Timezones are a human invention to describe the natural world, so they are changed according to human whims. That’s a grand way to note this change in timezones that is global but I noted in a DragonFly commit of tzdata2014b – look at the last entry.
One of the requirements to get NSS/LDAP working on (most) any unixlike system is to have dynamic binaries; meaning they are dependent on various libraries to run. Since you’re talking about programs for login when you’re talking about NSS/LDAP, that means if the libraries aren’t available, you can’t log in. DragonFly has static binaries just to avoid that problem.
Francois Tigeot proposed switching to dynamic binaries and building a /rescue directory with static backups, as is the case with I think FreeBSD and NetBSD. If you follow the thread, it looks like the best path is to use initrd instead. Initrd stands for INITial Ram Disk, and is the first volume the computer sets up to boot from BIOS. Since initrd gives the computer enough space to load all the needed modules (like Hammer2…), it works without making the computer dependent on various libraries or having a bloated /rescue directory.
(Someone correct me if I have the details wrong.) As long as we’re talking about things that would help DragonFly in a larger environment, can someone work on a VM balloon memory driver, too?
Aaaaaaaaa link overflow!
- The Story I’ll Tell at the Web’s 25th Birthday Party.
- When Will the Next Dot.com Bubble Burst? The comment from Gary Helms is correct.
- The truth about content management systems. It’s one of those basic mistakes that everyone gets to learn in some form. (via I lost track, sorry)
- The Facebook experiment has failed. Let’s do better. I agree with the sentiment that smaller communities are necessary, and that Facebook is an unsustainable place for them. I’m seeing more specific communities retreating from social media to mailing lists – and it’s better. (via)
- UNIX: Network Basics for the Beginner.
- Boulet takes on tech support. We’ve all gotten that call from an older family member.
- The Turino XL, a computer with over 45 x 1017 bytes available.
- Worse. Bundling and the negative effects that come with it. (via)
- Hooray! More James Mickens! (PDF) It’s listed as his last column. Booooo. Anyway, he starts talking about web browsers, and perhaps accidentally gives the best description of Javascript ever. (also via)
- This World of Ours, a James Mickens logout column from December 2013 that I missed.
- Actually, if you look at his Microsoft Research page, he has links to his past articles at the bottom, plus a link to his 2011 presentation about why web browsers are horrible.
- Why I Use Vim. Describes a “climbing up, sliding down” learning curve, which puts me in mind of one of my favorite diagrams. (via)
- How to boost your Vim productivity. Some interesting tips in this, plus bits on tmux. (via)
- Coffee and its Effects on Feature Creep. Sort of a basic economics lesson. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Space Replay. A very good use of an Arduino board. (via)
I have a list of commits I’ve saved between the various BSDs of licenses getting corrected to the 2-clause BSD license; that would definitely be a good cross-BSD project to sync.
- DiscoverBSD has a free KVM VPS for the taking – if you write about the BSD-specific thing you are doing with it.
- Also, DiscoverBSD’s news summary for the 17th.
- OpenBSD packages are generally up to date. The place I found this linked has comments noting the need to run multiple versions of Ruby to test – even multiple subversions, like different revisions of 1.9.x. I think that points at a different problem…
- There’s mg, which is a ‘micro GNU/Emacs’, found in OpenBSD. There’s also apparently a portable version. (via)
- OpenBSD’s upd(4) needs testing.
- OpenBSD has switched to Unbound, and it is apparently easy to enable DNSSEC.
- I didn’t expect rcp to be removed from OpenBSD, or a Thulsa Doom reference.
- Two small package managers for OpenBSD: sqlport and pkg_mgr.
- The hp300, mvme68k and mvme88k ports are gone from OpenBSD.
- If you’re using pkgsrc, php-fpm may be a better module than mod_php.
- FreeBSD has a faster SHA2.
- pkgsrcCon 2014’s Call for Papers is up.
- PC-BSD Digest 22.
- Hubert Feyrer has linked some NetBSD-specific slides from AsiaBSDCon 2014.
- Michael W. Lucas’s NYCBSDCon 2014 talk is up on Youtube.
BSDNow episode 029 is up containing a full slate of material. There’s an interview of Gleb Kurtsou, along with a PEFS tutorial and several other items that are new to me.
If you noticed the lack of a GUI DVD image for the 3.6 release of DragonFly, I posted a followup note on the users@ list that talks about the steps to get X installed. It’s not much work, with pkg set up.
Sepherosa Ziehau has an IPv6 patch for you to try. What’s it do? I think it improves performance under multiple streams of traffic, but that’s from looking at the code and totally guessing.
Matthew Dillon committed the start of a Hammer 2 cluster API. I noticed, while looking at the commit, that there’s a design document, a freemap design document, a changes list, and – most important for anyone interested – a TODO list.
Alex Hornung has updated tcplay in DragonFly to 2.0, and cryptdisks is updated to match. If you have a short memory, tcplay(8) is the tool on DragonFly to manage TrueCrypt volumes. Is DragonFly the only BSD to have this? I think so, based on very few seconds of googling.
A lot of this was done early; last week had a lot of interesting stuff turn up. Maybe because we’re coming out of a extreme winter in the northern hemisphere, and people are feeling a bit more energetic?
- How to Eat Your Entropy and Have it Too — Optimal Recovery Strategies for Compromised RNGs. One of the authors, Yevgeniy Dodis, is I think speaking at an upcoming NYCBUG meeting.
- This may not surprise you, but the GNU version of ‘true’ can sometimes return false.
- I still have a weakness for 80s vector graphics.
