Sepherosa Ziehau is continually trying to squeeze more network performance into DragonFly. I’m not always so good at pointing it out, but here’s several commits from him that improve performance on several chipsets.
Warren Postma found that hal and dbus caused a crash in VMWare for DragonFly. The answer is to use moused, not dbus.
Also, if you want to keep a custom or just older package from dports on your system, as karu.pruun did, ‘pkg lock’ is the answer.
There’s a lot this week, so let’s get started:
Git Reference. Not that there isn’t a lot of other documentation out there, but much of what you find is people asking specific questions rather than explanations of procedure. (via)
Movie Code. At least most of these are using legit code, even if it’s often the wrong application. It’s been worse. (See ‘state of the art video’ item) (via)
Unix: 14 things to do or stop doing in 2014. These tips are actually useful and contain no buzzwords.
TrewGrip, another item in my quest for interesting keyboards I don’t use.
4043 bytes to recreate a mid-80s IBM PC. There are less bytes of data in the program than there were transistors in the CPU that it emulates. It can run MS Flight Simulator. It was for the International Obfuscated C Code Contest, which should surprise you not at all. (via)
The World’s Most Pimped-Out ZX81. I don’t think it can run Doom, though.
The Unix Shell’s Humble If. For once, an article that doesn’t just pretend bash is the only shell that exists. (via)
Unix Shell RPG Tutorial. It’s exactly what that combination of words means. (via)
Scientists tell their favorite jokes.
Best programmer jokes, found here where there’s more.
I find these animations slightly hypnotizing. (via)
Technology used to suck even when it was cutting-edge, and we’ll still feel that way in the future. (via)
How did we end up with a centralized Internet?
Software in 2014. The summary is: server side is great, client is not. (via)
Able to be turn on, and that is it. Sci-fi movies ignore where technology comes from.
True Nuke Puke Story. My mine coworkers once did something similar to a copier repairman; got him so worried about going underground that he had a panic attack when he had to step on the hoist. We had to get a new repairman.
Your unrelated link of the week: BIG ENDING FACES! (via)
Running late putting this together… Back to bullets!
- The weekly PC-BSD digest for January 3rd.
- DiscoverBSD’s weekly roundup.
- PC-BSD’s weekly digest.
- Jailing FreeBSD 4 on FreeBSD 10. FreeBSD 4 has been a very long-lived release, so to speak.
- OpenBSD has a new auto-install feature that needs to be tested.
- Julio Merino has plans for his test suite on FreeBSD, and will be giving a tutorial on it at AsiaBSDCon 2014.
- OpenBSD has a new ‘signify’ program for cryptographically signing and verifying files.
- Ingo Schwarze has been implementing various optimizations for mandoc in OpenBSD. gprof helps.
- FreeBSD has updated netmap.
- python-3.2 is probably going to be removed from pkgsrc; it’s redundant to all the other versions.
- FreeBSD’s gcc version is being made more compatible to clang by incorporating some Apple changes.
BSDNow episode 19 is up, titled “The Installfest“. They install DragonFly along with other BSDs, and I haven’t even looked at it yet.
Markus Pfieffer has committed Larisa Grigore’s Google Summer of Code work, “SysV IPC in userspace”. It’s been a bit since the event finished, but it’s in DragonFly now.
BSDTalk 237 has 22 minutes of conversation with George Neville-Neil about The FreeBSD Journal.
For those of you near the NYC area, there’s a NYCBUG meeting tonight at 7 Eastern, with Brian Callahan giving a security-focused crash course in OpenBSD. Tickets for NYCBSDCon 2014, happening on February 8th, are going to be available there for the first time, starting at 6 PM. (and cheaper if you buy in person, too.)
Matthew Dillon acquired one of the Acer c720 Chromebooks recently. There were changes needed for the boot process, for the keyboard, an update from FreeBSD for the ath(4) wireless (g), smbus, and trackpad… but it works now, and he detailed exactly how to get it running, and even upgrade the drive.
‘M M’ had trouble with his “Realtek RTL8191SE Wireless LAN 802.11n PCI-E NIC” on DragonFly some time ago. He was able to get it working, and he documented the somewhat convoluted procedure here.
If you want to track the bleeding edge of DragonFly, which is currently version 3.7, I happened to describe it in a reply to Filippo Moretti, on users@. Long-time users will know this/do this already, but it’s worth repeating just because new users may not realize how easy it is.
The holiday break for most people at the end of the year translated to a lot more material showing up now. We all benefit!
