DragonFly now has its own ntp.org zone. What’s this mean? Nothing material, but it’s nice to do.
Sepherosa Ziehau has made changes to the initial TCP congestion window, based on a number of papers he links to in his post. The immediate effect is if you’re on DragonFly-current, you will need to do a full buildworld on your next upgrade. The long term effect could be improvements in latency by improving reactions to bufferbloat. Or not; this is pretty technical.
DragonFly has been given 6 slots (i.e. spaces for students) by Google for this year’s Summer of Code. That’s great! We have a crop of great student proposals this year, so far, so the biggest worry at this point is how to get to them all.
Julian Fagir has put together a graphical – meaning it works under curses in a terminal, or under X – interface to pkgin, the binary package manager. Can someone try it and describe how well it works?
Thanks to Sascha Wildner, the Areca RAID controller driver, arcmsr(4), now supports MSI. It should only make things better, but if it doesn’t, you can turn it off.
There’s several packages that will be removed from pkgsrc after the 2012Q2 branch, since they haven’t worked in a long time. Also, Python 2.4 has been removed from pkgsrc-current and 2.5 will go the same way before the end of the year.
The links are all over the map this week, which is fine. Enjoy!
- This makes me laugh every time. (via)
- Etsy has an astonishingly good internal development practice. And open source code? (via)
- For contrast, Facebook’s release engineering process. (via I lost it, sorry) Not as interesting but I can’t tell why.
- Mosh, a program designed for the persistence of screen but differently. (via) Dunno if it builds on DragonFly, but it looks neat.
- I’m getting more paranoid as I get older. Things like this Javascript ad injection on hotel wi-fi may be a reason. (via)
- “I just ran emacs. LOL!“
- 0x10c, a sci-fi game set in the future with spaceships running a 16-bit CPU. That you can program.
- I wish I could write here with the same mix of loathing and excitement found in this comics review. Warning: mildly… gonzo?
- The journey from user to contributor, a NYCBUG talk in mp3 form. (via)
- I’ve mentioned RetroBSD before, but here’s an example of it being installed on a Duinomite board. 2.11 BSD on a super-cheap, super-small Arduino-style board! (via) I don’t know what I’d do with it, but I want one. It even has keyboard and VGA ports.
- At some point, this CPU database will be handy. (via)
- A new, slow form of brute force ssh attack. (via) What I find interesting here is not so much the new attack itself, but Peter Hansteen’s careful gathering and analysis of data around it.
Your unrelated link of the week: memepool. It’s seen some activity lately. It was a blog before there were blogs, and I was part of it.
The next quarterly release of pkgsrc, pkgsrc-2012Q1, has been branched. I’ll start building binary packages momentarily.
The branch should show up in DragonFly git later today. Once available, you can change any references to ‘pkgsrc-2011Q4’ in /usr/Makefile to ‘pkgsrc-2012Q1’, and then to switch to it:
- cd /usr/pkgsrc
- git branch pkgsrc-2012Q1 origin/pkgsrc-2012Q1
- git checkout pkgsrc-2012Q1
- git pull
At that point, you can start building and installing newer applications. For more details on that, check the pkgsrc guide on the DragonFly website.
Note that you don’t have to do that; you can stick with the 2011Q4 (or earlier) packages you have installed now, if you don’t want to deal with software changes right now, or if you want to wait for the binary packages to become available. Upgrades/security fixes only happen for the latest quarterly release, though.
Note: don’t assume I tested this before advising you to do it, or anything like that. I mean, come on.
BSD Magazine’s April issue is out, and it’s about the Cloud. Or clouds, depending on how you look at it. Anyway, there’s several conversations in there about BSD-based hosting services, which I’m sure everyone has wished for at some time or another.
Steven Rosenberg is writing the longest DragonFly review ever. Here’s parts one, two, and three. There’s 3 more parts to come, 1 per day, so check back for the end of the story.
I have one trouble report. I need more, especially if you’re in Australia.
There’s been some discussion of packages that have been broken for a long time in pkgsrc, over on the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list. It’s interesting to see just what breaks these packages, though it still seems up in the air whether any will be removed or not. (Follow the thread if you have time.) I don’t think the discussion has ended yet.
This would be the right time for an April Fools joke… but no. It’s so common it’s hard to come up with something that won’t make people roll their eyes.
- Here’s an Ultimate SSH Hacks article that isn’t actually that ultimate, or hacky. However, I found it via this Slashdot article that had a comment with this nifty trick for having a single-file Unix-portable ssh link.
- Design Disease. (via) I can sympathize. If you can’t tell what he’s objecting to in the pictures, consider yourself lucky. There’s probably a similar symptom that makes people collect old computer equipment, which I daresay a few readers are vulnerable to.
- Legit, Git workflow for humans. Slightly more sensical syntax for git, as far as I can tell. (via)
- Michael Lucas is dedicated to writing. Really dedicated.
- Also, Michael Lucas and The Value of Tech Books. He’s very right about man pages; they’re great and also not great.
- How DNS Changer was taken down and victims redirected. (via) I link to it because Paul Vixie, the author, also wrote the cron program you’re running right now. Really, look at the end of the man page.
- Look at what’s happened to DuckDuckGo’s traffic stats! (via) I’ve linked to the search engine before, and I know there’s at least a few readers who like it.
- “Let’s kill all proprietary drivers for good” (PDF, via several places) It makes me happy that it talks about drivers and acknowledges the existence of BSD. Driver unification would be great, though it really needs someone solidly behind it as with any project.
- “The problem is compounded by the way Linux has grown over the years into an ungainly edifice, built upon thousands of individual packages of computer code that have been stapled together.”
Your unrelated link of the day: a Space Shuttle launch from the point of view of the booster rocket. (via) Remember when humanity had reusable spaceships?