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.
Avoiding non-routeable IPs
It’s possible your Internet service provider uses a non-routeable IP range (like 10.*) and occasionally your border device picks that up via DHCP by accident instead of an Internet address. If that happens to you, and you’re using DragonFly as your border gateway, it’s possible to prevent it with PF.
06/17/2013
Another tip: cleaning up a really, really full Hammer drive
If you get your Hammer drive really full, a normal cleanup won’t make enough space. When that happen, use ‘hammer reblock’ in increasing increments. That works because it does cleanup in much smaller steps.
An X tip on terminal switching
Switching terminals in X with ctrl-alt-Fx requires a not-on-by-default option. This could catch anyone used to the old behavior, so I might be doing you a favor by mentioning it.
06/16/2013
Lazy Reading for 2013/06/16
This is a text-heavy weekend, given yesterday’s post. Enjoy!
- SELinux’s toxic mistake. If people aren’t using something you built because it frustrates those same people, it’s not their fault. (via)
- Contrary to popular belief, QWERTY was not designed to slow the typist down. (via)
- VMS will finally reach end of life in 2020. VMS was a contemporary operating system to UNIX, and started on nearly the same hardware. (the PDP-11) Aw, I feel bad. Not so bad that I’d actually use it again, but still: Aww. (via luxh on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- “At the point all my hardware undeniably works on BSD, I will probably move there.” This article is in no way scientific, but it makes me a little happy. (via a Google search)
- The Deepest Uncertainty. A surprisingly enjoyable description of set theory and other math bits. (via)
- 8 months in Microsoft, I learned these. None of these are a surprise, really, but point 5, “not giving back to the public domain is the norm” is really sad. The example given isn’t even code – it’s just describing a solution on a web page, publicly. (via)
- Trillian is publishing the specs for their IMPP communication service. A quote from the announcement: “…our commitment to run a business whose primary focus is its communication products, not advertising”
Your unrelated link of the week: ScummVM in a browser. Comes with some LucasArts game demos, too. (via many places)
06/15/2013
PRISM, privacy, and what you make yourself
If you’ve been reading the Digest for a while, you’ve seen me talk about the value of hosting or running your own services. It’s not too much of a surprise in my case; if you are working on an open-source operating system, you want to run it. It’s good to get the experience, and you can run programs the way you want, instead of picking from whatever vendors happen to sell you.
The PRISM disclosure, which I am going to assume everyone is familiar with at this point, is another facet. Every time you use another company for your email, your entertainment, your software, and so on, their information on you can be accessed. This isn’t a problem that can be fixed by going from one webmail provider to another. You can shop around, but notice that the author in that link effectively throws his or her hands in the air and says, “there’s no way out” by the end of the article. This is because corporations work as collecting agents for the government, even if they don’t plan to do so.
That sounds drastic, but there’s legal frameworks in every country for governments to require companies to give up data on any person, on request. It happens. I’ve seen it myself; I worked for Time Warner for several years, tracking down cable modem user information and handing it over as compelled by law. I know the lawyers at TW Corporate didn’t like doing it, but they didn’t have a choice. (I have some horrifying stories about what people would do to themselves and each other.)
Companies are increasingly working to create services to sell, not products to buy. A service never stops being consumed, so it forms an ongoing revenue stream. I’m not saying this is bad; I firmly believe that a financial incentive to be paid improves services. However, as only a consumer, you can end up not owning what you use. Other people have pointed this out, and I don’t want to sound like a frothing crazy person… but it is relevant, though not necessarily as catastrophic as some people pronounce.
What I’m working towards here is a reminder that you should run your own software, and running it on DragonFly is the best way. (Or some other operating system, I guess. If you have to.) Instead of trying to figure out what the least-bad commercial option can be, run it yourself. Good for privacy, good for learning. I know that’s not an option for everyone; fighting with Sendmail (for instance) is not an activity that many people pick voluntarily. But, if you’ve been thinking of setting up a replacement for Google Reader, or hosting your own mail, or own blog, etc… there’s never a better time than now.
(Follow all those links for some good information; consider it an early Lazy Reading post)
06/14/2013
Rough network queues added
Sepherosa Ziehau has added a sort of queuing to altq, where TCP ACKs get higher priority. You may have seen this in any number of pf configurations, where returning data is given its own queue to keep high-volume transfers from slowing themselves down because the acknowledgements can’t get back to the sender. His commit has statistics on the performance improvement. He also added a ‘netrate‘ tool for calculating results from using netperf.
06/13/2013
Symbol versioning coming in, also buildworld
If you’re using DragonFly 3.5, your next update should be a full buildworld. That’s because John Marino is adding the framework for symbol versioning. This means that individual library (.so) files will internally keep track of newer and older symbols. The current behavior is to name the files differently, which can cause problems if an expected, linked file is missing – even if the needed symbols are present. The basic framework is being added now, and will be turned on all at once, to minimize the number of times that full buildworld is needed.
