BSD – Page 74 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2013/09/28

In Other BSDs for 2013/09/28

This week was relatively quiet, but also had the most cross-BSD work I’ve seen in a while. Look at the links and you’ll see.

Here’s some encryption fallout in FreeBSD.
MegaRAID Invader cards now work on FreeBSD.
OpenSSH is at version 6.3p1 in FreeBSD.
FreeBSD has moved to Unbound as a BIND replacement.
FreeBSD imported a newer version of NetBSD’s readline.
NetBSD supports the AlphaStation DS15, ported from OpenBSD.
OpenBSD has updated le(4) to match NetBSD’s version.
OpenBSD has also moved to Unbound – version 1.4.21.
OpenBSD now has ldns 1.6.16.

Here’s more on Unbound, since it seems to be a trend.

2013/09/222013/09/21

Lazy Reading for 2013/09/22

This week, the sewer drain for my house clogged. Fixing that is not fun. What is fun is reading random semi-technical articles around the Internet. So get clicking!

Avoiding Repetitious Work with Sed. I know I’ve never used awk and sed to their full potential, but… it’s kinda not fun.
Bunnie Huang goes to Burning Man 2013, and remote-controlled flamethrowers result.
The shocking truth behind Tetris. (via)
The USE Method: Linux performance checklist. This would be interesting to migrate to BSD – and then try it as a comparison method between the various BSDs. (via)
A Brief History of Lisp Machines. I find these machines built around a language interesting, especially since they are extinct. (via)
The Walkman Archive. (via)
Vim as a presentation tool. (via)
The First Critical Hits. Role-playing game history. (via)
Kickstarter for open source. (via)
Tracking disk space usage. Of course, doesn’t work the same way on Hammer.
Atari box art.
Atari box art parody.

2013/09/212013/09/22

In Other BSDs for 2013/09/21

Finally, a quieter week.

pfSense (which I use at work; performs great) has updated to 2.1, and now offers a ‘Gold‘ subscription program.
FreeBSD has a new iSCSI target and initiator. (World rebuild needed and again)
FreeBSD’s bxe(4) now supports the BCM57712 and BCM578XX.
FreeBSD now can build LLDB, though you have to do it on purpose.
FreeBSD’s arcmsr(4) driver for Areca hardware has been updated. (Areca supports BSD; buy them)
NetBSD has Renesas and ASIX AX88179 USB support.
NetBSD has a preliminary NVIDIA Geforce driver.
NetBSD has updated to dhcpcd-6.1.0.
NetBSD has updated to tzcode 2013e.
QNAP V200 boards all have the same MAC? Weird.
OpenBSD updated a large number of xenocara windowing parts.
The pkgsrc-2013Q3 freeze is on from now to the 29th.

2013/09/192013/09/19

New BSD video: BSDNow

Something I only just recently found out about: BSDNow. They’re planning weekly videos with BSD news and interviews. I say ‘planning’, but as of this writing, both Episode 1 and Episode 2 (which is much better quality) are already available. ~~Another episode is planned this week.~~ Episode 3 is out already.

2013/09/182013/09/17

OpenZFS announced

ZFS was originally created at Sun and open sourced. Sun was absorbed by Oracle and stopped being open (or even really existing), so ZFS was taken up by several separate groups – FreeBSD and Illumos being two examples. OpenZFS has been announced, in part to provide common reference for other platforms that might implement it and probably to avoid capability fragmentation. It’s certainly a good idea.

(If I have my history wrong, please correct me.)

2013/09/172013/09/17

Do you know sudo?

Michael W. Lucas needs tehcnical reviewers for his first draft of ‘Sudo Mastery’. If you know sudo, and know how to criticize (and who doesn’t, for this is the Internet), look at what you’d have to do.

2013/09/162013/09/14

vBSDCon speaker/presentation list

I don’t think I saw it before, but there’s a list of speakers and events up for vBSDCon. There’s no DragonFly-specific talks, but there is a presentation from Baptiste Daroussin, one of the people behind pkgNG, which is used to create parts of DragonFly’s dports framework.

It’s positive to see a BSD conference sponsored by a company that’s not selling a BSD-specific product. It’s happening in about a month and a half, October 25-27, in Dulles, VA.

2013/09/162013/09/14

BSD Magazine: administration

The September issue of BSD Magazine is out as a free download. The theme is BSD system administration, though there’s always other articles in addition to the issue topic.

(via freebsdnews.net, since I haven’t seen the announcement in the bsdmag.org RSS feed or by email)

2013/09/072013/09/05

In Other BSDs for 2013/09/07

There’s been a lot of commit activity across the BSDs, but my list doesn’t seem to reflect that. A lot of incremental work, I suppose.

