October 2015 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2015/10/312015/10/30

In Other BSDs for 2015/10/31

Another week that quickly went from “Gee, I hope I have enough links” to “I have to set time aside just to process the backlog of possibilities.”

Buy an x220.
A week of pkgsrc #12.
20Gb of Internet traffic on OpenBSD won’t work.
Nouveau runs on NetBSD with hardware GL support.
English-only in OpenBSD.
Help! Can’t install NetBSD 7 – problem with .iso file
Steam on the BSDs (not wine)
mge/etherswitch support in FreeBSD, especially for some Marvell chips.
Bluetooth LE Security Management channel support in FreeBSD.
mpsutil in FreeBSD has been updated. (for LSI Fusion-MPT 2/3 controllers )
add BSD to OS options in the forum user profile.
NetBSD 5.x is reaching end-of-life.
The Tor Browser for OpenBSD has been updated.
The 3rd quarter FreeBSD status report is out.
OpenBSD interviews: Ted Unangst, Brandon Mercer, Antoine Jacoutot, joshua stein, Landry Breuil, Henning Brauer, and Stefan Sperling.
Or just look at Undeadly’s complete list.
DiscoverBSD for 2015/10/16.
Lumina Desktop 0.8.7 is released.
FreeNAS ‘what’s new’ issue 26. FreeNAS is 10 years old.
A new FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS review.

2015/10/29

BSDNow 113: What’s Next for BSD?

BSDNow 113 has the normal news roundup, plus an interview of Jordan Hubbard, talking about BSD, and specifically NextBSD.

2015/10/28

GPT and Hammer

Via EFNet #dragonflybsd, “Booting DragonFlyBSD with Hammer on a GPT drive“.

2015/10/272015/10/28

Another i915 update

For those of you with DragonFly and an Intel i915 chipset, Francois Tigeot has moved support up another notch, to match Linux 3.18. This will help Cherryview and Broadwell chipset users the most.

2015/10/26

Yet another network optimization

I think at this point, Sepherosa Ziehau is able to improve the DragonFly network stack by just standing near his computer and concentrating for a few minutes. For example, he’s unearthed another improvement to connect rate/reduction of CPU usage.

2015/10/252015/10/23

Lazy Reading for 2015/10/25

No themes this week.

Raiders of the Lost Web. (via)
The first chapter of “The Go Programming Language” (PDF).
The Cray Files. (via)
Turning a conference into a conference call. (via)
3 Envelopes for sysadmins.
A Beginner’s Guide to the Synth. (via)
The Little Printf. (via)
The Tech Model Railroad Club – Hackers at 30. See comments at via link about the IBM 407.
Guide to Deploying Diffie-Hellman for TLS. (via)
The real meaning of ‘systemd’.

Your unrelated food image of the week: Cheese Meets Bread: an International Love Story. I shall treat that as a sort of to-do list.

2015/10/242015/10/23

In Other BSDs for 2015/10/24

There’s a lot of developer interviews lately.

DragonFly BSD + FreeBSD (via)
truenas
Hubert Feyrer has a roundup of the recent NetBSD interviews.
OpenBSD 5.8 is released.
OpenBSD turns 20.
OpenBSD developers: Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (via)
OpenBSD developers: Vadim Zhukov (via)
OpenBSD developers: Marc Espie (via)
OpenBSD developers: Bryan Steele (via)
OpenBSD developers: Ingo Schwarze (via)
OpenBSD developers: Gilles Chehade (via)
OPNSense 15.7.17 released.
DiscoverBSD for 2015/10/19.
EuroBSDCon 2014 Videos Online. The date is not a typo.
GhostBSD’s graphical ZFS installer. (via)
Grace Hopper Convention 2015. (FreeBSD Foundation)
W^X enabled in OpenBSD Firefox port. (via)
Announcing NetBSD 7.0 for USB Flash Drives. (via)
pkgsrc-wip has finished the move to git. It should be easier to contribute.
FreeBSD on 96-core (dual socket) ThunderX system. (via)
Compilers in the BSD base system. (via)
Michael W. Lucas is giving a talk on SSH on November 10th, in Farmington Hills, Michigan.
Robert Bourne is returning to NYCBUG to talk on November 19th. Catch this if you can; it’s worth it.
I already scheduled reminder posts for both those events.

