OpenBSD – DragonFly BSD Digest

Lazy Reading for 2025/07/13

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 12:04:08 +0000

Some of these links are relevant to my personal history. (dinosaurs, mining)

forbidden secrets of ancient X11 scaling technology revealed.
The untold story of the Carnegie Diplodocus. (via)
Mining And Refining: Drilling And Blasting.
The Historical Tech Tree. (via)
watch(1) utility added to -current. Does what it sounds like.
XScreenSaver 6.12. More Wayland changes.
Switching From Desktop Linux To FreeBSD.
The Wild Wild Web.
AI-operated vending machines and business process innovation (sorry). A decent analysis, though I feel like too many LLM examples are for avoiding feedback, when you want the opposite.
Which leads me to Paul Pangaro’s Cybernetics page.
New zine: The Secret Rules of the Terminal.
FreeBSD 14.3 on FrankenPad T25. Linked for the FrankenPad.
Some notes on X terminals in their heyday.
Yes, The Book of PF, 4th Edition Is Coming Soon. Preorders are open.

Your unrelated music of the week: Chali 2na x Cut Chemist – Melt Like Plastic. (via)

Lazy Reading for 2025/05/11

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 11 May 2025 12:04:14 +0000

Oddball link collection.

Best dishwasher ever but it gets better.
Open Source Commercial Synthesisers You Will Love. Well, I like the form factor.
windows experience goes to 11. Linked for my own benefit.
Introducing an OpenBSD LLDP daemon and Introducing bpflogd(8). OpenBSD is sort of becoming a SDR, which I don’t mean negatively.
GhostBSD: From Usability to Struggle and Renewal linked cause I didn’t know the history.
Yet Another Provider Survey – see some places report running hosted BSD systems with ease by following the thread. Here’s the very nice to have final summary.
XScreenSaver 6.10 is out. There’s something Ouroboros-y about having a Klondike screensaver.
The appeal of keyboard launchers for (Unix) desktops.
checking the wifi. Most people would parse ifconfig output, but not ted.
I use Zip Bombs to Protect my Server. (via)
Think Twice Dice.

Unrelated link of the week: sign up for the Dobbstown Mirror. Getting something that is both real and also crazy in the mail is always nice.

Lazy Reading for 2024/01/07

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 07 Jan 2024 13:07:56 +0000

Of course the first thing I did was type the wrong year into the title of this post.

OpenBSD printing and Avery labels.
pkgsrc-2023Q4 out.
Next NYC*BUG: Jan 10th.
DragonFly BSD on a Thinkpad T480s.
There’s a thread about disklabel on the TUHS list that went from interesting history to OpenFirmware discussion and then into the problem of bootstrapping/hardware monitors. Lots more I didn’t link. (iPhone-related)
‘Merchants of Complexity’: Why 37Signals Abandoned the Cloud. Recurring monthly payments for static goods are a goldmine – for the seller. (via)
Critical mass in the Goldilocks zone. (via)
Ten Things To Do After Installing FreeBSD. I don’t agree with it but it is interesting.
2024 FreeBSD community survey. Closes tomorrow.
Why Prusa is floundering, and how you can avoid their fate. I don’t know the products well enough to say this is the only analysis.
Why My Short Fiction Is Exclusively In My Store. Counterintuitively, he’s charging less money but making more money.
The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again. Read the article for the links inside it.

In Other BSDs for 2022/10/22

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 23 Oct 2022 03:03:44 +0000

It’s Long Article Title week!

In Other BSDs for 2022/10/15

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 15 Oct 2022 12:53:12 +0000

Accidentally OpenBSD-heavy this week.

In Other BSDs for 2022/10/08

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 08 Oct 2022 12:56:31 +0000

No theme this week for the BSD section.

Fiber + Static IP = Self-Hosting Glory! Sounds suspiciously like my ISP.
OpenBSD: Manage DNS, DNSSEC (to automate TLSA records). (via)
Red Hat OpenShift versus FreeBSD Jails. (via)
Netlink Added to FreeBSD – Unmodified Linux ip(8) Correctly Works. (via)
Fun with FreeBSD: Your First Linux Guest. (via)
OpenBSD.app – quick full-text searching of OpenBSD packages for -stable and -current. (via)
bsddialog 0.4 and LGPL-Free bsdinstall.
Meet the 2022 FreeBSD Google Summer of Code Students: Koichi Imai, Christos Margiolis, and Jake Freeland.
SCALE19X Conference Report.
HardenedBSD September 2022 Status Report.
Building Your Own FreeBSD-based NAS with ZFS Part 3.
Valuable News – 2022/10/03.

