If you were thinking about implementing DNSSEC, Michael Lucas did it himself and wrote down his notes. You can read them and either follow along to implement it yourself, or just spectate. The one disadvantage is that it uses BIND 9.9, and I only see 9.8 and 10 in pkgsrc.
PUFFS now in DragonFly
Nick Prokharau’s project for Google Summer of Code last year was “Port PUFFS from NetBSD/FreeBSD”. Sascha Wildner has now committed that to DragonFly. It’s experimental, so the normal caveats apply.
Some BSD Multimedia
Here’s several things to look at:
Michael Lucas’s “BSD Needs Books” talk from NYCBSDCon 2010, on Youtube. I’ve talked about it before because I saw it in person; it’s a good talk. Ironically, he talks about getting a publisher interested in your book, and he just self-published.
Hubert Feyrer linked to the slides of two pkgsrc talks at FOSDEM; one about bringing pkgsrc to MirBSD, and one about pkgin, which is included in DragonFly.
02/06/2012
GCC 4.6 now possible
John Marino has made it possible to build world and kernel on DragonFly using GCC 4.6 in the form of gnat-aux. (We’re currently on GCC version 4.4) Note that version 4.6 isn’t included with DragonFly, so you would need to download and compile GCC 4.6 a very recent version of lang/gnat-aux, and set CCVER=gcc46 before building world and kernel to try this out.
Update: John Marino points out in comments that you need to set WORLD_CCVER, not CCVER as his original message said.
BSD Magazine for February 2012
BSD Magazine for February 2012 is out, and the feature item is BSD Certification.
02/05/2012
Lazy Reading for 2012/02/05
It’s like early spring here in the northeast US. Which would be fine if it was actually spring. I miss snow.
- An explanation of the classic UNIX hierarchy. (via thesjg on EFNet #dragonflybsd) I’m behind any explanation that uses the phrase “accretion disk” to describe an organization.
- Hipster BSD. If this doesn’t make sense to you, it’s based on this.
- Would you like to have DNSSEC upgrading explained to you?
- Hooray for Unicode! (via)
- What Commons Do We Wish For? I was, briefly, technically, an AOL employee after the Time Warner merger in 2000. I didn’t like the notion of working for a walled garden then, and I think that’s why Facebook and other companies irk me now. Anyway, read that article for a good explanation of why that feeling is important.
Your unrelated link of the week: Top Shelf 2.0. A small comics publisher that has put much of their comics online to read. Their stuff on paper is worth buying too, as I have been doing for a while now.
02/04/2012
Google Summer of Code 2012 announced
It’s on, again! Not that there was any doubt. I need to collect potential mentor names before DragonFly can be involved, so you can guess what I’ll say next…
02/03/2012
Odd DVD drive issue
Edward Berger found that using a LG/Hitachi DVD drive kept him from successfully booting a DragonFly install CD. Using other manufacturers worked out fine. What causes the problem? I don’t know, but it’s worth mentioning it out loud in case someone else gets bit by it.
NetBSD Hackathon, February 10-12
There’s a NetBSD Hackathon going on February 10th through 12th, mostly online. I mention this because it may have some effect on pkgsrc, used by both NetBSD and DragonFly. Hackathons for pkgsrc usually happen separately, but no harm in keeping an eye out for any positive benefits.
02/02/2012
Book Review: SSH Mastery
I’ve reviewed Michael Lucas’s book here before, so when he offered a chance to read his newest, SSH Mastery, I jumped at the chance. Michael Lucas has published a number of technical books through No Starch Press, and started wondering out loud about self-publishing. This is, I think, his first self-published technical volume.
It’s a very straightforward book. The introduction opens with a promise not to waste space showing how to compile OpenSSH in text. Chapter 2 ends with the sentence, “Now that you understand how SSH encryption works, leave the encryption settings alone.” This stripping-down of the usual tech-book explanations gives it the immediacy of extended documentation on the Internet. Not the multipage how-to articles used as vehicles for advertising, but an in-depth presentation from someone who used OpenSSH to do a number of things, and paid attention while doing it.
It’s a fun read, and there’s a good chance it covers an aspect of SSH that you didn’t know. In my case, it’s the ability to attach a command to a public key used for login. It even covers complex-but-oh-so-useful VPN setups via SSH.
