John Marino’s committed libc versioning. He has a post describing it, along with a note that anyone DragonFly-current should do a full buildworld/kernel and also update all installed packages. (Update: those new packages are on the way.)
This week just sorta blew up with the links.
- as2914.net, visualization of the Internet, seen “from the as_path of 2914”. (via)
- The IPv4-pocolypse has started. (via)
- Make things astronautty. (via)
- Related: NASA Ames: This used to be the future. (via)
- Slack, the Ultimate Workday Distractor. Repent! Oh, wait, this is a different Slack.
- Endless Sky, a space exploration game similar to Escape Velocity. Cross-platform, so it miiiight work on BSD.
- Naev, a similar concept.
- “IT began with Ada – Women in Computer History 2 September 2015 – 10 July 2016“. You probably have to be in Europe (Paderborn) to catch this, but there’s lots of old computer hardware you can get close to. (via)
- Speaking of old (and expensive)… (via)
- Anderson.vim: Dark vim colorscheme based on colors from Wes Anderson films. That’s… specific. (via)
- A hardware flaw in a new Cisco switch. See first comment on the source page.
- When the Unix load average was added to Unix. (via)
- The history of Clarus the Dogcow. (via) I have a “bootleg”? Clarus shirt I picked up at… Macworld years and years ago. I’m sorta hipster-proud of it.
- Ted Unangst rants about compiler-inserted backdoors. Follow the links he helpfully supplied in an article update to show responses to his views. (Something more articles should have.)
- One Weird Old Productivity Tip.
- Cynical interpretations of various project milestones.
- How do you get network connectivity from the worst PC in the world? Ugh. I used one of those, once.
- Time Cube is gone, Thyme Cube is still alive. I’m… vaguely sad? that Time Cube doesn’t exist any longer. (verbatim via)
- Computer Science Courses that Don’t Exist, But Should. Some of these ideas are actually pretty good, not just humor. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Wonderella, a consistently funny superhero parody. As an added bonus, the author apparently can’t stop making (non-comic) one-liner jokes, so he stuffs them all in his Twitter feed instead of the usual case of Twitter as promotional tool.
This was a quieter-than-normal week, probably because of the North American holiday at the start of it, but I found enough articles by the end.
- Andrew Tanenbaum (creator of Minix) encourages you to go to BSDCon Brasil 2015. (though it has already happened by the time I saw this.)
- ctwm, an extension to twm in NetBSD.
- Lumina, and by extension at least PC-BSD, gains a Start menu.
- gpart can’t yet replace fdisk in FreeBSD.
- The rge(4) driver is removed in FreeBSD.
- FreeBSD has gained the sesutil(8) utility, for managing SCSI Enclosure Services (SES) devices. It turns the light on and off!
- A history of modern init systems.
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/09/07.
- Clarifying NextBSD’s Near Term Expectations.
- (OPNSense) System Health – whats next?!
- FreeNAS News, issue 23.
- Defeating Cryptolocker attacks with ZFS.
BSDNow 106 is up. The interview is with Nigel Williams about, you guessed it, multipath TCP. There’s the normal roundup and not a pun to be seen anywhere. I feel so confused!
If you missed last night’s DNSSEC presentation at CDBUG, here’s the slides.
John Marino is working on versioning libc, and as part of that process, libc is no longer loaded into executable memory. Here is I think an explanation of lib versioning that may apply, and of course moving things that aren’t supposed to execute, out of executable memory areas, is good for security. There’s more on that topic, too – W^X may be a similar example.
This is a complicated topic that I’m not part of, so suggest better descriptions in the comments, please.
Somehow I managed to find mostly articles with long headlines this week.
- Getting work done while you’re fishing – with expect.
- Linux workstation security checklist. Most of this would apply to a BSD system too. (via)
- Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Fsync(). From the POSIX point of view.(via)
- There are only two hard problems in distributed systems: (via I lost the source, sorry!)
- The somewhat surprising history of chroot(). (via multiple)
- Modern *BSDs have a much better init system than I was expecting.
- The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community. (via)
- The Research Is Clear: Long Hours Backfire for People and for Companies. I found this out the hard way over last winter. (also via)
- The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy. Can’t top this. (via)
- Unix Administration Horror Stories. (via)
- Roguelike Tutorial in Rust. (via)
Will I need to add a NextBSD tag? Time will tell.
- Clarifying NextBSD’s Near Term Expectations.
- Deleting files from /usr/, breaking your system, then recovering.
- BSDOwl, “A highly portable build system targeting modern UNIX systems.” (via)
- Virtualization support in OpenBSD. (via multiple)
- Berkeley DB: Architecture. Remember, the B in BSD is also Berkeley. (via)
- the peculiar libretunnel situation
- The v0.5 release of MPTCP for FreeBSD. (via)
- OpenBSD 5.8’s third song announced.
