Someday you will need this – DragonFly BSD Digest

2025/09/072025/08/26

Lazy Reading for 2025/09/07

A little bit of a thread here on the current crawling plague.

The Terminal Demise Of Consumer Electronics Through Subscription Services.
Why I prefer rST to markdown. Nobody remembers SGML, but everyone reinvents it. (via)
gpart on FreeBSD to partition and format a USB key.
stylish bugs.
The Magic Switch. Surely I’ve mentioned this story before? This is the actual hardware.
Box131: You’re a National Security Project, Harry. Read the first point, about accuracy and how it can be counterproductive.
Yet Another Roguelike Tutorial, Parts 0 and 1. (via)
The current (2025) crawler plague and the fragility of the web.
Related to the previous: “Bro, ban me at the IP level if you don’t like me!”
And more followup: A neat idea, but I can see this leading to the Balkanization of the Internet.
VIC-20 Ultima I. (via)
My other email client is a daemon. (via)

2025/08/182025/08/09

Disable console bell globally

DragonFly now has a sysctl that will disable the console beep everywhere, not just in a particular shell. This is either unimportant to you or a massive relief.

2025/07/062025/07/05

Lazy Reading for 2025/07/06

RPG mini-theme this week.

You’ll have to scroll a bit, but: Hal Foster images. (via)
A modern version of the 1968 game Hammurabi. (via)
I feel open source has turned into two worlds.
Classic Computer Replicas. (via)
Deep Fishing, a Sinclair game. (indirectly via)
FIST, a paranormal A-Team RPG. (via)
XScreenSaver 6.11 out – for the Wayland experimenters.
listfile: help your scripts process a list of things.
Blink and you’ll miss it! 4096 colours and flashing text on the console!
KDE Plasma 6.4 has landed in OpenBSD.
pkgsrc-2025Q2 has been released.
The Apple Johnathan, new to me. (via)
Microscope RPG, a GMless game for building a world. (via, via)
my official list of post-glitch.com hosting options.
How to install FreeBSD on providers that don’t support it with mfsBSD. I’ve linked to this sort of method before.
Ghostty is available for FreeBSD, from a comment last week.

Your unrelated music link of the week: Beanbag metal.

2025/01/262025/01/14

Lazy Reading for 2025/01/26

Done quite early, but it cleared my tabs.

A Retrospective on the Source Code Control System. SCCS, summarized by the guy who wrote it, 50 years later. (via)
Coding font comparison, the game. (via)
The new Public Domain Image Archive.
“/bin/sh: the biggest Unix security loophole“. A more fun read than the format would lead you to believe. (via)
The Visible Zorker. This is quite a gem.
Can you complete the Oregon Trail if you wait at a river for 14272 years: A study. (via)
What’s involved in getting a “modern” terminal setup? (via)
a grep that doesn’t stuck. Not a typo.
A tale from the time_t mines:
Using tcpdump to see only incoming or outgoing traffic.
What a FreeBSD kernel message about your bridge means.

Your unrelated music of the week: Tenebre Rosso Sangue by KEYGEN CHURCH.

2024/04/262024/04/24

Check your signal to noise ratio

Michael Neumann’s recent iwm(4) update fixes signal to noise display in ifconfig. I am linking it to remind you to check your existing ratios now, while your network is fine. You then can tell what has changed weeks, months from now when your network goes haywire and you’re looking for a reason.

2024/04/212024/04/20

Lazy Reading for 2024/04/21

Accidental ‘old web’ nostalgia theme this week.

BUTTERICK’S PRACTICAL TYPOGRAPHY. A very pretty site to read, unsurprisingly. (via)
SmolBSD: make your own BSD UNIX MicroVM. (via)
Email DNS Records Cheatsheet.
Timeline of the xz open source attack.
“Further Explorations” Now Available! If you missed the 50 Years of Text Games book.
The Mask of the Sun, a playthrough. The first of several articles, posted simply because I remember every screen in it.
The Wi-Fi only works when it’s raining. (via)
Kyrios, a fun blackletter font. (via)
Ways of Seeing, the website. I’ve mentioned that show before. (via)
“read, write, own” web. (via)
Read Me #5. Linked not for any particular segment, but for the writing style.
BSDCan 2024 registration is open.

2024/03/102024/03/05

Lazy Reading for 2024/03/10

No theme arose this week.

The Voyager Keyboard.
Important efibootmgr(8) Command.
Shift Happens is a fantastic set of books. Sold out, but dig around in the companion for gems like this.
History of the supercomputer, a video. (via)
Post-Scarcity Web Mapping. (via)
A history of the tty. In-depth!
The Quest to Decode the Mandelbrot Set, Math’s Famed Fractal. (via)
Player vs. Monster, a video game talk. (via)
nixbsd: An unofficial NixOS fork with a FreeBSD kernel. (via)
RGBtoHDMI, converts old computer RGB outputs to newer video with a Pi. (via, via)

2022/09/08

BSD Now 471: De-Penguinization

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.

2022/08/08

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.

2022/06/28

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”.

2022/03/042022/03/03

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.

2022/02/222022/02/20

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.

2022/02/212022/02/17

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.

2021/11/23

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.

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.