If you’re looking for philosophical reasons to buy it, how about the lack of DRM?
The physical version is not available yet, but the electronic version is available at Amazon (Kindle), Barnes & Noble (Nook), or from Smashwords (every other format ever, including .txt). The Smashwords variety of formats means that you’ll be able to read it on your phone, one way or another; I’d like to see more books that way in the future.
02/01/2012
2012 Joint Documentation Summit
There’s a single day between BSDCan and PGCon, May 13th. That day will be the 2012 Joint Documentation Summit. People from BSD projects and Postgres will get together to discuss documentation tools, projects, and so on. If you are going to either convention, I’d recommend visiting this too. This sort of cross-project pollination leads to good things.
01/31/2012
ISDN really gone
ISDN support has been removed from DragonFly. It was not useful at this point, because it’s rarely used any more. It does make me feel a little sad; this was the technology everyone said was the future before cable modems and DSL were figured out.
Updating Samba to 3.6
I’m posting this because it will save someone (possibly me) an hour of aggravation someday. If you are updating Samba from version 3.0 or 3.3 to a later version, it’ll take your existing config but possibly silently break on user authentication.
01/30/2012
BSDTalk 211: Deb Goodkin
Deb Goodkin of the FreeBSD Foundation gets 24 minutes of interview on BSDTalk.
BSDCan call for papers extension
The deadline for submitting papers for BSDCan has been extended, since the convention’s site suffered some downtime this past weekend. Submit proposals by tomorrow, the 31st, now.
01/29/2012
Lazy reading for 2012/01/29
This is the week of the funny, apparently.
- I’ve linked to this site before, but not this specific feature: History of UNIX manpages. Part of the formatting that makes up man pages dates back to 1964! ‘roff’ comes from RUNOFF, the original markup! This is the perfect mix of history, nerditry, and language for me.
- Hubert Feyrer says there should be BSD Certification training material. I agree.
- That’s the spiffiest TWM I’ve ever seen, and it’s on DragonFly. Found at the same place: Bash.
- Hey, Michael Lucas is planning for his next book!
- Developer error HTTP status codes. (via) What’s the geekiest joke I can still find funny?
- I like it when computers look like serious computers. (via luxh on #dragonflybsd)
Your totally unrelated video link of the week: The Necronomicon. Pitch perfect.
01/27/2012
Up-to-date packages and pkgsrc
Ulrich Habel wants to update some of the Perl 5 modules in pkgsrc. He published a request for comments, describing what he plans to do for changing some dependencies. He does note that Perl 5 in pkgsrc is at 5.14.2, which is very recent.
I was talking to a relative today who works at a large financial company, which is standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise. I find it strange that Red Hat, which has a lot of money behind it, still ships a years-old and arguably broken version of perl. By using pkgsrc, you’re getting more up-to-date software than people that actually shell out money for the privilege of compiling software.
3.0 Release Candidate images
They are located in the normal place, in .img (USB) and .iso (CD/DVD) formats. I haven’t made the desktop DVD yet; let’s see how these untested versions do…
http://avalon.dragonflybsd.org/iso-images/
01/26/2012
Libpcap, tcpdump updated
01/25/2012
Old ATA also out
A bit of symmetry in that title, there. Old ATA, which was replaced years ago, is finally gone. This should affect nobody…
Do you use ISDN?
If you need to use ISDN with DragonFly, speak up now. I think it may get tossed otherwise.
01/24/2012
Book review: The Linux Command Line
I received an em
ail from No Starch Press about reviewing this book, and my first reaction was to say no. I assumed this was essentially a book about using Bash, and therefore probably not useful to people reading the Digest.
I read it despite my knee-jerk reaction, and I didn’t need to reject it so suddenly. Almost all of the book will apply to any Unix-like system.
My first real experience with something that wasn’t Windows or a Mac was at a summer job during college, sitting in front of a SparcStation 5 editing files and processing data for real estate. Much of my muscle memory about vi and file manipulation dates from then. This book, even though it’s technically for a different operating system, would have been just what I needed. There’s no system administration in the book, just making your way around a filesystem and the tools you need to get results. It’s the kind of skills I think people lose out on when they boot to a graphical interface in Ubuntu, for example, and then never experience these tools.