FreeBSD has imported the multiqueue VirtIO driver
FreeBSD has added support for the BCM20702A0 chipset, for Bluetooth adapters.
FreeBSD can now reach single user mode with Digi i.MX53 / Wi-i.MX53 boards
FreeBSD supports Synaptics touchpad middle and extended buttons. (Breaks ABI)
FreeBSD has improved disk encryption speed with AES-NI.
FreeBSD has updated bmake to 20130904.
FreeBSD has added support for the DLINK DWA-127 wireless adapter.
NetBSD has updated to llvm/clang r189662.
Joyent has put together potential SMF support for pkgsrc.
PC-BSD has been synced with FreeBSD 9.2.
NetBSD has bare support for the Cubieboard 1 and 2.
NetBSD has updated to version 458 of less.
NetBSD has the beginnings of a Synopsys DWC2 (USB controller) driver.
OpenBSD has imported Mesa 9.2.0.
OpenBSD has added the ugold(4) temperature sensor driver.

2013/09/032013/09/03

BSDTalk 213: FreeBSD Documentation Project

In BSDTalk 213, Will Backman talks to a number of people about the FreeBSD Documentation Project. It’s about 14 minutes and it comes from the recent BSDCan 2013 event.

2013/09/012013/09/02

Lazy Reading for 2013/09/01

Another week of links completed early. And there’s a lot, so get clicking!

1BSD, the installation. Interesting to see the procedure and the tools used.
Over the Rainbow, polychromatic type from Microsoft. I don’t know if this is as exciting as they seem to think it is.
Do your own backups. Yeesh, what an unfortunate event. I’m fixing up my backups now, after my own troubles.
Operating System Development series. Dry but interesting. (via)
Windowing operating systems are too messy, too restrictive. From 1984. (via)
Home Automation via the Internet. For those who don’t want to deal with x10.
Chess implemented in Sed. No en passant? Sheesh, I was on board until that point. (I’m making a joke) (via)
Managing sshd in Ansible. Ansible’s getting more popular, it seems.
Remember that PDF compression/scanning error I mentioned a few weeks ago? Xerox has fixed it for their devices, and the patch is available. One of the ways to apply the patch is to print the file to a copier, via LPR/raw. Firmware updates via printing – that seems like a good and bad idea all at the same time.
JAVASCRIPT MESS. 45 different computers all emulated in Javascript. A Javascript Mac SE, for instance.
An XKCD cartoon slightly related to the previous link.
Learn to code. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: The remix of this 1997 Kid’s Guide to the Internet – somewhat NSFW, and has all the best moments. More from EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE.

2013/08/312013/08/30

In Other BSDs: 2013/08/31

I need to update this post during the week as I see stuff, or else I spend an hour rushing to get it all together before Satuday. I need to start watching PC-BSD src changes, too.

DiscoverBSD has a recent BSD roundup, too.
EuroBSDCon registration is 20% off but just today.
Using 6rd in OpenBSD.
FreeBSD has imported the Radeon KMS driver.
FreeBSD’s mfiutil has JOBD support.
FreeBSD has ARMv6/7 superpages support.
FreeBSD supports the PCI-E SSD in the Macbook Air. (It needs separate support?)
FreeBSD has updated support for Centrino 2200-N wireless.
FreeBSD has a speedup in madvise calls.
FreeBSD is using PCIDs on Intel chips to reduce process switch latency.
NetBSD has the start of a potential lint replacement, called ‘mint‘.
NetBSD supports the BCM57762 and BCM57765 chips, for Thunderbolt <-> Ethernet.
OpenBSD has support for more ciss(4) devices, via FreeBSD.
OpenBSD has updated to pixman 0.30.2, DejaVu Fonts 2.34, libX11 1.6.1, and xterm 296, and added ipv6-toolkit 1.4.
pkgsrc nearly has a signed packages mechanism.

2013/08/24

In Other BSDs: 2013/08/24

I hope I’m catching the interesting stuff; I’m only reading the src changes.

A talk about pkgsrc at a YAPC conference.
FreeBSD has improved parallel read performance by changing how locks work.
FreeBSD has enabled VFP in QEMU. No, I don’t know what that means.
FreeBSD has upgraded to BIND 9.9.3-P2.
FreeBSD has imported NetBSD’s libexecinfo-20130822.
FreeBSD has imported OpenBSD’s vmx(4) VMWare network driver.
FreeBSD has upgraded to ACPICA 20130823.
NetBSD has added ‘multigest’, for calculating multiple digests in parallel.
NetBSD has updated to Postfix 2.9.7.
NetBSD now supports the Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6235 Wi-Fi controller.
OpenBSD has updated a number of x* utilities in xenocara, including xserver.

