I’m actually a few days late pointing at this, as it came out a few days ago. Anyway, the most-recent-at-this-point Garbage podcast is out, talking about VAX going away, and ends with a good note about donations, and how just giving your pocket change helps.
If you’re somewhere around Michigan tomorrow around 7 PM, Michael W. Lucas is presenting at the SEMIBUG meeting, on FreeBSD filesystems. See the group site for location.
If you find yourself using gpt and disklabel64 for a new disk, and aren’t quite sure what order to type everything in to create a disk slice, why not crib from Tim Darby’s notes? (note that the archive has added some line breaks to it.)
The ‘hammer show’ command can be used to dump the B-Tree structure of a Hammer volume, and CRC errors can be spotted. It’s rare that anyone would need it, but if you do, this dumped information will include file hierarchy information.
If that makes you a bit nervous to repost any of that information when talking about it in public, Tomohiro Kusumi has added an ‘obfuscate’ option to ‘hammer show’ that does just that – it hides path information from the debug output.
BSDNow 131 is out, and has an interview of Jamie McParland, on I assume the topic of BSD in school environments, guessing by the title and guest’s email address. It has the normal summary of news items, including explanations of load average I think many people would find useful.
I see this bite people irregularly over the years: if your default shell on login can’t run, what do you do? I’ve seen it happen because of a missing /usr/lib, and it can happen with out-of-date library references, too. There’s several different ways to deal with it:
- Run a shell that can’t have this problem, like /bin/tcsh (the root default).
- Or, rebuild in single-user mode from the console.
- Or, perform the bullet-proof upgrade.
That last one may be useful if your dports setup gets mangled, somehow – though ‘pkg upgrade’ has always worked for me.
BSDTalk 262 is available, talking with Tex Andrews for 23 minutes about LightZone, “open source digital darkroom software”.
DragonFly 4.4.2, a bugfix release to 4.4.1, is out. This was mostly prompted by the recent OpenSSL update, but other little fixes have made it in, too. It’s available for download and is probably available at your nearest mirror by now, if you want an image. The release page is updated, and there’s always the Git tag summary for 4.4.2 for the most exact details.
I have DragonFly shirts, helpfully printed up by Sepherosa Ziehau in China. I have a list of people that are interested in shirts, most of whom remembered to give a shirt size. I don’t have anyone’s email address or mailing address on that list.
If you are on that list, send me your mailing address.
The shirts are marked L/XL/XXL/XXXL, but they run smaller than U.S. versions of those sizes. I usually find a U.S. XL shirt baggy, but “XXXL” is the one that fit me, for instance. I’ll do my best to place the appropriate one. This is just an advance apology, since it’s too late to change anything if it turns out tight.
I’ll mail these out as I have the spare cash and time on hand. (I hope most of you live in the continental U.S.)
Rimvydas Jasinskas has consolidated/restored/updated a large number of papers into share/doc on DragonFly. I’m not going to link to his large number of commits, but instead point you at the directory where they all went. There’s a number of design documents in there that date back to 4.4BSD and beyond (and some much newer), which may interest or educate you. Of special note: The Guide to the Dungeons of Doom, for rogue, or the KAME IPv6 implementation notes.
If you’re building from dports, and you want to include debugging information, you’ll want to put ‘WITH_DEBUG=yes’ in /etc/make.conf. Note that this affects anything you build at that point, including world, which you’d want to rebuild anyway.
Once again, I’m a bit late posting about BSDNow; blame my classes. BSDNow episode 127 is up, with Willem Toorop as the interview subject, talking about getdns, with a link to his vBSDCon presentation.
The slides from yesterday’s shell-fu presentation at NYCBUG have been posted.
NYCBUG is having a presentation tomorrow, February 3rd, 18:45, Stone Creek Bar & Lounge at 140 E 27th St. in New York City. The presenter will be Isaac Levy and the title is “shell-fu”. .ike is an energetic speaker and it’s worth your time if you are near enough.
For those of you running DragonFly-current, the already-mentioned library privatization going on means that ports have to be rebuilt. You will want to do it yourself, or wait a little bit before upgrading if you want to install binaries.
This week’s BSDNow has an interview of John Baldwin, with a focus on running a DevSummit.
(linking to the Jupiter Broadcasting page cause the bsdnow.tv site isn’t updated as of this typing.)
I’ve never heard of ‘McCabe Complexity‘ before now. It’s a description of how complicated software can be, measured by the number of possible paths through it. Pierre Abbat used that measure on Hammer code and not surprisingly, got a high number.
John Marino has opened up his new utility for testing: Synth. It’s made for building custom package repositories, similar to poudriere, but much less setup work. If you’ve ever said “I like binary installs, but I want my own build options”, this is for you. The README includes screenshots to show all the things it can do.