January 2015 – Page 2 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2015/01/16

Google Compute Engine and DragonFly?

Can someone with experience on Google Compute Engine try out running DragonFly on it? There’s FreeBSD instructions, so it might work.

2015/01/16

SCTP removed

DragonFly no longer has SCTP. Nobody minds, I think – I had to look up what it is.

2015/01/162015/01/16

Which wireless cards for DragonFly?

The short answer is ath(4) and iwn(4), via this post. There’s an update coming for the wireless infrastructure in DragonFly; Matthew Dillon and Adrian Chadd (on the FreeBSD side) are working together for improvements.

While I’m mentioning recommendations, the Silicon Image 3132 chipset is apparently excellent for eSATA drives on DragonFly.

2015/01/15

BSDNow 072: Common *Sense Approach

As promised last week, the BSDNow show has an interview with Jos Schellevis of OPNSense, along with the normal array of stories and links.

2015/01/14

sshlockout in DragonFly

Matthew Dillon’s added a sshlockout utility, to temporarily block SSH traffic from repeated brute force SSH login attempts. It’s been mentioned before, but it’s in the system now. It’s been refashioned to work with pf.

2015/01/13

Major DragonFly sound update

Francois Tigeot has performed a major upgrade of DragonFly’s sound system. If you had sound problems or unsupported hardware before, this may fix them. It will require a full buildworld+buildkernel.

2015/01/12

More DragonFly/Chromebook tricks

Romick posted some more tips on setting up various special keys on an Acer c720 Chromebook, running DragonFly of course, and Matthew Dillon also has backlight key configuration. I wish I had a spare $200 right now for one of these.

2015/01/12

BSDNow 071: System Disaster

I managed to miss this last week because of issues with my RSS feeds, but the 71st episode of BSDNow is/has been up. It’s “systemd isaster”, cause the interview is with Ian Sutton talking about BSD replacements for systemd dependencies. There’s a number of at-least-slightly DragonFly-related things in there, including OPNSense, pkgng, and Hammer mentions.

2015/01/112015/01/11

Lazy Reading for 2015/01/11

Historical links are the accidental theme this week.

RFC Reader. For those uncomfortable with plaintext? (via)
The truth about C & Unix history. An oldie but goodie. (via)
After several decades, there’s still no standard for querying registration data, surprisingly. There’s something coming together, though.
Plan-55A, store and forward messaging – on paper. (via)
1980s sci-fi show openings. No fancy House of Hobbit Thrones catering to nerds back then… this was as good as it got. (via)
Who named Silicon Valley? (via)
Unix people cards. (via)
Big Boring System, a text only online community, and another sort of throwback like tilde.club. (via)
The Cryptographic Doom Principle. A clear explanation. (via)
TL;DR-ify, a One Thing Well item. Happens to contain a paragraph-sized 40-year history of hypertext on the bottom of that page.
Ping stories. I’ve linked to other versions before. (via)
The history of grep. (via)
The little book about OS development. (via)
Decentralize All the Things! (via)
That previous link took me to Gary Bernhardt’s Twitter feed, where I saw this pun. Also this truth.
His site is destroyallsoftware.com. I like the ‘screencasts’ idea; much easier to watch than some person in a room staring into a camera.
Also also found through that link: Sandstorm, a personal server setup. My initial impression is that it’s similar to Owncloud. I wish more people did this.
Also also also: from Justin Cormack through Twitter: Unhosted.

2015/01/102015/01/09

In Other BSDs for 2015/01/10

I got this done early, for once.

Dissecting OpenBSD’s divert(4). (via)
Running ownCloud with httpd on OpenBSD (via)
OpenBSD 2014 by the numbers. (via)
Code rot & OpenBSD. Many comments at the original link. (via)
Accessing radio hardware switches in NetBSD.
What does this Etherswitch framework do?
FreeBSD now has Elf Tool Chain utilities, which appears to be BSD-licensed versions of binutils; possibly more?
FreeBSD is now on Gnome 3.
BSDCan 2015’s Call For Papers is out.
NYCBUG is meeting January 13th at a new location for “Designing Versatile Unix Utilities“, presented by Eric Radman.
There’s a new BSD user group in the Albany, NY area.
BSD Magazine for December 2014 is out. (via)

2015/01/10

4.0.2 images up

I’m breaking my normal weekend posting schedule to note that DragonFly 4.0.2 images are now linked on the main site and on mirrors now/soon.

2015/01/08

DragonFly 4.0.2 released

DragonFly 4.0.2 has been tagged. I’m building the release images now. If you’re already running 4.0.1 it’ll be easy enough to upgrade to; you will want to catch up to this commit fixing a quiet memory issue.

2015/01/07

Multiple disk speedup

The CAM layer in DragonFly has had its big lock removed/been marked MPSAFE, so you will notice a performance increase when using multiple disks. (assuming you aren’t throughput-limited, of course.)

2015/01/07

DragonFly on a VPS

That’s Virtual Private Server, if you don’t know the term. I mentioned VPSs and BSD before in a In Other BSDs article, but “Ed” found an article specifically about installing DragonFly on Vultr.

2015/01/06

ZFS and Hammer conversation

There’s a FreeBSD Forums thread about ZFS and Hammer, as several people have pointed out to me. It’s interesting to see, but there isn’t a lot of quantitative discussion. (It’s a forum post, not a white paper, though.)

2015/01/06

Library building with DragonFly

Do you remember the BSDNow story a while ago about a Tanzanian community effort using FreeBSD to build a library? They’re looking at DragonFly, too, because of the low resource requirements. From that discussion: a hardware reason for an ‘indefinite wait buffer’ error, and a note on how to most efficiently download packages for multiple machines.

2015/01/05

V4-mapped addresses out, TCP MTU discovery in

Sepherosa Ziehau has posted a note that V4-mapped addressing is no longer supported in DragonFly. You will need to do a full buildworld/buildkernel if you are running master. Also, TCP MTU path discovery is on by default. Also also, he’s added a SOL_SOCKET/SO_CPUINT socket option for use to reduce load in heavy network activity. As usual, I don’t quite comprehend.