06/12/2013
Old amd64 removed and extra upgrade step added
The ‘amd64′ specific parts of kernel architecture have been removed, since x86_64 covers all that. As a side effect of other changes, John Marino warns that upgrading DragonFly from a version older than 3.4, to a version newer than 3.4, will require an intermediate step of going to 3.4 first. e.g. If your machine is a DragonFly 3.0 system, you will need to upgrade to 3.4 before moving to, say, 3.6 once it is out. This won’t matter for some months, since the next release is months off.
2 more GSoC projects: Hammer compression, System V IPC
Larisa Grigore posted an introduction of her Summer of Code project: Userland System V IPC in userland, and Daniel Flores wrote out his initial ideas for Hammer compression. That’s the remaining two projects introduced. If any of these interest you or you want to make suggestions, respond on the lists. Work starts on the 17th.
06/11/2013
BSDCan 2013 videos
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.
GSoC project: checkpointing vkernels
Pawel Dziepak has posted details on his Summer of Code project for DragonFly. He will be making it possible to checkpoint vkernels, restoring network and console state. He even has a public repository for his work set up.
06/09/2013
Lazy Reading for 2013/06/09
Not as wordy this week, but still wordy. And linky!
- Max Headroom and the Strange World of Pseudo-CGI. A discussion of how old fake CGI can look better than modern, real CGI. This is an opinion I’ve had for quite a while, and my children pretty much ignore it every time I bring it up. (via)
- The Colby Walkmac, which predates the Mac Luggable. Linked to because it includes good pictures of what the (external) hardware was like. I find all the old ports interesting, since it’s all USB and the occasional eSATA these days… not that I’m complaining! I’ve never had a good experience with a 9-pin serial port. (via)
- A brief education on escaping characters.
- I get worried when remotely rebooting a server in a different town or even state. In Praise of Celestial Mechanics covers much more stressful circumstances: interplanetary reboots. Does Voyager 1 or 2 have an ‘uptime’ function?
- The equivalent of what you are doing right now, 20 years ago. I personally never got to see this; my experience was MUDs. Speaking of which…
- The Birth of MMOs: World of Warcraft’s debt to MUD. MUD == MMO, Roguelike == Diablo/Torchlight, Doom == almost everything else. There’s a number of game archetypes that haven’t changed in some time. (via)
- Playing with powerlines. I used to work at a company that used these lines for data transfer. It was neat technology, but it sure wasn’t easy to set up. Imagine wiring a city but only being able to use Ethernet hubs. Not switches, hubs. That, combined with undersized ARP caches/MAC tables, made it really difficult.
- OpenVPN on FreeBSD, which will come in handy for at least several readers, I’m sure, as the directions should apply to any BSD.
- Is there anything DNS can’t be used for? Cause now it’s domain-based mail policy publishing. (via ferz on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- “Have you tried DragonFly?” posts on various forums seem to pop up with some regularity.
- Uses of tmux, explained. A slide show talking about how tmux works. (via)
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.
06/08/2013
Adding to dports
Since dports uses FreeBSD ports as a base, adding something to FreeBSD ports means it will show in dports, too. However, it doesn’t have to go that way. It’s possible to have dports packages that exist only in dports. If you have changes to a port that make it compile on DragonFly, that can be added too. For all of that, go to the dports issues page on GitHub.
pkgsrc-2013Q2 freeze coming up
The next pkgsrc freeze is planned for June 17th, 9 days from now. So, get your changes in now, for 2013Q2…
06/07/2013
Another Summer of Code project: vkernels and hardware
Another DragonFly/Google Summer of Code project introduction is up: Mihai Carabas wrote out his project on developing hardware nested page table support for vkernels. If Mihai’s name seems familiar, it’s because he was in Summer of Code for DragonFly last year, with a successful project.
Creating new pkgsrc packages, a lesson
Johnathan Perkin has a nice tutorial up about creating pkgsrc packages. It’s done on SmartOS, but I imagine it’ll generally apply to anything pkgsrc supports.
06/06/2013
First Summer of Code description: Capsicum
Joris GIOVANNANGELI has posted a description of his Summer of Code project for DragonFly, implementing the Capsicum kernel APIs. I expect the other students will post summaries soon, too.
Full buildworld, not quickworld
If you are running DragonFly 3.5, make sure you do a full buildworld depending on how recent your version is. Just a quickworld will cause problems. DragonFly 3.4.x users are unaffected.
06/05/2013
Getting dports without pkg installed
I pointed out in my converting-to-dports post from yesterday that I had to download dports and build pkg by hand in order to install binary packages. This was because my DragonFly system was upgraded from 3.2 to 3.4 and therefore didn’t have pkg installed.
