A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Michael W. Lucas has a short article up about sysrc, a FreeBSD tool for handling rc.conf across multiple machines. This could easily be a cross-BSD tool – hint, hint.
Update: as Sascha Wildner pointed out, rcrun covers that in DragonFly. Mostly I’d like to see the same interface, then, I guess?
Not just source links, this week:
Michael W. Lucas has a review up of Richard Bejtlich’s “The Practice of Network Security Monitoring“. Both of them are long-term BSD users, and Bejtlich, if I remember correctly, was part of the design of Capsicum, the security framework that is serving as a Summer of Code project for DragonFly right now. So it’s worth looking at his book. And/or looking at his blog, for those who want more.
BSDTalk episode 230 is out. It’s 12 minutes of conversation with Burt Kaliski, CTO of Verisign, about the upcoming newest BSD convention, vBSDCon.
Registration is open for vBSDCon, happening in Dulles, Virginia, USA, on October 25th through 27th. There’s some neat-sounding presentations listed.
I think that is the same location where I went to a rather spectacular pre-dotcom-crash presentation from Time Warner/Road Runner back in 1999. The hotel was great; the presenters were befuddled. An internal account manager ran up a $3,000 bar tab in one night on a company credit card… I still have the fancy Guinness glass he bought me. I don’t think this convention will work exactly the same way, but unlike my 1999 trip, the speakers at this one will actually know what they are talking about.
If you missed Michael W. Lucas’s talk about DNSSEC, it’s recorded and available on Youtube. Or buy his book.
Again, lots of links. Some of these are overflow from previous weeks where I just said “That’s enough; let’s work on the next Lazy Reading.”
Your unrelated link of the week: Mighty Taco radio ads. Mighty Taco is a Mexican fast food place from Buffalo, New York, USA. It’s about as authentically Mexican as fast food from a city on the edge of Canada can be, which is ‘not much’. I’ve always loved the food, though, and the commercials are just the right mix of amateur joke and commercial advertising.
Bonus unrelated: If you enjoy imgur/fukung but it’s not youtubey enough, hit ‘Random’ on IWantMoar.com a few times. You may want to turn down your volume.
Wired has an article up about Jordan Hubbard and his move from Apple to iXsystems. It’s not a bad article, though it doesn’t delve into the why of BSD very much. In any case, iXsystems has been really bulking up lately to be more than a generic hardware provider.
Speaking of which, that blade system going in now for dragonflybsd.org was sold by iXsystems.
How many tags can I fit on this post? I think I’ll aim for Saturday for these BSD catchup posts. In theory, I can prep this and the Sunday Lazy Reading posts ahead of time, since they tend to be all-week items, and have the whole weekend covered.
Here’s what jumped out at me from reading source change mailing lists:
I’m going to have to set a specific day of the week aside for these.
The July issue of BSD Magazine is out, and the listed theme is “Security and Cryptography”, but there’s plenty else.
BSDTalk 228 has a nearly half-hour chat with Michael W. Lucas at BSDCan 2013.
While these aren’t his BSD books, Michael W. Lucas has an interesting post up about the sales on his two recent books, SSH Mastery and DNSSEC Mastery. I’m always interested in seeing how self-publishing models work, whether it’s software or books or music. He points out that the point of his DNSSEC book is to see if a very difficult subject can be covered in a book like that – which it is. There’s very few published books that go that in-depth.
(I’m hoping for a whole “Mastery” series covering topics other writers don’t, especially in a BSD-friendly way.)
Supposedly it’s FreeBSD 9.0 under the hood on the new Playstation 4 systems. What does this mean for FreeBSD, or driver support, or BSD in general, or what you can run on that hardware? Possibly nothing other than a vague sense of superiority.
On the other hand, this BoingBoing article makes a good point about commodity hardware and its immediate utility. It’s an effective network storage device and it doesn’t even mention FreeNAS.
Julio Merino is not renewing his membership of the NetBSD board of directors; he wrote an extensive post as to why. I agree with some of the issues he raised; they are possible on any open source project. I don’t necessarily think the solutions he proposes are correct.
I am clearly biased on this, but I think NetBSD needs a ‘NetBSD Digest’, to talk about the changes being made and the work being done. I once asked someone experienced in dealing with volunteers how you motivate people without a paycheck, and he said “Celebrate their accomplishments”. All the BSDs could use that. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
There’s already been some previous conversation about how much longer to support the i386 platform for DragonFly. It looks like PC-BSD will be the first ‘flavor’ of BSD to make the jump. Support for PC-BSD on i386 will be dropped after release 9.2. That includes ‘TrueOS‘, the version of PC-BSD for servers, which I did not know about until just now.
The June 2013 issue of BSD Magazine is out, and the focus is Ruby. The PDF is free if you tell them your email address.
This is a text-heavy weekend, given yesterday’s post. Enjoy!
Your unrelated link of the week: ScummVM in a browser. Comes with some LucasArts game demos, too. (via many places)
FreeBSDNews.net has a nice summary up of video from all (?) the presentations at BSDCan 2013. Of particular interest to DragonFly users: a video about pkg, the tool used for package maintenance in dports. In this presentation, it’s talking about use on FreeBSD, but the future stuff applies to DragonFly too.
Not as wordy this week, but still wordy. And linky!
Unrelated link of the week: I’ve had several deadlines and a mail server with issues this week at work, so this is all I got.
