Mosh, mentioned on this Digest a few weeks back, is now installed on leaf.dragonflybsd.org. If you’re doing any development work there but dealing with a relatively high latency, this should help. (Thanks Venkatesh Srinivas.)
I’m still working on building them. I kept getting panics, which seem to be fixed by this commit, so I should have something soon. Sorry!
Enjoy!
- I like the sentiments here about Instagram. (via) I can see why it was popular, but not how it represented anything but a cosmetic tool, dependent on other services.
- Waxy.org turns 10. I relink (reblog? I don’t know) material from the links page on waxy.org, because Andy Baio has a keen eye. That article has links to various high points over the last 10 years, so it’s worth setting aside some of your time and looking at previous features. Come to think of it, he started that only a year before I started this Digest.
- Supercomputers installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. All the way back to UNIVAC. (via swildner on EFNet #dragonflybsd) This picture is one of the more realistic I’ve ever seen about rack installation.
- RFC6540: IPv6 Support Required for All IP-Capable Nodes. (via) YES.
- The Story of BSD and Open-Source Linux, unfortunately incorrect, starting with the headline.
- 40 years on: Why Unix standards still matter. A brief note about the Single Unix Specification. There’s some implication that Unix was involved in the moon landings; was that the case? I didn’t think so, since at least a chunk of the moon landings predate Unix existing. (i.e. before the Epoch.)
- A photo followup on the one PHP article from last week. (via aggelos on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- From the same site as the PHP article, tmux is sweet as heck. It’s nice to see the positive points of tmux defined outside of licensing. Also, it serves as a good tmux configuration checklist.
Your unrelated link of the week: One Thing Well. The BSD tag might be the most useful.
Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL in DragonFly to version 1.0.1a, to fix the recent vulnerability CVE-2012-2110. Thanks Peter!
Michael Lucas’s worthwhile book, SSH Mastery, is currently having one of those sudden price cuts on Amazon – for the paperback version, about 25%. Now it a good time to nab it before the price bounces back up.
Francois Tigeot has followed up with a description of how to enable and disable quotas on DragonFly, which will work for most any local file system, unless rebooted. There’s also the vquota(8) man page.
Based on a recent post from Chris Turner to the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list, here’s a bug report that should get you to a working lang/OpenJDK7 pkgsrc package.
It’s a good week when I can start collecting new Lazy Reading material right after posting the previous week’s summary.
- There’s a ‘flickr doomsday clock‘. The concept is entertaining, even though the result it warns about is pretty bad. (via) There’s a sort of assumption that external sites hosting huge amounts of our personal data will never go away, or that there’s always an easy way to deal with it if they do.
- Dragonfly – the knife.
- Jack Tramiel died this past week. He’s responsible for Commodore, and the Amiga, and later owned Atari. There’s a DragonFly connection; Matthew Dillon was known for his DICE Amiga C compiler, among other things.
- Bufferbloat: Dark Buffers on the Internet. (pdf, from sephe on EFNet #dragonflybsd) Hopefully I’m summing this up correctly: too many devices buffer network data when there’s congestion (and even when there isn’t congestion) instead of saying “It’s congested” through the normal TCP mechanisms, with the end result of much higher latency for everything. bufferbloat.net talks about it more, and Matthew Dillon found a good paper about it.
- “PHP is a programming language like scrapple is a meat.” (via) I’m just enjoying the metaphors in the third paragraph.
- And that led me to this: PHP: A fractal of bad design. The list of problems is larger than I thought. As in, it went from comedy to tragedy in the same document.
- Peter Hansteen talks about port knocking. (via) As a side effect, the article provides a good checklist of how to make your system more secure. “No root login” is already implemented on DragonFly.
- Computers Brochures, 50s-70s. (via swildner on EFNet #dragonflybsd) There’s a whole bunch of desktop wallpapers in a zip file down at the end. The scans are a bit noisy, but fun to see. I like the layout of the PDP issues.
- Whatever happened to UNIX? We’re soaking in it.
- I mentioned RetroBSD on PIC32 last week, and now here’s a picture.
- Valve’s internal structure sounds astonishingly like an open source project. Everyone has access to the code, project direction is determined by interest, and it’s up to you to coordinate with others.
- Google as a 1980s BBS. (via, via) It totally works.
Your unrelated link of the week: Quigley’s Cabinet Followups. There’s about a bazillion links there to follow about weird history.
DragonFly now has a optimized scoreboard for SACK, thanks to Sepherosa Ziehau. What’s that mean? SACK is a way to make sure only the needed parts of a TCP transmission get retransmitted, when multiple packets are lost. The scoreboard is where the packets needing retransmission are tracked. So, the result of these improvements is better performance in packet-lossy situations.
(Please correct me if your understanding is better than mine; my explanation is based on stumbling around the Internet for a few minutes of reading.)
Sepherosa Ziehau has updated the em(4) driver from Intel; it only matters if you are using the specific chipsets mentioned in the commit message.
If you’re curious about Hammer2 development, it’s been ongoing, but there haven’t been any more juicy commits to point at. Here’s one – the start of the messaging system.
DragonFly now has its own ntp.org zone. What’s this mean? Nothing material, but it’s nice to do.
Sepherosa Ziehau has made changes to the initial TCP congestion window, based on a number of papers he links to in his post. The immediate effect is if you’re on DragonFly-current, you will need to do a full buildworld on your next upgrade. The long term effect could be improvements in latency by improving reactions to bufferbloat. Or not; this is pretty technical.
DragonFly has been given 6 slots (i.e. spaces for students) by Google for this year’s Summer of Code. That’s great! We have a crop of great student proposals this year, so far, so the biggest worry at this point is how to get to them all.
Julian Fagir has put together a graphical – meaning it works under curses in a terminal, or under X – interface to pkgin, the binary package manager. Can someone try it and describe how well it works?
Thanks to Sascha Wildner, the Areca RAID controller driver, arcmsr(4), now supports MSI. It should only make things better, but if it doesn’t, you can turn it off.
There’s several packages that will be removed from pkgsrc after the 2012Q2 branch, since they haven’t worked in a long time. Also, Python 2.4 has been removed from pkgsrc-current and 2.5 will go the same way before the end of the year.