FreeBSD Basics is out now on Amazon and perhaps elsewhere, containing much (all?) of Dru Lavigne’s column of the same name from OnLAMP.com. It says ‘FreeBSD’ in the title, but I’d expect everything that isn’t ports-specific will apply to every BSD. Her columns are clear and to the point.
Other factoids:
- A portion of the book’s proceeds are going to the BSD Certification Group.
- Dru Lavigne is also the author of O’Reilly’s BSD Hacks.
- The publisher of this book, Reed Media Services, is Jeremy C. Reed, a contributor to pkgsrc and DragonFly.
Matthew Dillon wrote an update for the state of HAMMER, the new file system for DragonFly. It’s at the point where historical data can retrieved even after data is deleted, though it’s not stable yet. The most recent commit notes an interesting upcoming feature idea: historical atime and mtime tracking.
Matthias Schmidt committed changes to kdump(1) that make the output more human-readable. (Original code is from FreeBSD.)
Stephane Russell posted on users@ asking for opinions on using commodity gateways (Linksys devices, etc) vs. DragonFly for a firewall and network gateway device.
Link summation time! Those gateway devices can run open-source operating systems – most famously the Linksys WRT54G. However, they can be problematic, though “Tomato” was recommended, as was OpenWRT. For read-only security, you can also boot from CD, as Dave Hayes does.
Matthew Dillon pointed out a small device that boots an free OS is all you need, which leads to stores selling my personal fascination: teeny computer systems. Michael Neumann listed favorites pcengines.ch and soekris.com, and Thomas Donnelly added Logic Supply.
Dru Lavigne has posted a pile of links to various things – click through and eat up an hour or two.
Joerg Anslik posted his setup to blacklist IPs which repeatedly scan via FTP or SSH. Some discussion ensued.
Long-time readers will remember a previous discussion like this.
pkgsrcCon for 2008 is happening June 13th-15th in Berlin. If you are planning to present a paper there, their call for papers is up. You have until May 25th.
DragonFly has two new committers, as an end-of-year treat: Matthias Schmidt and Nicolas Thery. Welcome, both of you. (Also, don’t forget ‘walt‘ earlier this month.)
Sepherosa Ziehau has imported the msk(4) driver, which supports the Marvell Yukon II networking chipset, orginally from FreeBSD.
Matthias Schmidt has tried synchronizing with FreeBSD’s /etc/periodic; he reports no issues on his DragonFly system. He also helpfully summarizes all the improvements in his post.
- The FreeBSD Foundation has released its semi-annual newsletter for the end of 2007.
- NetBSD has released version 4.0.
- Peter Avalos has updated DragonFly’s libarchive to 2.4.8.
The latest BSDTalk has a16-minute interview with Peter N. M. Hansteen, who recently wrote The Book of PF, and apparently possesses a lot of middle names.
It’s also the 2-year anniversary of BSDTalk – Congratulations to Will Backman.
Chris Turner posted his thoughts on improving vn(4).
Peter Avalos has added the CAM_NEW_TRAN_CODE kernel option, which apparently is very helpful in an unspecified way if you are using SCSI disks via CAM.
The December issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out.
Also, Cisco is looking for some FreeBSD developers. Given Cisco’s recent announcement that they were moving to an open source operating system for their equipment, and that Juniper’s system is already BSD-based…Â Hmm.
I group these together because they were both found by Dru Lavigne at AYitLoaBG.
BSDCan 2008, held in May, in Ottowa, has the initial call for papers out. They have space for informal talks and presentations too.