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/08/31.
- Native EFI Bootloader Support for OpenBSD.
- LiteBSD for PIC32-HMZ144 released. (via)
- New Release Schedule for PC-BSD.
- Get your pkgsrc fixes in now, before the freeze.
- If you have anything in pkgsrc-wip, please help clarify copyright as it moves to new hosting and also git.
- “A bibliography of FreeBSD and BSD related papers and books.” You’ll have to dig through the .bib format, but there’s some good titles to track down in there.
CDBUG is having a presentation on DNS, given by Patrick Muldoon, on Sept. 8th. That’s next Tuesday. If you are anywhere near Albany, go visit.
BSDNow 105 is up, and has all the recent news, plus an interview with Scott Courtney about the in-about-a-month vBSDCon 2015.
BSDTalk 255 is out, and it’s a brief episode – 6 minutes. No interview, but talk about recent events.
HAMMER2 recently gained the ability to be used as the root mount for your DragonFly system. Live deduplication of data is also now possible, which means fast copy operations, less space used, and no need to wait for an overnight batch process to do it. If you want to try it, you need a bleeding edge DragonFly system and the WANT_HAMMER2 option. It’s still not ready for production use, so don’t try it with any data you want to keep.
Historical platforms week, quite by accident.
- NADCOG, North American Data Center Operators Group. A new list similar to NANOG but for those who have to manage multiple servers.
- MIT has a Platform Studies series of books on systems like the Amiga, Atari, and so on. The latest is on the Nintendo Entertainment System, titled “I Am Error“. (via)
- The Lives of Bots. We don’t have AI, but we do have non-human actors on the internet. (via)
- Unix and Windows Hell. The I HATE EVERYTHING response. (via)
- Do math with awk.
- A Salute to Solo Programmers. Follow the links for some interesting historical stories.
- The Ship Date Predictor. For Windows 95.
- Wired Style: A Linguist Explains Vintage Internet Slang. I still have HotWired Style on my shelf, which I guess would be a companion book. (via)
- Fred Brooks: “A Personal History of Computers”. (via)
- The MUD Connector. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Jack Kirby would have been 98 today.
Put together at the last minute.
- NeXTBSD, a video presentation. (via multiple places)
- Why FreeBSD should not adopt launchd. Sort of commentary on the previous item. (also via multiple places)
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/08/24.
- OPNSense 15.7.10, 15.7.11 released.
- Beyond the Fork, an OPNSense status report.
- OpenBSD 5.8, Another Song.
- Kernel W^X extended to i386 on OpenBSD.
- SSLv3 removed from LibreSSL.
- Call for Testing: Using tame() in userland.
- OpenBSD’s tame gets a path list parameter. (via)
- DistroWatch introduces PC-BSD’s new Enterprise package repository. (via)
- Why 32-bit MIPS isn’t interesting. (via)
- FreeBSD gains an ioat(4) driver.
- Summer of Code 2015 just finished, and the code is starting to appear.
- Lumina-fm gets a major update.
- pkgsrc as non-root, a discussion. (follow the thread)
BSDNow this week is titled “Beverly Hills 25519”, which is a play on an older U.S. TV show if you missed the reference. There’s the normal news, back this week, plus an interview of Damien Miller about OpenSSH.
Francois Tigeot has stepped i915 support in DragonFly even farther, this time bringing it to match Linux 3.17. This may be most useful for those with Broadwell and Cherryview chipsets.
I’ve gradually been leaning towards two opinions:
1: Having the Digest load as fast as possible is a benefit for everyone, and
2: I want to get off the PHP/Wordpress vulnerability merry-go-round.
Does anyone have specific experience with static site generators? Ideally there’s something out there as polished/unfiddly as WordPress, but I don’t know what. The Digest started using the Movable Type product, and I’m tempted to return.
Update: People have been recommending Hugo, Pelican, and Jekyll. It looks like comments would end up going into Disqus, which is an external not-under-my-control application. There are other plugins for comments, but none of them as straightforward. What are people’s thoughts on using an outside service?
I don’t note it enough, but Tomohiro Kusumi has been making constant updates to HAMMER, the version we have now. Often they are the sort of update that makes the code more readable, or fixes possible problems, and so on. Very essential, but hard to post about it. In any case, I’m using his recent improvements to hammer volume-del to note his contributions, of which there are much more than the day’s worth I link here.
Francois Tigeot has pushed in some significant updates from Rimvydas Jasinskas, updating the radeon driver to match Linux 3.17. Try it if you have the corresponding hardware.
If you are near thoughtbot at 7 PM tonight in New York City, “The search for truth: the `true` and `false` programs” is happening there. It’s a code reading group, so there will be comparisons of each program and its history in the various BSDs and other less important operating systems. This sounds neat, plus food and drinks will be served. (via)