This week on UnixReview: a program review of ‘Snort 2.6 and Afterglow‘, a book review of ‘BigNum Math‘, which may be good for causing naps, and ‘Sharing A Linux Scanner On Your Network‘. Don’t let that last title fool you – that’s more about the available-for-BSD SANE.
The binary driver (“blob”) for NVIDIA video cards contained, until recently, a remote root exploit. Maybe those anti-binary people aren’t completely crazy. (Thanks, Undeadly)
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert suggests two projects available for a taker: updating Radeon DRM support, or updating the linux syscall support, both of which have existing code from which to start.
In the news recently:
Advisory Check 1.0 was released, which checks for vulnerabilities in installed software, and works with an impressive number of package managment systems on BSD and Linux. It includes pkgsrc, so it should work on DragonFly. (Thanks, BSDNews)
PC-BSD, a ‘with-its-desktop-and-package-manager’ version of FreeBSD, was bought by iXsystems. Reading this interview, it seems ‘bought’ == hiring of the main developer of PC-BSD by iXsystems. The lucky guy gets to be paid for what he used to do for fun.
pfSense, a FreeBSD-based firewall derived from m0n0wall, has reached version 1.0. One of the project leads on pfSense is Scott Ullrich, who also commits to DragonFly. pfSense uses the BSD Installer (again, Scott Ullrich is involved in that) as does DragonFly.
For those of you who run Preview, the tag is about to be slipped up to synchronize with the beeding edge code, as it’s been running pretty stable recently.
If you aren’t sure what Preview is, see “Is there a branch oriented towards stability?” on the FAQ.
Anthony L. Bryan has created a ‘metalink‘ for the DragonFly 1.6 ISO.  See his message for more details on the format.
Jeremy C. Reed interviewed a number of folks using pkgsrc on non-NetBSD platforms, and put the results together on a webpage at bsdnewsletter.com. (DragonFly is represented by your humble Digest writer.)
Vector image files of the DragonFly logo are now available, which can produce much better versions of the image, especially at higher resolutions.
A discussion on users@ has wandered into just how much of any data transmission is overhead; e.g. not data.
Hubert Feyrer has an interesting post showing some of the many places BSD (often NetBSD, in his search) code can be found, which is probably in no small part due to the BSD license.
csup is usable for a cvsup client, and since it’s written in C, doesn’t require modula-3, which doesn’t build on DragonFly. csup was broken on DragonFly, though YONETANI Tomokazu has a fix. Of course, the server side still needs to be compiled, with the same dependency problems. Alternatives like cvsync have problems, and rsync is supposed to be too taxing, but now is a good time to test that assumption, perhaps with a benchmark?
Dru Lavigne has a new article on OnLAMP.com describing how to fine-tune your firewall, assuming your firewall is IPFW.
Markus Schatzl happened to (re)post a link to a DragonFly installation guide he wrote that includes mention of the Smart Bootmanager, which can allow booting from the DragonFly install CD even on systems that don’t allow for CD booting. I may have posted this before, but it’s worth repeating.
There’s a new version (4.0) of the BSDStats program out. Hubert Feyrer has recently suggested some changes on his blog, which should make it into the next version. Those changes may or may not apply to DragonFly, since there’s several elements of DragonFly that originated with NetBSD.
Gergo Szakal managed to get a DragonFly system running as a filtering bridge using PF; his writeup on how he did it can be found on the wiki.
Much thanks is due Jason Watson, who donated a new server to Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert. This new, more powerful server is bugs.dragonflybsd.org, builds the snapshot ISOs, and is one of the mirrors for DragonFly releases.
Simon added “if you have spare/old hardware which you will throw away anyways, don’t hesitate to ask if somebody can use it for dragonfly.”
Daniel Hartmeier recently posted several chapters from a now-canceled book that describe using and managing PF, on undeadly.org. These should also generally apply to DragonFly’s version of PF.
If you are running DragonFly as the only operating system on your computer, there’s not much point to having a boot menu installed. If you want to speed up booting, my first guess at how to get rid of it works, plus Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert describes how to back it up.
Massimiliano Stucchi announced that registration for EuroBSDCon 2006 is now open.