John Marino has added a ‘pkg-bootstrap’ option to /usr/Makefile, for fixing exactly that problem. It downloads a static version of pkg, which then lets you upgrade to the full pkg and install binaries as you’d expect.
Pkgsrc and xorg, native vs. packaged
NetBSD uses pkgsrc but ships a version of xorg with NetBSD. This is effectively producing the same code twice. There’s a long discussion on tech-pkg@ (first article linked; keep reading) about moving to the pkgsrc version of xorg for NetBSD, which seems like a good idea for focusing effort, as far as I can tell. The thread goes on quite a way.
06/04/2013
Switching to dports software
I changed shiningsilence.com over from pkgsrc to dports over the last 48 hours or so. Here’s how it went, in a series of bullet points:
- I had to download dports source and build the pkg tool by hand; since this system was upgraded from DragonFly 3.2 to DragonFly 3.4, pkg wasn’t automatically present as it would be for a new installation.
- I took the output of ‘pkg_info’ and culled it down to the applications I knew I used, and that formed my ‘to-install’ list for dports. That worked in a very straightforward way.
- It took so long mostly because of two things: I was also dealing with an email problem at my workplace, which usually took precedence. Also, I had several applications that I had previously installed by hand and needed to reconfigure to work as a dports item.
- Installing from binaries is really fast! Really, the dports part of this was possibly the most brief.
- The only thing I needed to compile from source was php, in order to get the Apache plugin. I’m sort of surprised the option isn’t on by default.
- Using ‘pkg search packagename’ is a good idea, because ‘pkg install’ can pick up multiple versions of a package. e.g. ‘pkg install mysql-server’ selects mysql-server51, mysql-server55, and mysql-server56. You probably don’t want to install all three. Or even one, depending on your opinions.
- Overall, it went more easily than I had expected, given it only had half of my attention.
06/03/2013
Pardon my dust
I’m switching this server from pkgsrc to dports. No post while I fight with old, stale configs and etc.
06/02/2013
Lazy Reading for 2013/06/02
Last week was a lot of very brief links. I’ll go for verbosity this week…
- Regular expressions and regular grammar. I hope you like detailed explanations. I’ve said it before: you should understand regular expressions. The difference between knowing and not knowing is sometimes the difference between knowing how to finish a project, and being hopelessly swamped. (via)
- A plea for less (XML) configuration files. From the same place. I don’t advocate rejecting XML files out of hand like some people, but I think you need to have a certain existing level of complexity already in your program before you use XML. For example, so complex that nobody will notice some XML sprinkled in there too.
- Where Looks Don’t Matter and Only the Best Writers Get Laid, a talk about the Internet from roughly the late 90s to the 2000s. Some parts of this get farther into political notes than I usually care to read, but I like the point made with “Many women and men alike are using, not building, the web.” I am frustrated by how the Internet is effectively one-way transmission for so many, like TV. (via I forget, sorry)
- Bringing Unix commands to a Windows world. It’s about Cygwin. I’ve installed Cygwin a number of times, but it’s such a strange hybrid I eventually stop after using it for whatever specific reason caused the first install. These days, it’s almost easier to set up a virtual machine on a Windows system and just switch over as needed.
- The Weird Stuff Warehouse. How much does this look like your basement? I like looking in stores like there cause there’s always some hardware item that seems to be worth resurrecting. (via)
- Open Source Game Clones. I feel iffy about these things. This tends to be viewed as “I want a free game”, not “I want the right to modify a game”. Also, you could argue it takes revenue away from the original artists who work on a product when it copies the original game methodology, reducing the incentive to produce. That could be debated, but I am certain of this: I wish people tried original rather than rehashed ideas in open source, because it has a much lower threshold for success. You don’t need a studio to tell you when you can be published… which is sort of the idea behind “indie gaming“, I suppose. (first link via)
- Remember those old not-a-desktop-not-a-laptop computers? They looked like this image I saw recently. I actually learned to use vi in a mild panic on a Sparcstation Voyager, which would be another device in that land between categories.
- SSH Tricks, found by accident while I was searching for how to do per-host configs in ssh, so that I only had to type a short name and leave off the long suffix (like dragonflybsd.org) when connecting to a server. Someday I might even get remote port forwarding over ssh correct.
- USSR’s old domain name attracts criminals. Somehow I doubt you can identify a criminal site by domain suffix that easily. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Massive Chalice, a Kickstarter for a new strategy and tactics game. It’s by Double Fine, who has made some fantastic stuff, and it has permadeath, turn-based combat, randomly generated maps… it’s a roguelike! It’s cross-platform, apparently, though I don’t know if it will work on any BSDs.