2013/08/212013/08/22

Details on sysrc

Michael W. Lucas has a short article up about sysrc, a FreeBSD tool for handling rc.conf across multiple machines. This could easily be a cross-BSD tool – hint, hint.

Update: as Sascha Wildner pointed out, rcrun covers that in DragonFly. Mostly I’d like to see the same interface, then, I guess?

2013/08/172013/08/14

In Other BSDs: 2013/08/17

Not just source links, this week:

OpenBSD no longer has the Y2038 problem.
A head-mounted augmented reality display using FreeBSD?
The 2013 EuroBSDCon is going to have a vendor summit (primarily FreeBSD, from the sounds of it).
There’s a new BSD Certification Group training CD.
NetBSD now supports the Sitecom N300 wifi adapter.
Do you have an Amiga that runs NetBSD, and an X-Surf 100 network card? It’s supported.
nvi now has multi-byte character support, at least on FreeBSD.
The July FreeBSD Foundation newsletter has a “Strategic Planning” section that I can’t imagine anyone would disagree with. The goals expressed – experience, design, and documentation – are all things that each BSD project can do better than Linux or most any other open source system.

2013/08/152013/08/20

A book review somewhere else: Network Security Monitoring

Michael W. Lucas has a review up of Richard Bejtlich’s “The Practice of Network Security Monitoring“. Both of them are long-term BSD users, and Bejtlich, if I remember correctly, was part of the design of Capsicum, the security framework that is serving as a Summer of Code project for DragonFly right now. So it’s worth looking at his book. And/or looking at his blog, for those who want more.

2013/08/14

BSDTalk 230: Burt Kaliski of Verisign

BSDTalk episode 230 is out. It’s 12 minutes of conversation with Burt Kaliski, CTO of Verisign, about the upcoming newest BSD convention, vBSDCon.

2013/08/13

vBSDCon registration open

Registration is open for vBSDCon, happening in Dulles, Virginia, USA, on October 25th through 27th. There’s some neat-sounding presentations listed.

I think that is the same location where I went to a rather spectacular pre-dotcom-crash presentation from Time Warner/Road Runner back in 1999. The hotel was great; the presenters were befuddled. An internal account manager ran up a $3,000 bar tab in one night on a company credit card… I still have the fancy Guinness glass he bought me. I don’t think this convention will work exactly the same way, but unlike my 1999 trip, the speakers at this one will actually know what they are talking about.

2013/08/12

DNSSEC talk, recorded

If you missed Michael W. Lucas’s talk about DNSSEC, it’s recorded and available on Youtube. Or buy his book.

2013/08/112013/08/10

Lazy Reading for 2013/08/11

Again, lots of links. Some of these are overflow from previous weeks where I just said “That’s enough; let’s work on the next Lazy Reading.”

Perl, the Detroit of scripting languages. The slides are entertaining, but it’s also interesting for the discussion of how to handle a very old code base and a community. (which are BSD issues too) (via)
Ruins of Forgotten Empires: APL languages. “APL uses one thread per CPU, which is how sane people do things.” (via)
Remember when we used mega- prefixes to measure disk and memory, and not bandwidth?
Ian Lance Taylor’s 20-part series on ELF linkers and linking. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
PDF compression formats. Incidentally, here’s an answer on the Xerox number alternation issue, where compression means one number gets misidentified and substituted for another. The Economist has a not-crazy take on it. It’s not a Xerox problem but rather a JBIG2 compression issue. I have a number of Xerox models at work and have not seen this issue, but also haven’t checked for it.
OSI, the Internet That Wasn’t. People only ever care about levels 1, 2, 3, and 7 in the OSI model. And this joke. (via)
The Toshiba Libretto. You can get more powerful, smaller computers now, but they’re cheap netbooks and totally uncool.
A crash course in tmux. (via)
Whatever room you keep your primary computer in – clean it, please.
Robots for destroying buildings. This is not some speculative article; these are robots you can buy right now. Screw the flying cars joke everyone makes; the future is now. (via)
How to shutdown computer under Linux? A rough summary of how Linux can be a moving target for actual usage.
Vim 7.4 out, mostly so there isn’t so many patches to apply.
Goto is making a comeback. (via Eric Radman)

Your unrelated link of the week: Mighty Taco radio ads. Mighty Taco is a Mexican fast food place from Buffalo, New York, USA. It’s about as authentically Mexican as fast food from a city on the edge of Canada can be, which is ‘not much’. I’ve always loved the food, though, and the commercials are just the right mix of amateur joke and commercial advertising.

Bonus unrelated: If you enjoy imgur/fukung but it’s not youtubey enough, hit ‘Random’ on IWantMoar.com a few times. You may want to turn down your volume.