UnixReview.com this week has an ‘examination’ of the CISA and CISM certifications, plus an article about the relative value of certifications.

David Rhodus needs to read Excel files. Joerg Sonnenberger is fixing up OpenOffice 2 and Gnumeric in pkgsrc to work, while Eli Green suggests the program antiexcel.

Csaba Henk posted a link to Sun’s OpenGrok source code search engine. He’s got a version running at http://dragonfly.creo.hu/source.

This makes me think of two things: 1: Sun’s sure putting out a lot of neat stuff and 2: I always hated Stranger In A Strange Land.

UnixReview.com this week has only two articles: a book review of “Running IPv6” and “Regular Expressions: Rexx Still Going Strong“.

The NetBSD quarterly report (that seems to cover a half instead of a quarter; July – December 2005) is out. It covers their new logo, their new releases, new developers and ports, etc. Also, DragonFly’s adoption of pkgsrc is mentioned, along with the fact that Joerg Sonnenberger is more or less responsible for over 3,000 of the successful pkgsrc builds on DragonFly.

The fourth quarter Status Report for FreeBSD is out. Among other items of interest, the report contains links to two recent presentations at EuroBSDCon: New Networking Features in FreeBSD 6.0 and Optimizing the FreeBSD IP and TCP Stack (both links are PDF files). Also, OpenBSD’s dhclient has replaced ISC’s dhclient, and efforts to port DragonFly’s variant symlinks.

For entertainment value, there’s also the FreeBSD/XBox port, which is close to having network support. There’s now a FreeBSD list of available work for volunteers; there’s a number of DragonFly items on there.

Update: PDF links fixed, thanks to Joe “Floid” Kanowitz.

David Rhodus brought up the idea of bounties for DragonFly. Would you pay money for certain one-off programming projects?

Update: Matthew Dillon doesn’t care for it, which makes it unlikely to happen.

From recent discussion on the users@ mailing list: pkg_chk is a known method for upgrading pkgsrc packages; the problem with it is that it removes existing packages, builds the new versions, then installs them. It has problems; this leaves a system without software for the length of the build time, and if a build dependency fails, the previously installed software is not restored. There are other solutions. There’s pkgmanager, or using a jail/chroot environment to build binary packages and then install using those, which the not-yet-ported pkg_comp can help with.

Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert noticed that /dev/random produces nothing; no random numbers at all. This is bad for crypto; Matthew Dillon is working on a fix.

“Haidut” kindly send along news of the NeWBIE project, where a NetBSD CD is used as a bootable end-user system, similar to FreeSBIE (which also uses the BSD Installer, same as DragonFly). He also sends word that he’s working on a DragonFly version of that same CD.

Joerg Sonnenberger announced that binary pkgsrc packages for 1.4.0 are now available, with a whopping 85% of all pkgsrc packages represented. He also noted that pkg_chk now can remotely update binary packages.

Csaba Henk wrote up a detailed explanation of his patch for cache coherency; it’s a good, highly technical read on the various issues involved.

informit.com has the typical BSD overview article: BSD: The Other Free UNIX Family. (Seen on hubertf’s site) Shadow Development has an article about FreeBSD as a desktop; topical after this previously-linked DragonFly review. There’s some interesting material about the Intel Macs on there, too. (From BSDnewsletter.com, via Liam Foy’s BSD Portal.

Also: this is the 1,501st post on this blog! I am curious to see how this volume stacks up to the other BSD sites out there…

I’m adding DragonFly BSD Digest JP over to the links – a site that does what I do here, but in Japanese.

There’s a harsh but accurate review of the DragonFly 1.4 release up now on OSNews.

Matthew Dillon has posted his second parallel routing patch; there’s still some issues, listed in his post along with a link to the patch.

A bit unusual, but here’s a pkgsrc “wallpaper“, courtesy of Hubert Feyrer

mod_php, in pkgsrc, is the package ap-php. If you install the binary version, Apache 1.3 is the dependency it tries to load. This can be a problem if you are alreay running Apache 2.

The ap-php package works with Apache 2 – it has to be built from source, however. Joerg Sonnenberger has more details.

There’s an ongoing debate about this on the pkgsrc tech-pkg list, too.

Matthew Dillon’s posted the first patch for parallelizing the route table. People who don’t mind mangling their network connection are encouraged to give it a try.

UnixReview.com this week has a book review of Real Digital Forensics: Computer Security and Incident Response, and a book review of Book Review: Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution – good for those who got religion.

Linux ‘emulation’ packages are present in pkgsrc, same as they are in ports, but the use is slightly different. Joerg Sonnenberger detailed some of the differences in a recent post.

Updated: And check this post too.

OnLAMP.com/BSD has a new Big Scary Daemons article up about emulation – specifically, Linux emulation on FreeBSD. It should mostly apply to DragonFly.

Jeremy C. Reed has been adding to the PF documentation to cover other operating systems, including DragonFly. He needs another set of eyes to look it over, though.

Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has put together a Roundup issue tracker and has been collecting issues off the bugs@ mailing list for a while. He says it’s about 5 minutes of work daily to keep things straight, which isn’t bad at all for mailing list integration.

Garance Drosihn wrote up a little summary about the oft-revisited subject of: why isn’t there something easier to build than CVSup?

At Daniel Sturm’s suggestion, I’ve put a link for the DragonFly BSD Frappr group over on the side of the page.

There’s been 4 recent security alerts for FreeBSD, for ipfw, cpio, ee, and texindex, all of which could apply to DragonFly since they are in FreeBSD 4.

While we’re on the topic of papers, BSDCan 2006 is happening at the University of Ottowa, May 12-13th, and any proposals for a paper are due January 19th.

Joseph Garcia noticed that the newaliases command is apparently not run as part of a new DragonFly 1.4 install.

The USENIX 06 Technical Conference, held May 30th to June 3rd, has a call for papers out – due by the 17th!

UnixReview.com has 4 articles, this week: book reviews of
Write Portable Code,
Eclipse IDE Pocket Guide,
Debugging Expect,
Marcel’s Linux Game of the Month : eboard, a networkable chess game.

Bob Bagwill posted a link to an “unflattering (but not inaccurate)” review of DragonFly BSD 1.4 over at DistroWatch.

DragonFly 1.4 is out, available for download via HTTP, FTP, or torrent. Be sure to check the errata.

(My post about this was eaten while I set up the server…)

I was bit by this myself: the weekly tarball of pkgsrc files, for those who plan to install pkgsrc, appears to be broken. Use CVS (instructions on the aforementioned wiki page) to update the files within it.

This lengthy blog post details the use of NTP and time in general on Un*xy systems. (Seen on the #NetBSD Blog via hubertf)

Also seen on #NetBSD Blog: play hack over ssh!

The vnodes discussion has morphed into a conversation about kernel memory, and how it is allocated.

O-Reilly’s OnLAMP.com has a new FreeBSD Basics article up titled “Building Binary PC-BSD Packages“, which talks about the slick-sounding PC-BSD package superset of the FreeBSD port system.

In a conversation about having lots of RAM, Matthew Dillon described the relationship of vnodes to memory, and how you rarely want to change it.

UnixAdmin.com has an article up about building a widget for systems admin (Normally Mac-specific, but maybe not much longer), solutions to phishing attacks, and a guide on the venerable but useful tools iostat, vmstat, and netstat.

Several people more educated than I have chimed in with comments that describe the difference between pkgsrc and pkgsrc-wip. Read the comments to be enlightened.

DragonFly BSD 1.4 Release Candidate 2 is out. I think there are no outstanding issues to hold up release at this point…