- Matching one of the links from last week, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game online. (via)
- The History of Information. Mesmerizing, like reading Wikipedia in serial order. (via)
- Drifting into Fragility, a look at complex system failure analysis at WETA. Notable for the offhand comment that they’re rendering on 49,000 cores. That’s… over 9,000! (Old joke but still fun.) (via)
- pleaserun, an attempt to abstract away the systemd vs. everything else argument. Also, a perfectly descriptive name. (also via)
- Unix: Pranks that sysadmins play.
- Token ring: still used. Eh, could be worse; could be frame relay.
- The Mid-Career Crisis of the Perl Programmer. The leading tl;dr segments are dead on, but the essay itself rolls out into a conversation about skills for older programmers and what choices you make. (via)
- Maury, Innovation, and Change. Open data and common APIs – in 1850. (via)
- How to save read-only files in Vim. A step better than the usual advice.
- UNIX Magic. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: The Conet Project, recordings of numbers stations, at the Internet Archive. (via the Orbital Operations newsletter)
Bonus timewaster: 2048. (via multiple places)
Another week with lots of links.
- DiscoverBSD’s summary for 2014/03/10.
- PC-BSD Digest 21 – 10.0.1 release.
- FreeBSDNews needs a new maintainer. (am I the old man of BSD blogs? Yeesh.)
- FreeBSDNews also has two FreeNAS videos.
- OpenBSD is starting on USB 3 support. I assume this is separate from USB4BSD?
- OpenBSD has moved to OpenSMTPD by default.
- Hubert Feyrer has a summary of recent ARM developments in NetBSD.
- The 2014Q1 freeze for pkgsrc starts effectively today, lasting two weeks.
- Eric Radman pointed out that non-linear editing is possible on the BSDs using Blender, and here’s a tutorial.
- FreeBSD had an ABI change, so rebuild carefully on master.
- Man pages added by Microsoft to FreeBSD. It makes sense, but it still makes me pause.
- Apache is out of OpenBSD base.
- The window manager cwm has been made portable, meaning it’s not just for OpenBSD now.
- IPX and AppleTalk have been removed from FreeBSD.
In part because I asked him, Sepherosa Ziehau benchmarked 10G ix(4) with 2 ports on DragonFly. The results? Good, both for bandwidth and for CPU usage.
Uh oh, I don’t get the pun this time. Anyway, the newest BSDNow episode is an interview with Eric Turgeon of GhostBSD, and a disk concatenation tutorial for NetBSD and a tutorial that isn’t uploaded yet. (Wait, now I get it.)
A recent commit from Sepherosa Ziehau has a 5% improvement in the number of network connections per second a x86_64 machine can accept. He’s also reducing the number of IPIs during network activity. If this seems somewhat esoteric, it’s because network speeds are getting so fast that the benefits come from reducing the accompanying CPU load.
Sascha Wildner updated the time zone database on DragonFly to tzdata2014a. The odd thing isn’t that update – Sascha updates like clockwork, haha! – but the release notes. Apparently Even Microsoft is starting to support time zone names, sorta, finally.
If you’re on DragonFly 3.7, you will need to build world before building the kernel again if you are updating to some point in the last 24 hours. Sascha Wildner points out the related commit.
Poudriere is the tool for building all of ports/dports, and Michael W. Lucas has written up his experience using it to build a custom ports set. He’s doing on FreeBSD, but if you ignore the geom-specific parts, it should generally apply to DragonFly.
DragonFly has moved from the old USB stack to USB4BSD by default. That means:
- If you are already using USB4BSD, you will want to remove WANT_USB4BSD from your kernel config.
- If you have trouble, switch back to the old USB.
- There’s some drivers that are not yet converted; help with them would be appreciated.
- A full kernel/world build and ‘make upgrade’ will be needed in either case.
Sascha Wildner’s announcement email has all the gory details, including the kernel config changes to move back to the old USB setup. This is of course in master; 3.6 users are unaffected.
This week blew up with links fast.
- An 8-bit integer overflow turns Mahatma Gandhi into “255 points of pure nuclear rage“. That’s one of the more entertaining sentences I’ve ever typed here.
- “DevOps” is one of the new buzzwords lately. The most shallow approaches seem to equate it with automated deployment, but it really seems to be about project management within IT. It’s probably of most use within larger companies that have enough staff to build up department-internal silos. I don’t know if it’s a new strategy or a way to deal with the rigidity of larger corporate IT groups. (via)
- mosh: the answer to ssh annoyances. (via)
- Why I use Emacs. I like “retrogrouch.” (via)
- The Zen of Comprehensive Archive Networks. You know your system/program has really made it when it starts it own plugin/theme/library/mod/extension/app store collection. (via)
- Only 90s Web Developers Remember This. “DHTML was the Twitter Bootstrap of the time.” (via)
- What is a web framework? A temperate description. (via)
- Reflections on Eric Raymond’s “Myth of the Fall”. Makes a good point: open source is the best when it’s for architectural, interoperational reasons.
- Bitrot and atomic COWs. Will make you worried about your already-RAIDed data. (via #dragonflybsd)
- Thoughts on style, the TLS, and errors. I agree with the note about ‘affirmative
conformationconfirmation’. - Technology has changed. Tech items from a decade ago. Everything was silvery and round back then. (via)
- A little farther back in time, Thomas Dolby Explains How Synthesis Works To Kids & Ghosts. 1989, and yes, he plays that song. (via a mailing list for yetis)
- Related to nothing: it’s odd to see your great-grandfather mentioned in a random place on the web.
- The 2014 7-Day Roguelike Challenge has started. (via)
- Ow my eyes.
Your unrelated video of the week: This trailer for Crawl. This is a roguelike multiplayer cross-platform game, though I don’t know if it would work on BSD. The important thing: the voiceover narration is fantastic.