A useful BSD item from the Howling Void: BSD jails found to be more efficient than VMWare in given situations. I am both pleased and not really surprised.
BSDTalk 174: Kris Moore
BSDTalk 174 is up, with 16 minutes of conversation with Kris Moore of iXSystems (neé PC-BSD), from BSDCon 2009.
More BSD cross-pollination: bwi(4)
Sepherosa Ziehau’s bwi(4) driver for DragonFly is going into FreeBSD 8, as mentioned in this Warner Losh blog post.
“Thousands of times more secure than bcrypt”
Mr_Bond on #dragonflybsd passed along a link to Colin Percival’s post about scrypt, a “provably as strong as possible” encryption function that is designed to withstand brute force attacks. This was presented at BSDCan 2009, but his post has more details and links.
Roguelike roguelike hacklike
Two recent roguelike items:
Gamasutra has a 4-page article about Rogue, emphasizing its origins being intertwined with the original BSD UNIX. Read the comments for some BSD history, from that actual people involved. (via)
The latest @Play column about roguelikes is very long, and that will not be a surprise after you read the title: How To Win At Nethack. I find articles like this fascinating, but then again, I also enjoyed reading through the AD&D Dungeon Master Guide for the charts.
A lot of BSD
“FreeBSD – the unknown Giant” has beaten me to the post I was intending to make, noting that there’s 4 different BSD releases this week, all of varying sizes, and showing a lot of vigor in the BSD community.
BSD Book: virtual labs
Hubert Feyrer, for his PhD, put together a Virtual Unix Lab – a whole lab of NetBSD systems for teaching System Administration. It’s a good strategy for an environment where some percentage of the systems will be irretrievably mangled. It’s available as a book.