05/31/2013
3.4.2 images uploaded
I finally got DragonFly 3.4.2 img/iso files uploaded, so they are available now or at least soon at your local mirror. These are built using pkgsrc, so if you want dports, go for a snapshot image.
Is anyone using KDE 3.5?
Are you using it and unable to upgrade to KDE4 for a specific reason other than aesthetic preference? You should check this thread about support for 3.5, at least in dports.
05/30/2013
More download statistics
There’s more download statistics on dports and pkgsrc packages, from Francois Tigeot. There’s a heck of a lot of dports activity, though there’s probably much more pkgsrc building from source than this would report on. So, not necessarily representative of actual numbers, but an interesting ratio none the less.
DPorts and snapshots
Matthew Dillon and Sascha Wildner have converted snapshot/release building over to use dports instead of pkgsrc. If you want to try one of those snapshots, look in the snapshots directory… Oh, and here’s the mention of this on kernel@.
05/29/2013
More experimenting with dports
Here’s another “getting started with dports” article. It runs through the basic range of commands, similar to my existing writeup – but much less verbose.
8-way benchmarks for DragonFly and Linux
Phoronix has another set of benchmarks that include DragonFly and PC-BSD, along with several Linux distributions. It’s interesting to see, though don’t take them as performance measurements. 7-Zip as a benchmark doesn’t describe much other than the program itself, and the Himeno benchmark results are because of the compiler in use rather than any underlying performance aspect of the operating system – for instance. The DragonFly benchmarks disappear after page 3.
05/28/2013
DragonFly 3.4.2 released
I’ve tagged DragonFly 3.4.2. The major reasons for this point release were fixes for DragonFly under Xen with more than 2 CPUs specified, and for booting x86_64 DragonFly in KVM. The 3.4.2 tagged commit has every detail.
If you’ve already got a working 3.4.1 installation, you don’t need to rush to upgrade; this is mostly for the people affected by the issues listed above. I’m working on 3.4.2 install images; give that some time to complete and upload if you need one.
DragonFly and Summer of Code 2013 projects announced
Here’s the accepted projects for DragonFly and Google Summer of Code 2013:
- Block compression feature in HAMMER2, Daniel Flores Tafur, mentored by Matthew Dillon
- Capsicum kernel implementation, Joris GIOVANNANGELI, mentored by Alex Hornung
- Implement hardware nested page table support for vkernels, Mihai Carabas, mentored by Venkatesh Srinivas
- Make vkernels checkpointable, Pawel Dziepak, mentored by Samuel Greear
- Userland System V Shared Memory / Semaphore / Message Queue implementation, Grigore Larisa-Ileana, mentored by Markus Pfeiffer
Like last year, we had more excellent proposals than we could accommodate with available slots and mentors. We now enter the ‘community bonding’ period, so that students can get used to the DragonFly environment and make sure they have all the tools needed to perform work. The work itself starts on June 17th.
Good luck to everyone involved!
05/27/2013
Book review: Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition
Michael W. Lucas wrote a new edition to his Absolute OpenBSD book, and that second edition was published relatively recently. It’s a hefty book, nearly 500 pages in length, and I’ve needed to write a review for some time now. Not-necessarily-relevant-disclaimer: I contributed the IPv6 haiku/joke at the start of Chapter 12.
If you’re interested in OpenBSD, it’s an obvious purchase. It goes into detail for all aspects of OpenBSD, starting with a very detailed conversation about installation, then disk setup, and so on. This is not going to surprise anyone, of course. Past the initial overview, the book starts with a chapter that talks about nothing else but locating other resources to help learn OpenBSD. It seems a little counter-intuitive to start a book with advice on how to look somewhere else, but it makes sense in light of the topic.
What if you aren’t using OpenBSD, at least not right now? Something I didn’t realize until I had chewed my way through most of the book was that there’s several smaller books hidden inside. The book goes very far into individual utilities. So far, in fact, that it ends up creating mini-guides about the topics within the chapters. (or entire chapters, in the case of pf.)
There’s in fact 2 chapters for pf, initial and advanced. TCP/IP gets close to 30 pages just to itself, and topics like snmpd or chroot get an introductory section that assumes nothing about your prior knowledge. These are technologies you’re using already, no matter which BSD flavor you’re dealing with.
It works as a reference. I’m going to show the aforementioned chapter 11, on TCP/IP, to my coworker who makes a confused face every time I say “link-layer protocol.” I don’t know if he’ll make it from one end to the other, but it’s a lot better than waving a hand in the air and mumbling “You should look that up on the Internet sometime.” There’s enough detail that some of the smaller sections could probably be broken out into individual books, and I daresay that’s what is happening with Lucas’s Mastery series.
It’s comprehensive, it’s readable, and you’ll find something useful in it no matter your experience level. The book is available in printed and eBook form, from the usual online stores linked at Michael W. Lucas’s site, or directly from the publisher. It’s also available through the OpenBSD Project, which then gets a cut towards development.
