March 2013 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2013/03/312013/03/30

Lazy Reading for 2013/03/31

I hope you like reading; there’s some very meaty links this week. Go get a cup of tea and settle in. You drink tea, don’t you? You ought to.

Reading about KDE’s repository near-meltdown makes me think we need more checks for DragonFly. We have the advantage of Hammer, of course, which would help in the same way that the linked article names ZFS as a ‘fix’. (via multiple places)
We know that Apple will reject apps it disagrees with. Google also will do so. Has there ever been a program rejected from pkgsrc or (FreeBSD/OpenBSD) ports on content grounds? Not that I know of – anyone remember differently? I’d argue that’s a favorable point for the BSD packaging systems, though it may just be that no application has tested those boundaries yet.
Portscanning all IPv4 addresses on the planet. Possibly the largest distributed effort ever? The detail in the maps and returned services is especially interesting. (via)
Scale Fail, a Youtube video of a 2011 talk about screwing up your services. Mostly about the humor, but the underlying points are valid. (via #dragonflybsd IRC)
There’s still improvement possible to fsck, apparently based on this. That’s UFS2 fsck.
What is your most productive shortcut with Vim? A very thorough explanation of verbs, marks, and registers. Holy cow, I wish I had known about ‘: … v’ before. It’s long, but worth it. (via)
Matthew Garret’s description of Secure Boot vs. Restricted Boot with UEFI, (via a coworker who went to Libreplanet 2013). I’m still not sure what DragonFly will need to do about this.
I missed mentioning this earlier: 20 years of NetBSD. We’re coming up on 10 soon.
Dragonfly drones. Unrelated except for name.
That guy who starts to froth madly every time BSD is mentioned on Phoronix is still there (see comments).
Mainframe computer supercut. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Tom Spurgeon of the Comics Reporter asked people for their lists of webcomics that could go in a ‘Hall of Fame’. The resulting list is a lot of really, really good material. Go use up a few hours reading.

2013/03/30

A 3.4 release clarification

I saw this Hacker News post and figured I should emphasize: pkgsrc is still going to be available in the 3.4 release of DragonFly; we’re not suddenly switching to dports. I don’t want anyone to think they’re going to have to rip out all their packages and go to a new, untried system, all at once.

2013/03/302013/03/29

Pre-release images for 3.4

If you were thinking, “Hey, I’d like to try an early version of DragonFly 3.4 before it’s released”, I’ll just point you at the recent daily snapshots of 3.3. These are close enough to a release candidate, I think.

2013/03/29

Planning for DragonFly 3.4

The next release of DragonFly will be 3.4, and it’s probably going to be mid-April.

2013/03/28

Cons and more cons

EuroBSDCon 2013 is being held in Malta at the end of September, and the Call for Papers has just gone out. BSDCan 2013, which is the tenth BSDCan (!) and happening in May, just opened up registration. Same for PGCon.

2013/03/262013/03/26

DragonFlyBSD on OpenGrok

OpenGrok is a source browser that I have not used extensively, but many people say is a great tool. The same people say it’s difficult to run. Zafer Aydogan just posted that DragonFly’s source is available now from his perfectly-functional OpenGrok installation.

(I’ll put it in the links sidebar here, too.)

2013/03/252013/03/25

Book publishing experiences

Michael W. Lucas posted about his results selling an early edition of his recent DNSSEC book through Leanpub. He lays out all the numbers in detail, the sort of thing I love to see. The idea of self-publishing and open source go hand in hand, but the idea of that selling is often talked about in speculative terms rather than concrete. He’s now opening his own direct sales store, which hopefully means more direct BSD material.

2013/03/242013/03/23

Lazy Reading for 2013/03/24

It’s still snowing in my area, which is unusual. And great!

An IBM Selectric being gutted, in stop motion.
Apple is Losing the War – Of Words. I’m not interested in it for Apple, but rather the casual reference to the huge quantity of astroturfing going on, all the time, from major tech companies.
Following up on my earlier tweetspam post: World’s Best Spam. Remember, recommendations from others is the most effective persuasion method to get people to buy, so there’s a big economic incentive to create positive recommendations. (via)
Related: The Economics of Spam. (via)
se, a modernized, screen-oriented ed. (via)
Where the symbols “+” and “-” came from. (via)
A Partial History of Headphones.
Geometric shapes in Latex. I’m sure someone will find this useful. (via)
“The Kung Fu Killing Machine DragonFly” See the second cover. I have this actual series in paper form; it’s great. (via)
That Afrodisiac comic from the previous link is available from the publisher; there’s a PDF preview.
Continuing – the best blaxplotation homage ever is Black Dynamite.
I never promised I’d stay on topic here.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: French cartoonist Boulet knocks it out of the park again.

2013/03/232013/03/24

A short npf note

NetBSD is using/will be using? ‘npf’, a new ~~version of pf~~ similarly-named-but completely-different firewall from pf. Hubert Feyrer put together a bunch of links talking about it. I link this because DragonFly is using a version of pf equivalent to what OpenBSD 4.8, and there’s been some discussion of what to do next; it appears FreeBSD and NetBSD are forking off separately from OpenBSD’s version.

