Greg Lehey’s big book, “The Complete FreeBSD”, is now available as a PDF and as a set of source files under a Creative Commons license, meaning anyone can download, update, and submit back changes. This was the first book ever on FreeBSD, and it’s a big ‘un.
Chris Buechler and Scott Ullrich are giving a talk at BSDCan about various firewalling technologies on BSD systems, including DragonFly.
I’m going to try to make it to this event, too…
Chuck Tuffli is working on an implementation of MSI for DragonFly. MSI is a way for device drivers to talk, similar to but better than the old IRQ method. As Chuck kindly explained it to me, MSI and MSI-X are necessary for PCI-Express support.
This worked great when I was looking for a laptop, so I’ll solicit opinions again:
If I wanted to move shiningsilence.com to someplace that wasn’t the end of my cable modem, where could I look? A perfect solution would be someplace where I could put a small rackmounted server in, and run DragonFly.
Matthew Dillon recently committed code to fix a timing issue that could cause filesystem corruption. This may have (on DragonFly) fixed the ‘dirbad’ bug that has been seen on both DragonFly and FreeBSD.
Adrian Nida has put together a new Atheros patch, for anyone using that chipset. Please test if you have the hardware, so that this can go in the tree – it’s overdue!
UnixReview.com has two noow book reviews up: Pro Perl Debugging, which should have obvious uses, and Math You Can’t Use, for those who want to feel bad about copyright.
The 5th System Administration and Network Engineering Conference is being held in the Netherlands, May 15-19, 2006. Register before April 7th for a discount.
Postings will be slow here for the next week or so, as my net connection will be intermittent.
OnLAMP.com has an article up about bandwidth shaping using various tools; it should work on DragonFly…
Things have been quiet for the past few days, so there’s few posts here. Take a look at the NetBSD News Beat if you’re hungry for links. Also, BSDNews.com appears to have become a lot more busy lately (perhaps it’s more automated).
Since DragonFly has been diverging from the FreeBSD 4 model, and because NVIDIA no longer produces a FreeBSD 4 X11 driver, there is no 3D acceleration for NVIDIA chipset video cards under DragonFly. It’s frustrating, though there are efforts to deal with this.
Looking at the latest version of xorg, there is mention in a few places of 3D support for more recent ATI cards, though it’s not reflected in the radeon man page.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has added OpenSSH 4.3p2 to DragonFly.
Kevin L. Kane’s patch to add certain malloc features from OpenBSD has been added, by Matthew Dillon.
Strangely, this interview on the ACM Queue magazine site by Marshall Kirk McKusick of a former Enron sysadmin is quite informative on project planning with large groups. Amazingly, that is not a run-on sentence. (Thanks, Slashdot)
Stumbled into this: nmap‘s latest version has DragonFly support. It worked before, so I don’t know what changes are needed…
Release 1.4.1 is out now, for anyone tracking the Release line of DragonFly. Remember, try make quickkernel and make quickworld first, just because it can be faster.
A little tip picked up from Liam Foy Adrian Nida on #dragonflybsd on EFNet: If you have a 16-bit UTF file, cat and less will read it with ^@ characters all through the file. The pkgsrc package converters/recode will allow cleanup like so:
cat file.utf16 | recode utf16..ascii > file.ascii
Update: Several people pointed out that iconv can do the same thing.
OpenSSH 4.3 has been released, and it’ll be in DragonFly soon, though some of the new features may or may not work well.