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.
BSDTalk 233 plays David Chisnall’s hour of presentation from vBSDCon 2013 about moving from gcc to llvm/clang.
BSDNow 9 is up and it’s all Current Events, going by the title. I’d describe it better but I haven’t even had a chance to watch it yet.
The venerable (from 1979!) program, lpr, has been superseded by CUPS in many installations. Francois Tigeot suggested removing it, but it’s still directly usable in specific situations and easier to just shift out of the way. It’s staying, but it’s interesting to see how it still gets used.
Update: Predrag Punosevac has descriptions of the various tools involved.
Multiple transmission queues are possible for the mxge(4) driver; I’m mentioning it because Sepherosa Ziehau’s post about this describes the exact tunables to configure this.
I’m planning to branch DragonFly 3.6 this weekend. The actual release will come 2 weeks later. (Ignore what I wrote about a dports installer/image.)
BSDNow has Episode 8 out, containing an interview with Antti Kantee, a number of BSD news items (including some I missed entirely), and if you couldn’t tell from the purposefully misspelled title, a conversation about Tor and BSD.
Matthew Dillon wrote a roundup post summarizing all the changes he’s made to DragonFly to improve SMP performance in the last few weeks. He’s removed almost all contention from DragonFly. This means better performance, scaling upward depending on the number of processors.
‘monster’, the system that builds all 20,000 items in dports, can complete the run in 15 hours. Compare this to the 2 weeks it used to take me to build the 12,000 packages in pkgsrc. This is admittedly on different hardware and different packaging systems, but it gives a sense of the scale of the improvement.
Joris Giovannangeli, who worked on porting Capsicum to DragonFly for Summer of Code 2013, is continuing his work. He’s posted a detailed note on how to do capability management in a new way, with it retaining compatibility with FreeBSD’s capsicum implementation.
Whee!
- Commodore 64 and Spectrum keyboards – USB versions. Not interesting to me, but I bet at least one person reading this just got excited.
- The Horrible World of Web Hosting. Unfortunately quite an accurate article, especially in his quote translations. (via)
- Getting an Apple 1 to run. Note that the circuit board is mounted in a wall frame.
- Interactive Fiction Competition 2013 recommendations. This can eat up a few hours if you have them to spare. (via)
- Where shutdowns are not disasters. An exploration of the shutdown command.
- Mail backups using newsyslog.conf for rotation. A clever idea.
- What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for? That story and the link on Hacker news where I found it have some entertaining floppy disk anecdotes. I originally wrote “old floppy disk” but realized that was redundant. Almost all floppies are old at this point.
- Don’t Copy That Floppy! Why haven’t I linked this before?
- Don’t Copy That 2. Why didn’t anyone tell me there was a sequel?
Your unrelated link of the week: Deep into Youtube, the top-rated films. You may want to turn your volume down, and make sure nobody is around. Not for NSFW content, but because some of those films are so confusing that it’s impossible to explain to someone else why you are watching them. (via) There’s some Nico Nico Douga-sourced stuff in there, which I thought I’ve mentioned before, but I can’t find it now. Why do I even know these things?