There’s a vulnerability in file(1), CVE-2019-18218. It’s fixed in current and release versions of DragonFly. Update when you get a chance.
This week’s BSD Now has a good mix of historical articles and how-tos, but of course I would think that’s a good mix.
NYCBUG is having an installfest tonight, at the usual meeting place. Go, if you are near.
As an example of how old design decisions have lasting effects, the POSIX standard still calls for terminal output to accommodate mechanical delay, as noted in this DragonFly commit – i.e. if output was still a line printer instead of a glass TTY, or, as it is 99.9% of the time today, xterm or puTTY or etc. etc.
I thought this would happen: the nrelease(7) process can use binary packages to build DragonFly. (For the dports packages, not the base system.) This is very interesting to me, but also useful for anyone who wants to build a custom DragonFly; something I think more people could do.
I still feel bad about missing a week, even though that’s a self-imposed requirement. In penance, here’s a linkdump.
- Cabinet Magazine is blogging and it’s wonderful in a way I haven’t seen in a long time.
- First, do no harm… with this software. The Hippocratic License. (via)
- BBC BASIC on Twitter. (via)
- Conceptronica. (via)
- Software Rights, the book. (via)
- Solid State: Minnesota’s High-Tech History. Public material, so freely streamed. (via)
- Berlin Tea Festival 2019, later this month. I’d go if I was near. (via)
- Pay attention to the difference between round() and floor(). (via)
- (mini-section about owning your information for the next several links)
- Historic Digital Places.
- Everything is Amazing, But Nothing is Ours. (via)
- Computer files are going extinct. (via previous)
- Yahoo Groups going away. Well, technically still there, but not really.
- Own your content on social media using the Indieweb. (via)
- The IndieWeb Movement: Owning Your Data and Being the Change You Want to See in the Web. (via)
- (mini-section over)
- The Open Book Project. Open hardware e-reader – not yet complete, so for hacking, not using. (via)
- uGlass: an AR module on your glasses. Low-cost, works on existing glasses – I like the idea.
- Cutest oscilloscope I’ve ever seen.
- Building the Ultimate Roguelike Morgue File, part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.
- The Hissing of Vintage Tapes. Not mentioned but related: Cr02 tapes, or comfort noise, which I did not know exists in an RFC. It’s funny to think of having a standard way to present what is normally a defect.
- An old-school shell hack on a line printer. (via)
- This Time, There Really Are NO IPv4 Internet Addresses Left. (via) My main workplace is sitting on a public /24, which shows how long ago it was obtained.
- Cluster SSH – Manage Multiple Linux Servers Simultaneously. Those who do not remember expect are doomed to recreate it. (via)
- Rotary Dial Phone Revival – 4 – Final. (via)
- Text Editing Hates You Too. (via)
- The $15 Sous-Vide Cooker. Save $50, burn the house down, is what this says to me.
- How “special register groups” invaded computer dictionaries for decades.
- One Page Dungeon Generator. Fun just to reload and read and reload and read, like a super-short story generator. (via)
I still haven’t caught up, natch, but not going to miss this week!
- Humble Book Bundle: Linux & BSD Bookshelf by No Starch Press. Includes books I’ve linked before; you get a lot of material for only $15.
- NYCBUG is having an installfest this Wednesday, 11/6. Go just to see what oddball hardware someone drags out.
- The Call for Participation for the FOSDEM 2020 BSD devroom is up. You’ve got about 3 weeks to get your proposal in.
- FreeBSD 2019Q2 status report.
- FreeBSD 11.2 EOL as of a few days ago.
- RPI/Pinebook and BSD compatibility, a current status.
- Semibug topics for next year. Keep going through the thread; A HAMMER2 talk would be nice.
- Speaking of Semibug, the November 19th meeting may be moved. I’ll post when I hear of the final spot, too.
- bzflag, runs on any BSD, still active.
- Anyone use FreeNAS for file server?
- Arm to Deliver CHERI-based Prototype to Tackle Security Threats. Related to CHERIBSD. (via)
- Valuable News – 2019/10/28.
- How to fuck up software releases. Linked cause the DragonFly release document is essentially a list of ways to keep me from repeating the mistakes I made on the last release.
