Matthew Dillon has rewritten the Locking and Synchronization documentation for DragonFly. Keep this in mind the next time you say “Which lock should I use for this new software/ported software?” There’s also locking(9).
BSDTalk 252 has 18 minutes of conversation with Brian Callahan, who runs devio.us, an OpenBSD-based shell provider.
The other day, I updated some packages using pkg. The default version of PHP went from 5.4 to 5.6. I ended up doing what /usr/dports/UPGRADING says and making a list of all PHP packages on my system, before removing PHP and its dependencies. I then reinstalled the packages that used PHP, bringing the needed packages back in at the right version. pkg 1.4 didn’t handle the transition cleanly, unfortunately. I also had to specify mod_php56 because pkg was trying to get the 5.4 version despite it not being default.
None of these are insurmountable problems, but it never hurts to be forewarned. pkg 1.5 is on the horizon and may have an easier time with sorting these types of dependency/version changes. This may apply to FreeBSD in addition to DragonFly.
I’ve tagged version 4.0.5 of DragonFly, and it’s available at your nearest mirror. This revision is mostly to incorporate the newest OpenSSL security bump.
As you read this, I am probably watching a storage processor reboot.
- Another worthy cause for donation/sponsorship: the Network Time Foundation.
- Really making sure the data’s gone. (via)
- Sirius, for talking to computers like all the big companies are doing – but open source! (via many places)
- Smart City.
- “Everybody“. The section on a car rebooting gave me pause.
- int3.cc, hardware hacking. (via)
- USB Type C.
- y = -x^3.
- The Worst Internet Things. Seems like a cheesy list, but these things are really quite awful. (via)
- The Humble Roguelike Bundle. Dunno if any of it runs on BSD… but that is far more likely these days.
- 17 years of curl. Same developer the whole time, which is neat. fetch(1) is 18.75 years old, for contrast. (via)
- The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers. (via)
- Single-page non-Javascript web apps, a proposal. (via)
- A software engineer’s role traversal. Linking for the end part: Ask your employer not for free food, but for the chance to create something that lasts outside of your employer’s operations.
I’d love to see fewer developers demanding superficial perks, and more of them asking to have more time to contribute to the open source products we use, mentor young developers, and learning more about the space they occupy. All of those result in us growing as developers in more than just our coding skills.
Your unrelated link of the week: National Corndog Day. Has audio. (via)
Not done in a last-minute rush before the weekend, yay! Done early cause I have to work over the weekend, boo!
- Tarsnap Mastery is out in print form. (as is author Michael Lucas’s newest sci-fi)
- Active Directory and FreeBSD. Might apply to all BSDs? (via)
- GhostBSD 10.1-alpha1 is out. (via)
- pfSense 2.2.1 is out.
- making security sausage. “Even if most users will just run yummi-gummi-belli-rubrub or whatever to install binary fixes, they should be able to inspect the changes.” I just like that package manager name.
- What differences would I notice when using BSD?
- Suggestions for honeypotting on BSD?
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/03/16.
- virtio on FreeBSD now works asynchronously.
- OpenBSD papers from AsiaBSDCon 2015 are up.
- Martin Pieuchot could use some OpenBSD hardware.
- OpenSSH 6.8 is out.
- Home server rack suggestions. Includes perennial favorite, the LackRack.
- How to format your diffs for OpenBSD.
- Good; they’re talking to each other.
- The pkgsrc-2015Q1 freeze is on.
OpenSSL has yet another security update, and Sascha Wildner has added it to DragonFly. It probably justifies a 4.0.5 release, so I’ll be working on that.
As a side effect of the new ipfw3 import, the sshlockout script included with DragonFly now has -pf and -ipfw options.
Some recent users threads pointed at SSD wear stats, along with what Matthew Dillon has seen on dragonflybsd.org machines, and good filesystem books.
Bill Yuan’s work on a new ipfw has been committed, and for clarity, called “ipfw3“.
Happy (almost) St. Patrick’s Day! An excuse in the U.S. to wear green things and drink beer.
- VimGolf. (via Rolinh on #dragonflybsd)
- Operating system research – 16 years perspective. (via)
- A bad day for your network infrastructure.
- Unix best practices.
- 8 Unix networking commands and what they tell you.
- Open computing progress. (via)
- Extracting content without the hassle.
- gvim-to-xcolors.
- A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge. I remember Visicalc. (via)
- Google Code is shutting down. There’s DragonFly Summer of Code stuff in there.
- Oxford is celebrating the 200th anniversary of Ada Lovelace’s birth. (via)
- What’s your great-great-great-grandmother’s maiden name?
I goofed up and didn’t complete last weeks’ In Other BSDs before it published, so you get some extra this week.
- DiscoverBSD news for 2015/03/09.
- FreeBSD Flame Graphs. (via)
- pkgsrc-2014Q4 binaries for illumos/SmartOS, plus support policy.
- 15 years of FreeBSD Foundation.
- autofs(5) on FreeBSD.
- DisplayLink adapters now work on FreeBSD.
- USB now consistently works on Raspberry Pi devices with FreeBSD.
- W^X in your browser, via the OpenBSD Foundation.
- OpenBSD and Summer of Code.
- Pre-orders for OpenBSD 5.7 are possible.
- Encrypted replication in PC-BSD.
- Better i386 NetBSD radeon support.
- The pkgsrc-2015Q1 freeze starts in a few days.
- 3-way cross-pollination.
Next time you’re building or installing world on your DragonFly system (running master), your computer will do a better job letting you know the status.
Matthew Dillon pulled in a new USB update from FreeBSD to DragonFly. What does it change? I’m not completely sure, but he did it to get apcupsd working, so that may be a hint.
If you have a HDMI-connected monitor, but no sound, this trick about increasing available memory may help.
The newest BSDNow video goes into PC-BSD and booting, and interviews Justin Gibbs about the FreeBSD Foundation.
Hey, look what I have! There’s a pfSense pair of classes available to take. I went through them and found them worthwhile. pfSense is easy enough to use that a dedicated person can puzzle through most of the settings, eventually, but I don’t have “eventually”, and I want to encourage BSD products in my workplace… so here we are.
DragonFly 4.0 has had a minor point release, to 4.0.4. There was a bug in the initial install where the rescue image installed on disk would be incorrect. This was fixed after the first time a build/installworld was done, but might as well have it start out right. There’s some other small fixes, and the release commit will show you the summary. Download from your nearest mirror or update normally.
John Marino has removed Sendmail from DragonFly (as part of the base system), and replaced it with DMA, the DragonFly Mail Agent. If you just need delivery to local users, DMA will do the trick.
The announcement message covers what you need to do to deal with it (potentially nothing), and there’s more in-depth documentation to cover how to switch if you need more full-featured software.
This is the Lazy Reading mix I like – some history, some commentary.
- How to make your Unix prompts more useful and interesting.
- An exploration of the mtr utility.
- Sweet 16: The 6502 Dream Machine. (via)
- SMS cards: The technology inside IBM’s 1960s mainframes. (via)
- Vim is a Game. (via)
- DoS by lightbulb. (via)
- Public vs. private cloud.
- Euclid’s algorithm in the Shell. (via)
- The Joys of Unix – Cryptolog in 1978 (via)
- The Web’s Grain.
- The day the rabbits died.
- How many IP addresses can a DNS query return? (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Perfect cup of tea renders all other tea pointless. A sloppy joke, so let me share these recipes for masala chai and hobnobs instead. I’m hungry.