There are no binary packages built for dports, on DragonFly 3.7, for 32-bit machines, at this time. Pierre Abbat found this out. You can build from source, of course, or just use 3.6 packages. Don’t forget -DBATCH to avoid getting asked for build options when building from source.
I didn’t post this before, and should have: Matthew Dillon posted a summary of all the trackpad improvements he added, and how to make use of the various features.
Warren Postma found that hal and dbus caused a crash in VMWare for DragonFly. The answer is to use moused, not dbus.
Also, if you want to keep a custom or just older package from dports on your system, as karu.pruun did, ‘pkg lock’ is the answer.
There’s a lot this week, so let’s get started:
Git Reference. Not that there isn’t a lot of other documentation out there, but much of what you find is people asking specific questions rather than explanations of procedure. (via)
Movie Code. At least most of these are using legit code, even if it’s often the wrong application. It’s been worse. (See ‘state of the art video’ item) (via)
Unix: 14 things to do or stop doing in 2014. These tips are actually useful and contain no buzzwords.
TrewGrip, another item in my quest for interesting keyboards I don’t use.
4043 bytes to recreate a mid-80s IBM PC. There are less bytes of data in the program than there were transistors in the CPU that it emulates. It can run MS Flight Simulator. It was for the International Obfuscated C Code Contest, which should surprise you not at all. (via)
The World’s Most Pimped-Out ZX81. I don’t think it can run Doom, though.
The Unix Shell’s Humble If. For once, an article that doesn’t just pretend bash is the only shell that exists. (via)
Unix Shell RPG Tutorial. It’s exactly what that combination of words means. (via)
Scientists tell their favorite jokes.
Best programmer jokes, found here where there’s more.
I find these animations slightly hypnotizing. (via)
Technology used to suck even when it was cutting-edge, and we’ll still feel that way in the future. (via)
How did we end up with a centralized Internet?
Software in 2014. The summary is: server side is great, client is not. (via)
Able to be turn on, and that is it. Sci-fi movies ignore where technology comes from.
True Nuke Puke Story. My mine coworkers once did something similar to a copier repairman; got him so worried about going underground that he had a panic attack when he had to step on the hoist. We had to get a new repairman.
Your unrelated link of the week: BIG ENDING FACES! (via)
‘M M’ had trouble with his “Realtek RTL8191SE Wireless LAN 802.11n PCI-E NIC” on DragonFly some time ago. He was able to get it working, and he documented the somewhat convoluted procedure here.
If you want to track the bleeding edge of DragonFly, which is currently version 3.7, I happened to describe it in a reply to Filippo Moretti, on users@. Long-time users will know this/do this already, but it’s worth repeating just because new users may not realize how easy it is.
Here’s how my upgrade from DragonFly 3.4 to 3.6 for this server went.
The system install went normally. I rebooted before performing ‘make upgrade’, as noted in UPGRADING and elsewhere.
I already have dports installed, so a binary upgrade should be possible. I had heard of people with older version of pkg, having trouble getting it to notice upgrades. I rebuilt pkg, and ran ‘pkg upgrade’. A number of the updates coredumped. Here’s one example:
[156/160] Upgrading gtk2 from 2.24.19 to 2.24.19_2...Segmentation fault (core dumped)
After the upgrade, I had two problems: PHP wasn’t working for the website, and some programs would segfault.
The random segfault was fixable by forcing a binary upgrade of all packages. Since there were some programs on the system that were still new enough that the version number was the same as on the remote repository, pkg didn’t upgrade them. Those packages were linked against old versions of system libraries that predated the locale changes in DragonFly 3.6, so they’d crash. Forcing the update for all packages fixed the issue.
The other problem, PHP on the web server, is not new to me. The binary package for PHP does not include the module for Apache. The solution is to build from source with that option selected. I understand that pkg is destined to support (some?) port options in the future. There’s also an immediate workaround for locking it.
However, the port would not build because of a security issue. The binary package installed without any warning. This, I am told, will change to pkg giving you the option to install if you are aware of the security problem, and whether it really affects you. (which is just what I want, yay!)
