Sascha Wildner has been using a new-to-me tool called coccinelle (no, not that) to scan for a number of problems. Patches for this tool may be useful for anyone else using coccinelle for bug-finding in other software.
Getting close to 2.12 release…
- Steam and Team Fortress 2 running on a BSD – PC-BSD with an NVIDIA driver, in this case, but it may apply to other cards and other games. Using Wine is always so intricate, it seems.
- Remember how suddenly a large chunk of Internet traffic was suddenly routed through China, briefly in early 2010? Apparently it’s happened a few more times since then. This article at the Economist talks about that and the SCION project, in an accessible way.
- The 2011 Interactive Fiction Competition has released this year’s entries, and almost all of them can be played online. (via) There goes a few hours of your life. Sorry.
- Speaking of hours, there’s apparently a civil lawsuit that has rendered timezone data unavailable. Here’s a good summation. It’s a frustrating scenario. (via multiple places)
- World’s best introduction to sed.
Yep, fall hits and it’s easier to find links.
- DragonFly morphology. The insect, not the operating system, though that would make an interesting diagram.
- Stick your pinkie in the corner of your mouth, Dr. Evil style, and say, “One MEEELion TCP connections on BSD!“. (via several retweets)
- Sudo vs. SSH public keys.
- The app store concept is taking over. Not that it’s a totally bad thing! We could implement one for pkgsrc, and should. (via)
- A nice (OpenBSD-centric) walkthrough of routing. (via)
- Ooh, decent disk benchmarks. I wish there were graphs, of course.
- I think this happens to most CS grads; you sit around one day and say to yourself, “Hey, I could write an operating system!” This forum post shows someone getting that idea and then realizing it’s not necessarily the goal he wanted. Why do I link to it? I appreciate the optimism.
- Or you can just build a functioning computer in Minecraft. This sort of thing has been happening for a while – this movie is just a link to the craziest example I’ve seen so far.
Your unrelated link of the week: Scientific Illustration. Not a comic, but still visually interesting.
At some point, you may want to generate binary programs that are unstripped of debugging information. You may want to generate them with pkgsrc. Here’s a little note on what options will make that happen.
It’s almost the end of summer here, or at least the traditional end of summer in North America. About time, too! I don’t like the heat. Anyway, as people trickle back to school, some more interesting doodads should show up for these weekly Lazy Reading posts…
- Yet another git cheatsheet, this time for KDE. (Via TGEN on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- What’s wrong with sort and how to fix it. I will enthusiastically link to any article that mentions letters like þ. (There’s others that this stupid blogging software just eats when I write out the HTML entities.)
- Did you wake up this morning and say, “I wonder if I could run some really old software. Like 4.1c BSD?” Well, today’s your lucky day.
- Creating new Linux base and infrastructure ports on FreeBSD. Interesting to see just how complex it can be.
- Distributed computing at Google. (PDF, via) I like the description of the error/failure rates and how they escalate as an architecture scales up.
Your unrelated comic link of the week: Jack Kirby art on what would have been his 94th birthday. I have trouble communicating how dramatic and influential his art has been.
As part of a larger thread, Chris Turner went into a longer explanation of how PPTP connections work. Do you have PPTP working on DragonFly? Please share details!
If you’re committing something to DragonFly, or even just working on your own Git repository so as to submit a patch, the new-to-me-and-not-actually-secret committer(7) man page has a lot of tips. I’m linking to it because it holds a lot of information that otherwise would be something you’d have to soak up over time from the community, maybe.
Apparently, if you are running IPv6, and using radvd (Linux)/rtadvd (BSD) to autoconfigure your hosts with IPv6 addresses, you need to tell your DragonFly hosts to accept this.
Lazy reading is easy when it’s been this hot out. In fact, I may melt before this article gets published.
- Ecdysis – a NAT64 gateway program. I link to it for two reasons. 1: You will probably need to NAT 6-to-4 sooner or later, and 2: it uses PF and so is BSD-compatible. (via)
- Don’t not copy that floppy! (also via) My original Apple ][ disk for Castle Wolfenstein is probably no longer functional. Not that I have equipment to play it on…
- World timezones, as a visible map. (via) I mention time zone updates here on occasion, and this is a immediate guide to what a strange patchwork of zones it is. You can’t even see some of the really tiny/crazy ones.
- A crappy way to start your day. Nobody ever enjoys that call from work…
And now, a link that has nothing to do with this.
Background: You may remember some time ago, I posted a review of Michael Lucas’s Network Flow Analysis. He’s written several BSD books and so I figured it was worth reading further, knowing that this network-specific book would be BSD-friendly. Also, he made it easier by sending me a copy.
No Starch Press, the company that published all the books linked in the previous paragraph, asked if I’d read/review another book from them. This would be Practical Packet Analysis, 2nd edition. (Review continues after the break…)
I happened to stumble on this: the DuckDuckGo search engine will take you directly to a DragonFly man page, if you type ‘!dfman’ at the start of your query. For instance, “!dfman hammer“.
I didn’t think of this, but I needed it: if you have an older Hammer system that now can perform deduplication because you upgraded to DragonFly 2.10, make sure to add it to the configuration for that file system, or else it won’t run.
