Seen on Hubert Feyrer’s blog: The BSD daemon used for sex toy vending machines. Wierd.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert committed a fix to 1.2-RELEASE for the recent zlib security problem.
UnixReview.com has three new articles: a review of the book on 60’s culture and PCs, “What the Dormouse Said“, an article on Nagios, and a look at OpenSolaris.
So, if you’re using Google’s new personalization features, you can add DragonFly BSD Digest headlines using: http://www.shiningsilence.com/dbsdlog/index.rdf. Ooh, pretty.
Matthew Dillon only just noticed the Wikipedia entry for DragonFly. (It’s been linked here for quite a while.)
Also, IBM’s developerWorks has a “Why FreeBSD?” article that mentions DragonFly as the more technical alternative.
Gregory Neil Shapiro just updated sendmail to 8.13.4, which means it runs natively on DragonFly. (It no longer assumes FreeBSD.) He posted a list of changes.
Joerg Sonnenberger posted two alerts: the first is that pam.d now replaces pam.conf, and that he’s mangling the ABI in HEAD (bleeding edge code) over the next few days in preparation for moving what’s in HEAD to PREVIEW (moderately stable code).
FreeBSD’s latest newletter is out, covering a number of their projects.
Speaking of this topic, there hasn’t been a BSD news roundup on OnLAMP for some time. Where did you go, Sam?
Matthew Dillon posted about the work he and others are doing to track down some elusive SMP bugs. Because of this work, the “preview” tag will be moved up soon.
The BSDNews website has undergone a cosmetic change. Content and layout appears to remain the same, however.
OnLAMP/BSD has a new (and long!) interview of Colin Percival, who discovered the cache security flaw in multicore chips.
Colin primarily works on FreeBSD, but he very kindly sends alerts to DragonFly developers for issues that affect both code bases.
Chriss Pressey announced the 2005.0721 version of the BSD Installer. This version can partition disks and leave existing installed operating systems intact. Also, the entire session is saved in a repeatable script that doesn’t even require the installer to run, similar to RedHat’s Kickstart or other technologies.
There’s more changes, and a new upgrade feature that needs testing. Check the announcement for details.
Or rather, potentially no weekend update. A friend of mine is getting married this weekend, so news postings may be slow. I’ll catch up early next week, if need be.
Joerg Sonnenberger has updated zlib to version 1.2.3, for good reason.
BSDCertification.org has a new newsletter out, and a monstrous 143-page summary of the Task Summary Survey they conducted some time ago. Interestingly, 3.8% of respondents use DragonFly at school/work, which is more than I expected in this part of the development cycle.
OnLAMP/BSD is back in action with an article on the latest trend: Live CDs, this time for OpenBSD.
Also, UnixReview.com has new material,including a number of book reviews such as “Silence on the Wire” and the goofy-sounding but probably useful “Spring into Technical Writing for Engineers and Scientists“.
It’s a slow news day, for once, so here’s a minor bit of information: a definition of “rollup” for patches.
This site now has an index2.xml page that lists full stories without comments. The original XML page listed just the beginning of entries.
By the way, it’s time to renew your The Perl Journal subscription. The magazine’s successfully survived a full year, even printing in dead-tree format.
FreeBSD has 18 different Google Summer of Code projects, one of which is integrating our very own BSD Installer, among other very interesting ideas. There’s a wiki with information on a few of the proposals. NetBSD is also particpating, though there’s no list of accepted proposals online, yet. (hubertf will probably have something soon.)
Update: There’s a SourceForge project for the NetBSD Summer of Code work. (thanks, anonymous poster!) Ooh! Someone’s working on zeroconf!