As noted on the kernel@ list, it’s tagged but not yet in image form.
Predrag Punosevac asked for good fileserver examples. Several people answered, including me – the best answer is from Francois Tigeot, but there’s discussion of IPMI support in the thread.
Related: I wonder if the Backblaze Storage Pod would work for DragonFly?
The November issue of BSD Magazine is out, with a feature on High Availability Storage (that’s HAST) on FreeBSD, plus more. (noticed via freebsdnews, since I somehow missed the email/rss from bsdmag.com)
BSDTalk 235 has 26 minutes of conversation with Allan Jude about various topics, including this BSDNow thing I was just on,
John Marino isn’t interested in supporting the i386 architeecture for DragonFly and dports, so he’s not going to actively work on it. (Packages for DragonFly 3.6 are already built, so that’s not a problem for release.) If you feel like taking on a significant but interesting workload, check his message about the work involved.
It’s been snowing this week in the northeast US, which makes me happy.
- Unix: sending signals to processes. Signals have always struck me as a somewhat byzantine messaging system that everyone uses for the equivalent of Ctrl-C.
- Unix: Debugging your scripts. This will be useful if it’s not already familiar to you.
- Compatibility is Hard. Contrary to popular belief, Microsoft Word documents are not backward or forward compatible, from release to release.
- From that previous link: Why Microsoft Word Must Die. The worst problems to troubleshoot are when someone says “Word/Excel is acting funny”. There’s so many intermediate layers of software in those programs that it’s difficult to find the actual data and the actions being performed on it, much less troubleshoot any process.
- SparkFun.com moved from MySQL/MariaDB to Postgres. I agree with the sentiments in the article, but I want to know the technical reasons that made Postgres the choice for scaling. (via)
- Apple ][ DOS source code. I don’t have anything I can actually do with the source, but there’s a 1977 price list pictured in the the article that shows some interesting numbers: A 4Kb RAM system costs about $1300, and the prices just go up from there.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: the first four pages of Necropolis. This comic looks to be fun.
Not as much pulled directly from the source lists this time, which is good.
- It’s no surprise that I would say this, but: it makes me happy to see other BSD projects doing regular summaries, like this one or that one for PC-BSD or this general BSD summary.
- A random PC-BSD review found via Google Search.
- PC-BSD 10 test images are available. I wonder if that’s related to the eleventy-billion commits lately out of the PC-BSD Github account?
- OpenBSD/CARP, Cisco, and schadenfreude.
- The FreeBSD Foundation’s annual fundraising is on; they have already made it well along, but there’s still lots of dollars to go.
- OpenBSD now has automatic disk mounting.
- g4u 2.6 has entered beta. It’s “Ghost for Unix”, which gives you an idea of what it does.
- EuroBSDCon 2013 DevSummit video recordings are up. I said there would be video all week, didn’t I?
- Using OpenBSD with Vagrant and Veewee. Those tool names sound somewhat rude.
- pbulk bulk builds for pkgsrc made easy. I was working on a script like this.
- Cross–pollination makes me happy.
- svn in FreeBSD is updated.
- FreeBSD supports the MediaTek/Ralink RT5370/RT5372 chipset.
- nvi still gets updates.
- FreeBSD supports the (takes deep breath) Freescale Vybrid Family VF600 heterogeneous
ARM Cortex-A5/M4 SoC. (exhales) - FreeBSD has an IEEE Organizationally Unique Identifier. Not sure what it means.
- NetBSD has a new game, hals_end. If you saw 2001 the movie, you may guess the contents.
- OpenBSD has a new ugl driver for the Genesys Logic GL620USB-A
USB host-to-host link cable.
BSDNow episode 11 is up, with conversations about OpenSSH, FUSE, building an OpenBSD router, etc… and a whole hour of me talking about the upcoming DragonFly 3.6 release and this very Digest, too!
This appears to be all audiovisual media week, because author Michael W. Lucas gave a talk at the Michigan Users Group about OpenBSD (he’s qualified), and it’s up now in two parts. He describes it as:
“Among other things, I compare OpenBSD to Richard Stallman and physically assault an audience member.”