Update: npf and pf share 2 letters in the name and nothing else, as Joerg told me – corrected.

2013/03/22

DragonFly and spam

Hey, look, DragonFly BSD showing in tweetspam! Don’t bother following the tweeted links; they don’t have anything useful. It’s entertaining to see the structure and coding of these bots; they’re no horse_ebooks, of course.

2013/03/202013/03/20

Mailing lists interruption

There’s an as-yet-undiagnosed problem with the @dragonflybsd.org mailing lists; you won’t see any mail from them right now. I don’t have an ETA for a fix because I don’t know the underlying cause yet…

Update: Fixed; I think – dragonflybsd.org DNS server was not responding, and it had a ripple effect.

2013/03/202013/03/20

Summer of Code and DragonFly as of right now

I’ve put in an application for DragonFly to be a Google Summer of Code mentoring organization for the 6th year in a row – we have mentors lined up, so we’ll know by the Friday after next. See my post on kernel@ for pretty much what I just said.

2013/03/20

Pentest ebook for sale

If you are a BSD Magazine subscriber (meaning you provided your email to download a free issue), you can get a 20% discount on a security e-book from Craig Wright. As the promtional email said, ‘Write to editors@bsdmag.org with “BSD ebook” in the title of message to get the special code’. I have no idea of the contents; just the existence of the sale.

2013/03/192013/03/19

A new OpenBSD identd

OpenBSD has a new identd daemon. Is identd used for anything other than verification when connecting to an IRC network? I’ve never seen it in another context.

2013/03/192013/03/19

Another sh(1) update

Peter Avalos has committed another batch of updates to sh(1), from FreeBSD. I was going to comment on how strange it was to see software getting updated so many years later; you’d think everything there was to update for /bin/sh had been done at this point. Digging casually, the oldest bit on sh that I can find is from 1991 – 22 years old. The man page mentions a rewrite in 1989 based on System V Release 4 UNIX, and there were versions of sh all the way back to version 1.

Here’s a trivia question – what’s the oldest Unix utility, and what’s the oldest code still in use? I don’t know the answer.

2013/03/182013/03/18

Default PHP in pkgsrc moving to 5.4

Right now, if you install PHP, or something dependent on PHP, from pkgsrc, you get PHP 5.3. The default for pkgsrc will move to 5.4, though I assume that’s going to be after the pkgsrc-2013Q1 release scheduled for the end of this month. I don’t know the upgrade path, but it sounds like 5.3 is on the way to retirement, in any case.

2013/03/182013/03/17

pkgsrc-2013Q1 freeze starts

The freeze for pkgsrc-2013Q1 has started; expect the next release at the end of the month. (Ignore the subject line).

2013/03/172013/03/16

Lazy Reading for 2013/03/17

You know what stinks? I find a really cool thing online somewhere, early in the week, or even in a previous week, like today’s unrelated link. Between me finding it and this always-on-Sunday post, other people encounter it, the link gets reposted everywhere, and it’s old hat by the time you see it here. Yeah, I’m complaining like it’s hipster linking!

Has anyone noticed how there’s been an explosion in nontraditional peripherals lately? Seriously, follow those links. I know there’s more.
A Roguelike Primer. An excellent overview of a lot of different roguelikes. I didn’t know NetHack had an isometric view. (via)
There’s a programming language called Quylthulg. That makes me happy, in a D&D/roguelike kind of way.
Abandoned Apples. I feel bad about the Apple ][ units, and the fatmacs. (via I forget)
yes `yes no`. The comments on the linking page note how the linking description is all wrong (and here’s corrections), but one comment is fun: shell Russian Roulette: [ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo *Click* (via)
A note about Google Reader’s demise from an interview with one of the creators. It strikes me that there aren’t more people mad that RSS feeds are hard to find. There’s lots of conversations on Twitter and Facebook and Google Plus and other places, and I can’t see them without getting an account for each, and logging in. The overall effect of this separation is that it’s hard to follow any one source.
The Thing, an art BBS.
Here’s a chart of possible Google Reader replacements, plus my query earlier this week let to a number of comment suggestions. tt-rss looks like a good candidate, because I don’t have to worry about someone deciding not to run it anymore. There’s also newsbeuter, though maybe that’s too minimal.

Your unrelated link of the week: I almost can’t tell this is a parody. Actually, it’s more like a double level of parody. Seen on this inexplicable, wonderful Tumblog; found via arts inscrutable.

Bonus link: Dog Snack Episode 3.

2013/03/14

BSD Magazine: March

The March issue of BSD Magazine is out, with topics like handling crash dumps. Apparently April’s issue is going to be all FreeNAS.

2013/03/13

RSS reader recommendations

Google Reader, which is what I use to track as much BSD stuff as possible, is being retired as of July 1. I need a new RSS reader – any recommendations? Something that I can access from multiple places (i.e. online app) is best.