If you’re on DragonFly, or maybe even if you aren’t, and you are using NFS, here’s some tips on how to wring the best performance out of it.
I’ve finally used up my Lazy Reading links backlog!
- Hand-crafted containers. A good explanation of how containers are set up, and a certain sense of deja vu for anyone familiar with BSD jails. (via)
- Punctuation in Novels. I like seeing the conversion of data from text to image. (also via)
- Overclocking an old IBM 701. The butterfly keyboard model. (via)
- Accurate CRT Simulation. (via)
- RS-232 for Commodore PET and Dialing a BBS Over WiFi. (via)
- tmux2html: “Render full tmux windows or individual panes as HTML.” (via)
- MobaXterm – all-in-one SSH/X client. Anyone use this vs. PuTTY?
- Documentation is for the weak.
- A Brief History of ClarisWorks. Back when office packages were actually light. (via)
- Dwarf Fortress’ creator on how he’s 42% towards simulating existence. (via)
- What Infrastructure Should Learn from NPM JavaScript Debacle. “Don’t execute programs directly from the Internet” should not be a hard lesson to learn. (via)
- Debian ships very outdated packages. It frustrates upstream creators. The response from most people misses the point, but the maintainer at least has a sane response. (via and via)
- Ubuntu on Windows. I think it’s less “Let’s use Linux” and more “Apple’s UNIX tools get everyone to buy Macbooks, let’s try that.” It unfortunately does not do anything (yet?) with process control or user authorization or other things you would actually need. Related: GNU/kWindows. (via).
Your sort-of off-topic link of the week: Michael W. Lucas’s fiction is, for a short time, part of a larger book bundle which is available for less than the price of buying it all individually. Buy now if you want a deal/lots of fiction to read.
I keep posting about Sepherosa Ziehau’s work on sustaining extremely high traffic loads in DragonFly. Now I’m posting about a tool to create that load: kq_sendrecv. It creates tens of thousands of TCP connections, without creating a process for each, and uses kqueue, as you might guess from the name. This may be useful if you really want to tax another system.
This is actually overflow completely from previous weeks. I am not sure how I am ending up so far ahead on these but not the Saturday BSD items. As long as it shows up on the expected day, I suppose it works out.
- Tcpdump is amazing. (via)
- A Collection of Dice Problems. PDF format. (via)
- Sending email in 1984. Video. (via)
- Copperhead, a Life spaceship, which is a new concept to me. (via)
- The Powerful Emotional Pull of Old Video Games. (via)
- Digging a Little Deeper: Dwarf Fortress, Fantasy Tropes, and World Building. (via)
- Open source tax credits. That would have saved me some money in recent years.
- Can we save the open web? (via)
- insane chown posse (via)
- Preparing for Production of The Essential Guide To Electronics in Shenzhen. Seeing the physical process is neat.
- SQLite with a Fine-Toothed Comb
- Open-access CACM articles. This will keep you busy for a while.
- Nerd Fonts.
- Orgmode for Sublime Text 2 and 3. (via)
Your kinda-unrelated item for the week: Butterfly Stomp, Michael W. Lucas’s free short story. He writes fiction when he’s not writing BSD books.
Garbage 18 is out, and talks about the hardware in the title – and also goes into tethering between Android and OpenBSD, which I am sure someone will find immediately useful.
If you find yourself using gpt and disklabel64 for a new disk, and aren’t quite sure what order to type everything in to create a disk slice, why not crib from Tim Darby’s notes? (note that the archive has added some line breaks to it.)
I see this bite people irregularly over the years: if your default shell on login can’t run, what do you do? I’ve seen it happen because of a missing /usr/lib, and it can happen with out-of-date library references, too. There’s several different ways to deal with it:
- Run a shell that can’t have this problem, like /bin/tcsh (the root default).
- Or, rebuild in single-user mode from the console.
- Or, perform the bullet-proof upgrade.
That last one may be useful if your dports setup gets mangled, somehow – though ‘pkg upgrade’ has always worked for me.