Your cross-platform software of the week: Syncthing. Runs on all the BSDs. (Via discussion on EFNet #dragonflybsd)

2015/10/22

BSDNow 112: Tracing the source

It’s been an oddly quiet week for news, plus I have been busier than usual at work due to snow hitting the northeast. But! It’s Thursday and there’s a new episode of BSDNow. There’s an interview of Adam Leventhal and the usual news roundup.

2015/10/182015/10/16

Lazy Reading for 2015/10/18

Accidental topic this week: very, very old computers.

Computer Show. Modern show, looks like it’s exactly from the mid 1980s. (via multiple places)
Computing Britain. From the BBC, freely downloadable computing history audiofiles, quite worth it. (via)
Phones for the People. I don’t think it’s as egalitarian as it is described, but it is interesting to see the variety. (via)
RTC Quickstart. RTC is an alternative to the not-private-and-not-open Skype. Why don’t more people use it?
More secure Wi-Fi routers. This would be the best Internet of Things approach. (via)
You Wouldn’t Base64 a Password. (via)
Blue screens of death, some of which you’ve surely seen before. (via)
The first Apple ][ viruses. (via)
Dark Castle and Macintosh System 6 Emulator. (via)
Vim and Composability (via)
A Simpler Vim Statusline. (via)
Vim: Convenient Code Navigation for Your Projects. (via)
Unix commands: The joy of curl
Ohmu. I like the visualization.
Wander (1974) — a lost mainframe game is found! (via)
Lost mainframe games (also via)
The lack of historic knowledge is so frustrating. AKA “learn from past mistakes”.
The SCELBI, rebuilt. (via)
CSIRAC, the oldest computer that’s still physically assembled – from 1949! (via)
Cardboard computers. (via)
Long long long term data storage. (via)
Google Code-In starts on my birthday, and Google Summer of Code 2016 has been announced.
INOC-DBA: dial an ASN, get the network operations center responsible for it. One of the ways people make the complex creature called the Internet continue to function. (via)
sandstorm.io, self-hosting which I’ve linked to before, and known, which I haven’t. More tools that people will eventually regret not using. (via)

Your comics link of the week: Cartozia Tales #1, with more added. I subscribed to this series long ago, and it’s a lot of fun.

2015/10/172015/10/16

In Other BSDs for 2015/10/17

Another good week for BSD releases and events.

Why do you love FreeBSD?
Announcing FreeNAS-10 ALPHA
tame(2) is now pledge(2), and Call for testing: pledge(2) in -current
The OpenSMTPD audit, a debrief
OPNsense 15.7.16 Released
EuroBSDcon-2015 Recap
NetBSD-7.0 developer interviews: Pierre Pronchery, Antti Kantee, Christos Zoulas, Mateusz Kocielski
Tom’s Hardware Reviews the FreeNAS Mini
Call for testing: FreeBSD i915 driver (via)
bhyve gains a sysctl-like interface.
By chance, DMA in FreeBSD is newer than what’s in DragonFly.
A summary from the recent BSDCon Brasil.

2015/10/15

BSDNow 111: Xenocratic Oath

BSDNow episode 111 is up, with an interview of Brandon Mercer, talking about OpenBSD and healthcare. There’s the usual news, plus several ‘how-to-build-something’ articles up for discussion.

2015/10/132015/10/13

Wayland on DragonFly

Imre Vadász has put together an initial port of Wayland / Weston for DragonFly. You can look at his pull request for dports to see how to install, though I’d imagine this is only for people who like to experiment at this point. It’s still work in progress, as is Wayland itself.

2015/10/12

Slow your disk down

Tomohiro Kusumi has added a dm-delay target, which means you can simulate poor disk performance, without having to have poor disks. His commit message includes some benchmarks that shows it doing a good job creating a bad job.

2015/10/112015/10/08

Lazy Reading for 2015/10/11

You will probably be able to guess some of my thinking processes this week based on these links.