BSDTalk 234 is 30 minutes of conversation with Henning Brauer, taken at vBSDCon 2013. There’s a correlation between east coast BSD conferences and the number of BSDTalk episodes coming out.
I just finished a whole hour of gabbing on about DragonFly and BSD work in general for BSDNow. Because I am a ninny, I didn’t post something here earlier today so that people would know to watch the livestream. Sorry! However, it should be showing up in the next day or so on the BSDNow site. When it does, I’ll link it.
If you’ve seen my previous two reviews of Michael W. Lucas’s ‘Mastery’ books – DNSSEC Mastery and SSH Mastery – then you can guess what this will be: his newest book, focusing on a single software topic. This time it’s sudo.
The one downside of reading this book: I now am aware I’m using sudo wrong. Perhaps not wrong, but not anywhere near its potential. Sudo – and I’m not the only person who has experienced this – is used as a “Let’s install sudo so we don’t have to tell anyone the root password”. Sudo works for that sort of thing, but there’s a lot more possibilities.
Sudo is designed to be deployable across multiple systems, as part of a security policy. It’s an easy way to create purpose-shaped roles with different users, especially with users that have specialized skills and tasks, like database maintenance.
Obviously I think better of sudo after reading the book; there’s a lot of program capabilities of which I was unaware, but it’s the book that sells them. Michael W. Lucas’s humor is on display again, to break up some very technical material. Here’s some bits, pulled out.
Remember that “syntactically valid” is not the same as “does what you want.”
Pressing Q tells visudo to break sudo until you log in as root and fix it. Do not press this button. You won’t like it.
Here I create the TAPEMONKEYS alias for the people who manage backups.
And if Carl tries to configure Oracle on the PostgreSQL server, senior sysadmin Thea needs to have sharp words with him. Probably involving a tire iron.
The book is in-depth enough to cover more complex topics like using sudo and Active Directory, and sudo as an intrusion detection tool, of all things.
The usual reasons to buy a Mastery book are all still there: it specifically mentions working on BSD systems instead of pretending Linux is the only system out there. It’s available through a DRM-free seller (Smashwords) in addition to Amazon. It’s a self-published effort, not shovelware. It’s available now as an ebook, and in physical form soon. Lucas talks about it on BSDNow 010, too.
I have one last nontechnical note. Since these Mastery books are working into a series, I’d like to see a whole printed run of visually matching books. Something with the equivalent of the O’Reilly animals or the Pelican or even Little Blue Books common look and feel.
The takeaway: You should be reading this book if you plan to use sudo in any sort of multiuser environment. It’s available as an e-book direct from the author, via Amazon, via Smashwords, and possibly Barnes & Noble at some point in the near future. Physical books are available, and you can buy both forms together, apparently.
And of course this sudo joke.
I spent this entire week saying things like “Wait, today’s Tuesday?” and “I thought this was Wednesday, not Thursday.”
- Welcome to my GUI Gallery, a whole lot of different GUI screenshots. This mention of the “Salto” Alto emulator brought me there, and there’s some material I’ve never seen before. Also, there’s Bob. Not “Bob” the prophet, but Bob, the computer mistake. Speaking of problematic designs, see the Windows 8 page.
- 5 Cool UNIX Hacks. Sounds linkbaity, but it’s useful. I didn’t realize that CTRL-a is the non-destructive version of CTRL-u. (via)
- This seems strange, but I never heard of PLATO, even though it seems to be the precursor to so much. (via)
- “Goodbye Google“, in terms of switching to your own platform, seems to be a new trend.
- arkOS, a similar idea.
- Finding Files Your Way. I can never remember all the arguments to ‘find’.
- Google has a Shell Style Guide. Which equates to a Bash Style Guide, but that’s OK. Shell scripts are sometimes considered the most disposable form of programming, so it’s good to see a full guide. (via)
Your unrelated animation of the week: late for meeting. A followup to going to the store, which I think I posted here years ago.