The Year Megaplatforms Ruled The Internet. Online companies aren’t ‘disruptive’ any more; they are the establishment. That didn’t take long. Is it a cycle? I hope so. (via)
Intel XDK. Should be cross-platform enough to work on DragonFly, I bet. (via)
On Hacking MicroSD Cards. Bunnie Huang from 30C3, so it’s in-depth. “In reality, all flash memory is riddled with defects — without exception.” The microcontroller on the cards is exploitable. (via)
Speaking of 30c3, the recordings are up. (via same place)
Bignum Bakeoff contest recap, from 2001. 512B to return the largest number possible. (via)
Owlbears, Rust Monsters, and Bulettes, oh my! The origin of some of the AD&D Monster Manual monsters. (via)
The Postmodernity of Big Data. I don’t know about the text, but I like the punchcard images.
You are going to be using IPv6, whether you are ready or not. (via, with good discussion)
End Paper Maps. This is ephemera that shan’t survive the Internet, I suppose – but I always did enjoy it. (via)
Understanding the Galaga No-Fire Cheat. I would have loved to do this as a child, but surviving 15 minutes in a coin-op video was nearly impossible, barring (for me) one strange exception. (via)
Creative usernames and Spotify account hijacking. (also via)
Remember, The Cloud means that even if companies last, their services may not – even if there’s no other service to replace it. (via)
Eventually, will every program have its own internal upgrading and management code? It seems like it.
New Year’s Resolutions for Sysadmins. Some of these resolutions look forward, some look backward.
Things are picking up again after the break.
- Faces of FreeBSD: Isabell Long. Note that she came in via Google Code-In. That’s the value of those programs.
- OpenBSD: Randomness, sooner.
- OpenBSD’s change to PIE for i386 means special upgrade procedures – if you’re on i386. Also, here’s PIE. atexit(3) changes also changes the upgrade method this one time for… all platforms? I’m not sure.
- The DiscoverBSD roundup for 12/31/2013.
- The FreeBSD Test Suite. It’s similar to what NetBSD has, but see the source link for comments on what’s different. DragonFly has a test setup too, though I’ve never tried it – is there one for OpenBSD?
- Pkgsrc-2013Q4 is branched.
- FreeBSD has improved NFS performance.
- NetBSD has updated libpcap, tcpdump, wpa, bind, and dhcpcd.
- OpenBSD has updated xterm, glproto, and some other xenocara parts.
The ixgbe(4) driver, for a number of Intel 10Gb network cards, has been updated by Sepherosa Ziehau to version 2.5.15. Note that this changes the interface name to ‘ix’ by default. This driver is actually written by Intel.
Franco Fitchner has updated mdocml in DragonFly to 1.12.3. The changelog is right on the front page of the vendor site.
Update: Undeadly has a nice summary of the changes.
BSDNow 18, first of the new year, is up. Among other things, it mentions my crazy ‘OpenPF’ idea, and there’s an interview with Baptiste Daroussin. He’s one of the people working on pkg, so whatever he does there affects both FreeBSD and DragonFly.
A reminder based on a question from Pierre Abbat: John Marino isn’t working on 32-bit packages for dports; there’s a volunteer who will, but until the volunteer is ready, 3.7 users will want to build from source.
Last of the year! You’ll want to take some reading/watching time this week.
Can you be arrested for what’s on your computer? Yes, of course.
Making SSH connections easier. If you don’t know it, you should.
Ansible vs. Salt and Creating a new Ansible node. BSD-focused.
Vim in the hands of a Real Maniac. Damian Conway, the speaker, is a man of complicated skill, and a good speaker. It gets pretty crazy by the end. (via)
The Saddest Moment, James Mickens talking about Byzantine fault tolerance. (via)
The via link on that last one led me to Dadhacker, with some excellent entries like this Eject button at Apple or Fuctuation.
Digital restoration and typesetter forensics. Brian Kernighan, Ken Thompson, and Joe Condon reverse-engineering hardware because the vendor won’t reveal how it works – in the 1970s. The letter to the vendor is hilarious. The story of how it was recovered, also linked there, is a good read, too. (also via)
Over-Extended Metaphor for the Day. Could quibble, won’t. I like the Emo Phillips followup joke quoted here, where I found it.
Oldcomputers.net. There’s some neat old things there – and they’re selling/buying! (via)
Console Living Room; more old game systems resurrected via JSMESS. First reaction was that it was neat, second reaction: these old games were horrible, compared to what we have now. (via multiple places)
exabgp, human-readable BGP messages. (also also via)
The Grand C++ Error Explosion Competition. I had a student who excelled at this, involuntarily. (via)
We’ve run out of closed-source things to re-implement as open source, and now we’re reinventing the open-source wheel.
How open source changed Google – and how Google changed open source. Their open source group is essentially about license compliance, not evangelism. That is the way it should be. The last paragraph about Summer of Code is spot-on. (via)
Readers of a certain age will recognize the global vector map theme. (Here’s more.) It makes me think of the old Apple ][ game, NORAD. (incidentally, I was way better at it than the player in that video.)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: not a comic, but a magazine that includes comics: Mineshaft. I’ve heard about it many times, and I keep meaning to get a subscription.