A note for everyone: use Hammer default on a very busy filesystem, and you will eat a lot of disk space since all file changes are recorded. (I’ve done this to myself a few times.) Francois Tigeot has a list of tips on how to keep that from happening.
Are you running a Hammer filesystem on a low-memory system? You may get some warnings. It’s possible to tweak some settings to accommodate it, or just deal.
O’Reilly is running a 50% off special on a variety of books on electronics, with coupon code WKECTRC. I’m posting it now because it only lasts for this week.
Update: another offer just popped up in my email – 50% off various “web performance and operations” books with the code CFVLTY4.
If you’re building ports, it will treat OpenSSL as a dependency and bring in whatever version is available. If perhaps you want to use the version of OpenSSL installed as part of your base system, Robin Hahling has the answer for how. (This probably works on FreeBSD too.)
Thanks to Markus Pfeiffer, there is now a locking(9) man page for use the next time you say, “Which is the right lock to use?” Something I see almost monthly.
Short week, cause I’m on the road…
- The NetBSD Foundation 2013 Financial Report. (via)
- PC-BSD Digest 27 – they’re mushing pkg and PBI management together.
- Decent VPS providers with BSD images. There’s more out there than I realized.
- FreeBSD Foundation newcons highlight.
- DiscoverBSD for 2014/05/05.
Remember the joke I and probably a zillion others made about OpenOpenSSL? It’s happening, except it’s called LibreSSL. (thanks, Tomáš Bodžár)
If you noticed the lack of a GUI DVD image for the 3.6 release of DragonFly, I posted a followup note on the users@ list that talks about the steps to get X installed. It’s not much work, with pkg set up.
Hammer’s ability to stream to remote disks is great, but what if you have storage that uses some other file system? Antonio Huete Jimenez put together a shell script that will dump out the contents of a Hammer PFS, for upload to whatever. Read the README for the details.
pfi, the automated installer that nobody knows about, now supports installing an authorized_keys file as part of an install. Credit goes to Alex Hornung for adding the functionality.
There’s been periodic commits updating the USB4BSD support in DragonFly; I haven’t been linking to them because they are generally incremental. However, it’s good to (re?)mention just how you can build DragonFly with that new USB support.
Recent updates to tzcode apparently fixed a long-standing time zone bug in DragonFly. POSIX says the America/New_York timezone is picked as default if nothing else has been selected. That didn’t happen in DragonFly – until recently. If your timezone seemed to suddenly jump to U.S. Eastern time, that’s because you never picked before.
There are no binary packages built for dports, on DragonFly 3.7, for 32-bit machines, at this time. Pierre Abbat found this out. You can build from source, of course, or just use 3.6 packages. Don’t forget -DBATCH to avoid getting asked for build options when building from source.
I didn’t post this before, and should have: Matthew Dillon posted a summary of all the trackpad improvements he added, and how to make use of the various features.
Warren Postma found that hal and dbus caused a crash in VMWare for DragonFly. The answer is to use moused, not dbus.
Also, if you want to keep a custom or just older package from dports on your system, as karu.pruun did, ‘pkg lock’ is the answer.
There’s a lot this week, so let’s get started:
Git Reference. Not that there isn’t a lot of other documentation out there, but much of what you find is people asking specific questions rather than explanations of procedure. (via)
Movie Code. At least most of these are using legit code, even if it’s often the wrong application. It’s been worse. (See ‘state of the art video’ item) (via)
Unix: 14 things to do or stop doing in 2014. These tips are actually useful and contain no buzzwords.
TrewGrip, another item in my quest for interesting keyboards I don’t use.
4043 bytes to recreate a mid-80s IBM PC. There are less bytes of data in the program than there were transistors in the CPU that it emulates. It can run MS Flight Simulator. It was for the International Obfuscated C Code Contest, which should surprise you not at all. (via)
The World’s Most Pimped-Out ZX81. I don’t think it can run Doom, though.
The Unix Shell’s Humble If. For once, an article that doesn’t just pretend bash is the only shell that exists. (via)
Unix Shell RPG Tutorial. It’s exactly what that combination of words means. (via)
Scientists tell their favorite jokes.
Best programmer jokes, found here where there’s more.
I find these animations slightly hypnotizing. (via)
Technology used to suck even when it was cutting-edge, and we’ll still feel that way in the future. (via)
How did we end up with a centralized Internet?
Software in 2014. The summary is: server side is great, client is not. (via)
Able to be turn on, and that is it. Sci-fi movies ignore where technology comes from.
True Nuke Puke Story. My mine coworkers once did something similar to a copier repairman; got him so worried about going underground that he had a panic attack when he had to step on the hoist. We had to get a new repairman.
Your unrelated link of the week: BIG ENDING FACES! (via)
‘M M’ had trouble with his “Realtek RTL8191SE Wireless LAN 802.11n PCI-E NIC” on DragonFly some time ago. He was able to get it working, and he documented the somewhat convoluted procedure here.
If you want to track the bleeding edge of DragonFly, which is currently version 3.7, I happened to describe it in a reply to Filippo Moretti, on users@. Long-time users will know this/do this already, but it’s worth repeating just because new users may not realize how easy it is.
Here’s how my upgrade from DragonFly 3.4 to 3.6 for this server went.
The system install went normally. I rebooted before performing ‘make upgrade’, as noted in UPGRADING and elsewhere.
I already have dports installed, so a binary upgrade should be possible. I had heard of people with older version of pkg, having trouble getting it to notice upgrades. I rebuilt pkg, and ran ‘pkg upgrade’. A number of the updates coredumped. Here’s one example:
[156/160] Upgrading gtk2 from 2.24.19 to 2.24.19_2...Segmentation fault (core dumped)
After the upgrade, I had two problems: PHP wasn’t working for the website, and some programs would segfault.
The random segfault was fixable by forcing a binary upgrade of all packages. Since there were some programs on the system that were still new enough that the version number was the same as on the remote repository, pkg didn’t upgrade them. Those packages were linked against old versions of system libraries that predated the locale changes in DragonFly 3.6, so they’d crash. Forcing the update for all packages fixed the issue.
The other problem, PHP on the web server, is not new to me. The binary package for PHP does not include the module for Apache. The solution is to build from source with that option selected. I understand that pkg is destined to support (some?) port options in the future. There’s also an immediate workaround for locking it.
However, the port would not build because of a security issue. The binary package installed without any warning. This, I am told, will change to pkg giving you the option to install if you are aware of the security problem, and whether it really affects you. (which is just what I want, yay!)
Anyway, other than the system changes biting me because I didn’t realize some packages weren’t updated, it went very quickly. That is the reason for binary updates through pkg, or at least a major one.
Still quiet out there, but I found some good reading.
PHP functions originally named for string length and sorting. Yeesh. (via)
A great old-timey game programming hack. There’s an initial speed hack in this story, and then there’s another clever trick to fix memory corruption. (via)
My hardest bug. This was a pretty fiendish problem. (via)
Gitdown: don’t commit when drunk. I’ve done that. Actually will use an Arduino-based breathalyzer. (via)
Another Perl One-Liners review.
Zeno of Elea, a game. It’s based on a classic… (via)
Vim plugins you should know about. From that One-Liners author.
Speaking of Perl, here’s a Larry Wall interview. An old-school hacker – he wrote patch, too.
Moonpig: a billing system that doesn’t suck. An in-depth review of system design. More Perl, too.
Three Books You Should Read… Mostly BSD content.
How to use Tor wrong, in multiple ways. It’s not for petty crimes, and it’s not any use when you’re using it from a monitored network. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Cookie Puss.