A recurring argument that pops up from time to time is replacing Sendmail in the base system with something else – Postfix , qmail, or a similar product. Licensing, complexity, or user preference usually lead to a long discussion that doesn’t change the matter. Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has come up with an answer: none of the above. He’s writing a simple MTA that will handle delivery on the local machine, which is enough for a system that doesn’t handle normal mail. For people who need more, sendmail and Postfix and others are all in pkgsrc.
Matthew Dillon pointed out a relatively easy vkernel exercise: making them run without being attached to a terminal. You could spin off multiple virtual systems, all from one command line.
There’s a new Estonian mirror up for DragonFly, in IPv4 and IPv6:
ftp://ftp.estpak.ee/pub/DragonFly
http://ftp.estpak.ee/pub/DragonFly
rsync://ftp.estpak.ee/DragonFly
Doubly useful right now, because dragonflybsd.org appears to be having slight network issues.
Hasso Tepper has produced an interesting patch that allows for notification on network link state changes.
Early registrations for the Sys Admin Technical Conference for 2007 are due by the end of March. It’s being held in a nice town (Baltimore, MD) and has some interesting speakers, including security talks from BSD user Richard Bejitlich.
Jonathan Buschmann has posted an initial patch to get a much-requested feature onto DragonFly: CARP.
With Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s recent 1:1 threading work, a recent conversation exposed future plans to experiment with M:NCPU support in DragonFly. (That’s M kernel threads supporting N userland threads, where N == number of CPUs.)
Matthew Dillon has written up the initial documentation for the SYSLINK protocol. (Also available as a PDF, thanks to Sascha Wildner.) SYSLINK is the inter-system communication method for DragonFly clusters.
If you read carefully, you may notice that the proposed clustering file system for DragonFly is named in the document as “ANVIL”.
Joerg Sonnenberger posted on the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list his Summer of Code plans for pkgsrc work. The bulk-building tasks are similar to what he’s started with his bulk builds of pkgsrc for DragonFly.
BSDCan 2007‘s schedule is posted, and registration is now possible. (Thanks, BSDNews.)
leaf.dragonflybsd.org is going down for a hardware change tonight, which means the mail archive and man pages will be temporarily unavailable.
Nerdcore rap, specifically about kill -9. (Warning: Youtube video; contains strong language.)
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert 1:1 threading work is ready for use! There’s still some rough bits to finish, but he reports successful use of Firefox with the new library.
You may need to copy in a new /etc/localtime file to account for daylight savings time changes in the U.S. and Canada, especially if you have an older system; Matthew Dillon explains.
I’m trying to get together the ideas, mentors, students, and etc. needed to participate in Google’s Summer of Code 2007. If you’re interested, please mention it on the mailing lists.
April 8th is a month away, and it’s the deadline if you want to register for pkgsrcCon 2007, happening in Barcelona, Spain from April 27th to the 29th. The deadline for presentations is April 1st. (no fooling!)
As part of a larger discussion about logging IRC channels, Dmitri Nikulin wrote an interesting pasage on security and encryption, and how governments tend to work around rather than break encryption.
On UnixReview.com this week, Shell Corner has “Epoch to UTC Time Conversion“, a script that may be very useful to U.S. and Canadian residents this upcoming weekend, a (digital) book review of “Cisco Firewall Technologies“, and a hardware review of the “Adderlink IP”, which works as a VNC station for attaching to a KVM.
Antonio Huete Jiménez has written a new wiki article on how to set up a network card using WPA, on DragonFly.
YONETANI Tomokazu has managed to get DragonFly partially booting on an Intel Mac.