If you’re looking to change your DragonFly system’s keymapping to support a non-US character set, use this users@ post from Adolf Augustin as a cheat sheet to make all the right changes.
Matthew Dillon answered some mailing list questions on how clustering and data copies will work in HAMMER2 – no due date, of course, because this is very complex. If you’re really into it, there’s always watching the recent commits.
Matthew Dillon has rewritten the Locking and Synchronization documentation for DragonFly. Keep this in mind the next time you say “Which lock should I use for this new software/ported software?” There’s also locking(9).
The other day, I updated some packages using pkg. The default version of PHP went from 5.4 to 5.6. I ended up doing what /usr/dports/UPGRADING says and making a list of all PHP packages on my system, before removing PHP and its dependencies. I then reinstalled the packages that used PHP, bringing the needed packages back in at the right version. pkg 1.4 didn’t handle the transition cleanly, unfortunately. I also had to specify mod_php56 because pkg was trying to get the 5.4 version despite it not being default.
None of these are insurmountable problems, but it never hurts to be forewarned. pkg 1.5 is on the horizon and may have an easier time with sorting these types of dependency/version changes. This may apply to FreeBSD in addition to DragonFly.
I’ve tagged version 4.0.5 of DragonFly, and it’s available at your nearest mirror. This revision is mostly to incorporate the newest OpenSSL security bump.
OpenSSL has yet another security update, and Sascha Wildner has added it to DragonFly. It probably justifies a 4.0.5 release, so I’ll be working on that.
As a side effect of the new ipfw3 import, the sshlockout script included with DragonFly now has -pf and -ipfw options.
Some recent users threads pointed at SSD wear stats, along with what Matthew Dillon has seen on dragonflybsd.org machines, and good filesystem books.
Next time you’re building or installing world on your DragonFly system (running master), your computer will do a better job letting you know the status.
If you have a HDMI-connected monitor, but no sound, this trick about increasing available memory may help.
Hey, look what I have! There’s a pfSense pair of classes available to take. I went through them and found them worthwhile. pfSense is easy enough to use that a dedicated person can puzzle through most of the settings, eventually, but I don’t have “eventually”, and I want to encourage BSD products in my workplace… so here we are.
DragonFly 4.0 has had a minor point release, to 4.0.4. There was a bug in the initial install where the rescue image installed on disk would be incorrect. This was fixed after the first time a build/installworld was done, but might as well have it start out right. There’s some other small fixes, and the release commit will show you the summary. Download from your nearest mirror or update normally.
John Marino has removed Sendmail from DragonFly (as part of the base system), and replaced it with DMA, the DragonFly Mail Agent. If you just need delivery to local users, DMA will do the trick.
The announcement message covers what you need to do to deal with it (potentially nothing), and there’s more in-depth documentation to cover how to switch if you need more full-featured software.
Michael W. Lucas’s Tarsnap Mastery book is out, in electronic form. While not a strictly BSD news items, it’s a service built on BSD, so worth looking at if you care about that – or about encryption.
If you are on DragonFly-master and you upgraded during select hours on the 25th of February, you may have been bit by a makefile error. The fix, as listed in that link, is simple:
cp /usr/src/share/mk/sys.mk /usr/share/mk
If you are not on -master or you did not upgrade in that timeframe: never mind.
Michael Neumann has switched out pkgsrc packages for dports packages for building DragonFly with a GUI. There’s no built image to download right now, but I’m optimistic the next release will have it. You can build it now on a DragonFly system using src/nrelease. With all this video work going in lately, it will give us something to show.
This bites many people sooner or later: you think you’ve turned sendmail off, but it still gets opened up on your system. The answer: sendmail_enable=”NONE”.
(It should support sendmail_enable=”NOPE”.)
Several of the DragonFly machines used for building packages and/or releases have SSDs, and have been vigorously exercising those disks for some time. SSDs are supposed to have a shorter lifetime than spindle-based hard drives. However, Matthew Dillon found that there’s surprisingly little wear on those SSDs. This empiric information was noticed in several places.
Say hello to the newest DragonFly committer: Tomohiro Kusumi. He’s been contributing Hammer patches for some time and appearing on IRC, so it’s easier to just let him make changes directly. Welcome, Tomohiro.
It’s now possible to build world and kernel on DragonFly using gcc 5, and Matthew Dillon has posted an announcement that describes how. He also separately lists the (small considering the included C++) effect on build time.
Note that gcc 4.7 remains the default compiler.