leaf lockout

Matthew Dillon issued this warning to folks with accounts on leaf: Due to an increase in automated ssh scans, he’s implemented a security policy that may lock you out if you goof up your login. Mail him if that does happen.

I’ve seen these same ssh scans with some frequency for at least a few months; these scans appear to be looking for poorly configured machines. Not a huge threat, but enough to warrant a closer eye.

gcc 3.4.3 added

Joerg Sonnenberger has placed gcc-3.4.3 into DragonFly; it is still considered experimental, so use it by setting the environment variable CCVER to ‘gcc34’ only after careful thought. His post has other details.

Old drivers deprecated

Joerg Sonnenberger warned that several drivers will be removed in the next two weeks from all flavors of DragonFly, including Stable, unless someone needs them:

– GPLed math emulator
– GPLed dgb driver
– GPLed awe driver
– old pre-newbus rp driver (use nrp instead)
– OLDCARD AKA pcic (also not built as module by default)

HEAD and Stable, together

The Stable tag has been moved up to the most recent code, as some critical fixes required what’s in the most recent code. In general, this should only be positive, unless you are using unionfs or nullfs, as they will be broken if you upgrade. So, if you are using those file systems, hold off on upgrading for a few weeks. When you do upgrade, it has to be a full buildkernel/buildworld.

Bad Bug Better; VFS work in

Matthew Dillon reported that he and David Rhodus have tracked down and eliminated a longstanding bug that caused VM/filesystem corruption, dating from FreeBSD 4, which may even still be present in FreeBSD 5.

As a side effect, Matthew Dillon’s VFS work will get pushed into the most current code (HEAD). Unionfs and nullfs work has not been completed in the VFS code, so that means if you use HEAD and also use unionfs/nullfs, either don’t update for the next week or so, or drop back to DragonFly_Stable.

Scary VFS work, stable update

Matthew Dillon wrote that the DragonFly_Stable tag is being moved up to the current code, as his potentially destabilizing VFS work is going to be going into the tree, starting tomorrow.

The moral: if you have production or near-production machines, stick with the stable tag, for now.

Axe(4) grinding

Joerg Sonnenberger has commited a whole pile of updates to various network drivers, among them axe(4). He warns that anyone with a axe(4) device should give it a whirl, as the driver is untested at this point.

Fragging fragment

Due to a typo, now fixed, in the disklabel man page, the Installer for DragonFly 1.0A used a too-large fragment size for disks larger than 1G. You may run out of inodes depending on the size of your disk and the number of files you have on it. Matthew Dillon suggested this temporary workaround when installing, until the Installer is changed.

Buildworld is the only way

Matthew Dillon noted that a full make buildworld/kernel and installworld/kernel is needed on the next update, due to a number of changes he has made.

If you haven’t updated recently to catch the scheduler changes, you may want to do this in any case.

Bent fork

forknibbler.com is down; that’s where I host builds of material that is in doc CVS. It’ll be up as soon as I can get to the physical location.

Update: fixed.