Using ‘serno’, meaning specifying disks by serial number rather than path, is a good idea. If you have a machine that started out as an older DragonFly installation, it may be a good idea to use this feature.
I apologize; I’ve been missing. Here’s some misc links while I get back in gear:
- A very good reason to be interested in Hammer over ZFS: nobody will threaten lawsuits over Hammer.
- 10 tricks for admins. I’m posting it cause I can never remember that thing with tunneling ssh out. (via)
- This Gaming Life, as a free download. An excellent book that is in physical form on my shelf right now. Yes, unrelated.
EHCI support is now always on, for 2.7 users, and will be for 2.8 when released. It’s possible to turn it off if it causes a problem, but it should generally just mean better USB performance.
Alex Hornung recently added mkinitrd(8), a tool for building a RAM disk early in the boot process. What’s it for? It’s needed to support more interesting bootable volumes, like LVM2, encrypted disks, or iscsi roots, all of which I’d like to see.
There’s several publications with new issues out. It’s a long weekend (in the U.S.) so you can catch up on the reading/listening:
BSD Magazine has a new issue out, on OpenBSD. There’s also the happy news that they’ve managed to more than double their circulation.
The July issue of the Open Source Business Resouce is out, with the theme “Go To Market”. Next month is “Interdisciplinary Lessons”, and submissions are due in the next two weeks.
BSDTalk 192 is out with an interview of Colin Percival, the FreeBSD Security Officer. It’s another interview from BSDCan 2010. Colin Percival is also responsible for, among other things, tarsnap.com, which I find interesting because of its clear and modern business model.
Samuel Greear has a whole page about his Google Summer of Code kqueue project, recently updated.
Sometimes, packages are renamed in pkgsrc, usually because of a version change. If that happens, it can be hard to find the replacement. You can manually add them, or there’s a trick to make the build ‘jump’ to the new name.
NYCBSDCon, happening November 12-14th, in New York City, at Cooper Union, has a call for papers out. (via here and also George) They’re due by the end of July.
BSD Magazine sent out a link to all the BSD Magazine back issues, reproduced here for your enjoyment:
Siju George has written up his ‘real world’ experience with DragonFly in production; I should probably do the same since this site has been DragonFly-driven for years now. Add your story to the page.
Matthew Dillon followed up on some comments from Sepherosa Ziehau about power management to describe a possible new way to manage power consumption; the project is up for grabs.
Matthew Dillon has added powerd(8), a daemon that adjusts CPU frequency based on activity; his initial report describes a whopping 40% power savings for server use.
Link catchup!
- The BSD Certification Group needs reviewers for the BSDA exam objectives. It’s as easy as writing on a wiki.
- Undeadly has a lengthy article up about the OpenBSD equivalent of pkgsrc bulk builds, called dbp3. Interesting, because it was constructed on purpose, for that purpose. It’s interesting to me because I have pbulk running all the time, and it’s not as liner a process as I’d like.
- The PC-BSD installer is now present in FreeBSD; I think this is based on the same original installer used for DragonFly. Maybe, maybe not, but I’m curious about the feature set if it’s able to displace the venerable and firmly lodged FreeBSD sysinstall.
- Off topic: I bought an Android-based phone recently, so this (kinda grody) comment on how Apple handles bad reception for the new iPhone is entertaining.
- Really off topic: this man’s conversation about polyhedral dice (Youtube) is strangely compelling. You may or may have needed to play tabletop games previously to really appreciate it. (via)
Matthew Dillon set up a git copy of the pkgsrc repository some time ago. However, it’s had syncing problems, and there’s an ‘official’ pkgsrc git repository now which does not have the problems. You can still pull from the same place, but it’s the ‘master’ branch now. His heads-up message describes how to switch.
Not actually related to DragonFly except by coincidental name, but it’s entertaining and imageblogging is fun. (via, some other images there nsfw)
Michael Lucas is giving away a limited number of copies of his new Network Flow Analysis book. Post something clever and you may get it. Please don’t be more clever than me, though, as I want a copy.
Dru Lavigne is the new “Director of Community Development” for PC-BSD. I am totally jealous, and she is the perfect person for the job.
November 12-14th, in New York City, at Cooper Union.
(via)