DragonFly 1.6.2 is released, along with 1.4.5, to include the recent changes that had been merged back to the branches. Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert moved the release up, and a changelog is available for 1.4 and 1.6. (changelogs are in forward chronological order, so skim down.)
Updating pkgsrc is usually done through cvs, though it is apparently also now possible using Mercurial. (Thanks HubertF)
csup is usable for a cvsup client, and since it’s written in C, doesn’t require modula-3, which doesn’t build on DragonFly. csup was broken on DragonFly, though YONETANI Tomokazu has a fix. Of course, the server side still needs to be compiled, with the same dependency problems. Alternatives like cvsync have problems, and rsync is supposed to be too taxing, but now is a good time to test that assumption, perhaps with a benchmark?
Sascha Wildner has updated timezone data! Yeah, slow news day.
Dru Lavigne has a new article on OnLAMP.com describing how to fine-tune your firewall, assuming your firewall is IPFW.
Markus Schatzl happened to (re)post a link to a DragonFly installation guide he wrote that includes mention of the Smart Bootmanager, which can allow booting from the DragonFly install CD even on systems that don’t allow for CD booting. I may have posted this before, but it’s worth repeating.
The BSDStats.org statistics script is now in DragonFly. It’s not enabled by default; the following two lines in /etc/periodic.conf are needed to activate it.
monthly_statistics_enable="YES"
monthly_statistics_report_devices="YES"
A wierd bug in bmake, pkgsrc (and NetBSD’s) version of make, would occasionally make it difficult to kill a make process with a Ctrl-C. Matthew Dillon found the bug, a fix for it, and a suggested fix for NetBSD, too.
There’s a new version (4.0) of the BSDStats program out. Hubert Feyrer has recently suggested some changes on his blog, which should make it into the next version. Those changes may or may not apply to DragonFly, since there’s several elements of DragonFly that originated with NetBSD.
The latest quarterly release of pkgsrc is out, and here’s the announcement. Start your somewhat difficult upgrade process now!
Gergo Szakal managed to get a DragonFly system running as a filtering bridge using PF; his writeup on how he did it can be found on the wiki.
Much thanks is due Jason Watson, who donated a new server to Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert. This new, more powerful server is bugs.dragonflybsd.org, builds the snapshot ISOs, and is one of the mirrors for DragonFly releases.
Simon added “if you have spare/old hardware which you will throw away anyways, don’t hesitate to ask if somebody can use it for dragonfly.”
Daniel Hartmeier recently posted several chapters from a now-canceled book that describe using and managing PF, on undeadly.org. These should also generally apply to DragonFly’s version of PF.
Hubert Feyrer posted a link to his summation of the Google Summer of Code projects for NetBSD.  Included is a description of DragonFly (and pkgsrc) developer Joerg Sonnenberger’s pkg_install work.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has imported a newer version of OpenSSH. Along with this, he pointed out that the current method of importing 3rd-party code into DragonFly could be made much simpler by using CVS vendor tags.
If you are running DragonFly as the only operating system on your computer, there’s not much point to having a boot menu installed. If you want to speed up booting, my first guess at how to get rid of it works, plus Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert describes how to back it up.
Massimiliano Stucchi announced that registration for EuroBSDCon 2006 is now open.
Jeremy C. Reed is looking for someone from a user perspective who has been using pkgsrc and had experience with the old dfports system. This is apparently for an article.