Not sure why, but there wasn’t a lot of things this week to pick out.
- A short discussion of Perfect Forward Secrecy on pkgsrc-users.
- PC-BSD apparently (used to) play a movie on first boot.
- FreeBSD now has a ‘mini-memstick‘ install option. (a later messages says ~200M in size.)
- FreeBSD has updated aacraid.
- OpenBSD supports the RTS5229 card reader in rtsx(4).
- OpenBSD has updated OpenSSH, and NetBSD has updated. (DragonFly has a fix for the underlying problem.)
- OpenBSD has FUSE support.
Matthew Dillon did some more performance tuning for DragonFly. I’ll just pull a paragraph from the commit message, since that will have more impact than anything I say:
Improves fork/exec concurrency on monster of static binaries from 14200/sec to 55000/sec+. For dynamic binaries improve from around 2500/sec to 9000/sec or so (48 cores fork/exec’ing different dynamic binaries). For the same dynamic binary it’s more around 5000/sec or so.
“monster” is a 48-core machine used for testing.
The 10th BSDNow episode is out, with the ambitious title, “Year of the BSD Desktop”. As you can guess from the title, a PC-BSD desktop gets set up as part of the episode, and as you might not guess from the title, they interview Michael W. Lucas.
Branched, not released. The release should happen in two weeks. One major bug has been squished, and remember the upgrade process from 3.4 to 3.6 is a little different from normal.
DragonFly developer Francois Tigeot was interviewed on linuxfr.org. As you can probably guess from the names, it’s a French site, but don’t let that stop you if you’re an Anglophone.
This was a loooooong week, with me working 24 of the last 48 hours. It didn’t get in the way of the link-gathering, though!
- This report on what’s new in Unicode 7 is stranger than you’d expect. (via)
- gzip + poetry = awesome. This is a great way to visualize compression. (via)
- The Internet Archive now lets you run old software via in-browser emulation. Of course, all the screenshots are of games because everyone wants to revisit childhood. (via)
- I tell people a Leatherman is one of the best computer tools you can have. Here’s multitool overkill. I’m mentioning a specific brand for a reason, by the way. (via several places)
- Fixing UNIX filenames. It’s a bit older, so you may have seen this. (via)
- UNIX: the Art of Being Lazy. Remember, the Three Virtues of a programmer, from Larry Wall: Laziness, Hubris, and Impatience.
- A Mac Plus running System 7 – in Javascript. One of my first computers; even the control panels seemed to hold promise. (via)
- Lets Blather All Over… Quadrilateral Cowboy. A hacking game that actually involves code.
- What I do when I’m not on here. Rotary phones dialing through an electromechanical exchange to reach between Asterisk VoIP server. I love watching the gears go. (via)
Your unrelated animated image of the day: (via via)
There’s a surprisingly large list this week.
- FreeBSD has updated netmap.
- FreeBSD supports VT-d DMAR hardware. Not totally sure what that is.
- FreeBSD supports the RealTek RTL8168G, RTL8168GU, RTL8411B, and RTL8168EP.
- FreeBSD updated byacc to version 20130925.
- FreeBSD has binary packages again.
- Managed Services using FreeBSD at NYI, a whitepaper.
- NetBSD has imported OpenBSD’s support for ASIX AX88178a and AX88179 USB network interfaces, in the axen(4) driver.
- NetBSD supports the Broadcom BCM56340 iProc based switch.
- OpenBSD supports unattended installation. See Also on Undeadly.
- OpenBSD has softraid booting documentation. Someone will find this useful, I’m sure.
- OpenBSD 5.4 is released.
- Inspecting Packets with OpenBSD and pf, the presentation from vBSDCon.
- Lua in pkgsrc has been modified.
- Ocaml in pkgsrc has been updated to 4.0.1.
- The BSD Router Project has hit 1.5. (via)
- PC-BSD 10 alpha images are available for testing.
- PC-BSD is doing weekly updates, an idea I support, unsurprisingly.
- No BSD systems in Google Code-In this year, darnit.