This week’s BSDNow has a lot of “You will not regret knowing this” material – ZFS performance measurement, 2FA SSH, and using Netcat in various ways.
Matthew Dillon’s moved tty_token from a global to per-CPU token in most cases in DragonFly. This is good for performance as with any global->local shift, but I can’t tell you what aspect it improves.
Did you use the digi(4), rp(4) and si(4) serial device drivers in DragonFly? I don’t think so, but you definitely can’t now.
SemiBUG is having the monthly meeting tonight. The presenter is Nick Holland, talking about SPECTRE mitigations in OpenBSD, and similar mechanisms. If you are near, go.
If you are running DragonFly in a virtual environment, ‘ddegroot’ has put together a virtio_balloon driver for handling memory usage. (An explanation of the term) Try it if you can; he wants testers.
Here’s your reminder: MeetBSD is happening October 19-20 in Santa Clara, CA. That’s the end of this week. Go, if you are near.
A good, oddball week.
- Happy #CIDRDay!
- Exploring OmniOS in a VM.
- Endless amounts of Commodore 64 games, in-browser. (via many places)
- Dangit, I missed posting about the Roguelike Celebration. (via)
- Software Heritage, archiving code. (thanks, Siju)
- Classic computers in Lego. Cuter than I thought possible. (via)
- Spleen – Monospaced bitmap fonts. A teeny terminal font, working down to 5×8. Designed on OpenBSD? I don’t know the tools used. (thanks, Frederic)
- Engineered Arts, a company that builds robots for interaction. What a fun job to have! (via)
- Bellingcat’s Online Investigation Toolkit. (via)
- 2018 IFComp entries. (via)
- everything you ever wanted to know about terminals (via)
- Oddness: the zoneinfo file on your computer right now could be affected by Earth speeding up.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Draculagate, a book funded by Kickstarter. Watch the video.
Still playing catchup with links.
- FreeBSD and OpenBSD fundraisers from Michael W. Lucas.
- One-liners for submitting your dmesg to NYCBUG. There’s other versions in that thread; I linked to the last described.
- Configuration of OpenSMTPD to relay mails to outbound smtp server.
- Let’s Try on OpenBSD: CrossCode and Stardew Valley Multiplayer.
- Port for endless sky submitted to ports@. I’ve linked this game once before; it resembles Escape Velocity, which resembles Taipan, my historic favorite game.
- MidnightBSD reaches 1.0. (via)
- pfSense and Google Cloud Identity.
- iXSystems and the Chinese hardware hack.
- Process title and missing memory space.
- Valuable News – 2018/10/07.
- Running FreeBSD on OSX using xhyve, a port of bhyve.
- AF3e ship date and next FreeBSD talk.
- FreeNAS 11.2-BETA2 is available!
- EuroBSDCon 2018 Recap.
- September 2018 FreeBSD Foundation Update. (via)
- GhostBSD tested on ThinkPad T410. (via)
- What is ZFS? Why are People Crazy About it? (via)
- Login_duress: A BSD authentication module for duress passwords. Password as command. (via)
- Porting Keybase to NetBSD. (via)
- pkgsrc on SmartOS by Jonathan Perkin. (via)
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 17 – Automount Removable Media.
- unixpackages.com – a commercial service for packaged software. It’s ports or pkg or pkgsrc, but just for Solaris 2.5+, and it costs money. Technically not a BSD, but the contrast with what we get for free is interesting.
- Installing Hugo and hosting website. On OpenBSD. (via)
In case it’s useful to you, here’s several laptop recommendations for DragonFly.
BSDNow 267 is posted a bit early this week, with an interview of Michael W. Lucas, about his upcoming Absolute FreeBSD 3rd edition and local BUG.
I’m posting a day early cause of time zone difference: there’s a meeting of the Polish BSD User Group tomorrow.
Michael W. Lucas is giving a talk at mug.org tonight; he may have physical copies of his new Absolute FreeBSD, 3rd edition available. Go, if you are near. Pro tip: If you are late but still want to catch up to Michael, look for the nearest gelato shop.
