If you missed Michael W. Lucas’s talk about DNSSEC, it’s recorded and available on Youtube. Or buy his book.
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.
Wired has an article up about Jordan Hubbard and his move from Apple to iXsystems. It’s not a bad article, though it doesn’t delve into the why of BSD very much. In any case, iXsystems has been really bulking up lately to be more than a generic hardware provider.
Speaking of which, that blade system going in now for dragonflybsd.org was sold by iXsystems.
How many tags can I fit on this post? I think I’ll aim for Saturday for these BSD catchup posts. In theory, I can prep this and the Sunday Lazy Reading posts ahead of time, since they tend to be all-week items, and have the whole weekend covered.
- BeagleBone systems are getting popular.
- Distributed chrooted pkgsrc bulk builds. Very necessary documentation.
- …And a script to do all the setup for those builds.
- The VBSDCon site has more details on the upcoming convention. (via)
- The cxgbe(4) device has hardware dedicated to sniffing packets?
- FreeBSD has switched to the BSD-licensed version of patch.
- FreeBSD has an updated ACPI implementation.
- FreeBSD is importing OpenBSD’s rsu(4) wireless Realtek driver. Needs firmware.
- What’s new in pkgsrc-2013Q2. With screenshots!
- NetBSD now supports 2 new Centrino Wireless-N devices.
- NetBSD now has BIND 9.9.3-p2
- PHP 5.5 has hit pkgsrc.
Here’s what jumped out at me from reading source change mailing lists:
- pkgsrc now has Ruby 2.0.
- NetBSD now has wpa_supplicant and hostapd, and dhcpcd 6.0.3.
- NetBSD supports Nanjing QinHeng Electronics devices via puc(4). No idea what that is.
- NetBSD also supports Intel 8 Series SMBus devices, which I mention just because finding the right drivers for SMBus devices always frustrated me on Windows.
- NetBSD’s hostname has some new options.
- FreeBSD supports Coleto Creek devices: SATA, SMBus, and Watchdog. Not sure if that’s a brand name or a special type of construction. Also, AR934x and the Qualcomm Atheros DB120 development board, and the Broadcom BCM5725 network controller.
- OpenBSD now has sshd supporting encrypted host keys. I can’t find an open mail archive with OpenBSD source-changes as an archived list, so I don’t seem to be able to link to it directly.
I’m going to have to set a specific day of the week aside for these.
The July issue of BSD Magazine is out, and the listed theme is “Security and Cryptography”, but there’s plenty else.
BSDTalk 228 has a nearly half-hour chat with Michael W. Lucas at BSDCan 2013.
While these aren’t his BSD books, Michael W. Lucas has an interesting post up about the sales on his two recent books, SSH Mastery and DNSSEC Mastery. I’m always interested in seeing how self-publishing models work, whether it’s software or books or music. He points out that the point of his DNSSEC book is to see if a very difficult subject can be covered in a book like that – which it is. There’s very few published books that go that in-depth.
(I’m hoping for a whole “Mastery” series covering topics other writers don’t, especially in a BSD-friendly way.)
Supposedly it’s FreeBSD 9.0 under the hood on the new Playstation 4 systems. What does this mean for FreeBSD, or driver support, or BSD in general, or what you can run on that hardware? Possibly nothing other than a vague sense of superiority.
On the other hand, this BoingBoing article makes a good point about commodity hardware and its immediate utility. It’s an effective network storage device and it doesn’t even mention FreeNAS.
Julio Merino is not renewing his membership of the NetBSD board of directors; he wrote an extensive post as to why. I agree with some of the issues he raised; they are possible on any open source project. I don’t necessarily think the solutions he proposes are correct.
I am clearly biased on this, but I think NetBSD needs a ‘NetBSD Digest’, to talk about the changes being made and the work being done. I once asked someone experienced in dealing with volunteers how you motivate people without a paycheck, and he said “Celebrate their accomplishments”. All the BSDs could use that. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
There’s already been some previous conversation about how much longer to support the i386 platform for DragonFly. It looks like PC-BSD will be the first ‘flavor’ of BSD to make the jump. Support for PC-BSD on i386 will be dropped after release 9.2. That includes ‘TrueOS‘, the version of PC-BSD for servers, which I did not know about until just now.
The June 2013 issue of BSD Magazine is out, and the focus is Ruby. The PDF is free if you tell them your email address.
This is a text-heavy weekend, given yesterday’s post. Enjoy!
- SELinux’s toxic mistake. If people aren’t using something you built because it frustrates those same people, it’s not their fault. (via)
- Contrary to popular belief, QWERTY was not designed to slow the typist down. (via)
- VMS will finally reach end of life in 2020. VMS was a contemporary operating system to UNIX, and started on nearly the same hardware. (the PDP-11) Aw, I feel bad. Not so bad that I’d actually use it again, but still: Aww. (via luxh on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- “At the point all my hardware undeniably works on BSD, I will probably move there.” This article is in no way scientific, but it makes me a little happy. (via a Google search)
- The Deepest Uncertainty. A surprisingly enjoyable description of set theory and other math bits. (via)
- 8 months in Microsoft, I learned these. None of these are a surprise, really, but point 5, “not giving back to the public domain is the norm” is really sad. The example given isn’t even code – it’s just describing a solution on a web page, publicly. (via)
- Trillian is publishing the specs for their IMPP communication service. A quote from the announcement: “…our commitment to run a business whose primary focus is its communication products, not advertising”
Your unrelated link of the week: ScummVM in a browser. Comes with some LucasArts game demos, too. (via many places)
FreeBSDNews.net has a nice summary up of video from all (?) the presentations at BSDCan 2013. Of particular interest to DragonFly users: a video about pkg, the tool used for package maintenance in dports. In this presentation, it’s talking about use on FreeBSD, but the future stuff applies to DragonFly too.