BSDTalk 227: Matt Ahrens and ZFS
There’s a new BSDTalk by way of the recently-completed BSDCan 2013 event, and it’s half an hour of talk with Matt Ahrens about ZFS and matters related.
05/26/2013
Lazy Reading for 2013/05/26
A really packed week, this week.
- Interview with Donald Knuth (via ferz on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Garry’s Mod on DragonFly. We need that linuxulator working on x86_64. (thanks, tuxillo)
- Exxon used to be in the processor business? (via)
- PDP-11 in your pocket. (via)
- I’ve mentioned before how news aggregators go in cycles: Slashdot, then Digg, then Reddit, then Hacker News, which might be reaching the peak of its cycle. (via)
- Another review of Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition.
- And I don’t think I’ve noticed that Unix column before.
- Dennis Ritchie’s earliest known C compiler, now on GitHub. (via)
- Why makefiles indent target lines with a single tab character. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Computer Beach Party, with backstory and interview (via) Not recognizably Unixish.
- A very in-depth exploration of SSH keys. (via)
- The Real Origins of Tumblr. Related: I often link here to Trivium. (via many places)
- UK readers may find this ZX joke funny.
Your unrelated link of the week: Superman’s Ultimate Crotch Kick.
05/23/2013
Man page for dports
Sascha Wildner’s added a man page for dports. Don’t forget the existing how-to page.
SO_REUSEPORT turned on
SO_REUSEPORT has been added and turned on by Sepherosa Ziehau. This is an implementation of a feature found in the Linux kernel. Check the very lengthy commit message for a description of what it does.
05/22/2013
DragonFly and GRUB, together
Rados?aw Szymczyszyn has manged to get support for DragonFly’s bootloader into GRUB. This is part of his Master’s project to make DragonFly multiboot capable, at least for i386.
(I love having new things show up from new people, out of the blue.)
Summer of Code status
We’re in the picking and choosing stage of Summer of Code. I posted a note to kernel@ describing the next dates to watch for.
05/21/2013
Postgres still crazy fast on DragonFly
Loïc BLOT posted about his benchmark of several operating systems using KVM and Postgres 9.1. Happily, DragonFly is the fastest, with one exception. Linux/ext4 comes out faster – if you run it with barrier=0, which can be dangerous in a non-battery-backed-up volume.
BSD Hardware ideas
PC-BSD now has a hardware store, with equipment known to work under PC-BSD. Chances are good that if it works for PC-BSD, it’ll work for other BSDs or could be ported to do so… (via)
05/20/2013
DPorts updates
New builds of dports have been uploaded and updated, for x86_64 and i386. (x86_64 was already done; I linked the note about i386) This means you can change PACKAGESITE in /usr/local/etc/pkg.conf to point at LATEST instead of RELEASE and get newer packages. ’pkg upgrade’ is all it takes, with dports.
BSD Magazine in May: PF and more
The May issue of BSD Magazine is out with a number of pf articles, plus others.
05/19/2013
Lazy Reading for 2012/05/19
Super-compact links week!
- New Vim 7.4, soon. It’s mostly because the patchlevel is going to exceed 999.
- 10 Golden Rules for Making the Perfect Cup of Tea. (via I forget)
- Stop Avoiding Regular Expressions Damn It. Iffy example, but correct sentiment. (via)
- Ode to a shipping label. (via)
- The Luck of the Listserv. (via)
- Introduction to Machine Code for Beginners. (PDF) (via)
- DragonFly-specific improvements in the Phoronix test suite.
- Hand-drawn Emacs instructions, and printable. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Tom Gauld, a U.K. artist who makes some very entertaining minimal cartoons (recently published), has the best inspirational poster.
05/18/2013
vBSDCon website up
vBSDCon, the newest BSD conference, happening in October and in Virginia, has a new website. (via)
BSDCan 2013: more BSDTalk, more streaming
There’s another BSDTalk episode up already, because Will Backman’s at BSDCan 2013 and talking to Scott Long, Alistair Crooks, and David Discher, about NetFlix. Apparently there’s streaming video available now from the convention, and some people’s presentation slides have shown up.
05/17/2013
DNSSEC Mastery in print, and Absolute FreeBSD 3 status
Michael W. Lucas has two bits of mostly-BSD-centric publishing news. One is that a physical version of his DNSSEC Mastery book is now available through Amazon.
The other bit is that, having just released an Absolute OpenBSD update, his Absolute FreeBSD book will not see an update… until the FreeBSD installer gets more coherent.
(If you manage DNS in any fashion, buy DNSSEC Mastery.)
BSDTalk 225: Kris Moore and PC-BSD
BSDTalk 225 has 12 minutes of conversation with Kris Moore about PC-BSD, recorded at BSDCan 2013, which is going on right now.
