Matthew Dillon posted another of his HAMMER updates; he reports on a number of issues he’s having trouble with. The happy result is that fixing these problems actually led to a solution that was much easier to implement.
BSDTalk 140 is an interview with Kristaps Dzonsons, author of Mult, a “instance multiplicity system”. It sounds similar to vkernels or Xen, though I’m sure there’s someone gritting their teeth at my generalizations.
I noticed this article describing a product called ‘Flyback’ on Ubuntu, advertised as being similar to Apple’s Time Machine.  It creates a backup system via rsync and hardlinks. Oddly enough, this has already been done on DragonFly, and could work on any BSD. Perhaps we need to name more basic assemblies of system features with cool names. (via)
As mentioned here before and now on FreeBSD – the Unknown Giant, there will soon be “BSD Magazine“. It’s due out in 2Q 2008.
Digging around on the site shows some promotional material that says “Linux” where it should say “BSD”. This is probably because it’s repurposed from one of Software Media LLC’s other publications. It should be interesting. If you have a itch to write, they are taking submissions, though it sounds like they’ve already got the first issue ready.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert mentioned plans to eventually build an encrypted network file system; Matthew Dillon added a description of how that could work with HAMMER.
Vincent Stemen did a good amount of testing of cvsup vs. rsync in terms of update speed. Rsync came out way ahead, though as a few people noted, rsyncd’s load relative to cvsupd on a server serving many clients is unknown. In any case, cvsup does not build on DragonFly via pkgsrc, so it looks like rsync is generally a better choice, plus most mirrors are using it now. HAMMER may provide a better alternative, in any case.
While on the topic: Ulf Lilleengen’s blog post about improving csup.
Vincent Stemen put together a tool for automatically updating his DragonFly systems. It’s called ‘mirror’, and he has an explanatory web page up for it now. Give it a whirl.
An aside in this post from Matthew Dillon notes that the next release (which I assume will be 2.0) will be before the end of February.
This week’s BSDTalk is an interview with Dru Lavigne, covering her new “Best of FreeBSD Basics” book and the new BSDA exam, both previously mentioned on this Digest.
To continue that topic, Dru also attended DemoCamp7 in Ottawa recently and has a writeup on the new products she saw.
boulder.tele.dk is a new DragonFly mirror, serving images and pkgsrc binaries via HTTP and FTP.
An article on OpenAddict talks about managing multiple FreeBSD systems, though it could apply to most any BSD system, including DragonFly. It boils down to “Share code via NFS.”, really. (Via FreeBSDOS)
The January issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out. There’s notes in there on some $300k (!) of grant money for Ontario, canada universities for open source projects looking to commercialize. (Via Dru Lavigne)
As I was notified by Michael Lyngbøl, there’s a new Danish mirror for DragonFly:
Snapshots and ISO images:
pkgsrc binary mirrors:
BSDTalk this week is about setting up a centralized syslog server. If you manage more than a few non-Windows systems, this is going to be useful.
Matthew Dillon wrote another one of his updates on the work being done on HAMMER; he’s moving on to balancing code next.
Seen on Undeadly: Peter Hansteen, author of The Book of PF, will be giving a full day tutorial on PF, on February 20th in Riga, Latvia.
Gerard van Essen, from the PC-BSD project, has started a blog called “FreeBSD – the unknown Giant“.   It’s news reporting, similar to this site, and it’s updated regularly! It makes me very happy to see resources like that in the BSD world. (Via Dru Lavigne)
Michael Neumann wrote up a HAMMER description, with some ZFS comparisons. Matthew Dillon had some corrections, which I think have made it back to the original article. There is an obvious bias in the article, but it does at least provide a feature list.
Hasso Tepper pointed at the usb4bsd project as a potential improvement for USB, though Jeremy Messenger saw something that may keep it out of FreeBSD, at least.