Some recent users threads pointed at SSD wear stats, along with what Matthew Dillon has seen on dragonflybsd.org machines, and good filesystem books.
Next time you’re building or installing world on your DragonFly system (running master), your computer will do a better job letting you know the status.
If you have a HDMI-connected monitor, but no sound, this trick about increasing available memory may help.
Hey, look what I have! There’s a pfSense pair of classes available to take. I went through them and found them worthwhile. pfSense is easy enough to use that a dedicated person can puzzle through most of the settings, eventually, but I don’t have “eventually”, and I want to encourage BSD products in my workplace… so here we are.
DragonFly 4.0 has had a minor point release, to 4.0.4. There was a bug in the initial install where the rescue image installed on disk would be incorrect. This was fixed after the first time a build/installworld was done, but might as well have it start out right. There’s some other small fixes, and the release commit will show you the summary. Download from your nearest mirror or update normally.
John Marino has removed Sendmail from DragonFly (as part of the base system), and replaced it with DMA, the DragonFly Mail Agent. If you just need delivery to local users, DMA will do the trick.
The announcement message covers what you need to do to deal with it (potentially nothing), and there’s more in-depth documentation to cover how to switch if you need more full-featured software.
Michael W. Lucas’s Tarsnap Mastery book is out, in electronic form. While not a strictly BSD news items, it’s a service built on BSD, so worth looking at if you care about that – or about encryption.
If you are on DragonFly-master and you upgraded during select hours on the 25th of February, you may have been bit by a makefile error. The fix, as listed in that link, is simple:
cp /usr/src/share/mk/sys.mk /usr/share/mk
If you are not on -master or you did not upgrade in that timeframe: never mind.
Michael Neumann has switched out pkgsrc packages for dports packages for building DragonFly with a GUI. There’s no built image to download right now, but I’m optimistic the next release will have it. You can build it now on a DragonFly system using src/nrelease. With all this video work going in lately, it will give us something to show.
This bites many people sooner or later: you think you’ve turned sendmail off, but it still gets opened up on your system. The answer: sendmail_enable=”NONE”.
(It should support sendmail_enable=”NOPE”.)
Several of the DragonFly machines used for building packages and/or releases have SSDs, and have been vigorously exercising those disks for some time. SSDs are supposed to have a shorter lifetime than spindle-based hard drives. However, Matthew Dillon found that there’s surprisingly little wear on those SSDs. This empiric information was noticed in several places.
Say hello to the newest DragonFly committer: Tomohiro Kusumi. He’s been contributing Hammer patches for some time and appearing on IRC, so it’s easier to just let him make changes directly. Welcome, Tomohiro.
It’s now possible to build world and kernel on DragonFly using gcc 5, and Matthew Dillon has posted an announcement that describes how. He also separately lists the (small considering the included C++) effect on build time.
Note that gcc 4.7 remains the default compiler.
John Marino has removed gcc 4.4 in DragonFly, and replaced it with gcc 5.0. Two things to note: gcc 5 does not yet successfully build world, and DragonFly is an officially supported platform for gcc with this release.
Here’s a number of DragonFly links to clear out my backlog:
- Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSH in DragonFly to version 6.7.
- He updated file, too.
- Bill Yuan’s ipfw branch has been updated.
- Matthew Dillon’s been making more Hammer2 commits; check the TODO for status.
- Michael Neumann has Rust working on DragonFly.
- Filesystem encryption on Hammer.
ISO/IMG files for DragonFly 4.0.3 have been uploaded and by now should be available on your favorite mirror. You should update for the OpenSSL upgrade. If you already have DragonFly 4.0.x installed, the normal ‘make buildworld && make buildkernel && make installkernel && make installworld && make upgrade’ cycle should work just fine.
John Marino has written up an extensive how-to for slider, the history tool for Hammer filesystems, including screenshots.
Normally I’d hold this off until the In Other BSDs item on Saturday, but by then it will be too late: There’s a “Building redundant and transparent firewalls with OpenBSD” presentation happening at the Scottish Linux User’s Group meeting, Thursday night in Glasgow, Scotland.
I’m breaking my normal weekend posting schedule to note that DragonFly 4.0.2 images are now linked on the main site and on mirrors now/soon.