05/15/2013
tpm(4) module added
The tpm(4) driver has been added by Sascha Wildner, ported from FreeBSD. What’s it do?
From the man page: “The tpm driver provides support for various trusted platform modules (TPM) that can store cryptographic keys.” Crypto keys stored in hardware, where they are in theory unmangleable, instead of on the disk. At least, that’s my impression after 30 seconds of research.
05/14/2013
More IP forwarding performance
Sepherosa Ziehau has posted some numbers showing improvements in ip forwarding rates. He’s done this before, except this time it’s with bnx(4), probably because of his recent commits.
05/12/2013
Book review: DNSSEC Mastery
Michael W. Lucas recently wrote and self-published a new book, DNSSEC Mastery. He asked me to review it, and I’ve been reading it in bits and starts over the past few very busy weeks.
First, the background: If you’re not familiar with the acronym, it’s a method of securing DNS information so that you can trust that domain name information is actually from the machine that’s supposed to provide it. DNS information is basic to Internet operation, but it traditionally has been provided without any mechanisms to deal with misinformation or malicious use. This seems to happen with protocols that have been around for many years, as any mail administrator can tell you…
In any case, ‘DNS poisoning’ (or as Wikipedia calls it, ‘DNS Spoofing‘) attacks such a basic part of how the Internet works that it will completely bypass any security methods that assume name information is correct. DNSSEC is a way to deal with that. It introduces public-key encryption into the process of sharing and updating DNS information. The idea has been around for a while, but it’s only been completely implemented recently.
DNSSEC Mastery goes over this history, and through the setup required to get (recent) BIND working with DNSSEC. Lucas seems to be starting a series of ‘Mastery’ books, where he covers all the territory around a specific topic. This one, like his previous title, is exactly what it says. As long as you have some existing clue around zone files and DNS, the book will take you from no DNSSEC at all to fully implemented in less than 100 pages. (well, at least in the PDF version, but that gives you an idea of the size.)
Use it to learn, or use it as a quick reference – either way will work. If you have any DNS server(s) to manage, you’re the target audience. I expect DNS without these security extensions will go the way of telnet vs. ssh.
A book covering things like new encrypted hash zone record types is going to be a bit dry, but there’s an appropriate sprinkling of humor through the book. I’ve reviewed other Lucas books before, and I’ve got another on my plate right now, but this is the same: there’s plenty of funny to make the lessons go down easier.
DNSSEC Mastery: Securing the Domain Name System with BIND is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and his self-publishing site. Also see Peter N. M. Hansteen’s review of the book.
No Lazy Reading
I’m inexplicably short on links this week; I blame my schedule/the nice weather for much for much of the U.S./the class I’m teaching ending/my trip to TCAF for this. More Lazy Reading next week! Meanwhile, I have a book review coming up as an alternative.
05/10/2013
Many upgrades, and Hammer
John Marino managed to update GCC from 4.7.2 to 4.7.3 (4.7 changelog), zlib from 1.2.7 to 1.2.8 (changelog), and awk from 20110810 to 20121220 (can’t find a changelog).
In other update news, Matt Dillon has been working on HAMMER2′s flush sequencing.
Update: tcsh too.
05/08/2013
Usage for dports and pkgsrc
In the week after DragonFly 3.4 was released, Francois Tigeot was tracking downloads for each type of packaging system. It looks like dports downloads far outnumber pkgsrc. I think there’s reasons it appears different in uptake, but it’s still neat to see people trying the new system.
Absolute OpenBSD: super-short sale
As seen on Author Michael W. Lucas’s blog: Absolute OpenBSD 2nd edition is 50% off in a sort of ‘flash deal’. Grab it today if you are interested, cause I think it’s only for today.
05/07/2013
How about Ansible?
Ansible seems to be a configuration management system that’s lighter than puppet or salt. I had a student talking about it in my class tonight. BSD users Hubert Feyrer and Michael W. Lucas have both posted about it recently. Anyone want to repeat their experiences?
Transmission server directions
If you were perhaps thinking of setting up transmission-daemon, a BitTorrent server, this post on pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org will help you out.
05/06/2013
sili(4) testers needed
If you have a sili(4) device, Francois Tigeot needs you to run a particular patch and tell him what happens. He’s testing a larger I/O request size, and wants to see how it will work out “in the field”.
05/05/2013
Lazy Reading for 2013/05/05
Lots of links, not a lot of commentary, this week. Enjoy!
- What is your most productive shortcut with Vim? The first very extensive answer is actually all vi, not vim. (via)
- Found via previous link: vi / vim graphical cheat sheet.
- The site where that image site sells a vi emulator for Visual Studio/Word/Outlook. I can totally understand why you’d want that.
