What if you have a DragonFly system that you want to use for an wireless access point? Andrey N. Oktyabrski did, and he helpfully listed his solution.
I just mentioned DNSSEC in last week’s Lazy Reading, and here’s a “How to get DNSSEC with BIND 9.8.1 working” article from Michael Lucas. It’s pretty simple… Conveniently, BIND 9.8.1 is available in pkgsrc as net/bind98.
If you’re running DragonFly on a very low-end system, you may be wondering about memory requirements for Hammer. Hammer is much less RAM-hungry than ZFS, so it looks like you can get away with 128M, as long as you don’t mind the occasional error message. You can manually tweak settings for it if you like. 256M is plenty.
It still strikes me as odd to consider systems with less than 1G of RAM as “low-memory”. What rich times we live in!
There is now a NO_BINUTILS221 option, added by Sascha Wildner, that will keep your system from building binutils 2.21 during a buildworld. The system will still build binutils 2.22, so there will still be a functioning ld on the system. Use this along with NO_GCC41 (so only gcc 4.4 gets built) to speed up your buildworlds, if you like.
If you’re looking to use IPMI and remotely watch the console of another system, Matthew Dillon has made some changes to help with that.
Getting close to 2.12 release…
- Steam and Team Fortress 2 running on a BSD – PC-BSD with an NVIDIA driver, in this case, but it may apply to other cards and other games. Using Wine is always so intricate, it seems.
- Remember how suddenly a large chunk of Internet traffic was suddenly routed through China, briefly in early 2010? Apparently it’s happened a few more times since then. This article at the Economist talks about that and the SCION project, in an accessible way.
- The 2011 Interactive Fiction Competition has released this year’s entries, and almost all of them can be played online. (via) There goes a few hours of your life. Sorry.
- Speaking of hours, there’s apparently a civil lawsuit that has rendered timezone data unavailable. Here’s a good summation. It’s a frustrating scenario. (via multiple places)
- World’s best introduction to sed.
Yep, fall hits and it’s easier to find links.
- DragonFly morphology. The insect, not the operating system, though that would make an interesting diagram.
- Stick your pinkie in the corner of your mouth, Dr. Evil style, and say, “One MEEELion TCP connections on BSD!“. (via several retweets)
- Sudo vs. SSH public keys.
- The app store concept is taking over. Not that it’s a totally bad thing! We could implement one for pkgsrc, and should. (via)
- A nice (OpenBSD-centric) walkthrough of routing. (via)
- Ooh, decent disk benchmarks. I wish there were graphs, of course.
- I think this happens to most CS grads; you sit around one day and say to yourself, “Hey, I could write an operating system!” This forum post shows someone getting that idea and then realizing it’s not necessarily the goal he wanted. Why do I link to it? I appreciate the optimism.
- Or you can just build a functioning computer in Minecraft. This sort of thing has been happening for a while – this movie is just a link to the craziest example I’ve seen so far.
Your unrelated link of the week: Scientific Illustration. Not a comic, but still visually interesting.
At some point, you may want to generate binary programs that are unstripped of debugging information. You may want to generate them with pkgsrc. Here’s a little note on what options will make that happen.
It’s almost the end of summer here, or at least the traditional end of summer in North America. About time, too! I don’t like the heat. Anyway, as people trickle back to school, some more interesting doodads should show up for these weekly Lazy Reading posts…
- Yet another git cheatsheet, this time for KDE. (Via TGEN on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- What’s wrong with sort and how to fix it. I will enthusiastically link to any article that mentions letters like þ. (There’s others that this stupid blogging software just eats when I write out the HTML entities.)
- Did you wake up this morning and say, “I wonder if I could run some really old software. Like 4.1c BSD?” Well, today’s your lucky day.
- Creating new Linux base and infrastructure ports on FreeBSD. Interesting to see just how complex it can be.
- Distributed computing at Google. (PDF, via) I like the description of the error/failure rates and how they escalate as an architecture scales up.
Your unrelated comic link of the week: Jack Kirby art on what would have been his 94th birthday. I have trouble communicating how dramatic and influential his art has been.
As part of a larger thread, Chris Turner went into a longer explanation of how PPTP connections work. Do you have PPTP working on DragonFly? Please share details!
If you’re committing something to DragonFly, or even just working on your own Git repository so as to submit a patch, the new-to-me-and-not-actually-secret committer(7) man page has a lot of tips. I’m linking to it because it holds a lot of information that otherwise would be something you’d have to soak up over time from the community, maybe.
Apparently, if you are running IPv6, and using radvd (Linux)/rtadvd (BSD) to autoconfigure your hosts with IPv6 addresses, you need to tell your DragonFly hosts to accept this.
Lazy reading is easy when it’s been this hot out. In fact, I may melt before this article gets published.
- Ecdysis – a NAT64 gateway program. I link to it for two reasons. 1: You will probably need to NAT 6-to-4 sooner or later, and 2: it uses PF and so is BSD-compatible. (via)
- Don’t not copy that floppy! (also via) My original Apple ][ disk for Castle Wolfenstein is probably no longer functional. Not that I have equipment to play it on…
- World timezones, as a visible map. (via) I mention time zone updates here on occasion, and this is a immediate guide to what a strange patchwork of zones it is. You can’t even see some of the really tiny/crazy ones.
- A crappy way to start your day. Nobody ever enjoys that call from work…
And now, a link that has nothing to do with this.
Background: You may remember some time ago, I posted a review of Michael Lucas’s Network Flow Analysis. He’s written several BSD books and so I figured it was worth reading further, knowing that this network-specific book would be BSD-friendly. Also, he made it easier by sending me a copy.
No Starch Press, the company that published all the books linked in the previous paragraph, asked if I’d read/review another book from them. This would be Practical Packet Analysis, 2nd edition. (Review continues after the break…)
I happened to stumble on this: the DuckDuckGo search engine will take you directly to a DragonFly man page, if you type ‘!dfman’ at the start of your query. For instance, “!dfman hammer“.
I didn’t think of this, but I needed it: if you have an older Hammer system that now can perform deduplication because you upgraded to DragonFly 2.10, make sure to add it to the configuration for that file system, or else it won’t run.
You can probably infer the new (to me) blog I found this week from some of the links…
- Adding IPv6 to a FreeBSD Mail/Web Server – from Michael Lucas, repeat BSD author. I link to this because we’re all going to have to do something similar in the next year or so, I bet..
- A visual guide to TMUX, part 1 and part 2. tmux has usually been introduced to me as “It’s BSD-licensed and not screen”, which is good, but not compelling on its own. The first of the articles linked here goes over the comparative differences in some detail. (via)
- Speaking of screen-ish things, do you leave an irssi session running in screen so that you can rejoin IRC conversations at any time? I sure do. Sometimes I even reconnect through ConnectBot on my Android phone. There’s now a Connectbot variation for irssi, just for people who do such a thing. Don’t forget: #dragonflybsd on EFNet.
- Also still on the topic: forgetting to use screen and then being stuck with a long-running process is lousy. There’s ways to deal with it, though. (via, from a blogroll link)
- Hey, it’s neat to see a new business built on BSD – OpenBSD, in this case: Tunnelr. (via)
- We’re still doing great in terms of pkgsrc packages building successfully on DragonFly.
- An hour+ recording of the recent NYCBUG meeting about BSD networking is online. (Link is to a MP3 – via)
- How not to comment code.
- AT&T -> BSD -> AT&T.
This is one of those scenarios that I’m noting because it might bite someone, some day: if your root partition is encrypted, you can’t fit in a different keymap. However, kernel options to build in a different keymap will fix this issue.