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The best way to fix up pkgsrc…

… is to make its patches unnecessary, by getting the changes needed for any program to compile on DragonFly built right into the program.  (Often called “pushing patches upstream”)  That usually means creating a patch and then tracking down the program authors to get them to include those changes in the next release of a project.  That tracking down can be a majority of the work.  In that case: thanks, Rumko!

Update: Also, thanks, Matthias Rampke!  He did the same thing for pcc.

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Anatomy of a Summer of Code proposal

“Arjun S R” wrote to the kernel@ mailing list asking about the Google Summer of Code projects for DragonFly that he found interesting.  Samuel Greear has a response so detailed it includes links to a similar project proposed last year.  It also works as a good model for how much thought needs to go in before you start.

Update: there’s more, plus some pertinent advice!

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Bridge building better

Matthew Dillon’s improved bridging to the point where you can now modify the MAC address of the bridge and most everything, including ARP, will come from it correctly.   It’s even possible to bond 2 or more interfaces together, with the side effect of dragonflybsd.org having a lot more bandwidth.

Update: the config for his bonded interfaces has been posted as an example.

Update 2: More notes here.

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DragonFly network handicap

I posted before about a move to use AT&T’s U-Verse fiber/DSL product for dragonflybsd.org’s connection.  It led Matt Dillon to try to add features to compensate for the service’s shortcomings, but it’s still problematic.  He’s written up just how broken U-Verse is, calling it “almost a complete failure” as a business connection.  The bulk of the problems seem to come from the 2Wire DSL modem supplied by AT&T.

Remember when the Internet used to be the place to find long technical writeups of a product directly from people who were using it?  Much of that has disappeared into comment forms and ephemeral Facebook posts.  That’s too bad.

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Lazy Reading

You can probably infer the new (to me) blog I found this week from some of the links…

  • Adding IPv6 to a FreeBSD Mail/Web Server – from Michael Lucas, repeat BSD author.  I link to this because we’re all going to have to do something similar in the next year or so, I bet..
  • A visual guide to TMUX, part 1 and part 2.  tmux has usually been introduced to me as “It’s BSD-licensed and not screen”, which is good, but not compelling on its own.  The first of the articles linked here goes over the comparative differences in some detail.  (via)
  • Speaking of screen-ish things, do you leave an irssi session running in screen so that you can rejoin IRC conversations at any time?  I sure do.  Sometimes I even reconnect through ConnectBot on my Android phone.  There’s now a Connectbot variation for irssi, just for people who do such a thing.  Don’t forget: #dragonflybsd on EFNet.
  • Also still on the topic: forgetting to use screen and then being stuck with a long-running process is lousy.  There’s ways to deal with it, though.  (via, from a blogroll link)
  • Hey, it’s neat to see a new business built on BSD – OpenBSD, in this case: Tunnelr.  (via)
  • We’re still doing great in terms of pkgsrc packages building successfully on DragonFly.
  • An hour+ recording of the recent NYCBUG meeting about BSD networking is online.  (Link is to a MP3 – via)
  • How not to comment code.
  • AT&T -> BSD -> AT&T.
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VirtIO-net drivers disappear

The virtio network drivers for DragonFly (mentioned previously here, here, and here) went away.  Apparently the original FreeBSD code was not supposed to be available publicly, under a BSD license, and it’s having a knock-on effect for DragonFly and probably NetBSD.

(virtio drivers, if this is an unfamiliar term, are for devices in virtual environments, as when DragonFly is running under VMWare or something similar.)