- Memory of a Broken Dimension, a game that starts as a command-line shell and breaks out into a 3D glitchy world. This is what Tron should have been. Mac/Windows only right now, unfortunately. (via)
- TCP Headers in Lego. (via)
- The History of ASCII art. (via)
- QWERTY, DVORAK, KALQ.
- Greytrapping.
- “Hey, a dot out!“
-
Futuristic User Interface 14: Primitive Computer Visualisation [sic]
Your unrelated link of the week: Baman Piderman. It’s a series of Youtube videos. Just… roll with it.
05/04/2013
DragonFly and Bittorrent
I’ve put the 3.4 release images up on terasaur, a Bittorrent seeding site. Please try pulling them and let me know how it goes. I haven’t torrented many things, so I am unsure how to even verbify “torrent’. Hopefully that sentence and those links work out.
05/03/2013
Matching configs with ipsets, except when you don’t need to
I am somewhat entertained by Michael W. Lucas’s most recent blog post about IP Sets. This is mostly because, as he points out, he could use one pf config file across multiple machines and BSDs for network management, but has to fiddle with ipsets to get different Linux machines to match.
Kimsufi servers, DragonFly, and French
If you’re looking to install DragonFly on a Kimsufi server, and you can read French, this explanation may help you. (via Enjolras on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
05/02/2013
HAMMER file system resizing
If you’ve ever wondered about how you can resize/move a HAMMER filesystem, follow this thread for a variety of answers.
05/01/2013
More about the DragonFly boot process
Have you ever wondered about how the booting process works on DragonFly? Well, Ivan Uemlianin did, out loud. Several different recommendations followed, so now you can learn too.
DragonFly 2.12/2.13 package removal
It’s been 2 years since the pkgsrc packages for DragonFly 2.12/2.13 were getting updated, so I am going to remove them. If you’re running DragonFly 2.12, you’ll want to either build from source or upgrade DragonFly.
04/30/2013
Howto: dports and xfce4
‘william opensource4you’ posted a summary of the steps he took for setting up a DragonFly system with XFCE4, using dports. It’s pretty straightforward, and thanks to dport’s binary nature, should be exactly reproducible.
i386 end-of-life appears on the horizon
John Marino brought up a point every operating system project will have to think about: when does support for i386 (i.e. 32-bit x86 processors) stop? Follow the thread for details. There’s no final answer, yet.
04/29/2013
DragonFly 3.4 released!
As posted in my email to users@: Version 3.4 of DragonFly is officially out.
The release ISO/IMG files are all available at the usual mirrors:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/mirrors/
The release notes have details on all the changes:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/release34/
If you are planning to try the new dports system for installing third-party software, check the DPorts Howto page:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/howtos/HowToDPorts/
If you have an installed DragonFly 3.2 system and you are looking to upgrade, these (not directly tested) steps should work, as root:
cd /usr/src
git fetch origin
git branch DragonFly_RELEASE_3_4 origin/DragonFly_RELEASE_3_4
git checkout DragonFly_RELEASE_3_4
… And then go through the normal buildworld/buildkernel process found in /usr/src/UPDATING. If you are running a generic kernel, that can be as simple as
make buildworld && make buildkernel && make installkernel && make installworld && make upgrade
(and then reboot)
If you encounter problems, please report them at bugs.dragonflybsd.org. I get better at testing for each release, but I also get better at discovering new problems just after release.
04/28/2013
Lazy Reading for 2013/04/28
These are getting denser and denser with links, in part because I’m looking harder and in part because Hacker News is becoming a better and better source of links; there seems to be a new go-to site for tech links every 8-12 months. Slashdot, then Digg, then Reddit, then Hacker News…
- Intel has published a HTML5 development environment. I don’t even know if it would work on DragonFly or even any BSD, but I feel efforts to make tools that are actually, genuinely, crossplatform should be looked at. Defensive platform-specific content seems to still be a thing.
- Slightly related: Building a Roguelike in Javascript. There’s several parts to this. (via)
- The Eternal Mainframe. The argument is a little wild-eyed, but the underlying thesis: “Cloud == Mainframe” is valid. (via)
- A Primer on IPv4, IPv6, and Transition. I signed up for an IPv6 tunnel recently, but I’m not directing traffic over it. I should be. (via)
- How to make Your Open Source Project Really Awesome. The title is linkbaity, but the steps listed are correct. You will look at the “If you want to completely screw your users…” notes and nod to yourself, recognizing something that bit you. (via)
- There’s still Apple ][ software being sold. I vaguely feel like I bought from there before… (via)
- Everything’s being put into a git repo these days. (via) Wait, spoke too soon. (thanks, ‘bla’ in comments)
- Scaling Pinterest. I like seeing what technology is used as a site transitions from “oh yeah, running on leftover hardware in my basement” to “we need to hire yet another person to keep this all running”. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Sometimes, repeated variations on a single theme can lead to some entertaining humor. Therefore, Dog Snack.