Not as wordy this week, but still wordy. And linky!
- Max Headroom and the Strange World of Pseudo-CGI. A discussion of how old fake CGI can look better than modern, real CGI. This is an opinion I’ve had for quite a while, and my children pretty much ignore it every time I bring it up. (via)
- The Colby Walkmac, which predates the Mac Luggable. Linked to because it includes good pictures of what the (external) hardware was like. I find all the old ports interesting, since it’s all USB and the occasional eSATA these days… not that I’m complaining! I’ve never had a good experience with a 9-pin serial port. (via)
- A brief education on escaping characters.
- I get worried when remotely rebooting a server in a different town or even state. In Praise of Celestial Mechanics covers much more stressful circumstances: interplanetary reboots. Does Voyager 1 or 2 have an ‘uptime’ function?
- The equivalent of what you are doing right now, 20 years ago. I personally never got to see this; my experience was MUDs. Speaking of which…
- The Birth of MMOs: World of Warcraft’s debt to MUD. MUD == MMO, Roguelike == Diablo/Torchlight, Doom == almost everything else. There’s a number of game archetypes that haven’t changed in some time. (via)
- Playing with powerlines. I used to work at a company that used these lines for data transfer. It was neat technology, but it sure wasn’t easy to set up. Imagine wiring a city but only being able to use Ethernet hubs. Not switches, hubs. That, combined with undersized ARP caches/MAC tables, made it really difficult.
- OpenVPN on FreeBSD, which will come in handy for at least several readers, I’m sure, as the directions should apply to any BSD.
- Is there anything DNS can’t be used for? Cause now it’s domain-based mail policy publishing. (via ferz on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- “Have you tried DragonFly?” posts on various forums seem to pop up with some regularity.
- Uses of tmux, explained. A slide show talking about how tmux works. (via)
Unrelated link of the week: I’ve had several deadlines and a mail server with issues this week at work, so this is all I got.
Phoronix has another set of benchmarks that include DragonFly and PC-BSD, along with several Linux distributions. It’s interesting to see, though don’t take them as performance measurements. 7-Zip as a benchmark doesn’t describe much other than the program itself, and the Himeno benchmark results are because of the compiler in use rather than any underlying performance aspect of the operating system – for instance. The DragonFly benchmarks disappear after page 3.
Michael W. Lucas wrote a new edition to his Absolute OpenBSD book, and that second edition was published relatively recently. It’s a hefty book, nearly 500 pages in length, and I’ve needed to write a review for some time now. Not-necessarily-relevant-disclaimer: I contributed the IPv6 haiku/joke at the start of Chapter 12.
If you’re interested in OpenBSD, it’s an obvious purchase. It goes into detail for all aspects of OpenBSD, starting with a very detailed conversation about installation, then disk setup, and so on. This is not going to surprise anyone, of course. Past the initial overview, the book starts with a chapter that talks about nothing else but locating other resources to help learn OpenBSD. It seems a little counter-intuitive to start a book with advice on how to look somewhere else, but it makes sense in light of the topic.
What if you aren’t using OpenBSD, at least not right now? Something I didn’t realize until I had chewed my way through most of the book was that there’s several smaller books hidden inside. The book goes very far into individual utilities. So far, in fact, that it ends up creating mini-guides about the topics within the chapters. (or entire chapters, in the case of pf.)
There’s in fact 2 chapters for pf, initial and advanced. TCP/IP gets close to 30 pages just to itself, and topics like snmpd or chroot get an introductory section that assumes nothing about your prior knowledge. These are technologies you’re using already, no matter which BSD flavor you’re dealing with.
It works as a reference. I’m going to show the aforementioned chapter 11, on TCP/IP, to my coworker who makes a confused face every time I say “link-layer protocol.” I don’t know if he’ll make it from one end to the other, but it’s a lot better than waving a hand in the air and mumbling “You should look that up on the Internet sometime.” There’s enough detail that some of the smaller sections could probably be broken out into individual books, and I daresay that’s what is happening with Lucas’s Mastery series.
It’s comprehensive, it’s readable, and you’ll find something useful in it no matter your experience level. The book is available in printed and eBook form, from the usual online stores linked at Michael W. Lucas’s site, or directly from the publisher. It’s also available through the OpenBSD Project, which then gets a cut towards development.
There’s a new BSDTalk by way of the recently-completed BSDCan 2013 event, and it’s half an hour of talk with Matt Ahrens about ZFS and matters related.
Loïc BLOT posted about his benchmark of several operating systems using KVM and Postgres 9.1. Happily, DragonFly is the fastest, with one exception. Linux/ext4 comes out faster – if you run it with barrier=0, which can be dangerous in a non-battery-backed-up volume.
PC-BSD now has a hardware store, with equipment known to work under PC-BSD. Chances are good that if it works for PC-BSD, it’ll work for other BSDs or could be ported to do so… (via)