Let’s see… 3 digits in the episode number, so they’re planning to make at least 973 more BSD-related pun titles. Anyway, BSDNow’s latest episode has an interview with Joe Marcus Clark, along with more material including this item that I missed, of getting some ancient hardware to run OpenBSD.
pfi, the automated installer that nobody knows about, now supports installing an authorized_keys file as part of an install. Credit goes to Alex Hornung for adding the functionality.
Sascha Wildner brought in ACPICA 20140214, and his commit message has a list of the updates.
The DragonFly Mail Agent is being suggested as a possible sendmail replacement for FreeBSD.
I’m helping out at the BSD Events website. If there’s upcoming BSD-linked events, please tell me. Speaking of which: the call for papers for EuroBSDCon 2014 is out, as is the BSDCan 2014 schedule.
I am late posting this: the most recent episode of BSDNow has, along with the regular array of items, an interview of Chris Buechler, of the commercial support company behind pfSense.
DragonFly wasn’t accepted for Summer of Code, which frankly I expected to have happen last year – we’ve been participating every year since 2008. However, FreeBSD and (for the first time) OpenBSD are listed as participating mentoring institutions, so you can still get your BSD/GSoC going.
I’ve tagged version 3.6.1 of DragonFly, and built ISO/img files of it. They should be available by now on mirrors if you need them, or you can just upgrade as normal. See the linked tag commit message for what’s changed.
Pardon me as I wander through a lot of topics.
- Where to keep your pubic hair. I worry about this (syntax, not hair storage) when I’m writing titles here. (via)
- Top 100 most searched for out-of-print books in 2013. This is a UK site, so it’s UK-specific, I assume. I am thinking of it because I saw copies of the entertainingly illustrated “UNIX System Administrator’s Handbook” at NYCBSDCon. I have copies of the 3rd edition; the 4th edition in print now is the “UNIX and Linux…” version, and I don’t know if the illustrations survived. (via)
- Also found while looking at the previous links: UNIX Systems Advanced Administration and Management Handbook. No idea of the contents, since it’s nearly 20 years old, but the cover hints that it might be interesting more for the style of how it was assembled and what it covers, rather than the technical aspects. I am entertained by ‘first edition’ AD&D manuals the same way.
- It’s about time. DDOS attacks and NTP. A summary of the recent trend.
- Ten Things We Forgot to Monitor. The authors very kindly include the scripts they use to monitor these things now. (via)
- Less Commonly Used UNIX Commands. From a variety of places, so only a subset of this list is available on any given system. (via)
- The Death of Xenix. That was Microsoft UNIX, for those who don’t remember. (via)
- Unix: Using pushd and popd for faster navigation. One of those habits I’ve never been able to establish.
- Introducing BPasswd2. By Alex Hornung, one of the DragonFly developers. I’ve been meaning to post this for some time.
- Typeset In The Future, examining typefaces all through a sci-fi movie, down to the buttons. (via)
- World War G. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Top Shelf is now selling their excellent comics without DRM, so they can be stored/read however you like.
Read the first item, if nothing else.
- You may have seen that Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19B; take a look at the graph here to see that WhatsApp has more than double the user count of Facebook, and then look at these two posts on NYCBUG talk noting that WhatsApp uses FreeBSD to serve all those people.
- DiscoverBSD’s 2014/02/17 summary.
- DiscoverBSD has an interview of Kent Riboe, maintainer of BSDEater.org, which appears to be a BSD RSS feed aggregator. I find the last sentence problematic: “…people shouldn’t need to read first half on one site and then click it to read the following part somewhere else.” I’d like people to read my words on my site, at some point, especially given that 75% of the text on bsdeater.org appear to be me.
- GNOME 3 on OpenBSD, on Undeadly. There’s more effort than I realized being put into this.
- How to build FreeBSD/EC2 images. (via)
- Synopsys bought Coverity. Coverity provided free source code analysis for FreeBSD; no idea if that will continue. (via swildner on #dragonflybsd)
- PC-BSD needs testers for a new upgrade method.
- Goodbye nve(4), hello nfe(4).
- FreeBSD has Synchronous Audio Interface (SAI) support. (Freescale-specific)
- NetBSD has imported SQLite 3.8.3.1.
- Some discussion of OpenBSD rootkits, or the lack thereof.
- Power failure resistance.
- LIBC_BUILTINS is no longer used in pkgsrc.
Grep /var/run/dmesg.boot for PMM, and if it turns up, Sepherosa Ziehau has a patch he’d like you to try.