(Did I just sneak in two unrelated links? Yes I did.)
04/27/2013
Are you using hotplugd?
Are you using hotplugd? If you are, this post from ‘william opensource4you’ about a small patch he made may be useful to you.
Updates for libmpfd, grep, diff, and libbsdxml
John Marino has committed updates for libmpfr, diff utils, grep, and libexpat/libbsdxml. Libmpfr, the one item that I suspect doesn’t spring instantly to mind, is a library for floating-point computation.
04/26/2013
DragonFly 3.4 release very soon
As I described in a post to the kernel@ mailing list, the DragonFly 3.4 images are getting uploaded for mirroring and downloaded for testing. Assuming no surprises happen, we will be able to release very soon.
04/25/2013
bxr.su for everyone else
For those of us still on IPv4 networks, the BSD-specific OpenGrok site bxr.su should now be available in general, not just on IPv6.
04/24/2013
DragonFly 3.3/3.5 users and dports
BSD Magazine: FreeNAS FreeNAS FreeNAS
The April 2013 issue of BSD Magazine is all about FreeNAS. I mean, every article is FreeNAS related. If you’re curious about the product, this is the place to start. (The magazine is also now available in ePub format in addition to PDF.)
Does FreeNAS count as another BSD flavor, rather than an appliance? I’m not sure.
04/22/2013
Google Summer of Code: students, apply!
Now’s the time to put in your application for Summer of Code projects, if you’re a student. The application period runs until May 3rd. There’s already been some proposals on the mailing lists; now they can be put in officially.
I’ll point out the last link is from a returning GSoC student, and has a lot of detail; use that as an example if you’re thinking about your own application.
04/21/2013
Lazy Reading for 2013/04/21
I think spring has arrived; everything’s turning green, and a young man’s thoughts turn to computer hardware upgrades. Time to move to 64-bit! Anyway, lots of links this week. These are getting more and more content-filled over time, but I don’t think anyone minds…
- For the Bitcoin enthusasts: ‘…when my wife refuses to bring him cake on our sofa, he calls it a “denial-of-service attack”’ (via)
- Make It So, coverage of computer interfaces from movies. I always thought that was what Enlightenment was trying to achieve: the Interface From The Future. (via several places)
- Same computer interface topic, but from anime movies. It would be nice if this became something people actively worked on, instead of Bitcoin selling and Facebook monetizing. (via)
- Flat icons/monochromatic icons seem to be another microtrend. This is probably because few people do small dimensional icons well. My favorite was always the BeOS set.
- On benchmarks. It says what you should already know, but I like the Phoronix/MD5 benchmarking joke. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- This article titled “The Meme Hustler” draws a finer line than I’ve seen before between “open source” and “free software”. The author, Evgeny Morozov, seems to also have a hate-on for Tim O’Reilly. See some reviews of a recent Morozov book for a counterpoint, of sorts.
- Spacewar championship, 1972, in Rolling Stone. Exactly two years before I was born! At this point, finding things older than me makes me a bit happy. There’s a picture of a Dynabook in there, photographed by Annie Liebowitz. It’s entertaining to read this 40-year-old story and see how well it predicts the future. I’m also sort of amazed it exists, in Rolling Stone. More Spacewar links here.
- Meet the Web’s Operating System: HTTP. ”Because HTTP is ultimately the one social contract on the web that, amidst a million other debates over standards, rules, policies, and behavior, we have collectively agreed to trust.” (via)
- Ancient computers in use today. I’ve linked to a story about that IBM 402 before, but the following pages about VAX and Apple ][e systems are new. Well, new to read, certainly not new hardware. (via)
- Yahoo Chat! A Eulogy. The spray of forbidden words is an entertaining acknowledgement message. (via)
- The $12 Gongkai Phone. Bunnie Huang breakdowns are always fun, and he’s describing a strange sort of open source that isn’t through license. (via)
- The FreeBSD Foundation is looking to hit a million dollars donated this year, which seems quite possible given last year’s performance. Donate if you can; their activities help the whole BSD community.
- A Complete History of Breakout. It’s not actually complete, but that’s OK. It includes Steve Jobs being a jerk and Steve Wozniak being very clever, which is their traditional roles. (via)
- Ack 2.0 is out. It’s a very useful utility; I’d like to see more standalone utilities created this way.
- Space Claw, Flickr via BBS. You’ll need telnet. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Shady Characters, a typography/history blog I’ve linked to before, has a book out. If you liked those links, you know what to do next.
Hey, mirror operators!
If you administer one of the DragonFly mirrors, there’s a new /dports directory that can be mirrored. See that second link for details.