Anyway, other than the system changes biting me because I didn’t realize some packages weren’t updated, it went very quickly. That is the reason for binary updates through pkg, or at least a major one.
Still quiet out there, but I found some good reading.
PHP functions originally named for string length and sorting. Yeesh. (via)
A great old-timey game programming hack. There’s an initial speed hack in this story, and then there’s another clever trick to fix memory corruption. (via)
My hardest bug. This was a pretty fiendish problem. (via)
Gitdown: don’t commit when drunk. I’ve done that. Actually will use an Arduino-based breathalyzer. (via)
Another Perl One-Liners review.
Zeno of Elea, a game. It’s based on a classic… (via)
Vim plugins you should know about. From that One-Liners author.
Speaking of Perl, here’s a Larry Wall interview. An old-school hacker – he wrote patch, too.
Moonpig: a billing system that doesn’t suck. An in-depth review of system design. More Perl, too.
Three Books You Should Read… Mostly BSD content.
How to use Tor wrong, in multiple ways. It’s not for petty crimes, and it’s not any use when you’re using it from a monitored network. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Cookie Puss.
Things are very quiet this week; I’ve had nothing to post for some days – DragonFly or even for other BSDs. The end of the year has most people distracted, I think. This makes it a good time to bring up something that’s been bothering me: the state of software firewalls in BSD. The pf utility is a BSD advantage; I’ve heard people say “I used iptables on Linux and pf is a much better alternative.” I know that’s anecdotal, but there it is. Here’s the question, and the reason I’m writing this: which pf?
DragonFly has a version of pf equivalent to what was shipped in OpenBSD 4.4. FreeBSD has a version equivalent, I think, to OpenBSD 3.8 4.5’s pf, and it has been further modified. NetBSD has a similar, older pf, but there’s people working on a NetBSD-specific version called npf, which isn’t yet ready. And of course, OpenBSD has its version of pf. If you feel good about these different alternatives, you call it divergence. If you don’t feel good about it, you call it fragmentation.
Compare this to OpenSSH – it works the same on each platform. There’s no confusion on how to configure it, or interoperability problems. It would be wonderful to have the equivalent for pf, where other BSD platforms would import a portable version. This software firewall is a strength, and it’s much easier to tout it when there’s only one.
I doubt there’s a way to bring it all back to one source tree. There’s a lot vested in the different forks out there. You know what would take a lot less effort: a compatibility test suite. Agreeing on a common syntax and set of functions would make life easier for every end user. It would incidentally make vendors a lot happier, too. Even if a user or vendor wasn’t hoping to move between BSD flavors, a test suite would still guarantee a certain known level of functionality for any BSD release.
How likely is this? I don’t know. But I want to bring up the notion before it gets missed. Now is a good time, with each pf version still being relatively close to one another.
Update/note: Henning Brauer is willing to help.
If you have a DragonFly 3.4 system that has already been switched over to dports, and you upgrade it to DragonFly 3.6, you might see an odd problem. Rebuild pkg, and it will work.
I’ve only seen a few reports, so I don’t know if this is even likely to happen to most upgraders.
Happy birthday to me!
- Is Your Stack Protector Working? On Undeadly, so it’s OpenBSD.
- ChaCha20 and Poly1305 in OpenSSH. (via)
- The next PC-BSD 10.0 image is available.
- Reid Linnemann is the latest in the Faces of FreeBSD series.
- NetBSD has updated file.
- FreeBSD’s iwn(4) driver has some updates (also in DragonFly).
- FreeBSD now has casperd, for controlling access to out-of-sandbox capabilities.
- FreeBSD’s oce(4) driver now supports 40Gb devices. (yay for manufacturer support)
- FreeBSD has Hyper-V drivers.
- OpenBSD’s ifconfig now shows the NWID, channel, and BSSID for IBSS networks.
- OpenBSD has updated to pixman 0.32.4.
- pkgsrc’s 2013Q4 freeze will start on the 16th.
- How old is who? (Don’t tell me 900 years.)
- There’s a broken builds list for pkgsrc-2013Q4 for anyone who wants to help.
