As part of a larger discussion on users@, I wondered what can be done to reduce power usage. There’s different options available, but it doesn’t matter much unless you have multiple servers.
Peter Avalos has updated libarchive and bsdtar to version 1.3.1. This leads to the question: should GNU tar be replaced with bsdtar, in DragonFly?
The tersely named chsh command is what changes a user’s shell: Gergo Szakal has the best description of several on how to use it.
Matthew Dillon has added documentation of how to use cpdup for incremental backups, and some scripts that show useful examples.
BSDCertification.org has the results of their “Test Delivery Survey” available as a PDF. It “summarizes the results from a recent survey of potential testing candidates to determine their geographic locations, the price they are willing to pay to take an examination, and their thoughts on various methods for delivering IT certification exams.”
It’s mind-bogglingly complete like many of their reports, though I question the idea of surveying to see what price people will want – the only price anyone can agree on is ‘free’; nobody volunteers to pay more money, no matter how realistic the price.
Welcome to the newest committer: Victor Balada Diaz.
OnLAMP.com has a 3-page interview of Charles M. Hannum, recently known for describing NetBSD as ‘stagnant‘.  DragonFly gets a slight mention.
A conversation about NFs led Matthw Dillon to give a short description of locking under NFS for most any operating system: generally broken. DragonFly clusters ought to, in contrast, work.
After making some adjustments, Matthew Dillon created a new test program for his virtual memory page tables.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has imported CVS 1.12.13.
Matthew Dillon warns that he is doing some virtual kernel memory mapping work; it may destabilize the bleeding-edge of DragonFly.
Are you a DragonFly user who can give a talk at NYCBSDCon, October 28th-29th? If so, contact Matthew Dillon.
As Oliver Fromme found, bsdstats.org has a script that reports on BSD usage. It’s easy enough to run on your own, though it could be added to the base DragonFly system. (which would no doubt affect the per-flavor BSD scores on the site.)
Want something to do? Bring dcron to feature-parity with vixiecron (check end of post), or shave some time off the DragonFly boot process.
Adrian Nida was looking for a ‘how-to’ for Postgres. Petr Janda supplied one.
If you’re unfamilar with Postgres, Postgres is to MySQL as BSD is to Linux.
UnixReview.com has a light week, this week: Exploring the RFID+ Certification and a review of the book CCNA Official Exam Certification Library.
To go with an earlier post about rc and launchd, Rahul Siddharthan described a similar tool from Ubuntu Linux: Upstart.
Strangely, one of the listed reasons for Upstart is that Apple’s launchd isn’t free enough in GPL terms, but it’d probably be easier (in licensing terms, thanks to the BSD license) to integrate launchd in DragonFly than the ‘more free’ Upstart.
Sepherosa Ziehau has a description of how to set up your DragonFly box as an 802.1x client, whether wired or unwired.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has fixed a recently-discovered BIND security problem.