“If you work for Facebook, quit.“
Related: Facebook “Shadow Profiles”. A DragonFlyBSD “fan group” spontaneously appeared on Facebook at one point, but didn’t actually exist – they auto-create Facebook pages for other people’s work, but don’t make it clear that the actual owner isn’t involved.
Building an Analog Computer. (via)
The Joy of Non-Smoking Breaks. Has anyone read “the Healthy Programmer”, mentioned in the text?
Zipf’s Law, which I didn’t know existed.
SP800-199, “Guidelines for the Secure Deployment of IPv6” from NIST. Very complete. (via)
In defense of client certificates.
Coding like it’s 1999. (via)
Haunted by Data. More Maciej Ceglowski. (via)

Your unrelated tea link of the week: Health benefits of tea. Not the original title; I made it less clickbaity. (via)

2015/10/102015/10/08

In Other BSDs for 2015/10/10

I didn’t get to run through as much of the source commits as normal this week, but there’s still plenty to read.

Why do you use *BSD?
Service to read BSD 4.2 UNIX reel tape to file?
vnStat, a network monitoring tool.
Is OpenSMTPD worthy of OpenBSD inclusion? (via)
Assigning programs to specific video ports.
Recent OpenSMTPD errata and you
The Rise and Fall of the Operating System. Talks about rump kernels, developed on NetBSD, I think. (via)
junk filled files.
EuroBSDCon 2015 OpenBSD Presentations Online.
An interview of Jeff Rizzo about NetBSD 7. (via)
What to expect in NetBSD 7.
NetBSD-7.0 developer interview: Leonardo Taccari (via)
FreeBSD using radius for login (via)
What does the OpenBSD crowd think of Intel SGX? (via)
Closing a door, via many places, which had a link to this BSD-related note.
Verisign youtube channel has vBSDcon videos (via)

2015/10/092015/10/08

DragonFly and African digital libraries

The Tanzanian Digital Library Initiative is using DragonFly (and FreeBSD) as part of their library setup, and Michael Wilson, the project coordinator sent a note to users@ describing this. They are looking to spread through the continent, so get in contact if you want to be part of the project.

2015/10/08

BSDNow 110: Firmware Fights

BSDNow 110 is now available. It’s back to the text summary format, so I can tell you easily that it includes an interview with Benno Rice, about Isilon and their interactions with FreeBSD.

2015/10/06

New Intel video driver

There’s a new version of the Intel video driver in dports – xf86-video-intel-2.99.2015.09.09. If you update to this and you experience an xorg-server crash, Matthew Dillon found that changing the acceleration method from SNA to XAA fixes the problem. Don’t change it unless you actually see the problem, of course.

2015/10/05

True and False code reading, NYCBUG edition

NYCBUG is having “true(1) and false(1), The Classical Code Reading Group of Stockholm, NYC*BUG Mix Tape Edition” happen this Wednesday the 7th. You may remember a similar event at the end of August. This will be led by George Brocklehurst from the original event, with NYCBUG members present. If you missed the previous one, try this out – by all accounts, these code readings are inordinately fun.

2015/10/042015/10/03

Lazy Reading for 2015/10/04

Completely unrelated: I rebuilt a baking (Hoosier) cabinet over the past few months, and I’m quite happy with how it turned out.

The $9 computer is shipping today. Well, some days ago by when you read this. (via)
What Happens Next Will Amaze You. Maciej Ceglowski’s talks are always excellent. (via)
Vim Creep. (via)
Hacking Graphing Calculators. “As powerful as Game Boys, and mostly used for the same reason”.
ASCII to My Heart. (via)
Awesome Open Source Documents. (via)
Roundup: Retro computers in your browser. (via)
Breakouts, 36 Breakout variants. This will keep you busy for a while. See previous Breakout links here. (via)
The price of the Internet of Things will be a vague dread of a malicious world. (via)
The History of the Design of Unix’s Find Command. The comments at the source of the link are interesting.
A vim Tutorial and Primer. Again, the comments at the source of the link are possibly a better read.
18 cardinal rules of systems administration.
30 years a sysadmin. Same author as previous article.
Brian Kernighan interview. Steve Jobs is getting treated like a saint; BWK is barely known. They both helped the same number of people, but Steve Jobs made more money. (via)
Content Addressable Memory intro. Why routers are both underpowered and faster than general hardware at some tasks. (via)
Your phone’s homescreen is dead. The gradual removal of user-initiated actions in computing. (via)
Why have digital books stopped evolving? Lack of competition, I’d say. (via)
aRrgh: a newcomer’s (angry) guide to R. (via)
Predicting and controlling NetHack’s randomness. (via)