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In Other BSDs: 2013/08/31

I need to update this post during the week as I see stuff, or else I spend an hour rushing to get it all together before Satuday.  I need to start watching PC-BSD src changes, too.

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Deduplication benefits, again

Remember my recent disk issues?  As a side effect of protecting myself, I have a good example of deduplication results.

I have a second disk in my server, with slave Hammer PFSs to match what’s on my main disk.  I hadn’t put them in fstab, so they weren’t getting mounted and updated.  I got them re-created, but they were nearly full.  Here’s an abbreviated df, from which you should be able to tell which drives I have :

Size   Used   Avail   Capacity
929G   729G   200G    78%    /slave/slavehome
929G   729G   200G    78%    /slave/slavevar
929G   729G   200G    78%    /slave/slaveusr
929G   729G   200G    78%    /slave/slaveslash

That 78% is how full the Hammer volume was.  I turned on Hammer deduplication, since it’s off by default.  The very next day:

Size   Used   Avail   Capacity
929G   612G   318G    66%    /slave/slavehome 
929G   612G   318G    66%    /slave/slavevar 
929G   612G   318G    66%    /slave/slaveusr 
929G   612G   318G    66%    /slave/slaveslash

It’s a 1 terabyte disk, and I gained more than 10% back – That’s 100g of disk space that I gained overnight.  There might be more tomorrow, given that it was all of 5 minutes of dedup work.

This won’t surprise you if you’ve seen previous deduplication links here, like my previous results or some real-world tests.  It’s still great.  I’d suggest turning it on if you haven’t – hammer viconfig the appropriate PFS and uncomment the dedup line.

 

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DragonFly and Summer of Code, week 10

Only 3 more Mondays left in the student work part of Summer of Code!  Unsurprisingly, it seems the students are mostly in the cleanup phase – as it should be.

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Lazy Reading for 2013/08/25

This week, I’m opinionated on every link.

  • An 80s computer ad that got almost everything correct.  It used to be sci-fi environments were super-clean – now they’re dirty, with ubiquitous electronics.  That’s something that could be picture-blogged to prove, but I ain’t doing it.
  • Bunnie Huang does “exit interviews” when he stops using equipment.  Given his electronics knowledge, he goes into a lot of detail, including pictures through a microscope.  Speaking of this, how has my ancient HTC Incredible survived 3 years of trips into a salt mine?  I don’t know.
  • InterTwinkles, open source group decision making software.  Don’t know how well it works, but it certainly seems like the right idea.  (via)
  • Turning the Apple //e into a Lisp machine, part 1.  They don’t actually get to the Lisp machine part, but it talks about how Apple computers could load data through the audio jack.  I remember doing that with a tape player, too.  It sucked.  (via)
  • kOS.  It’s so minimal that I am not sure what it can do or how to use it, but it’s also so minimal that I’m sure there must be something to it.  (via)
  • Building a Chording Keyboard.  I’ve mentioned the Microwriter and Twiddler before, but this article goes into a lot of detail about the actual construction of a home-made unit.  (also via)
  • Book review: The Healthy Programmer.  It may or may not make you exercise, but it will make you feel a little guilty about sitting and reading the web like you are doing right now.
  • Hyphen, en dash, em dash, minus.  So few people know there’s a difference.  (via)
  • ASCII Art.  History of, examples, and so on.  (via, with video)
  • Five Useful Git Tips.  Git tips come up all the time, but this one is interesting because it’s using “showterm“, which lets you make text-based animations?  movies? to show a work process in a terminal.  I think I may have linked to something similar before, but this is good.
  • How to Avoid the Emacs Pinky Problem.  A neat idea, but some of the suggestions are actually going to make it worse.  (via)
  • Vim: revisited.  Decent ideas, and the links at the end are good further reading.  There, I’ve posted on both sides of the editor issue.  (via)
  • The problem with Vim.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: the Scary Godmother Doll.  One of my favorite illustrators, building a doll.  I met the creator years ago in Pittsburgh; she is an astonishingly energetic person.

 

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In Other BSDs: 2013/08/24

I hope I’m catching the interesting stuff; I’m only reading the src changes.

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Details on dragonflybsd.org hardware

If you’re curious about the hardware being used for the colocated dragonflybsd.org servers (this includes the website, the repository, the mailing lists, dports build machines, etc.), here’s the ‘MicroCloud’ product page.  DragonFly’s model was purchased from iXsystems.   Apparently those Haswell processors have a fantastic power consumption to performance ratio.  (via)

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Lazy Reading for 2013/08/18

Had this one done before the last Lazy Reading.  There are so many things to see and think and do in a day, and they’re not even all on the Internet.  You get only the Internet ones here, though.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Boulet’s Long Journey.  Get ready for a lot of scrolling.  I know there’s a lot of really good French comics that I don’t see just because I don’t speak the language.  (This one’s in English, but the cartoonist is French.)

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In Other BSDs: 2013/08/17

Not just source links, this week:

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Wanted: a Mailman patch

One of the most-requested items for the DragonFly mailing list archives is reverse sorting by date.  Mailman, which is what’s being used now for archiving, doesn’t have a ‘native’ way to do that.  Has anyone seen a trick/patch to get that to happen?  I already patch Mailman to get the message date to show in listings.

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A book review somewhere else: Network Security Monitoring

Michael W. Lucas has a review up of Richard Bejtlich’s “The Practice of Network Security Monitoring“.  Both of them are long-term BSD users, and Bejtlich, if I remember correctly, was part of the design of Capsicum, the security framework that is serving as a Summer of Code project for DragonFly right now.  So it’s worth looking at his book.  And/or looking at his blog, for those who want more.