Matthias Schmidt and Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert have put together ‘dma’, a local mail delivery agent that can replace sendmail for most common needs, with the benefit of being simpler and smaller. It’s already in the system.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert mentioned plans to eventually build an encrypted network file system; Matthew Dillon added a description of how that could work with HAMMER.
Vincent Stemen did a good amount of testing of cvsup vs. rsync in terms of update speed. Rsync came out way ahead, though as a few people noted, rsyncd’s load relative to cvsupd on a server serving many clients is unknown. In any case, cvsup does not build on DragonFly via pkgsrc, so it looks like rsync is generally a better choice, plus most mirrors are using it now. HAMMER may provide a better alternative, in any case.
While on the topic: Ulf Lilleengen’s blog post about improving csup.
Vincent Stemen put together a tool for automatically updating his DragonFly systems. It’s called ‘mirror’, and he has an explanatory web page up for it now. Give it a whirl.
Hasso Tepper has added “bthcid(8) – Bluetooth Link Key/PIN Code Manager and btpin(1) Bluetooth PIN utility”, along with “rfcomm_sppd(1) – RFCOMM Serial Port Profile daemon”. These all originate from NetBSD, so I’ve linked to the man pages there for further details.  That’s the lowest consonant to vowel ratio I’ve had in a while.
I had an Apple ][+ when I was younger, and Gamasutra has an article up all about pre-Mac Apples, exploiting my sense of nostalgia. (Via the howling void)
While we’re on the subject, there’s an online Apple ][gs emulator at virtualapple.org. One of these days I’ll get around to scanning my original Castle Wolfenstein disk just to show how old-school I am…
Chris Turner has added in support for a -l option to vnconfig(8), listing configured vnode disks. Note that this will require a full rebuild for those running bleeding-edge code.
An aside in this post from Matthew Dillon notes that the next release (which I assume will be 2.0) will be before the end of February.
Matthias Drochner managed to get one of those USB-powered missile launchers working on NetBSD; it looks enough like a USB keyboard that this could work on any BSD. (Via Hubert Feyrer)
This week’s BSDTalk is an interview with Dru Lavigne, covering her new “Best of FreeBSD Basics” book and the new BSDA exam, both previously mentioned on this Digest.
To continue that topic, Dru also attended DemoCamp7 in Ottawa recently and has a writeup on the new products she saw.
boulder.tele.dk is a new DragonFly mirror, serving images and pkgsrc binaries via HTTP and FTP.
An experiment in Barcelona, last year, took a number of people with no coding experience but plenty of graphic design experience whatever and got them to modify a version of the old game Breakout. The results were quite interesting. You’ll need Flash to see the video of the abstract results. (Via waxy)
Why do I mention this? Open source systems tend to assume users are either very experienced or totally inexperienced. Looking for people who don’t fit either of those categories is a much more useful goal, as it produces new methods and ways of looking at things.
An article on OpenAddict talks about managing multiple FreeBSD systems, though it could apply to most any BSD system, including DragonFly. It boils down to “Share code via NFS.”, really. (Via FreeBSDOS)
The January issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out. There’s notes in there on some $300k (!) of grant money for Ontario, canada universities for open source projects looking to commercialize. (Via Dru Lavigne)
As I was notified by Michael Lyngbøl, there’s a new Danish mirror for DragonFly:
Snapshots and ISO images:
pkgsrc binary mirrors:
BSDTalk this week is about setting up a centralized syslog server. If you manage more than a few non-Windows systems, this is going to be useful.
This has nothing to do with BSD, really, but it’s a live-action film by one of my favorite cartoonists, and it’s excellent.
View at Yooootube – embedding it gets mangled by this blog software.
Matthew Dillon wrote another one of his updates on the work being done on HAMMER; he’s moving on to balancing code next.