Negatives: a few areas won’t be of use to most BSD users, like the section on packaging, or the bash-centric instructions in the shell programming area. There’s the occasional off comment, like that OpenSSH originates from “the BSD project”. There’s surprisingly little of this however, and I had to think a bit to write this negative paragraph.
Positives: The book puts the proper focus on some complex but rewarding aspects of command line use, like using vi (alright, vim) and understanding regular expressions. Much of what it covers is the same material I’ve learned to use over time, and explained to others.
There’s clearly two areas to the book; the first half is about using the command line to accomplish work, and the second is about shell programming. Making it at least through the first half will result in being able to work at a prompt with little issue, with the shell programming a nice bonus. It’s not the normal mix of admin tasks and introductory text; it’s about working at the command line. I imagine giving it to new software testers in a lab, or to a Windows user that has to deal with the occasional unfamiliar environment. There isn’t an equivalent BSD-centric book like this, so it wouldn’t hurt a BSD user, either.
It’s available now at the No Starch website.
01/23/2012
DragonFly 3.0 branched
Note that it’s branched, not released. I’m building and uploading binary pkgsrc packages for it now, and hope to have a ‘release candidate’ very soon. This is the prep work before the release, really. There’s a catchall ticket for tracking remaining work.
Want to support newer Intel GPUs?
There’s a whopping 250 euro bounty up now on the DragonFly Code Bounties page. It’s for supporting the newer Intel video chipsets, and there’s already examples in FreeBSD to start with.
(David Shao, where are you? If you’re reading this, hop into #dragonflybsd and tell us how things are going with your GEM/KMS work)
01/22/2012
Lazy Reading for 2012/01/22
I even have some comedy in here this week.
- Here’s some interesting ideas on improving the standard terminal window. (via)
- Hey, a Windows Phone application that aggregates BSD news! Including this one, I think. No way to test it because Windows Phones are rarer than hen’s teeth.
- This article about Bruce Perens has some good quotes in it – especially the Mark Shuttleworth one. (via)
- I think these computers all predate the integrated circuit. (via)
- How Google Code Search Worked. (via)
- The Rise and Fall of Personal Computing. (via) I don’t think the numbers used are accurate, but the trend is correct: a lot more people are computing through devices that are “walled gardens”, where they can’t install what they want.
- The App Store Guide – Take Two. It boils down to: Curated information on what programs to run is very useful. Someone could do this with pkgsrc or ports, easily. pkgsrc.se is sorta there, but not really with any sort of authorial voice.
- Variable typing can be surprisingly funny. (via) The final punchline is great but may not make sense unless you’ve seen where it comes from.
- Network jokes are the bestest jokes. (via)
Your unrelated comics link for the week: Tom Neely‘s Doppelganger. Page 11 is my favoritest.
Another unrelated thing: David Shao, are you out there? Can you get on IRC (EFNet #dragonflybsd) and help some people out with GEM/KMS questions? Nobody’s been able to find you.
01/21/2012
New book review tag
I’m going to have at least 1 book review up next week, 2 if I can make it. I’ve done this several times now, so I’ve added a ‘Book review’ category so that they all can be found together.
Live deduplication marked experimental
‘Live dedup’, where a DragonFly system makes a deduplicative reference to copied data instead of actually copying the data, is now off by default. There’s no definite issue linked to it yet that I know of, but it never hurts to be careful just before a release.
01/20/2012
RELRO in a BSD
John Marino has added support for RELRO in DragonFly, which makes it the first BSD to have it. That’s great news! What is it? Apparently a guard against memory corruption or overflow in the linker. His commit message gives better details.
Security problem and a fix
Matthias Schmidt found a discussion about DragonFly’s password encryption. The result, if I am reading it correctly, is that brute-forcing the password from available hashes is quicker than it should be. Matthias also found a contributed fix. Samuel Greear updated to match the reference SHA implementation also in Linux, with this very pertinent warning.
01/19/2012
If you liked KDE3, you’ll like this
If you liked KDE3, you may like Trinity. Matthias Drochner would like you to help get it in pkgsrc.
