Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL to 1.0.0c, to fix a recent security problem. The problem doesn’t sound too catastrophic to my untrained ear, at least.
Matthew Dillon has moved CPU support to 63 processors and 512G of RAM. This may cause issues, he warns. It’s also just barely working, so don’t expect to go into production with half a terabyte of RAM in the next few days.
Samuel Greear wrote up a nice summation of Google Code-In progress. 30+ tasks are done now, which is great! Except! We need more projects, as we’re about halfway through the total. Suggestions are welcome, here or on the mailing lists. Recently finished projects include a devattr tool and vkernel usage documentation.
Tim Darby had an error with a particular AMD AHCI chipset, and the entertaining error was:
Attempting to reinitialize the port after it had a horrible accident
This gives me a chance to link to one of my favorite error messages ever.
(The chipset works in current DragonFly, by the way.)
wip/jdk15 now works on i386, too, under specific circumstances.
Matthew Dillon has made it possible to boot DragonFly on 24-CPU systems. Also, we’re currently limited to 32G of RAM. Oh, to have such limitations; I was considering myself lucky to have 4 CPUs.
Francois Tigeot has wip/jdk15 working for DragonFly/x86_64. It’s not there yet for i386…
There’s now descriptions for a number of the net.inet.* sysctls, thanks to Taras Klaskovsky as part of Google Code-In.
I was reading this Perl Advent Calendar (that would be good for DragonFly, come to think of it) post about ack, and came across a interesting line:
curl http://betterthangrep.com/ack-standalone > ~/bin/ack && chmod 0755 !#:3'
fetch’ would work just as well on a BSD system. The interesting thing is that it’s a one-liner for installing software that doesn’t make any assumptions about having an existing framework like pkgsrc or aptitude or anything like that – it just grabs the code and plops it in place. It wouldn’t work for more complex software, but the simplicity is intriguing, to match the Unix-like single, chainable program idea.
For those who haven’t seen it, ‘ack‘ is a grep replacement that automatically takes care of common activities around searching – skipping files that would cause duplicate matches, binary files, etc., handles a larger range of regular expressions, and runs startlingly fast.
Tim Darby was looking to take advantage of swapcache, and got some advice from Matthew Dillon. This led to a larger writeup that went into the mechanics and advantages of both swapcache and SSDs. The swapcache(8) page has been expanded with these notes, and I’m sure I need to buy a SSD for my next upgrade.
SSD devices have tumbled into the sub-$100 range for smaller devices; they are perfect for swapcache if you’ve got the spare SATA connector…
If you have net/proftpd installed, and you installed it in the last week or so, you may want to upgrade. There’s been a security problem with the source files.
So, informal poll time: do people like these Lazy Reading roundups?
- Numbers everyone should know. (via) I link to this cause it’s interesting, and because it shows something else. If you understand what these numbers mean, congratulations. You speak a language that a limited number of people on this planet can understand. Think about that for a bit.
- The end of a faithful server. (via) I can sympathize. Run any computer for some number of years without any issues, and you’ll miss it when it’s gone.
- A simple explanation for ‘git reset –hard’. Some chunks of git are magical, in that I know they work but the internal behavior is still opaque to me. It may be best to keep it that way.
- I do gain a perverse sense of pride that DragonFly is an all-volunteer organization. Linux, on the other hand, is mostly a corporate product. (via) I realize this is not a legitimate thing, and I’d love having enough of a market that someone could be paid to work on DragonFly.
- Hey, the Economist Magazine’s Babbage blog is pretty good. I like this recent article about the Eye-Fi, a device I tell people about whenever I can. It essentially erases the need for storage on your camera. The last paragraph in the Babbage entry is also a little bit important.
Another Google Code-In task completed: passwords are now created using SHA256 (PDF link) by default, and libcrypt also now supports SHA512.
Courtesy of another Google Code-In project, bugs.dragonflybsd.org now matches the main Dragonfly website.
Sascha Wildner has added even more RAID controller support, from FreeBSD, this time in improvements to the amr(4) driver. Check the green lines in this man page diff to see what’s new.
Another piece of work by one of the fine students participating in Google Code-In is a new 2.8 installation screencast/video. Check it out at the following link:
DragonFly BSD 2.8 Installation Screencast on YouTube
If you have been following along but have not yet tried DragonFly, this should evidence how easy it is — wait not a second longer!
The Google Code-In projects for DragonFly are bearing fruit, as there’s new pages in the new handbook, plus code commits from various finished projects. 14 tasks are done, and there’s 10 more in progress, out of… I think 50? This is a good rate, considering there’s more than a month left.
There’s a minute and a half of video up of NYCBSDCon 2010, showing off the nice facilities, food, and some of the talks. (via) You can see me shifting around in my seat at 1:28.
The December theme for the Open Source Business Resource is “Humanitarian Open Source”. It sounds somewhat ethereal, but the articles actually concentrate on achieving concrete targets. Plus, more microfinance!