In Other BSDs for 2022/09/24

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 24 Sep 2022 12:49:04 +0000

Check the first link; it’s time-dependent.

Happening tomorrow: Peter Hansteen presents to SEMIBUG about pf. It’s online and he’s certainly an authoritative speaker.
Desktop-installer: Use your Cleverness for Creativity. Note there’s multiple tabs within this writeup. (via)
A Quick Look at the History of Package Management on FreeBSD.
Open Source in Enterprise Environments – Where Are We Now and What Is Our Way Forward?
FreeBSD Cope with WiFi Fuckup.
AsiaBSDCon 2023 is happening. (via)
Analyzing BSD Kernels for Uninitialized Memory Disclosures using Binary Ninja. (via)
Your Comprehensive Guide to rc(8): FreeBSD Services and Automation.
How to Setup Apache/FCGID on NetBSD 9.3.
Valuable News – 2022/09/19.
“OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems” draft done!

In Other BSDs for 2020/09/17

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 17 Sep 2022 12:58:53 +0000

I got subscribed to the UNIX Heritage Society mailing list and it’s already turned up some good stories.

ps(1) gains support for tree-like display of processes. OpenBSD, though it would be useful everywhere, hint, hint.
rcctl(8) gains a “configtest” action.
Portable OpenSSH commits now SSH-signed.
Sharing Dual-Licensed Drivers between Linux and FreeBSD.
“interesting old-timey UNIXes” – I do not know where these intersect with the more well known branches of the family tree.
Time overflows have always been with us.
A fresh look at FreeBSD. (via)
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Unix Legacy. By Rob Pike. Note the timestamp, for 2 reasons.
Valuable News – 2022/09/12.
Installing BSD on an older Dell Laptop: having some issues.
-current has moved to 7.2. OpenBSD.
rpki-client 8.0 released.
ChiBUG is meeting this Tuesday, the 20th.

In Other BSDs for 2022/09/10

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 10 Sep 2022 12:47:29 +0000

Yay, another week that overflowed with links!

In Other BSDs for 2022/09/03

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 03 Sep 2022 12:55:17 +0000

This is an overflow week.

In Other BSDs for 2022/08/27

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 12:49:10 +0000

Catchup since I was on the road last week.

In Other BSDs for 2022/08/20

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 20 Aug 2022 12:39:59 +0000

Done while on the road.

Beastie In For Checkup: Analyzing FreeBSD with LockDoc. (via)
A year of using a FreeBSD laptop without a GUI.
FreeBSD Foundation Soliciting Proposals for Handbook Writing.
RAID 1C support added. Mirroring and encryption, if you are like me and can’t ever remember RAID levels.
OpenBSD Webzine #11.
sftp-server(8) gains support for home-directory request.
Desktop Environments preferred by various distributions, over time.
Emulating the Amstrad CPC on NetBSD. (via)
ravynOS – Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD. A fork of helloBSD, I think. (via)
FreeBSD – a lesson in poor defaults. I think I’ve linked to earlier editions. (via)
Coffee with Brian Kernighan. (via)

In Other BSDs for 2022/08/13

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 13 Aug 2022 12:55:35 +0000

The last link has some interesting applications to try.

logcheck – egrep: trailing backslash (\).
Meta-programming in Shell. (via)
MGR, a pre-X windowing system that I’ve never knowingly seen before. (via)
The odd return value of the original 4.2 BSD gethostbyname().
NetBSD 9.3 released.
FreeBSD 2022Q2 report.
svnlite(1) removed from FreeBSD base.
Ada development on FreeBSD 13.1. (via)
FreeBSD 13.0 EOL.
Valuable News – 2022/08/08.
/usr/games removed from the default $PATH. (OpenBSD)
What softwares do you recommend to a daily use BSD system?

In Other BSDs for 2022/08/06

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 06 Aug 2022 12:54:22 +0000

Some useful tips hidden in there this week.