How low can you go? (with RAM and Hammer)
Matthew Dillon has a very detailed commit message with changes to make sure Hammer will run overnight cleanups in situations as low as 256M of RAM. I think you can find that much RAM in breakfast cereal boxes these days.
01/18/2012
How long until DragonFly 3.0?
The answer is “not very”. As I wrote in a post to kernel@, DragonFly 3.0 will be tagged soon, and released when there’s pkgsrc-2011Q4 packages to go with it. Probably a week if everything goes to plan.
Building JDK 1.6, maybe 1.7
Chris Turner reports success building JDK 1.6 on DragonFly x86_64, though it requires a bit of fiddling. Building 1.7 on x86_64 is getting closer but not yet, as far as I can tell.
01/17/2012
Getting rid of lpr
If you install CUPS, or know that you will never print using lpr(1), you can make sure thatyour DragonFly system never builds lpr again by putting NO_LPR=true in /etc/make.conf.
Setting up a DragonFly wireless access point
What if you have a DragonFly system that you want to use for an wireless access point? Andrey N. Oktyabrski did, and he helpfully listed his solution.
01/16/2012
Have problems, become immortalized
What happens when you break enough things in DragonFly that you become a source of test cases? As Antonio Huete Jimenez (AKA “tuxillo” on IRC) found out, you get a stress test named after you.
Things that have been updated
I need to catch up on some older stuff, so here is a longer list of recent updates: libarchive to 3.0.2, xz to 5.0.3, mfi(4) and mfiutil(8) (LSI MegaRAID driver) updated, ATI SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 AHCI devices (on motherboards I assume) updated, and the PHY ID for the Atheros F1 added. Thanks to everyone who did the work! I bet I missed something.
01/15/2012
Lazy Reading for 2012/01/15
Getting back into the rhythm, here…
- Jeff Vogel, who is a funny and smart guy, wrote this article, essentially about crowdsourcing. It’s another way of saying “bikeshed“. Plus: D&D!
- Michael Lucas, sometimes BSD author, has a new fiction collection out. He’s working on a SSH book too.
- Hey, AsiaBSDCon is coming up in March, BSDCan in May. I don’t know about EuroBSDCon or NYCBSDCon, though. Plan ahead!
- Did you know there’s a bsd.org? Very old-school: here’s a list of commands, get going.
- GNU Tar doesn’t have a man page. (via) Weird. I didn’t verify that, but I’m not sure how to.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: there’s a Freddy, and a dragonfly, but it’s not DragonFly BSD. It’s still fun though.
01/14/2012
Gnat-aux is the way to go
John Marino has pointed out, with a number of examples, that gnat-aux is the best pkgsrc-based compiler for DragonFly right now, in terms of compatibility and support. It’s certainly good news if you are an Ada programmer. He lists some interesting numbers to demonstrate this superiority, though you can’t buildworld with it yet. (gcc 4.4, on DragonFly as part of the system, will do this normally.)
Mailarchive working again, but not NNTP
Matthew Dillon has the mailarchive working again. It pulled from the NNTP version of the DragonFly mailing lists, and when NNTP broke, so did the archive. NNTP isn’t working, but at least the mailing list archive is functional.
I’m hoping to try out Mailman (with NNTP) as a replacement soon…
01/13/2012
Virtual kernels on video
There’s a Youtube video showing how to set up a virtual kernel on DragonFly. I don’t think I linked to this before. (via)
TIM: Open Source Business, and a familiar face
There’s a new Technology Innvation Management Review out, with Open Source Business as the theme. The guest editor for this issue is possibly known to you – Leslie Hawthorn, who was the coordinator for the first years of the Google Summer of Code project.
01/12/2012
BSDCan 2012 call for papers
BSDCan 2012 is happening on the 11th and 12th of May, 2012, with 2 days of tutorials beforehand. It’s at the University of Ottawa. The call for papers is out. These are proposals for talks, not academic papers. The deadline for submissions is Jan 29th, unlike what the site says as of this writing.
Netgraph update
Nuno Antunes has committed a large quantity of work on updating netgraph to version 7. His goal is to be able to run mpd5, though it’s not there yet. If you want to look at it, go to the monthly page and look around the 10th; there’s too much to link to individually.
