BSDNow 174 this week presents a recap of the 2016 year, including chunks of interviews you may have missed.
Matthew Dillion mentioned his changed tutorial on secure web browsing on DragonFly, though I imagine it applies to other systems too. The trick is to use an isolated user account for running a web browser, and he includes the various steps to do so smoothly in the tutorial web page.
Here’s your reminder: SemiBUG meets tomorrow, for any BSD users in the Detroit / Michigan area.
If you are moving to the newest 1.8 version of Go, the language, you need to be on at least the last release of DragonFly 4.4, or 4.6. You’ve probably upgraded by now anyway, or at least I hope you have.
Tennessee area BSD user group KnoxBUG is meeting tomorrow, and Warren Block will be the guest speaker. He’ll be talking about documentation. Going by the linked announcement, there will be both prizes and blame, so something for everyone!
SemiBUG is meeting tomorrow; Joe Gidi will present on managing Android devices with BSD. My assumption is that it will be at Altair Engineering, in Troy, MI, again.
The January meeting will be Michael W. Lucas talking about Ansible. (Dunno if there’s a December meeting planned.)
I’ve been on the road all week, so it seems like I just posted about the last episode. BSDNow 167 is online, and it returns to the interview format. Scott Long of Netflix is interviewed. He’s part of the reason most of the Internet runs through BSD.
Reminder: Isaac (.ike) Levy’s “Infrastructure in a Post-Cloud Era” presentation is tonight, at NYCBUG’s November meeting. Go, see.
COMPAT_43 is gone, but it hasn’t worked in a long time anyway. Note that this is 4.3BSD, pre-everything.
I’ve uploaded ISO and IMG files for DragonFly 4.6.1, so they should be available for download at your local mirror. Note that there’s an uncompressed 4.6.1 ISO for those installing to a virtual server.
Tomohiro Kusumi is thinking about porting it. Follow the whole thread for details.
I may have mentioned this in part before, but Matthew Dillon has a brief script to reload pf when an interface IP changes. I’m linking it here in case it’s useful in the future.
How long does it take to build all 24,000 packages in the DragonFly ports collection? Apparently about 22 hours on a dual Xeon machine (with I think 36 cores) or 48-core Opteron. This is with synth. I used to measure pkgsrc builds in weeks.
This makes sense once you think about it: copy-on-write filesystems (like Hammer2 and ZFS and probably others) actually do nothing when “zeroing” out filespace.
There’s been multiple reports of pulseaudio causing problems for DragonFly users. It would get pulled in as a dependency, and audio would suddenly stop working. Uninstall, and audio is fine. John Marino has removed it from dports, to prevent that exact problem.
It’s a good week to learn: BSDNow 154 has no interview, but a lot of tutorials, including ones on GhostBSD, Enlightenment, Steam on FreeBSD, and so on.
Alex Merritt noticed that one of the new characteristics of DragonFly 4.6 was “improved IPI signalling”. He asked about benchmarks, Sepherosa Ziehau pointed at tools, and Matthew Dillon provided some results.
Here is some coverage of the DragonFly 4.6 release, which may be interesting to read because of the comments: Hacker News, Hacker News again, and lobste.rs.
A reaction to the initial creation of DragonFly I never saw before, and Matthew Dillon’s followup. (via)
I like the summary in the very first comment of this story on DragonFly removing page-zeroing.
It’s Thursday, so that means BSDNow 153, with a title inspired by the lead news item, “my int is too big”. (No, not spoon, int.) No interview this week, but lots of links.
Thanks to a reminder from IRC user ‘cgag’, I’ve put an uncompressed ISO image of DragonFly 4.6 up on the main site. It’s linked on the download page, and should be available within 24 hours on the mirrors. If you are buying service from a virtual host provider, and can install an operating system directly from a downloadable URL, this is for you.