How to use two gpus (intel and nvidia) attached to two monitors on FreeBSD.
Freshly installed NetBSD booting on a 80386 DX40 with 8MB of RAM. MB.
OPNSense 22.7 released. (via)
Advocating for FreeBSD in 2022 and Beyond.
Valuable News – 2022/08/01.
Ten Things To Do After Installing FreeBSD. The source link has a good comment about what’s wrong with sudo as currently used. Also, I did not know about .hushlogin.
Even more randomness.
HardenedBSD July 2022 Status Report.
depenguin.me, reminded of this FreeBSD-on-shared-host-install by this Hetzner news.
A brief history of looking up host addresses in Unix. Ugh, NIS.
Run FreeBSD 13.1 for ARM64 in QEMU on Apple Silicon Mac with HVF Acceleration. (via)
Microsoft’s Xenix – Microsoft tries their hand at UNIX.

In Other BSDs for 2022/07/23

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 23 Jul 2022 12:53:50 +0000

No mini-theme this week.

An assortment of timestamp formats found in our (Unix) logs.
How efficient can cat(1) be?
NetBSD can also run a Minecraft server.
Related: rjc shows Minecraft running on OpenBSD too.
Also: DragonFly too; I did it.
Valuable News – 2022/07/18.
Game of Trees 0.74 released.
OpenBGPD 7.5 released.
Using BSD make for your (small) project. A mini-tutorial. (via)
NetBSD is using a fork of the tz database. There’s a backstory.
-current has moved to 7.2-beta.
What is the most minimalistic BSD for desktop?

In Other BSDs for 2022/07/16

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 16 Jul 2022 12:49:40 +0000

Started with overflow from last week.

Toolchains adventures – Q2 2022.
Your next C compiler is a D compiler: Introducing DMD’s ImportC.
Comparative BSD cheatsheet?
From 0 to Bhyve on FreeBSD 13.1.
/bin/true used to be an empty file. (via)
How we run a Minecraft server.
Self-hosting a static site with OpenBSD, httpd, and relayd.
Looking for a USB WiFi adapter that is compatible with FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD.
rpki-client 7.9 released.
Porting OpenBSD pledge() to Linux. (via)
How Unix didn’t used to support ‘#!’, a brief history.
Valuable News – 2022/07/11.
Desktop Environments Resource Usage Comparison. It’s been a long time since E17.
helloSystem version 14-experimental is tagged.

In Other BSDs for 2022/07/09

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 09 Jul 2022 12:53:55 +0000

Lots to read this week.

In Other BSDs for 2022/07/02

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 02 Jul 2022 12:52:18 +0000

There’s multiple online and offline BUG meetings this month; go if you can.

In Other BSDs for 2022/06/25

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 25 Jun 2022 12:37:23 +0000

Almost cleaned out the RSS feeds I had waiting.

Differences between base and ports LLVM in OpenBSD.
FreeBSD Quick Guide: Audio on FreeBSD.
Hotfix GhostBSD 22.06.18 ISO is now available.
Using Netgraph for FreeBSD’s bhyve Networking.
(NomadBSD) New team member: Mehmet Mert Gunduz.
Use a gamepad to control mpv video playback. Should work for any BSD?
Valuable News – 2022/06/20.
Is FreeBSD a Real UNIX?
Legends start at 1.0! – FreeBSD in 1993 part 1 and part 2.
Speeding up autoconf with caching. A followup to a BSD Now link.
OpenBGPD 7.4 released.

In Other BSDs for 2022/06/18

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 18 Jun 2022 12:54:37 +0000

More links this week to make up for last week’s short haul.

Implementing non-stop protocol compatibility in LLDB.
OpenBSD folklore and share/misc/airport.
FreeBSD first status report 2022, talking about portconfig.
OpenBSD 7.1 on PINE64 RockPro64. (via)
FreeBSD Foundation work in the 13.1 release.
Please read this before upgrading to 22.06.07. (GhostBSD)
HardenedBSD May 2022 Status Report.
Give WindowMaker a macos Mojave look.
OpenLDAP update. (OpenBSD)
Vim colour scheme changes. (also OpenBSD)
Minecraft server on OpenBSD. (via)
Valuable News for 5/30, 6/6, and 6/13.
OPNsense 22.1.8 and OPNsense Business Edition 22.4.1 released.
OpenIKED 7.1 released.