You can probably infer the new (to me) blog I found this week from some of the links…
- Adding IPv6 to a FreeBSD Mail/Web Server – from Michael Lucas, repeat BSD author. I link to this because we’re all going to have to do something similar in the next year or so, I bet..
- A visual guide to TMUX, part 1 and part 2. tmux has usually been introduced to me as “It’s BSD-licensed and not screen”, which is good, but not compelling on its own. The first of the articles linked here goes over the comparative differences in some detail. (via)
- Speaking of screen-ish things, do you leave an irssi session running in screen so that you can rejoin IRC conversations at any time? I sure do. Sometimes I even reconnect through ConnectBot on my Android phone. There’s now a Connectbot variation for irssi, just for people who do such a thing. Don’t forget: #dragonflybsd on EFNet.
- Also still on the topic: forgetting to use screen and then being stuck with a long-running process is lousy. There’s ways to deal with it, though. (via, from a blogroll link)
- Hey, it’s neat to see a new business built on BSD – OpenBSD, in this case: Tunnelr. (via)
- We’re still doing great in terms of pkgsrc packages building successfully on DragonFly.
- An hour+ recording of the recent NYCBUG meeting about BSD networking is online. (Link is to a MP3 – via)
- How not to comment code.
- AT&T -> BSD -> AT&T.
This is one of those scenarios that I’m noting because it might bite someone, some day: if your root partition is encrypted, you can’t fit in a different keymap. However, kernel options to build in a different keymap will fix this issue.
Normally I hold this for Sunday, but I’ve got a good batch of links already. Something here for everyone, this week.
- A git cheatsheet, and another git cheatsheet. I may have linked to the latter one before, as it looks vaguely familiar. Anyway, bookmark. (Thanks, luxh on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- What should you do about bad blocks on a disk? Get a new disk.
- If you ever wanted to port software, there’s a pkgsrc developer’s guide (thanks Francois Tigeot) that shows you how.
- It’s NOT LINUX, for the billionth time. It’s BSD UNIX (certified, even) under there!
- “Children of the Cron“. An entertaining pun. (via)
- Nothing to do with BSD, or even computers, really: Gary Gorton, interviewed about the recent financial crisis, at a Fed bank website (!?). Interesting because I like economic matters, and because it’s the first web page where I’ve ever seen pop-up links added usefully, as a sort of footnote that you don’t have to scroll. (via)
- Michael Lucas recently had a machine broken into. Since everything on the machine is suspect, he’s using Netflow data to figure out when it happened, and how, which is not surprising given his most recent book. He has two posts describing how he backtracks his way to the probable source.
I never really noticed this before, but it’s possible to include your own patchsets into pkgsrc and have them picked up as part of the build process, using $LOCALPATCHES.
If you were dying to have less behave like more, it’s possible to do so with these tips from Oliver Fromme. I don’t know if it’s that desirable, but it’s an interesting thing.
Somehow I ended up with a zillion links for this week’s Lazy Reading. I hope you’ve got some spare time for this… Let’s get right into it:
- Michael Lucas, BSD book author (see links on site), has started Twittering. He’s also found the Wikileaks/NetBSD association that I didn’t know about, as Julian Assange even shows up in the NetBSD fortunes file. Also, while linking to his blog, I’ll point at his post on “Write what you don’t know“. Think of that article next time you feel you don’t know enough to contribute to something – especially open source.
- There’s a lengthy dialog on the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list about pkgsrc, and “Making it easier to get and use pkgsrc“. You can follow the whole thread on the listing page. I am all for the idea. Everybody and their brother has an App Store these days. Ports/pkgsrc are perhaps the original app store ideas, and I’d like to see them brought to the same level as these commercial entitites. This is important: pkgsrc is perhaps the only app store equivalent in existence that is not tied to a platform; that exists only to get you software rather than to provide a way to tie a platform into its developers profits.
- Hey, a roguelike zombie apocalypse game! Aw, it’s Windows-only.
- Mikel King has an editorial that sums up the many places BSD serves as an underpinning to products – a good checklist, if you don’t know of them. He’s also written an instructional article on passwordless/SSH setup.
- Along the same lines, Promote Perl by Building Great Things. This applies to BSD products too; telling people it’s great doesn’t work as well as making something great and showing that a BSD system is part of what makes it so.
- Did you know there are even BSD Certification classes in Iran? I really need to do that… though probably not at that location.
- Yacc is not dead. (via) I link to this because I had a moment of nerd excitement realizing that blog’s title is intended to look like a bang path.
- Database design ideas. There’s been a good series of posts there lately, good for anyone wanting to move beyond the basic CRUD details.
I was reading this Perl Advent Calendar (that would be good for DragonFly, come to think of it) post about ack, and came across a interesting line:
curl http://betterthangrep.com/ack-standalone > ~/bin/ack && chmod 0755 !#:3'
fetch’ would work just as well on a BSD system. The interesting thing is that it’s a one-liner for installing software that doesn’t make any assumptions about having an existing framework like pkgsrc or aptitude or anything like that – it just grabs the code and plops it in place. It wouldn’t work for more complex software, but the simplicity is intriguing, to match the Unix-like single, chainable program idea.
For those who haven’t seen it, ‘ack‘ is a grep replacement that automatically takes care of common activities around searching – skipping files that would cause duplicate matches, binary files, etc., handles a larger range of regular expressions, and runs startlingly fast.