- Hacker News had a link to the FreeBSD version of the BSD Family Tree, which is not unique, but the comments led to some interesting links, like this story of an 8-year NetBSD uptime.
- FreeBSDNews’s summary.
- All the AsiaBSDCon 2013 videos. (Last week’s link was just OpenBSD ones.)
- FreeBSD authentication against Samba 4 LDAP. I’m going to need this for the DragonFly machine I’m setting up in the same role at work… in my copious spare time.
If you have a Hammer volume that is offline, meaning that you don’t have the pseudo-file-systems null-mounted anywhere, it won’t get cleaned up in overnight processing. You just have to manually specify it.
This post from Konrad Neuwirth asking how to do a minimal installation of DragonFly led to this list of all the ‘knobs’ you can set to make your installation smaller, from John Marino. (And your buildworld faster, if that’s appealing to you.) I also pointed at rconfig and PFI, which are criminally underdocumented.
If you’re planning to run DragonFly in KVM, remember this post from Matthew Dillon, giving the settings he uses. This will save you a bit of time.
It’s been snowing this week in the northeast US, which makes me happy.
- Unix: sending signals to processes. Signals have always struck me as a somewhat byzantine messaging system that everyone uses for the equivalent of Ctrl-C.
- Unix: Debugging your scripts. This will be useful if it’s not already familiar to you.
- Compatibility is Hard. Contrary to popular belief, Microsoft Word documents are not backward or forward compatible, from release to release.
- From that previous link: Why Microsoft Word Must Die. The worst problems to troubleshoot are when someone says “Word/Excel is acting funny”. There’s so many intermediate layers of software in those programs that it’s difficult to find the actual data and the actions being performed on it, much less troubleshoot any process.
- SparkFun.com moved from MySQL/MariaDB to Postgres. I agree with the sentiments in the article, but I want to know the technical reasons that made Postgres the choice for scaling. (via)
- Apple ][ DOS source code. I don’t have anything I can actually do with the source, but there’s a 1977 price list pictured in the the article that shows some interesting numbers: A 4Kb RAM system costs about $1300, and the prices just go up from there.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: the first four pages of Necropolis. This comic looks to be fun.
If you’ve seen my previous two reviews of Michael W. Lucas’s ‘Mastery’ books – DNSSEC Mastery and SSH Mastery – then you can guess what this will be: his newest book, focusing on a single software topic. This time it’s sudo.
The one downside of reading this book: I now am aware I’m using sudo wrong. Perhaps not wrong, but not anywhere near its potential. Sudo – and I’m not the only person who has experienced this – is used as a “Let’s install sudo so we don’t have to tell anyone the root password”. Sudo works for that sort of thing, but there’s a lot more possibilities.
Sudo is designed to be deployable across multiple systems, as part of a security policy. It’s an easy way to create purpose-shaped roles with different users, especially with users that have specialized skills and tasks, like database maintenance.
Obviously I think better of sudo after reading the book; there’s a lot of program capabilities of which I was unaware, but it’s the book that sells them. Michael W. Lucas’s humor is on display again, to break up some very technical material. Here’s some bits, pulled out.
Remember that “syntactically valid” is not the same as “does what you want.”
Pressing Q tells visudo to break sudo until you log in as root and fix it. Do not press this button. You won’t like it.
Here I create the TAPEMONKEYS alias for the people who manage backups.
And if Carl tries to configure Oracle on the PostgreSQL server, senior sysadmin Thea needs to have sharp words with him. Probably involving a tire iron.
The book is in-depth enough to cover more complex topics like using sudo and Active Directory, and sudo as an intrusion detection tool, of all things.
The usual reasons to buy a Mastery book are all still there: it specifically mentions working on BSD systems instead of pretending Linux is the only system out there. It’s available through a DRM-free seller (Smashwords) in addition to Amazon. It’s a self-published effort, not shovelware. It’s available now as an ebook, and in physical form soon. Lucas talks about it on BSDNow 010, too.
I have one last nontechnical note. Since these Mastery books are working into a series, I’d like to see a whole printed run of visually matching books. Something with the equivalent of the O’Reilly animals or the Pelican or even Little Blue Books common look and feel.
