Imre Vadasz is our newest DragonFly committer. Welcome, Imre!
I’ve seen Atlassian Confluence, a Java-based wiki program, in a few places. Atlassian apparently offers their software at a discount (free?) to qualified open source projects. I set up Confluence 5.4 on DragonFly as a test run, and it generally worked. That’s great! I tried to set up version 5.5, and it will not start.
May 08, 2014 7:24:41 PM org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase startInternal
SEVERE: A child container failed during start
java.util.concurrent.ExecutionException: java.lang.InternalError: platform not recognized
at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.report(FutureTask.java:122)
This is annoying. DragonFly (or any BSD) is not supported by Atlassian for Confluence, so it’s not a surprise… but I was so close! Their product has a very nice interface and I was planning to replace Mediawiki at my workplace with it, for some internal documentation. This FreeBSD bug report is the closest fix I can find, but it’s old enough it shouldn’t matter now.
NYCBUG has a presentation from John Baldwin, happening on the 7th (tomorrow!), all about Bhyve, the BSD hypervisor.
Wojciech Puchar noted with some surprise that DragonFly uses less CPU than expected for high-packet-rate traffic. This has been going on for a while, and apparently Sepherosa Ziehau has even more improvements planned.
The reaction I have heard a number of times from new DragonFly users: hey, this runs really fast, even when I try to load it down!
The pkg tool, used in DragonFly (and FreeBSD) for ports, is at version 1.2. Version 1.3 will apparently be able to solve the problem where one port is ended and replaced with another. This is a problem that’s been around forever, and I don’t just mean with pkg. I don’t know how soon 1.3 will be out, or what version FreeBSD is at.
Just so nobody’s surprised: DragonFly process IDs now go an order of magnitude higher.
Sascha Wildner’s updated ACPICA to a very recent version, which happens to fix a bug in an earlier ACPICA version.
Release 3.6.2 of DragonFly has been tagged, and ISO/img files are available. This includes an updated OpenSSL for Heartbleed problems. Here’s the changelog. You can, if you haven’t already, update your existing 3.6 systems the normal way.
All the dragonflybsd.org sites (www, bugs, gitweb, lists, leaf) should be available via https now, thanks to a wildcard certificate from InterNetX. Also, all the machines have an up-to-date version (1.0.1g) of OpenSSL installed to prevent the Heartbleed issue.
Francois Tigeot’s rescue ramdisk work is ready for testing. You can pull it directly from his repo and try it out. It’s surprising how small the ramdisk can be crunched.
Note: he now has a newer branch than what is in that linked message.
I wrote up some thoughts for the next release of DragonFly. There’s some project work in there for anyone interested. The next release should be near the end of May.
One of the requirements to get NSS/LDAP working on (most) any unixlike system is to have dynamic binaries; meaning they are dependent on various libraries to run. Since you’re talking about programs for login when you’re talking about NSS/LDAP, that means if the libraries aren’t available, you can’t log in. DragonFly has static binaries just to avoid that problem.
Francois Tigeot proposed switching to dynamic binaries and building a /rescue directory with static backups, as is the case with I think FreeBSD and NetBSD. If you follow the thread, it looks like the best path is to use initrd instead. Initrd stands for INITial Ram Disk, and is the first volume the computer sets up to boot from BIOS. Since initrd gives the computer enough space to load all the needed modules (like Hammer2…), it works without making the computer dependent on various libraries or having a bloated /rescue directory.
(Someone correct me if I have the details wrong.) As long as we’re talking about things that would help DragonFly in a larger environment, can someone work on a VM balloon memory driver, too?
If you noticed the lack of a GUI DVD image for the 3.6 release of DragonFly, I posted a followup note on the users@ list that talks about the steps to get X installed. It’s not much work, with pkg set up.
Normally I’d save this for Lazy Reading, but I’m indirectly involved: the Rochester Institute of Technology now has a minor in Open Source and Free Culture. Here’s the press release. I taught one of the precursor classes, Humanitarian Free/Open Source Development (essentially open source development methods) last spring. Steve Jacobs was my advisor years ago and Remy Decausemaker was my (best) student from the HFOSS class. In any case, the courses are definitely worth it. (via)
bugs.dragonflybsd.org, the bug reporting site for DragonFly, uses Redmine. It’s been updated and now can take OpenID for your login.
pfi, the automated installer that nobody knows about, now supports installing an authorized_keys file as part of an install. Credit goes to Alex Hornung for adding the functionality.
I’ve tagged version 3.6.1 of DragonFly, and built ISO/img files of it. They should be available by now on mirrors if you need them, or you can just upgrade as normal. See the linked tag commit message for what’s changed.
As I mentioned on kernel@, I’m going to roll a point release of DragonFly soon. Push in your changes if you want to get them in!
Antonio Huete put together a list of goals for the next release on the DragonFly bugtracker. Some of them are pretty ambitious, some of them are relatively easy, but they are all very useful.