See the announcement, and the commit. I’m not totally sure what this affects.
If you have i915 chipset-based video on DragonFly, and you get a “Output xxx has no Monitor section” complaint in your xorg logs, look at this fix using xrandr.
Here’s two recent changes in DragonFly that may interest you if you have an AMD processor: Compute Units are now supported, thanks to Mihai Carabas, and Imre Vadasz ported over km(4), for temperature monitoring on 14h and 15h CPUs. I’m still not totally clear on what Compute Units are.
I was remiss in not posting this before it happened, but Issac (.ike) Levy of NYCBUG went to Tokyo to talk about the translation efforts for pfSense, on the 17th. He posted a summary of his talk and slides.
Normally I would be posting this in an “In Other BSDs” Saturday item, but the summary page includes links on Open Network Hardware, which .ike and I talked about at NYCBSDCon. I wanted to create a separate post for it, but he’s got all the links piled in with his talk summary already.
The hardware I want to see as a real product is the Intel ONP Switch Reference Design. (PDF) Having a device that looks like a switch but is actually a normal computer with a lot of network ports – that can run BSD – opens up a huge range of network possibilities.
As I mentioned on kernel@, I’m going to roll a point release of DragonFly soon. Push in your changes if you want to get them in!
Antonio Huete put together a list of goals for the next release on the DragonFly bugtracker. Some of them are pretty ambitious, some of them are relatively easy, but they are all very useful.
This site, shiningsilence.com, is now available on IPv6. Thanks to Markus Müller for getting me to actually complete the process.
Trivia fact that I told someone about at NYCBSDCon: the habit of using (via) to correctly attribute links comes from a still-online-but-not-functioning site called The Nonist. The fellow putting it together had the most wonderful ability to find esoteric, interesting items to read about. I can’t match his talent for images. The Wayback Machine has a copy of the Nonist site so you can see it in its original glory.
To the (text-only) links!
- English minus the non-Germanic words. (via)
- ‘Tainted Love’, played via floppy drive.
- Unix: When to look for a new job.
- The Dreamliner’s latest in-flight emergency. I’m not that interested in the article, but I like the quote from the place where I found it linked: “The Internet of Rebooting Things”.
- Android is becoming unforkable. (via) The article doesn’t mention Cyanogen or Replicant when it’s talking about ‘alternative’ strategies for Android development; I’m curious what to make of them.
- Broken by design: systemd. (via)
- A followup: Why systemd is winning. (via) ‘winning because nobody else showed up to the game’. Not a direct quote, but a summary.
- Bunnie Huang’s Name That Ware February 2014 is a mystery to me, but it’s oddly pretty.
- 3D versions of D&D Monster Manual creatures from Patrick Farley. (via)
- A Vim tutorial and primer. (via)
- ICMP types in IPv6.
- An objective points-based system for keyboards. “KLACKY keyboards feel great but they will get you knifed in the back by the people who work near you.”
- Hello boss… Something happened…
- All IBM training videos should be this awesome.
Your unrelated link of the week: If I met you at NYCBSDCon last week, did I seem like a mature adult? I’m not. Here’s Deer Fart.wmv.
Lots of links, yet again.
- Michael W. Lucas intends to have more BSD books out this year – at least 2. He goes into great detail on his plans. He hints at other authors with material on the way.
- BSD-linked Twitter accounts. I like finding accounts of individual developers, so you can see what projects people are working on. (plz suggest)
- The PC-BSD Weekly Digest 16 and number 17.
- The latest freebsdnews.net summary.
- Another BSD-based product I didn’t know about.
- FreeBSD has a new version of netmap.
- NetBSD and FreeBSD have brought in version 2.0 of ATF, the Automated Test Framework.
- FreeBSD has imported OpenBSD’s RNDIS framework.
- More cross-BSD fixes.
- Found through this OpenBSD sendmail upgrade: Sendmail, Inc., is now owned by a company called Proofpoint? A ‘security-as-a-service’ provider. I don’t know how to feel about this.
- OpenBSD has Intel Centrino Wireless-N 2230, 2200/105/135 support.
- OpenBSD supports qle(4), the QLogic ISP24xx fibre channel HBA.
- First Impressions of FreeBSD 10 on Distrowatch. (via)
- The minimum acceptable OpenSSL for pkgsrc has been bumped up.
- Undeadly has several n2k14 hackathon reports.
- Ahem. (via Freenode #nycbug)