BSDNow manages to hit a majority of the BSDs this week, talking about Free/Open/Net in various ways. No interview, but lots to hear about.
DragonFly’s root account defaults to tcsh, and that now defaults to autorehash being set on. Useful to remember if you reflexively type ‘rehash’ like I do, and also useful if you come from a shell where ‘rehash’ isn’t needed.
Michael Neumann wrote up his first contribution to Ravenports, some time ago, but I just noticed it now. If you find it inspiring, your next step is Chapter 14: Port Creation Walk-though.
There’s several new mirrors for DragonFly, all listed on the mirrors page thanks to Matthias Schmidt: Checkdomain GmbH, Philipps-University Marburg (both in Germany), and KoDDos (Japan).
I did finally clean out my “to post” email folder, at least.
- History of Gopher. (via)
- Learning BASIC Like It’s 1983. (via)
- textbeat, write music in Vim or other text source. (via)
- 2048 in the terminal. (via)
- Can you use the terminal for everything? A video, and relevant to the previous two links. (via)
- The 30 Best Web Games. I link it to show a sort of technology snapshot from 10-15 years ago. (via)
- Good books for deep hacks. Very In-depth reading.
- The origins of clip art.
- MIT-licensed vector clip art, related. (via)
- The Ethical OS Playbook. It’s “only” a PDF of questions, but definitely good questions to ask. (via)
- Best RSS feed reader apps. Well, services, but not everyone can run Tiny Tiny RSS. Anyway, you should be taking full advantage of RSS. (via)
- You can now pre-order the Edible Games Cookbook even if you weren’t in the Kickstarter.
- Stripping tabs in ‘here’ documents. I wish I had known this years ago.
- The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software.
- Markov chains, explained visually. (via)
- Hidden gems of xterm. (via)
Your unrelated item of the week: Please enjoy this masterclass in comedy timing from a pizza. (via)
I am having trouble keeping up with BSD news items. This is a good problem to have.
- The History of a Security Hole. Cross-BSD. (via)
- hard state soft state confusion. A followup on the previous link.
- NetBSD 7.2 is out. More than one branch is supported, if you find yourself saying “didn’t 8 just release?”
- 2FA with ssh on OpenBSD. Useful; probably can extrapolate out. (via)
- OpenBSD Gaming Resource (2018.08 update). I didn’t realize this was getting regular updates; that’s a good thing. (via)
- HumbleBundle sale. Runs for another 5 days.
- OpenBSD on the Microsoft Surface Go. I appreciate the in-depth hardware listing.
- A look beyond the BSD teacup: OmniOS installation. Try to ignore the meme image linked in that article; it’s an example of BSD culture trying to destroy itself. The article is good for examining OmniOS.
- OPNSense 18.7.1 released.
- OpenBSD-current changes as an RSS feed.
- Valuable News – 2018/08/25 and 2018/09/02.
- New ZFS Boot Environments Tool.
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 15 – Configuration – Fonts & Frameworks.
- arm64 gains RETGUARD. OpenBSD architecture.
- Theo on the latest Intel issues. “currently public artifacts”, should give you pause.
- OpenBSD Foundation gets first 2018 Iridium donation! I had not heard of Handshake before.
- Native Encryption for ZFS on FreeBSD CFT. (via)
- OpenSSH 7.8 is out. (via)
I’ve been linking to other parts of this, but now it’s on one page: “Zenripper“, talking about how to overclock/underclock a Threadripper system on DragonFly.
This week’s BSDNow covers a few things I haven’t seen yet – a news update from the FreeBSD Foundation, and a status report on Project Trident.
DragonFly’s default compiler is now gcc-8. This will help with some amount of dports builds.
Reminder: the next KnoxBUG meeting is tomorrow, September 5th, with a demo of TridentOS.
There’s a social meeting for NYCBUG tomorrow, September 5th, at Suspenders. As far as I can tell, the only difference between “technical meeting” and “social meeting” is if there’s a presentation. Go, if you are near.
If you are near Stockholm, there’s a BSD User Group meeting tomorrow night. Go, if you are near.
It turns out Threadripper (well, a Ryzen CPU) delivers good performance at relatively low power usage. As I sit in a room made too warm by a single desktop machine running, this lower wattage sounds pretty good to me.
Unofficial accidental “time” theme this week. Also charts!
- “GlitchPEG is perhaps the first screen saver that’s excellent at detecting buffer overflow exploits.” XScreenSaver 5.4 is out.
- Arguably the same topic: A Brief History of Generative Art. (via)
- “Update: After 87 hours, I stopped waiting.“
- On the Virtues of Terseness.
- The Emperor’s New Tools?: pragmatism and the idolatry of the web. (via many places)
- wideNES – Peeking Past the Edge of NES Games. Nice technical explanation. (via)
- PaperTTY, an e-ink terminal emulator. Note that it’s running on solar power in some of the pictures. (via)
- Time is crazy, part 1: Working with Timezones. With graphs! (via)
- Time makes us crazy, part 2: Higgins Time.
- Time is poorly defined even now, part 3: [tz] Mozambique officially uses LMT?
- Takeaways from SIGGRAPH 2018. (via)
- Related: Technical Papers Preview: SIGGRAPH 2018.
- Metasploit+Amazon SES, or debugging Sendmail’s SMTP Authentication. Debugging SMTP when it’s encrypted. (via)
- Dogbot.
- The Curta Calculator, which I’ve mentioned before.
- The Pudding, where I’ve linked before, but I didn’t realize how much data research/visualization there was on the site. (via)
Lots of event notices in here… Watch for what’s near you.
- The next KnoxBUG meeting is September 5th, with a Trident demo. I’ll post a reminder.
- OpenBSD.Amsterdam. Dedicated OpenBSD/vmd servers, which is a neat idea. Could probably do the same thing with vkernels.
- MeetBSD is happening October 19-20 in Santa Clara, CA. (via)
- Configuring OpenBSD – System and user config files for a more pleasant laptop. Not all of it is OpenBSD-specific. (via)
- Happy Bob’s Libtls tutorial. Also not wholly OpenBSD-specific; more libressl-specific. (via)
- AsiaBSDCon 2019 is happening March 21-24, Tokyo, Japan. (via)
- Ravenports now on gcc 8.2.
- Recent freebsd-jobs posts.
- [talk] ARM – any Tier-1 *BSD options? Nice support work from Netgate.
- libfuzzer, parts 1, 2, and 3 – a Summer of Code project for NetBSD. I linked the first one before, but hadn’t followed up until now. (via)
- OpenBSD, SpamPD and the Startup Bug. (also via)
- Public Access Multics. I am happy just typing that sentence.
tuning(7) had some updates from Matthew Dillon. It’s minor, as he says, but it’s such a useful man page I want to make sure people are reading it.
No interview this week in BSDNow 261, but links to a recent 1999 convention video, details about TrueOS/Project Trident, and the usual.
If you like pizza and BSD, and you are near Portland, Oregon, there’s an event you will enjoy tomorrow night. At least 2 of those 3 characteristics should match you. (via)
Following up on the DragonFly/Threadripper benchmarks, DragonFly now has some NUMA work to accommodate the non-uniform CPU and RAM layout on those boards.
Matthew Dillon (re?)added a sysctl: vfs.hammer2.cluster_write. It defaults to off, since HAMMER2 already writes a large buffer size and this should, in theory, not be needed. It may improve performance in some situations where there’s a lot of file creation and deletion, but that’s my theoretical guess rather than anything I’ve bennchmarked.