Matthew Dillon recently fixed a TRIM bug, where a TRIM command was being issued unconditionally, regardless of the mount flag, and duplicating the action if it was set normally. It’s fixed now. This would only have any significant slowdown on UFS, which means it would only affect installworld – the rest of your mounted volumes are HAMMER, right?
Old computer theme this week. That may be more of a constant.
- PiDP-11: Recreating the PDP-11/70. (via)
- Fonts on Unix. (via) The source comments mention Go Mono a number of times; new to me.
- Commodore 64 left outside for over a decade! Could it still work?? Of course the answer is eventually yes or why link to it? (via)
- Standard Notes, an open source alternative to other notes apps. (via)
- Two Bit History, computer history by decade. I’ve linked to some of the individual articles before.
- The Story of the Polysynth, video. (via)
- Colour Without Colour: Apple II Computer Graphics. (via)
- The Apple II Source Code for the LOGO Language Found. (via)
- STAR, an Arduino Robot Recreation. Creepy crawler.
- Full Table. Down the rabbit hole of images. (via)
- Rules for Online Sanity, a PDF. (via)
- SGI collectors.
- Bad relay: Fixing the card reader for a vintage IBM 1401 mainframe.
- Inform: Past, Present, Future. (via)
Still catching up on links.
- garbage 43. The RSS feed may have changed? I should have seen this directly. (via)
- EuroBSDCon 2018 and NetBSD sanitizers. (via)
- EuroBSDCon 2018 travel report and obligatory pics. (via)
- NetBSD curses ripoffline improvements. (via)
- Installing Hugo and publishing Hugo web-pages on OpenBSD server. (via)
- NetBSD8.0 on UEFI Bootloader and Windows Tablet. (via)
- NetBSD/arm64 on QEMU. (via)
- A Brief History of the BSD Fast Filesystem. (via)
- Old xcb libraries removed in OpenBSD.
- EuroBSDCon 2018 report.
- Announcing the pkgsrc-2018Q3 release. (via)
- Debian on OpenBSD vmd (without qemu or another debian system) (via)
- Installing Gophernicus in OpenBSD. I just like the name. (via)
- Valuable News – 2018/09/29.
- Polish BSD User Group, a summary. There’s a meeting soon, too.
- Manage ”nice” priority of daemons on OpenBSD.
Something I didn’t know existed but makes sense now that I do: a virtualized randomness device, added to DragonFly. Entropy is usually provided through hardware, so of course you’d need something for it in a VM.
BSDNow 266 is up, and while the title is “File Type History”, there’s a number of “this is how I use BSD” stories on there, which I always find interesting.
6:30 tonight: NYCBUG’s monthly meeting, with the topic of Subdo. I don’t know what that is, but we all can find out: tonight’s meeting will be streamed.
To add to my ongoing slow fiddle with DragonFly: I’ve noted how to install in Hyper-V, and how to use Cygwin to connect to run X. Here’s another step: if you are using PuTTY/Pageant, as I am, and want to connect, Cygwin/X needs to be told to listen on TCP. Find your /usr/bin/startxwin file in Cygwin and change serverargs to:
serverargs=”-listen tcp”
And then in PuTTY, under Connection -> Session -> X11, check “Enable X11 forwarding”, set X display location to “:0.0”, and locate your .Xauthority file. It will be in your user’s Cygwin home directory. (tips found here)
plink can be used to create shortcuts – open an xterm directly into your DragonFly VM from your Windows desktop, for instance, with a shortcut that runs ‘plink <sessionname> xterm’.
If you are running a slightly newer version of Windows and aren’t trying to accommodate a ‘legacy’ PuTTY install, using Windows Subsystem for Linux may work better; I have not yet tried.
There’s a KnoxBUG BSD user group meeting in Knoxville, Tennessee, with the topic of “Real-world Performance Advantages of NVDIMM and NVMe: A Case Study with OpenZFS“, presented by Nick Principe. It’s happening at 6 PM, tonight. They have the prettiest logo of any BUG that I’ve seen.