A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Matthew Dillon’s been using a Kabylake NUC for a DragonFly workstation and it’s generally working out well. It’s tiny enough to lose on a desk, in my opinion. He added performance details and a screenshot. The Specific Configs page has his notes, recorded, too.
Related laptop tip: If you have a Lenovo Yoga and can’t mount the drive after install, various sdhci modules may be the answer. Update: definitely the answer.
Here’s a detailed writeup from Aaron LI on how to get a DragonFly system onto an IPv6 network.
Update: He also supplied an example pf ruleset that solved some IPv6 throughput problems for his VPS.
There’s a new facility in DragonFly: kcollect(8). It holds automatically-collected kernel data for about the last day, and can output to gnuplot. Note the automatic collection part; your system will always be able to tell you about weirdness – assuming that weirdness extends to one of the features kcollect tracks. Here’s some of the commits.
sshlockout(8) will now lock out based on number of attempts, just so that you don’t have huge logs of stubborn but stupid SSH brute force attacks.
I’ve got some esoteric stuff this week.
Unrelated audio link of the week: Alan Lomax recordings are up on Bandcamp.
Bryan C. Everly eventually figured out how to configure his ThinkPad x230 so that the TrackPoint worked in xorg, and he wrote it down.
Should you need have Ubiquiti devices, and you need to get the Unifi management program running on your DragonFly server, this script will work for you. Some of the filepaths are different, but it’s otherwise complete.
Matthew Dillon noted some OpenVPN problems, requiring him to disable compression. I don’t think this is a DragonFly problem, or even necessarily a BSD problem, but it’s worth mentioning in case you run it.
A lot of this was picked up during the previous long U.S. holiday weekend.
Andrew MacIntyre manually installed DragonFly onto a UEFI system, and conveniently he posted his notes. It includes a GRUB menu entry, which will come in handy for someone
If your DragonFly system’s Intel network device doesn’t seem to pick up on DHCP, try turning on polling. This may already be a nonissue, but it doesn’t hurt to mention it.
Update: fixed.
A tip that might be useful for some readers: Mohammad BadieZadegan posted that he had a poor network connection, and so was having a hard time installing packages. If that bites you too, there are some pkg.conf options – starting with FETCH_TIMEOUT and FETCH_RETRY – that may help.
A little meta, this week.
Your unrelated tea link of the week: In Sri Lanka’s Tea Paradise, A Social Enterprise Is Brewing. I actually heard about the quality of the tea (very good) before I heard about the way the company was formed. Consider where your next tea purchase comes from, in light of this.
Here’s one of the reasons to have your own permanent server: The New York Times has a daily feature called, not surprisingly, “The Daily“. It’s a short 15-20 minute news segment, ready by 6 AM. It’s available through Google Play Music or iTunes, but I leave for work by 6:15, and I don’t want to use up cell data downloading something that should arrive on my phone just before I leave the house. Of course, there’s no obvious way to tell Google Play, “I know it’s there; go get it right now”. I don’t know the iPhone experience, but I imagine it’s the same. I want to download on my time, not on Google or Apple’s schedule.
Luckily, there’s an RSS feed for this podcast. That, plus this simple script on my DragonFly system, means I can pull it down whenever I’m ready:
fetch -o – http://feeds.podtrac.com/zKq6WZZLTlbM | grep enclosure | cut -d ‘”‘ -f2 | xargs fetch -m
So, it’s a matter of running that script, and syncing off my own local storage, on my own schedule. FolderSync Lite will happily sync back to my phone using sftp.
The question of using vkernels(7) in a manner similar to jails pops up time and again, and the answer is, unsurprisingly, “it depends“. It looks like when you want to isolate greedy programs, vkernels are the way to go.
I mention this because people don’t realize there’s a console screensaver: ‘vidcontrol -t XX’ will blank the console after XX seconds of inactivity. This way you aren’t lighting up your server closet with a terminal screen, forever.
Did you know you can set the border color for the system console? I didn’t. syscons(4) lists a number of options, including scrollback length and some other features I never thought about changing.
If your DragonFly machine is using CARP, and you don’t want CARP messing with your default routes, the sysctl net.inet.carp.setrou
This week’s Lazy Reading came together in perhaps 10 minutes.
Your unrelated music video of the week: Danny Brown – When It Rain. The music may not be what you are used to, but I like how “damaged VHS tape” is being used as a visual design choice. (via)