This week on UnixReview.com:
Shell Corner: Safely Sharing Screen Sessions with sudo,
Certification: Exploring the CWSP Wireless LAN Security Certification, and
Book Review: Core Security Patterns.
My house was robbed today; I lost my desktop computer, among other things. Not surprisingly, posting here may be slow for a little while…
For a bit of clarification, Matthew Dillon noted that his goal of having a single system image takes into account having “slow” network links to connect system, which means fancy (and expensive) high-speed interconnection will not be necessary.
I discovered that, at least on my uniprocessor test system, -j doesn’t make a speed difference for ‘make buildworld‘. The -jn flag creates nextra processes, and is supposed to speed the process up to some extent. I’d like if someone could show me a system where it does make a difference…
Francis Gudin found a problem with ppp causing crashes; he also found a fix.
Matthew Dillon has posted his first version of the patch for 32 bit block number to 64 bit byte offset conversion; it’s a dangerous patch because of the chance for data corruption. He has a long list of filesystem (some of which I’ve never heard of) that need testing.
Matthew Dillon has a post describing a bug in the installer (encountered by ‘Eugene’) along with a workaround.
Dillon also describes his upcoming work, which will include BUF/BIO conversion, a read() and write() buffer cache interface, and then the “grand
cache coherency management system”, also known as the most complex code yet.
The latest BSDTalk podcast has man page tips and a talk with Henning Brauer of OpenBSD.
Liam J. Foy’s ultra-comprehensive list of BSD-related RSS info has now got its own domain: BSDPortal.org. Update your booktagdiggmarks appropriately.
NFSv4 is desirable and new; I managed to somehow stumble into these slides from a LISA 2005 presentation on NFSv4 that describes a bit more about NFSv4 features. (If you want the basics on NFS, check Wikipedia.)
TextDrive, a web hosting company, has a weblog, and on it an author, Jason, likes ZFS. So naturally, he is apparently quite enthusiastic about DragonFly adopting ZFS.
If you wanted to use a different version control system, but wanted to be compatible with DragonFly’s CVS system, Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has written some scripts that make his Mercurial setup work with CVS.
There’s a new BSD article on ONLamp.com, about jail (8) usage. It’s written by Dan Langille, of FreshPorts fame.
Erik Wikström posted a link back to the Google Video presentation of Matthew Dillon’s BayLISA talk last year. The slides are on the DragonFly site, as HTML or OpenOffice SXD. This is the presentation that talks about the first benchmarks of the DragonFly approach to multiprocessing, along with revealing Matt’s preference for fvwm2.
Ben Cadieux has his own MBR that looks a little nicer than the FreeBSD-inherited one currently on DragonFly; he has it available for the taking and is willing to add features for parity.
jgarcia, on #dragonflybsd (EFNet), posted a link to this interesting IBM developerWorks story talking about the many types and small variation of Unix standards. Note to self: read developerWorks more often.
Miguel Filipe posted a link to a paper (slides) on speeding up the Linux network stack. The answers: It’s been discussed, and while the approach could sometimes affect speed, it doesn’t solve an actual problem, and introduces far more complexity (and therefore bugs) than it’s worth.
Sascha Wildner posted that due to spam on wiki.dragonflybsd.org, he’s only allowing known people to modify the wiki, which should only affect you if you’re a dirty, bottom-feeding, no-good spammer.
BSDTalk has an interview up with Matthew Dillon, where he talks about his goals with the DragonFly BSD Project, and makes some good points about application availability.
There’s a good pile of other useful interviews at the BSDTalk site; I did not know of any of this before. Browsing through the past interviews, I see mention of FreeBSD-based FreeNAS, a free network attached storage solution, which is also new to me. (Reminds me of the now-defunct DataHive servers…)