If you’re building from dports, and you want to include debugging information, you’ll want to put ‘WITH_DEBUG=yes’ in /etc/make.conf. Note that this affects anything you build at that point, including world, which you’d want to rebuild anyway.
For those of you looking to rent a place to run DragonFly, Nuno Antunes has very helpfully written out his procedure for installing DragonFly on a Digital Ocean ‘droplet’.
Another week where there’s so much to link to, it overflows into next week.
- Inaugural SemiBUG meeting notes. Next meeting is December 15th, with Josh Grosse presenting on bulk package builds in OpenBSD.
- Yahoo and FreeBSD (1997). For those who enjoy correlation without clear causation, there’s a relationship between Yahoo’s fortunes as a company, and reducing their usage of BSD. (via)
- “…I use BSD for my websites for a reason.” Similar material sprinkled through the comments. (via)
- What are some active BSD-focused blogs or news sites you follow? My answer’s in there.
- Setting color temperature.
- Try to make Graylog2 working on FreeBSD (and failed)
- Various options for presentation software on the BSDs. (Follow thread)
- rough code and working consensus, working in a group at the recent u2k15 hackathon.
- Speaking of which, one more u2k15 report.
- NetBSD machines at Open Source Conference 2015 Tokushima.
- Samba QoS? (FreeBSD)
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/11/16.
- OPNsense 15.7.19 Released.
Imre Vadász fixed top so that hitting ‘c’ filters displayed processes by command name. I am mentioning this not because it’s a huge change, but because I forget about all the interactive elements that are possible with top.
If you are using clang with DragonFly, and you want to always run the newest version, you can set options in compilers.conf, and use ‘clangnext‘.
If for some reason you are seeing messages about your CPU overheating – and you know it is not, there’s a solution. Disable coretemp messages.
Note that if your CPU is actually overheating, turning these messages off won’t help. Don’t want anyone to be surprised when their computer melts…
This is the week for entertainment, not deep thought.
- Not Even Close: The State of Computer Security (with slides) – James Mickens. I am always up for more Mickens. (via)
- Ferrolic. A sort of dali clock in real life, except crazy expensive and fragile.
- Inside The Machine, midcentury graphic images of computing.
- 80s computer hacking: a supercut. Here’s some good discussion. (via)
- Everything is turning into a service mediated by other companies. Everything. (via many places)
- Amiga 30 and the Unkillable Machine. (via)
- Touching the Internet, a story about MAE-East. (also via)
- The Big List of Naughty Strings. Good for testing input. (via)
- “Means Well” Technology and the Internet of Good Intentions. (via)
- Illuminascii, stretching the definition of roguelike.
- An excerpt from the new book Dungeon Hacks. (via)
- The Name Game: Rebranding the Roguelike. (also via)
- A Brief History of Character Codes. Relevant for all the locale work going into DragonFly right now. (via)
- “RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags“. See first answer. (via)
- The 8th Underhanded C Contest is now open. (via)
- The ARM processor architecture: Somebody else’s introduction.
- CSVfix. This will be handy to someone.
- Cameron’s World. A concentrated dose of Geocities. (via)
If you are sure you don’t need to look at your boot menu for very long in DragonFly, you can make it zip by quickly.
NYCBUG is having a chronologically appropriate speaker: Steven Kreuzer, talking about the Precision Time Protocol. It’s 6:45 PM (EDT) tonight, at the Stone Creek Bar & Lounge in New York City.
DragonFly builds two compilers by default. If you weren’t interesting in building both, there were switches to build only the default, like NO_GCC47. This changed with every compiler update.
With the switch to GCC 5, the new switch is “NO_ALTCOMPILER”. That will last through compiler changes. I’m mentioning this now because sooner or later, you’ll want to gain back some time on a buildworld.
I have had trouble with my daily/weekly periodic reports never making it to my GMail account. Sascha Wildner pointed out to me that periodic.conf has its own answer already:
daily_output=”/var/log/daily.log”
daily_status_security_output=”/var/log/security.log”
weekly_output=”/var/log/weekly.log”
monthly_output=”/var/log/monthly.log”
… and newsyslog is already set to take care of them. There’s more in the periodic.conf man page.