Not as much pulled directly from the source lists this time, which is good.
- It’s no surprise that I would say this, but: it makes me happy to see other BSD projects doing regular summaries, like this one or that one for PC-BSD or this general BSD summary.
- A random PC-BSD review found via Google Search.
- PC-BSD 10 test images are available. I wonder if that’s related to the eleventy-billion commits lately out of the PC-BSD Github account?
- OpenBSD/CARP, Cisco, and schadenfreude.
- The FreeBSD Foundation’s annual fundraising is on; they have already made it well along, but there’s still lots of dollars to go.
- OpenBSD now has automatic disk mounting.
- g4u 2.6 has entered beta. It’s “Ghost for Unix”, which gives you an idea of what it does.
- EuroBSDCon 2013 DevSummit video recordings are up. I said there would be video all week, didn’t I?
- Using OpenBSD with Vagrant and Veewee. Those tool names sound somewhat rude.
- pbulk bulk builds for pkgsrc made easy. I was working on a script like this.
- Cross–pollination makes me happy.
- svn in FreeBSD is updated.
- FreeBSD supports the MediaTek/Ralink RT5370/RT5372 chipset.
- nvi still gets updates.
- FreeBSD supports the (takes deep breath) Freescale Vybrid Family VF600 heterogeneous
ARM Cortex-A5/M4 SoC. (exhales) - FreeBSD has an IEEE Organizationally Unique Identifier. Not sure what it means.
- NetBSD has a new game, hals_end. If you saw 2001 the movie, you may guess the contents.
- OpenBSD has a new ugl driver for the Genesys Logic GL620USB-A
USB host-to-host link cable.
The IEEE identifier is a fancy way of saying: they were assigned a block of MAC addresses.
Apropos of g4u and Things You’d Think Would Be Convenient By Now But Aren’t, apparently the answer to “Oops, how do I extract something from this gzip’d full disk backup that I just made to the only disk in the vicinity that would be large enough to hold the image uncompressed?” involves The Sleuthkit/Autopsy browser plus the “ewf” tools.
(The current tools for the ‘open’ AFF format apparently try to seek so can’t convert via stdin or named pipe, but ewfacquirestream for the ‘proprietary’ format still works.)
I don’t think that implicates GNU/Linux specifically but that’s where I happened to pick that fight. After confirming that it appeared to be sort of possible in a roundabout way (and converting the “.ddimg.gz” to an EWF-format image) it fell to the bottom of the to-do list, so it’s not exactly 100% confirmed, but hopefully this saves someone else a lost night of Googling.
This trivia was inspired by some HP desktops at work coming with utility stuff on their EFI system partitions that can’t actually be conveniently re-downloaded from HP (at least if you’re not using Windows, which for all I know might now require some of that to boot). Odds of actually needing it for anything? Low, but an argument in favor of making a full-disk backup before blowing out the preloads… which I did… and in favor of making a *convenient* backup of just the relatively tiny ESP, oops.
This can also go on my permanent Internet record as the nasty letter to HP I never bothered to write.
“ghosting for unix”