DragonFly BSD Digest – Page 213 – A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.

2012/04/222012/04/21

Lazy Reading for 2012/04/22

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.

2012/04/21

OpenSSL updated to 1.0.1a

Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL in DragonFly to version 1.0.1a, to fix the recent vulnerability CVE-2012-2110. Thanks Peter!

2012/04/20

Cheap SSH Mastery

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.

2012/04/19

Disk quotas, the details

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.

2012/04/17

Try out quotas, temporarily

Because of several recent commits, quotas can be set. They aren’t persistent yet, so they’ll vanish on reboot. The standard disclaimer applies, as this is new.

2012/04/16

OpenJDK7 building

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.

2012/04/152012/04/14

Lazy Reading for 2012/04/15

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.

2012/04/14

Optimized scoreboard for SACK

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.)

2012/04/13

em(4) update

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.

2012/04/13

Hammer2 messaging

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.

2012/04/12

DragonFly time

DragonFly now has its own ntp.org zone. What’s this mean? Nothing material, but it’s nice to do.

2012/04/12

IW changes wiill need a buildworld

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.

2012/04/11

6 slots for Summer of Code

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.

2012/04/11

Longest review ever, finished

That DragonFly review is now available in all six parts. (I included the preamble there.) I still haven’t made it through the whole thing.

2012/04/10

OpenSSL updated to 1.0.1

Peter Avalos has updated DragonF’y’s OpenSSL to version 1.0.1, in part to make future upgrades easier. See the changelog for what’s new. Look for the part specifically about 1.0.1, since the notes include unreleased material too.

2012/04/10

pkginteractive: graphical pkgin

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?

2012/04/09

Have Areca RAID? Now you can use MSI

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.

2012/04/09

Some more pkgsrc expunging

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.

2012/04/082012/04/07

Lazy Reading for 2012/04/08

The links are all over the map this week, which is fine. Enjoy!

This makes me laugh every time. (via)
Etsy has an astonishingly good internal development practice. And open source code? (via)
For contrast, Facebook’s release engineering process. (via I lost it, sorry) Not as interesting but I can’t tell why.
Mosh, a program designed for the persistence of screen but differently. (via) Dunno if it builds on DragonFly, but it looks neat.
I’m getting more paranoid as I get older. Things like this Javascript ad injection on hotel wi-fi may be a reason. (via)
“I just ran emacs. LOL!“
0x10c, a sci-fi game set in the future with spaceships running a 16-bit CPU. That you can program.
I wish I could write here with the same mix of loathing and excitement found in this comics review. Warning: mildly… gonzo?
The journey from user to contributor, a NYCBUG talk in mp3 form. (via)
I’ve mentioned RetroBSD before, but here’s an example of it being installed on a Duinomite board. 2.11 BSD on a super-cheap, super-small Arduino-style board! (via) I don’t know what I’d do with it, but I want one. It even has keyboard and VGA ports.
At some point, this CPU database will be handy. (via)
A new, slow form of brute force ssh attack. (via) What I find interesting here is not so much the new attack itself, but Peter Hansteen’s careful gathering and analysis of data around it.

Your unrelated link of the week: memepool. It’s seen some activity lately. It was a blog before there were blogs, and I was part of it.

2012/04/072012/04/07

pkgsrc-2012Q1 is branched

The next quarterly release of pkgsrc, pkgsrc-2012Q1, has been branched. I’ll start building binary packages momentarily.

The branch should show up in DragonFly git later today. Once available, you can change any references to ‘pkgsrc-2011Q4’ in /usr/Makefile to ‘pkgsrc-2012Q1’, and then to switch to it:

cd /usr/pkgsrc
git branch pkgsrc-2012Q1 origin/pkgsrc-2012Q1
git checkout pkgsrc-2012Q1
git pull

At that point, you can start building and installing newer applications. For more details on that, check the pkgsrc guide on the DragonFly website.

Note that you don’t have to do that; you can stick with the 2011Q4 (or earlier) packages you have installed now, if you don’t want to deal with software changes right now, or if you want to wait for the binary packages to become available. Upgrades/security fixes only happen for the latest quarterly release, though.

Note: don’t assume I tested this before advising you to do it, or anything like that. I mean, come on.