Not much to report lately… Spend some time reading up on a question about documentation in PDF form that strangely turned into a thread about things like the relative quality of ext3fs, reiserfs, and ufs.
Month: March 2005
03/29/2005
UnixReview.com on Nagios
The monitoring system Nagios, which I used in a previous incarnation as NetSaint, is reviewed on UnixReview.com.
03/28/2005
Pre-NEWPCM sound gone
Joerg Sonnenberger has removed all the old sound support that dates back to before NEWPCM was added in FreeBSD-4. This probably does not affect anyone, as this is all for old, rare equipment, usually ISA.
Stable has slipped!
Stable has slipped.
If that doesn’t make sense to you, this means that the current “bleeding edge” code has been moved to “Stable” status, as there’s no outstanding problems with it. If you’re using the “DragonFly_Stable” tag in your CVSup file, you’ll have some new things to download.
03/27/2005
About make
Dru Lavigne has a new article in her ONLamp FreeBSD Basics column that talks about make. Most of what it says applies to DragonFly, too.
03/26/2005
Mail and TLS HOWTO
Adrian Nida posted that he’s added a “mail server with TLS” HOWTO to the wiki. It’s part of a larger HOWTO section, if anyone would like to contribute.
03/25/2005
Still no slip
The Stable tag has not yet been moved forward, because of a new error found. Matthew Dillon posted another summary.
03/24/2005
Jewelry, too
Devon H. O’Dell’s girlfriend happens to do dragonfly jewelry. That’s based on the bug, not BSD.
Multihead 3D is fun
Adam Kirchoff described something I did not know: MergedFB is the way to get multihead, 3D video going. Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has been working on it, too.
03/23/2005
Stable slip soon; what remains
The Stable tag will be slipped today; there are a few minor bugs remaining.
Update: Stable is not slipped yet.
03/22/2005
DragonFly laptop
Paul Grunwald is selling his IBM laptop, which happens to run DragonFly just fine.
UnixReview.com quick links
This week, UnixReview.com has a review of the tools Detox and jMemorize, a Linux book review that may be vaguely related to DragonFly, a conversation about regular expressions titled “Ten Years for Overnight Success“, and some other material that isn’t really on-topic enough for linking.
AMD64 hardware
Matthew Dillon found this interesting collection of quotes from FreeBSD users who have purchased amd64 hardware.
Word spreads
John Leimon saw that DragonFly gathered some attention on the “fox-toolkit” mailing list.
03/21/2005
Hassle fixed!
Historically, access to devices by anyone other than root has been a slight hassle under BSD. Joerg Anslik’s changes to MAKEDEV have been committed, which, among other things, allows for a /etc/devices.conf that controls individual permissions for different devices, such as the CD drive.
Better, and better still
The upcoming DragonFly release (1.5, probably) will be good, but the next release will be huge.
When in Windows
Matthew Dillon has committed changes to the DragonFly CD image, put together by Eduardo Tongson, so that if one is inserted in a computer running Windows, it will autorun a web page with information and links about DragonFly BSD.
03/20/2005
Looking out
As part of a longer thread about making your computer configure itself appropriately to available networks, Freddie Cash pointed at the profile.sh work in FreeBSD. This may be convertible to FreeBSD…
Stable slip soon; next release too
Matthew Dillon listed remaining bugs before the next move of the Stable tag, and also plans for the next release, which will probably be “1.5″.
03/19/2005
ACPI, again
YONETANI Tomokazu has already moved on to the next version of Intel’s ACPI code, and committed it.
DragonFly gone to hardware?
Joerg Sonnenberger has added firmware support, put together by he and Johannes Hofmann. Does this mean DragonFly could work on specialized hardware? Boot from an EEPROM? I don’t know, but it’s fun to pretend.
03/18/2005
OnLamp RAID
Dan Langille of FreshPorts and FreeBSD Diary fame has an article up at ONLamp/BSD that talks about monitoring a RAID system with Netsaint.
03/17/2005
New in next release
Matthew Dillon detailed some of the issues he wants to be resolved before the next release, and also mentioned that the next release will be the switch to using GCC3 as the default compiler, isntead of GCC 2.95 as now. Chris Pressey followed up with news of some installer improvements he wants to include.
03/16/2005
KDE 3.4 arrives, Gnome 2.10 hits FreeBSD ports
KDE 3.4 is out. I don’t know if the FreeBSD port will build on DragonFly, yet… A “new in this version” list is available. Gnome 2.10 is currently out in the FreeBSD ports tree too.
Finally, certification
bsdcertification.org is now available. As you may guess from the name, it’s an organization for creating a standard measurement of BSD skills, and it’s also a very good idea. Some very clever people are behind it. There’s a mailing list available, which looks like the best way to see what happens when it happens.
TeenyFly
If you’re looking to install DragonFly to something small, like, say, a USB memory stick, Gary Allan has some links for you.
3Ware speed tests
David Rhodus posted some initial results with using a 3Ware 9500 RAID controller on DragonFly. The summarized version of the thread is this: transfer rates were 30 MB/s with FreeBSD 5.3, and 152 MB/s with DragonFly.
Get dmesg
Rongsheng Fang suggested on users@ that the easy way to track working hardware would be to emulate an OpenBSD trick: sending a dmesg.
