Someday you will need this – DragonFly BSD Digest

2021/07/23

How to mess up mail delivery

Here’s something I just learned: If you are running dma(8), /etc/dma.conf will contain MAILNAME. If your email server is somewhere else, but you set MAILNAME as your domain – dma will deliver locally.

I had /etc/dma.conf set with MAILNAME shiningsilence.com – so dma kept delivering overnight periodic results to root, which was aliased to justin@shiningsilence.com in /etc/mail/aliases and so it was delivered to ‘justin’ locally on the machine.

Changing MAILNAME to www.shiningsilence.com – the host you are reading right now – fixed the problem. Now, whether this was an automatically set config or something I misconfigured some years ago… I can’t tell.

2021/07/162021/07/15

*_show_badconfig on by default in DragonFly

I didn’t know about this, but there’s a daily/weekly/monthly/security_show_badconfig option in periodic.conf that is now defaulting to “yes” in DragonFly. This I assume means you’ll get the output of erroring periodic scripts sent to you. Useful, especially if you find out about an error you hadn’t seen before.

2021/06/28

Forcing slower speeds on purpose

If you’ve got unshielded disk cables in a tiny PC, you can run the AHCI link a bit slower to better handle interference.

2021/05/13

One more reminder about pkg

If you are upgrading an older 5.8.x system to DragonFly 6, and get a lua error when updating pkg: manually copy over a config file, and you’ll be set.

2021/01/19

How to recover from a damaged fstab

If you edit /etc/fstab, and then later change something like the proc filesystem from OpenJDK, you might not boot normally. Antonio Olivares has a solution for you.

2021/01/11

A fix for sudden Lua errors in pkg

If you upgrade pkg on your system, it may start erroring out. This is because the default config will confuse the newer version. To fix this, you can copy over a working config and the problem will go away. I expect this may only be a problem until the next release.

2020/12/312020/12/30

New user and group updater

Aaron LI’s added a pw-update.sh script to DragonFly, for use in automating group and user changes, especially as – someday – part of a binary upgrade.

2020/12/192020/12/17

In Other BSDs for 2020/12/19

Working on less traditional BSD links here.

Toward an automated tracking of OpenBSD ports contributions.
Commentary on the MacOS -> FreeBSD article from last week.
BSD Unix Hardware Support Database. (via)
BSD Discord server. More linked in comments.
Become shell literate. Wonderfully not Linux/bash-specific.
There’s always more history. Early BSD work, indirectly.
CentOS killed by IBM – a chance to go new ways?
Set your favorite pager.
OpenBSD on TECLAST F7 Plus.
OPNsense 20.7.7 released.
Valuable News – 2020/12/14.

2020/11/11

ifconfig as a warning signal

I’ve seen this multiple times over the years: if ifconfig suddenly stops working, especially after an upgrade. your kernel and world are out of sync. Rebuild and make sure you get both updated.

2020/10/28

sysmouse fixes everything

Well, it doesn’t fix anything, but it seems like an answer that almost always helps: running sysmouse usually fixes most X11 mouse problems.

2020/10/13

ChiBUG meeting, now

The ChiBUG monthly meeting has gone virtual, so go now if you are interested. The thread about it also includes some notes on how to connect under BSD that may be useful beyond this immediate event.

2020/10/07

How to lose all your packages

If you delete all your installed packages, you will also lose the certificate used by pkg to verify the connection to download new ones. There’s several workarounds for this problem.

2020/09/22

DragonFly + iwm

If you buy a Lenovo Yoga 500, or any laptop with an iwm(4) chipset, here’s how to get it going with DragonFly.

2020/09/15

Screen switching, briefly

Screen switching, where an xterm’s contents return to what it was before starting a full screen program, was turned on and then back off for DragonFly. It would have only affected DragonFly-current users, and even then only for a short window of time. If you encounter it anywhere else, though, here’s how to turn it off using Xresources.

2020/08/182020/08/14

Unnoted changes, one place

Instead of posting about updates, here’s a feature that you will hopefully never notice: ‘make upgrade’, part of the upgrade process in DragonFly, will now go look for 3rd party software built to depend on deprecated DragonFly system libraries, before removing those libraries. (details) If you’ve had a program stop running because something else was upgraded – and I’m sure you have, cause “dll hell” is an actual phrase – you’ll be thankful for this.

2020/08/03

Category: Someday you will need this