BSD Magazine out for January-ish
It’s listed both as the December and the January issue, but either way, there’s a new issue of BSD Magazine.
(I’m way behind on posting news; I apologize. I’m working my way through several crises. Crisises? Not sure of the plural form of crisis.)
01/08/2012
Lazy reading for 2012/01/08
I said posting would be more regular now that the holiday’s over, didn’t I? I lied.
- Here’s a useful idea: a server that allows (Linux) systems with encrypted file systems to boot unattended. I’m not sure how that doesn’t defeat the concept, but actually reading the documentation may help with that. (via, via)
- While on the topic, the EFF says “Encrypt your disk!“. (via)
- The Commodore 64 is 30 years old, for those readers of a certain age who may have had one… I was a Apple ][ kid. (via)
- Aw, thanks.
- “What deduplicating file system should I use?” Well, I can think of an answer.
Your unrelated link for the day: The Restart Page. (via) Make your browser full-screen when trying any of them.
01/05/2012
OpenSSL update
Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL to 1.0.0f; this is to fix 6 security issues identified in the OpenSSL changelog.
01/04/2012
How to get DNSSEC going
I just mentioned DNSSEC in last week’s Lazy Reading, and here’s a “How to get DNSSEC with BIND 9.8.1 working” article from Michael Lucas. It’s pretty simple… Conveniently, BIND 9.8.1 is available in pkgsrc as net/bind98.
01/03/2012
Something for re(4) users
You may want to update for this – a lockup bug with the re(4) (RealTek 8xxx series) driver has been fixed.
dma(8) update
dma, which originated on DragonFly, is now at version 0.7, and so is the version in DragonFly.
01/02/2012
How much RAM is too little?
If you’re running DragonFly on a very low-end system, you may be wondering about memory requirements for Hammer. Hammer is much less RAM-hungry than ZFS, so it looks like you can get away with 128M, as long as you don’t mind the occasional error message. You can manually tweak settings for it if you like. 256M is plenty.
It still strikes me as odd to consider systems with less than 1G of RAM as “low-memory”. What rich times we live in!
01/01/2012
Lazy Reading for 2012/01/01
Happy new year! Regular posting should resume soon now that my holidays are over.
- I like the line, “Please note that BSD manpages are usually better as compare to Linux” [sic] found on this odd page of where to find documentation.
- Hey, this encryption of DNS requests is a good idea. Then again, so is DNSSEC. I’ve done neither.
- Stop using GoDaddy, if you can. There’s plenty of reasons, other than support for SOPA.
- There’s got to be at least one reader who gets this joke.
- If you don’t mind digging through all the comments in this Slashdot article about building a desktop environment, there’s some neat descriptions of different window managers and so on.
- A mild brain teaser to start the year: a regular expression to find prime numbers.
- This is a nice description of just what the Archive Team does. (via)
- The Coming War on General Purpose Computing. Sometimes the stuff on BoingBoing gives me the same irritated feeling as sensationalistic Wired articles, but this one is good to read if you happen to be working on your own operating system. Also, the similar thing with APIs.
- This “best tech writing of 2011” summary on Verge (via) led me to this excellent article: “The Web Is a Customer Service Medium“. There’s lots more reading in that summary.
- I’ve seen this mentioned before, but now it’s with a graph so it’s better! On the continuing decline of the GPL.
- OK, I admit graphs are not always a good idea. (via)
- Trivium, from which I yoinked that last link, also has an blog from its author, Chris Neukirchen. It’s not updated often but there’s some entertaining sysadmin tidbits on there, such as going all-ed, or zsh tips, or Why I use the MIT license.
Your completely unrelated link of the day: Tiny Legs of Fire. (video) Worth it for the origin of Beardslap.
(Sorry about the giant text block. This isn’t as readable as I’d like.)
12/29/2011
Libm updates, plus a free security fix
John Marino updated libm, bringing a large quantity of functions. This may be a stopgap measure for now. As a positive side effect, buffer overflow attacks are a bit harder now.