- Stabilization of the ptrace(2) threads.
- EuroBSDCon 2019, Norway – video. (via)
- Unix: A History and a Memoir. (via)
After 56k, I stopped paying attention, but apparently there’s stated baud rates of 460,800 and 921,600. And your DragonFly terminal can handle them, too.
This week’s BSD Now covers some releases, some history, and the very useful tool sshuttle, a VPN alternative.
This may be of most interest to me, since I’m usually the one building DragonFly releases. nrelease(7), which is used to build each release of DragonFly, now sticks to the default kernel config, and may use binary packages in the future. There’s some other changes but these are the ones I can describe most exactly; there might be more on the way.
Do you have a Coffee Lake Intel CPU? Cause corepower(4) in DragonFly now supports it.
I didn’t get them put together early, and I won’t have time – sorry! It’s the first time I’ve missed it in a long time.
If you were used to kldloading i915kms(4) and radeonkms(4)… they are now named i915 and radeon, respectively.
BSD Now 321 returns to the interview format, talking with Trenton Schulz about things I know about (FreeBSD) and things I did not (Robot OS).
Pluggable Authentication Modules on DragonFly have gone through some changes. pam_ssh has been removed, along with pam_tacplus, and pam_radius, in favor of the more frequently updated versions in dports. ppp(8) still supports radius, though.
As anyone who has been running HAMMER1 or HAMMER2 has noticed, snapshots and copy on write and infinite history can eat a lot of disk space, even if the actual file volume isn’t changing much. There’s now an ‘emergency mode‘ for HAMMER2, where disk operations can happen even if there isn’t space for the normal history activity. It’s dangerous, in that the normal protections against data loss if power is cut go away, and snapshots created while in this mode will be mangled. So definitely don’t leave it on!
There’s now (well, for DragonFly 5.7 users) an /etc/os-release file to show the installed DragonFly version. This is similar to the de facto Linux standard, which of course evolved separately from the not-consistently implemented general standard. Evolved cross-platform standards are fine with me.
Lots of variety this week; I’m happy with this link batch.
- Categories: models of models. Pleasingly abstract. (via)
- The Complicated, Slightly Better Manhood of Achewood. Linked so that someone who never read Achewood can now go through its entire archive. (via)
- The End of Oz. Read this if you read any/all of the many, many Land of Oz books when young. (via)
- Modding, Vim, i3, and Efficiency. (via)
- I’ve made a rotary dial number input, because why not? (via)
- Coffee Is Hard. (via)
- The Best Cast Iron Skillet. Secret tip from someone who has been using them for decades: treat them poorly, don’t spend money, they’ll be great. It’s a chunk of iron.
- The Computer as a Communication Device. I did not realize the role Hawaii played in causing packet communication.
- Computer Files Are Going Extinct. (via)
- Betrayal At Krondor.
- I hate the X11 ICCCM selection system, and you should too. (via)
- You know, we might as well just run every network service over HTTPS/2 and build another six layers on top of that to appease the OSI 7-layer burrito guys. Linked mostly for that sentence.
- The lines of code that changed everything.
Your unrelated music of the week: The Mysterious Professor 950’s Otherworldly Beat Tapes.
I’m leading with the most complex but perhaps also most unfulfilling link.
- 2020 OS MIGRATION. Or, how to make your project just one Linux distro among many.
- Bell Labs: Celebrating 50 Years of Unix. (via multiple places)
- Related: The UNIX Game. (via)
- FreeBSD at Work: Building Network and Storage Infrastructure with pfSense and FreeNAS. Video from vBSDCon. (via)
- Replacing an Oracle Server with FreeBSD, OpenZFS, and PostgreSQL. More convention video. (via)
- The Ubuntu package roulette. For contrast with BSD packages; people usually assume, wrongly, that Linux packaging systems are more complete.
- Valuable News – 2019/10/07, Valuable News – 2019/10/14, and Valuable News – 2019/10/18. Yeah, I’m running behind on my RSS.
- Threading support in LLDB continued
- OPNsense 19.7.5 released.
- OpenBSD 6.6 Released.
- OpenBSD crossed 400,000 commits.
- FreeBSD 12.1-RC2 Available.
- A Ghidra loader for the Linear eXecutable format.