This week’s BSD Now includes a link to depenguin.me, a way to install BSD using a rescue boot environment, which is going to come in handy for someone reading this. I know I’ve linked to it before.
Cleaning up a HAMMER drive
Predrag Punosevac has some notes on how he cleaned up some HAMMER drives and freed up half his disk space.
Hetzner cloud and DragonFly
When you are setting up a DragonFly machine on Hetzner, pay attention to this bug report for dhcp setup. The short answer is “use dhcpcd”.
DragonFly as a KVM guest
There’s a new page on the DragonFly site covering how to install DragonFly as a guest system under KVM.
A reminder on X
I know I’ll need this again, so I am making a post out of it. If you are running a DragonFly system through NVMM using the excellent site instructions, and you want X apps to display on a local Windows workstation, you need to:
- Install VcXsrv (or your X server of choice) on Windows and start it up.
- Install xauth and xterm on the DragonFly host.
- On the DragonFly host, set these three options in /etc/ssh/sshd_config. They are already there but commented out with different arguments.
X11Forwarding yes X11DisplayOffset 0 X11UseLocalhost yes
- Reload sshd: ‘service sshd reload’.
- ‘Enable X11 Forwarding’ under Connection -> SSH -> X11 in the puTTY setup dialog.
Connect to the DragonFly host with puTTY, type ‘xterm’, and a terminal window should appear on your Windows desktop within a few seconds. This could be turned into a shortcut with puTTY to avoid having redundant terminals, but I’m not writing that out yet.
Date output sanity
I use date(1) just rarely enough that I can never remember the right arguments to create a human-readable result. Now, there’s an -I arg to date(1) that uses a word instead of a format string to get ISO8601 output.
Synproxy/pf note to save
Linked here cause maybe it’ll help someone else with synproxy and pf in DragonFly: synproxy state doesn’t work in Packet Filter.
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.
*_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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.