OpenJDK 1.7 on DragonFly
Chris Turner got it working on i386, at least, and his post will help you do the same. I don’t know if these changes have made it through to pkgsrc or for x86_64 yet.
12/28/2011
Better MSI support
That’s Managed System Interrupts, for when your hardware is passing a lot of data and generating a lot of corresponding hardware interrupts. MSI is what deals with all that traffic. High-bandwidth (10G) network cards, for instance. Anyway, Sepherosa Ziehau’s made more commits than what I’m linking to here, for support with various devices.
There’s many other MSIs out there, oddly enough.
BSDTAlk 210: James Nixon, iXsystems
BSDTalk has 20 minutes of interview with James Nixon of iXsystems, from LISA 2011.
12/27/2011
Going to 28C3?
Are you going to Chaos Communication Congress 28? There’s going to be a number of DragonFly developers there, so it’s a good time to meet up. They’re in EFNet #dragonflybsd IRC, so speak up there if you want to find them.
Telnetd update, and history
The recently discovered telnetd vulnerability has been fixed in DragonFly, thanks to Peter Avalos. Apparently it’s been around everywhere forever. (last link via xhr) Hopefully there aren’t that many people that still need a telnet daemon; SSH has run it out of town for the most part.
12/26/2011
NFS fixes, too
Since I’m already talking about imports, several changes from FreeBSD and OpenBSD for NFS, plus more original material, have been brought in by Venkatesh Srinivas. Those changes from FreeBSD apparently improve NFS write performance, though I don’t have numbers to show.
12/25/2011
Merry Christmas, here’s an incredibly involved bugfix
There’s been a rare segfault present in DragonFly for quite some time. It’s been difficult to reproduce, and the 2.12 release due some months ago was held up specifically to fix it. Matthew Dillon was, after many days (months?) of work, able to replicate it reliably and eventually find a way around what appears to be a new AMD-specific bug. Read his very detailed explanation of what he did to get to this point.
12/20/2011
VFS accounting benchmarks
Francois Tigeot benchmarked his accounting work with blogbench, and posted a PDF with the results. Dmitrij D. Czarkoff made a simpler graph, which can be used to draw the conclusion: blogbench didn’t work well for estimating the impact of VFS accounting. If you want to try accounting yourself, put vfs.accounting_enabled="1" in your /boot/loader.conf.
(The normal DragonFly mailarchive isn’t updating because it feeds from DragonFly NNTP, and that’s not updating, so I’m using Gmane for post links.)
12/19/2011
Licensing for pkgsrc
I’m linking to this small discussion about licensing and its documentation in pkgsrc, just because these paragraphs, out of context, are good for any pkgsrc user to know.
12/18/2011
Lazy Reading for 2011/12/18
The links are sheer entertainment this week. No strong options or anything, not even about that U.S. legislative mess called SOPA.
- I greatly enjoyed this history of personal computer mishaps and blunders. Of course, nothing like any of that has ever happened to me. Ever. Ever ever ever.
- Nintendo Entertainment System stories. (a comic) Also familiar to anyone of a particular age.
- This is good advice about env(1) – use it.
- “Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos“, a video via matthiasr on EFNet #dragonflybsd.
- “What’s the strangest language feature you’ve ever encountered?“ (via) Some of these are mind-boggling. I’ve also never seen APL before, yeesh.
- My Year in Roguelikes. I think a few of the games mentioned are in pkgsrc.
Your unrelated comic link of the week: Basic Instructions. Well, not totally unrelated, since BSD author Michael Lucas’s tweet about it reminded me. I’ve got the first book; I need to get the second and third.
12/17/2011
Keeping binutils out of the build
There is now a NO_BINUTILS221 option, added by Sascha Wildner, that will keep your system from building binutils 2.21 during a buildworld. The system will still build binutils 2.22, so there will still be a functioning ld on the system. Use this along with NO_GCC41 (so only gcc 4.4 gets built) to speed up your buildworlds, if you like.
pkgsrc-2011Q4 freeze started
The freeze for pkgsrc-2011Q4 has started. No updates to pkgsrc, other than for security, for the next two weeks.
12/15/2011
New DragonFly mirror
There’s a new DragonFly mirror, in Colorado, USA – at dragonflybsd.mirrorcatalogs.com. It’s on the mirrors page on the DragonFly site, too.
