As part of a larger conversation about security measures, NX bit capability was added to DragonFly. You can turn it on or off, and it’s off by default so it doesn’t cause any surprises. As the first link in this post points out, your installed third-party software is more of a security issue than processor features, in any case.
Eclectic! I cover everything this week: computer history, modern pessimistic computing, odd hardware, strange software stories, comics, and tea.
- Tmux and Vim – better together. (via)
- Free Fonts Are Getting Better, But What Does That Mean? Destruction of value!
- vuln disclosure and risk equilibrium.
- How Google eats a business whole. Google’s Featured Snippets are often not wrong but also not right.
- Build a Better Monster. (via)
- Binary Keyboard.
- That time a customer reported an error in the map used by Flight Simulator.
- Ireland and England’s ‘best’ teas, reviewed by an American.
- “There are only 3 forms of bit storage, historically.” (via)
- Operating In Obscurity. QNX, OS/2, and others.
Your sorta-a-comics-link of the week: Liartown USA, the book.
Several “how to do this” items this week, which I like.
- OpenBSD 6.1 is not a CD release. (via)
- Netflix Serving 90Gb/s+ From Single Machines Using Tuned FreeBSD. (via)
- Forcing the password gropers through a smaller hole with OpenBSD’s PF queues.
- Creating an Apple Time Capsule using FreeBSD & ZFS.
- Related: Accessing your Time Capsule when on a different subnet.
- Help me find a match -> ‘^[DFNOT].*BSD$’.
- OpenBSD-current 2017/04/19 has clang enabled for amd64 and i386. (via) (also)
- g4u 2.6beta2 has been released – Happy 18th Birthday, g4u!
- 1.3.0 Development Preview: lumina-mediaplayer.
This week’s BSDNow talks about a lot of OpenBSD news, gets into UNIX history, and interviews Kris Moore about FreeNAS/TrueNAS/TrueOS/etc.
In my ongoing quest to actually catch up to all the DragonFly commits recently, here’s a recent update to machdep.cpu_idle_hlt. Set this to affect power usage. I’m linking to this list of the different settings because, like RAID levels, nobody can or should remember every one.
If you are nearby, KnoxBUG is having a presentation from Caleb Cooper tomorrow night, titled “Advanced BASH Scripting“.
A little heavy on the history this week. And no tea!
- Commodore 64: For the Love of a Machine. (via)
- Fun at the UNIX Terminal Part 1.
- Exploring 3-Move – A LambdaMOO inspired environment. More places named in the source link comments.
- A 1986 bulletin board system has brought the old Web back to life in 2017. (via)
- A link at the same place brought me to the Telnet BBS Guide.
- Hottest Editors.
- Upgrading a Vectrex to 32 Bits. (via)
- Taming Undefined Behavior in LLVM.
- The secrets of password aging on Unix systems.
- on the title of “git commit murder”
- Dungeonfs: A FUSE filesystem and dungeon crawling adventure game engine
Your unrelated food link of the week: Eating In Translation. This person seeks out new places, eats there, and makes notes, and has been doing it for more than a decade. The result is the most in-depth informal food guide I’ve ever seen. It’s NYC focused, but not exclusively.
All done at the last minute!
- OpenBSD imports new strstr() implementation from musl libc by Rich Felker. (via)
- FreeNAS Corral is being relegated to “technology preview” status (via and via)
- Free OSCON 2017 tickets from the FreeBSD Foundation.
- The next KnoxBUG meeting on April 18th is “Caleb Cooper: Advanced BASH Scripting“. I’ll have a reminder.
- 1.3.0 Development Preview: New icon themes. (Lumina, via)
- Linux user looking to try out BSD.
- Media Server.
- OpenBSD 6.1 Released.
- openbsd changes of note 620.
- Getting OpenBSD running on Raspberry Pi 3.
- Update on NetBSD and Google’s Summer of Code 2017: student application period is over, ranking is in progress.
- Let’s get meta: an interview with me (hubertf) about my NetBSD blog.
BSDNow 189 has a nice roundup of BSD projects in Google Summer of Code, along with an interview of Wendell of Level1Techs.com.
Continuing my catchup on recent commits, there’s now a ‘version 7’ internal to HAMMER 1. It changes the CRC code to a faster version, but since this instruction isn’t used (yet), there’s no real world impact. Remember this for next time you want to run ‘hammer version-upgrade’.
If you’re mounting a HAMMER2 filesystem, you can refer to it by label instead of by device.
No, it’s not ready for use yet and I don’t have a date other than “when it’s done”, to preanswer the next questions.
A slightly UK-ish tilt this week, by accident of course.
- Playing roguelikes when you can’t see.
- How Fountain Pens Work.
- Something you didn’t know about functions in bash.
- A comparison of regex engines. (via)
- /dev/null Follies
- Turtles on the Wire: Understanding How the OS Uses the Modern NIC. (via)
- In love with the BBC micro:bit. (via)
- Ultima VI. (via)
- How the PC Industry Screws Things Up. (via)
- Top Five Results of the Past 50 Years of Programming Languages Research. (via)
- The Arte of ASCII. (via)
- 1970s word processing with JOT. (also via)
Why why why…
- Why Isn’t OpenBSD in Google Summer of Code 2017? (via) (also)
- Why does everyone here seem to recommend Pfsense over VyOS?
- Why is pfsense better than dd-wrt?
- pkgsrc-2017Q1 released.
- openbsd changes of note 8.
- e2k17 Nano hackathon report from Bob Beck.
- Control Your Files Using Your Own Cloud With ownCloud. (BSD-oriented)
- Linux Action Show -> BSD Action Show.
- NetBSD and LLDB progress report. (via)
- Reading the FreeBSD Manual.
- How much collaboration is there between the different BSDs?
- Finding more software for UbuntuBSD.
Did you know there’s a randread utility on DragonFly that will report on disk performance? Well, you do now. The very terse comment in the source code will tell you how to compile it and the arguments.
It really does work, that lead-in, and it’s on BSDNow episode 188.
Yes, I know we just released 4.8. This is a rollup release, capturing everything that was committed to the 4.6 branch after 4.6.1 and before 4.8 came out. If you are going to upgrade, it’s worth it to go to 4.8, but this way there’s a clean final version in the 4.6 branch.
(Hat tip to Sascha Wildner for reminding me to do this.)
It’s happening tomorrow night at the NYCBUG meeting: a yes.c code reading. (more details) Go, if you are close.
I am late in mentioning this, because it was added just before the DragonFly 4.8 branch: there’s a new ‘efisetup(8)‘ script added to DragonFly. Use to to perform a complete a UEFI-bootable installation to a given disk.