Goings-on – Page 64 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2010/02/26

(b)make install change in pkgsrc

Joerg Sonnenberger announced new behavior in pkgsrc: Performing “bmake install” in pkgsrc with a package that supports DESTDIR will build a binary package and then install from that package. This means a package will be successfully build before the installation process is started, and I assume is to assist further work down the road.

Details: The old behavior was to build and install directly, which “bmake stage-install” can reproduce. DESTDIR support means that the software can be installed as non-root.

2010/02/262010/02/26

Works in progress: wifi, unionfs

There’s several projects in the works:

Rui Paulo is working on an update of wireless device support in DragonFly; Matthew Dillon added libbsdxml to DragonFly as part of the prep work.
Joe Talbott is working on unionfs; Nicolas Thery supplied some links, while Matthew Dillon wants deduplication.

2010/02/25

More SSD deals

For those wanting to try swapcache(8): Newegg has two deals running: a Corsair P128 128GB SATA II SSD for $355 and a Patriot PS-100 2.5″ 64GB SATA I/II SSD for $170. These are probably bigger than what’s needed for using swapcache, but if you’re itching to spend…

2010/02/24

New committer: Samuel J. Greear

Welcome Samuel J. Greear as the newest DragonFly committer; he’s been around the project for a while, but recently became more active.

2010/02/23

Swapcache better than expected

As part of a report on the status of swapcache and tmpfs, Matthew Dillon noted that a side effect of using a SSD for swapcache means that disk activity stays efficient, and the wear meter on the SSD is reduced much more slowly than for regular disk use.

2010/02/21

Get ready for 2.6

The next release, 2.6, is scheduled for mid-March. Please make sure things are running well, as there’s a lot of new features already ready for this release.

2010/02/19

Dear lazyweb: monitoring software needed

Since I have several machines repeatedly building all of pkgsrc now, I want to monitor RAM, disk I/O, CPU, and the like, and keep historical records. I’ve seen this done with cacti and snmp, and sort of done with nagios.

There must be easier/prettier choices out there. Any suggestions?

2010/02/19

Dragonfly and BSD but not this

It’s that Opera thing again. “Sigh“.

2010/02/18

Teaching down south

‘Sdävtaker’ posted a call for course proposals, for the ECI 2010 conference happening the last week of July at Buenos Aires University. Proposals are due by March 12th, and Portugese, Spanish, or English are all acceptable.

2010/02/18

Google Summer of Code presentation templates

If you need to talk about/sell the Google Summer of Code idea to people, Google now has a set of templates for GSOC presentations. Use them to drum up interest, or persuade someone to mentor/be a student.

2010/02/14

New committer: Constantine A. Murenin

Welcome DragonFly’s newest committer: Constantine A. Murenin. He’s responsible for the sensors framework, and is already busy.

2010/02/12

Default PostgreSQL and Python changes

Postgres will be 8.4, and Python 2.6, as default installs from pkgsrc. This affects anyone following pkgsrc-current, but if you are using pkgsrc-2009Q4, it won’t matter for a few months yet.

2010/02/12

A BSD cartoon

Brought to you by iXsystems: a BSD-themed cartoon. We haven’t had one since the one that ran on bsdnews.com… 5 years ago? (via) Updates each Friday.

2010/02/09

Outage Wednesday

Most of the dragonflybsd.org machines will be down for a short period Wednesday; this is for an upgrade that includes an SSD for the recent swapcache work. Everyone should notice a speedup, since while crater.dragonflybsd.org is getting the SSD/swapcache, a lot of crater’s directories are mounted on other machines via NFS.

2010/02/082010/02/08

A week’s worth of posts for you

I can’t keep up with all the things to post. I desperately want to clear my inbox, so here’s a week’s worth of posts all smushed together. Enjoy!

Naoya Sugioka’s tmpfs work is almost ready to go.
Francois Tigeot is looking to find supported RAID hardware for DragonFly; the LSI1068e isn’t useable. Freddie Cash listed a number of different and fully supported cards, and Francois listed some other potential choices.
While talking about hardware, Steve O’Hara-Smith reported excellent results with a particular Atom 330-based board and DragonFly.
Stathis Kamperis has added to ‘hammer snapls’ output; an example is in his submit@message.
The 2.6 release of DragonFly, scheduled for March, will have version 4 of HAMMER. 2.4 has version 2. Upgrading from version 2 to 4 can happen in place, live, and only needs to happen once per volume, not per PFS. That’s about as easy as it gets. More details are available.
The default sshd config has been updated; this shouldn’t affect your normal operations unless you’re using one of the mentioned options.
Oliver Fromme linked to more discussion of SSD durability.
Also, Matthew Dillon posted more notes and benchmark numbers for his swapcache work. There’s been some side benefits too. A man page for swapcache is now available.
Aggelos Economopoulos’s libevtr has been added, for event tracing. He’s posted some additional notes on this work-in-progress.
We now have /var/log/daemon, too.
Notes on prepping for Google Summer of Code 2010 from the GSOC Discussion list; I don’t know if that link is readable for nonsubscribers.
The Definitive Guide to PC-BSD is out at the end of this short month. Dru writes good books.
Did you know FreeCiv (a Civilization clone, of sorts) is playable in a web browser? Goodbye free time! Details are available at my favoritest game site.

Phew.

2010/02/05

BSDTalk 185: James Nixon and PC-BSD

James Nixon, iXsystems employee and PC-BSD developer, is interviewed for 16 minutes on BSDTalk 185.

2010/02/052010/02/05

Messylaneous for 2010/02/05

I’m really behind on my posting (this is why), so I’m piling a lot of stuff in here:

Yoinked from #dragonflybsd/EFNet IRC: Hiding sentences in IPv6 addresses.
Red Hat did it: opensource.com. Good articles, but your eyeballs may get fatigued from reading the word ‘open’ too many times.
Technically, this should have animated spacewar, not pong.
Hypergit, a git plugin for vim, with a contextual menu. (via I forget) Also, digerati, a color scheme for both vim and terminal. (via)
The Winter 2010 edition of the BSDA study DVD is out.
Hey, this is vaguely like what Matt’s doing with disk cache. Well, not really, but it’s a good idea.
More Crawlapalooza at @Play.
The February issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with this issue’s theme being “startups”.

2010/01/31

LTP for you and me

Vincent Stemen has a compiled version of the Linux Test Project available to download and run for anyone interested in helping linuxulator progress. Note that this is not a coding exercise, but rather a reporting exercise, so that we can identify what needs work in the linuxulator.

2010/01/30

New HAMMER presentation

Michael Neumann presented a talk on HAMMER at the Karlsruher Institut
für Technologie on January 27th. His slides (in English) are now available in PDF or ODP formats, and are listed on the dragonflybsd.org Presentations page.

2010/01/21

BIND updated to 9.5.2-P2

BIND has been updated by Jan Lentfer, fixing two recent vulnerabilities. His note about the update has a link to vulnerability info, for the curious. Along the same lines, Jeremy C. Reed is looking for others using DNSSEC, just to see how widespread it is.