Finding out about find
New at UnixReview.com: tips on find, that most useful and obfusticated of utilities.
new MINimal EDitor
A rambling conversation on users@ brought about the idea of a editor that would work under dire circumstances (i.e. /usr missing). A improved version of mined was brought in.
Places to put things
The Donations page on dragonflybsd.org has a number of new entries. Take a look, and help out if you can.
03/14/2005
386 no go
DragonFly apparently doesn’t work (easily) on a 386. This probably only affects 1 person.
03/12/2005
New ncurses
Things are being added in right and left: Eirik Nygaard has updated ncurses to version 5.4.
Whole lotta posts
A semi-milestone: This is news item 1001. That works out to an average of 2 posts per day over the last 18 months.
New ACPI
YONETANI Tomokazu has brought in Intel’s acpica-20050211 package. That’s power management software, if that’s not familiar.
More TV is always good
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has committed code from Steve O’Hara-Smith adding improvements to the bktr (TV input) driver, similar to those in FreeBSD, and adding support for newer cards.
Citrus coming
If you haven’t guessed from his commits, Joerg Sonnenberger is bringing in the Citrus project from NetBSD, which handles internationalization.
U(ucp) can do it!
ONLamp.com has a new article on sending email securely. In fact, it’s UUCP over SSH, an acronym combo I didn’t think I’d ever type. I think it’s been more than a decade since I’ve even seen a UUCP address.
Good laptops
Tom Hummel mentioned AMD Turion 64 laptops as a possible good fit for DragonFly, given their low power and cooling needs.
I have yet to encounter anyone who has bought one of the AMD 64-bit CPUs and been unhappy with the purchase.
New pkgsrc binaries, with xorg
Todd Willey announced on the GoBSD mailing list that a new set of pkgsrc prebuilt binaries have been placed on the gobsd.com site.
03/09/2005
USENIX release deadline
Matt Dillon mentioned that he hopes to have the next major release of DragonFly out, with journaling included in some form, before Usenix ’05 in mid-April. More info on this plus a stable tag slip are in his post.
Journaling /fs
In the ongoing discussion about journaling, Dan Melomedman linked to Paul Jarc’s “/fs“.
leaf is down
leaf.dragonflybsd.org is apparently down or unreachable, at least from where I’m standing.
Update: Working, now – thanks, Hiten!.
Power outage
shiningsilence.com was down for a good chunk of yesterday; a construction worker tripped a fuse in my house, and my UPS only kept going for so long… It’s obviously better now.
03/07/2005
No background, but a history
Matthew Dillon gave a further update on the journaling work, plus he noted (as many had hoped) that there would be no background fsck in DragonFly.
03/06/2005
Learning BSD system programming
Zera William Holladay was looking for tips on where to find BSD-oriented material for a OS design class; several people replied with references to the “Design and Implementation…” book, other books, and general experience.
How not to be seen
While talking about how to implement “undo” for disk journaling, Matthew Dillon also included some data on the relative effect of his journaling work on disk speed so far. (Look at the end of the post.)
Libre Software Meeting contributions
Thomas Petazzoni posted a request on the kernel@ list for contributions to the Libre Software Meeting in July, in France.
BSD for February
Sam Smith’s excellent BSD news roundup, this one for February, has appeared on the ONLamp/BSD site.
03/04/2005
Huge task just for you
Matthew Dillon is looking for someone with lots of time and know-how who can take on the userland side of his journaling work. Just read it, and you’ll see.
Lots more on scan blocking
Matthew Dillon posted his C program for blocking repeated ssh scanners. Garance Drosihn pointed at a similar perl script, while Scott Ullrich modified Matthew Dillon’s script to use pf.
Also, Brian Reichert posted a link to the DROP list, while George Georgalis followed with a link to bogons along with a “sloppy bash script” that blocks by country code.
(msf)Buf Better
Matthew Dillon has checked in a large update to msfbufs, produced by him and by Hiten Pandya.
03/03/2005
Samba something to do
If you’re looking for a task to fill a rainy day, Joerg Sonnenberger suggested that moving over bits of smbfs from FreeBSD 5/6 would be good.
leaf lockout
Matthew Dillon issued this warning to folks with accounts on leaf: Due to an increase in automated ssh scans, he’s implemented a security policy that may lock you out if you goof up your login. Mail him if that does happen.
I’ve seen these same ssh scans with some frequency for at least a few months; these scans appear to be looking for poorly configured machines. Not a huge threat, but enough to warrant a closer eye.
03/02/2005
Frenzy CD for FreeBSD
Frenzy, (also in Ukranian, I think) a cleverly-named Live CD based on FreeBSD, is available. Thanks, Slashdot/BSD.
It appears to be similar to FreeSBIE, though more oriented towards system maintenance. Once compressed filesystems are possible under DragonFly, a DragonFly version of these sorts of products should be easier to do.
UnixReview.com: OSI hate, abuse hate
Unixreview.com has an article up about using a shell script to find abusive folks connecting to your workstation, and another article that reviews “The Elements of Networking Style“, wich sounds great if you hate the OSI 7-layer model. (And who doesn’t?)
Handbook on wiki now editable
Sascha Wildner has made the wiki version of the Handbook editable. It can’t get any easier than this to update.