12/14/2011
pkgsrc-2011Q4 freeze soon
The last quarterly release of pkgsrc for the year is scheduled for the end of this month. This means the freeze, where only bugfixes are applies, will be starting on the 17th.
Loader changes for IPMI
If you’re looking to use IPMI and remotely watch the console of another system, Matthew Dillon has made some changes to help with that.
12/13/2011
Shopping shopping shopping!
I do this almost every year, with a little bit more every time. Check those previous years for non-comics/books, cause that’s most of what I’ve seen lately. I’ve recently seen a number of comics lists:
Comics/books: Wondermark gift guide – Wondermark store and cards – Dr. McNinja store – Schlock Mercenary guide – Spacetrawler (scroll down) – Secret Headquarters 1, 2, and 3 (via).
Other lists: Matthew Baldwin’s Good Gift Games list, plus his followup. (The defectiveyeti site is funny, too.)
12/12/2011
New ECC device
Sepherosa Ziehau has added updated the ‘ecc’ device, for Intel E3-1200 series systems. What’s it do? It will report on memory errors, and potentially fix them.
You should have ECC memory in your server already. If not, you oughta.
Update: as Sascha Wildner pointed out, ecc(4) already existed, but didn’t support Intel controllers. Also, the Xeon X3400 series is supported now too.
12/11/2011
Lazy Reading for 12/11/11
Last week was low on links, but this week is great! I hope you have some time set aside.
- This article “The Strange Birth and Long Life of UNIX” has a picture of a PDP-11. I don’t know if I ever actually saw one and knew it before. (via)
- Also from the same place: Window Managers Bloodlines.
- Anecdotal, but probably true. (via luxh on EFNet #dragonfly)
- nginx is the new cool and unpronounceable web server these days, apparently. Michael Lucas covers how to transition static Apache sites over to it.
- This PDF showing slides from the recent NYCBUG presentation by Ike Levy, titled “Inappropriate Cloud Use”, is entertaining, and makes a good point. Cloud computing is cheap on a per month basis, but since it’s a reoccurring cost, it can cost a surprisingly large amount in the long run. (via)
- Hey, a patch for DragonFly (and other BSD) support in Google’s leveldb.
- “Don’t Be a Free User” (via) The last paragraph is the best.
- An expanded grep and diff. ‘grep’ and ‘diff’ have been present for so long, and people understand what they do, generally, that new tools get named after them just because the concept is ingrained in people’s minds. Note that I said “generally”, as regular expressions can be difficult. (via)
- A lot of people don’t realize how they infringe on copyright. This writeup describes something I’ve seen for years: people think a disclaimer that effectively says “I’m infringing but I’m doing it with the best of intentions” makes a difference. It doesn’t.
- So this is what that Xerox Star GUI interface looked like. You know, the ‘first’ desktop GUI. (via) Also, there was some advanced stuff in 1968.
- I like this indicator light setup. (also via luxh on EFNet #dragonflybsd) There’s some other interesting old computer stuff at that site too. I wish there still were computers like these.
- While we’re talking about old things with a certain feel to them, why not Battersea Power Station? Here’s some pictures. (via)
Your unrelated link of the day: Since we’re talking about old things and environments, why not look at some pictures of my workplace?
12/09/2011
Coccinelle usage examples and DragonFly
12/08/2011
BSDTalk 209: BSD Certification
BSDTalk 209 is out, and it’s a 16-minute conversation with Jim Brown about BSD Certification. (who I think I met at NYCBSDCon 2010; a pleasant guy)
12/07/2011
Moving files with a virtualized DragonFly
BSD Magazine: Rolling your own kernel
The December issue of BSD Magazine is out, with the title “Rolling your own kernel”, though that’s just one of the articles there. No article from me this month.
12/06/2011
TIM Review: Intellectual Property Rights
The December issue of the Technology Innvation Management Review is out, with the theme of Intellectual Property Rights. Patents get used for Internet Outrage – read this and be better informed.
FreeBSD Foundation end of year donations
The FreeBSD Foundation is putting out their end of year donation notice. Donate if you can; the support for active developers there helps everyone.