The takeaway: You should be reading this book if you plan to use sudo in any sort of multiuser environment. It’s available as an e-book direct from the author, via Amazon, via Smashwords, and possibly Barnes & Noble at some point in the near future. Physical books are available, and you can buy both forms together, apparently.
And of course this sudo joke.
I spent this entire week saying things like “Wait, today’s Tuesday?” and “I thought this was Wednesday, not Thursday.”
- Welcome to my GUI Gallery, a whole lot of different GUI screenshots. This mention of the “Salto” Alto emulator brought me there, and there’s some material I’ve never seen before. Also, there’s Bob. Not “Bob” the prophet, but Bob, the computer mistake. Speaking of problematic designs, see the Windows 8 page.
- 5 Cool UNIX Hacks. Sounds linkbaity, but it’s useful. I didn’t realize that CTRL-a is the non-destructive version of CTRL-u. (via)
- This seems strange, but I never heard of PLATO, even though it seems to be the precursor to so much. (via)
- “Goodbye Google“, in terms of switching to your own platform, seems to be a new trend.
- arkOS, a similar idea.
- Finding Files Your Way. I can never remember all the arguments to ‘find’.
- Google has a Shell Style Guide. Which equates to a Bash Style Guide, but that’s OK. Shell scripts are sometimes considered the most disposable form of programming, so it’s good to see a full guide. (via)
Your unrelated animation of the week: late for meeting. A followup to going to the store, which I think I posted here years ago.
There’s a surprisingly large list this week.
- FreeBSD has updated netmap.
- FreeBSD supports VT-d DMAR hardware. Not totally sure what that is.
- FreeBSD supports the RealTek RTL8168G, RTL8168GU, RTL8411B, and RTL8168EP.
- FreeBSD updated byacc to version 20130925.
- FreeBSD has binary packages again.
- Managed Services using FreeBSD at NYI, a whitepaper.
- NetBSD has imported OpenBSD’s support for ASIX AX88178a and AX88179 USB network interfaces, in the axen(4) driver.
- NetBSD supports the Broadcom BCM56340 iProc based switch.
- OpenBSD supports unattended installation. See Also on Undeadly.
- OpenBSD has softraid booting documentation. Someone will find this useful, I’m sure.
- OpenBSD 5.4 is released.
- Inspecting Packets with OpenBSD and pf, the presentation from vBSDCon.
- Lua in pkgsrc has been modified.
- Ocaml in pkgsrc has been updated to 4.0.1.
- The BSD Router Project has hit 1.5. (via)
- PC-BSD 10 alpha images are available for testing.
- PC-BSD is doing weekly updates, an idea I support, unsurprisingly.
- No BSD systems in Google Code-In this year, darnit.
I think I’m finally catching up on the backlog.
- Unix: Flexibly moving files with lftp. I usually copy and paste a shell script together.
- BANCStar source code. In that sort of environment, there’s no good or bad code. It has moved beyond such considerations. (via)
- The Lenna Story. About the 1972 Playboy centerfold image used to test image compression. I mentioned it once before in passing. (via)
- If you find regular expressions difficult, putting another layer of expression on top doesn’t help. (via)
- How not to check the validity of an email address. I had a similar experience at an old job in 1999, where a coworker set a site’s main page to get all news stories and then showed the 10 most recent. This started to really slow things down when we reached over 5,000 stories… (via)
- Achieving Rapid Response Times in Large Online Services. A PDF of slides. (via)
- It’s described as “the best programming fonts“, but it’s really the most popular monospaced typefaces. Who cares about correct language – it has visual examples. (via)
- Phone keypads could have been very different. (via)
- Sudo Mastery’s first draft is complete. You can buy it now and get updates as it gets polished.
- Have yourself a keysigning party. GPG is complicated. I know there’s reasons, but still, this is the sort of thing that would be better with as little barrier to entry as possible.
- The Internet, via Commodore64 and Neuromancer.
Your unrelated link of the week: The Alan Lomax recordings.