From a discussion on users@: if you’re thinking about a UPS, look at what apcupsd can support.  (hint: apparently, almost anything)

dragonflybsd.org has been down for a good chunk of today; it was due to a blown transformer.

Google Alerts told me of two links: “Baby Steps with DragonFly BSD 1.8.1“, and “Review: DragonFly BSD 1.8.1“.  Both excellent reviews, in that they describe an accurate picture of the good and bad points of the recent release.

I’ve given the main page of leaf.dragonflybsd.org a slight update, to show more of the resources available to developers.

A task where much of the heavy lifting has been done: making a kernel boot no matter how many processors are in the system. (notes)  Right now, SMP kernels can’t boot on a system with 1 CPU, so the LiveCD runs only a non-SMP kernel.

On UnixReview.com this week: “Test Your Knowledge of Ethernet Topics“, two book reviews: “Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference” and “Building the Perfect PC“, along with a product review of “The Ultimate CompTIA Network+ Resource Kit” and the host integrity tool “Osiris“.

A recurring argument that pops up from time to time is replacing Sendmail in the base system with something else – Postfix , qmail, or a similar product.  Licensing, complexity, or user preference usually lead to a long discussion that doesn’t change the matter.  Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has come up with an answer: none of the above.  He’s writing a simple MTA that will handle delivery on the local machine, which is enough for a system that doesn’t handle normal mail.  For people who need more, sendmail and Postfix and others are all in pkgsrc.

Matthew Dillon pointed out a relatively easy vkernel exercise: making them run without being attached to a terminal.  You could spin off multiple virtual systems, all from one command line.

There’s a new Estonian mirror up for DragonFly, in IPv4 and IPv6:

ftp://ftp.estpak.ee/pub/DragonFly
http://ftp.estpak.ee/pub/DragonFly
rsync://ftp.estpak.ee/DragonFly

Doubly useful right now, because dragonflybsd.org appears to be having slight network issues.

Hasso Tepper has produced an interesting patch that allows for notification on network link state changes.

Jason Dixon has announced the creation of Meta-BUG, a BSD user group designed to coordinate between other BSD users groups.  The web page already has a list of events and ideas.

Early registrations for the Sys Admin Technical Conference for 2007 are due by the end of March.  It’s being held in a nice town (Baltimore, MD) and has some interesting speakers, including security talks from BSD user Richard Bejitlich.

Jonathan Buschmann has posted an initial patch to get a much-requested feature onto DragonFly: CARP.

With Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s recent 1:1 threading work, a recent conversation exposed future plans to experiment with M:NCPU support in DragonFly.  (That’s M kernel threads supporting N userland threads, where N == number of CPUs.)

Matthew Dillon has written up the initial documentation for the SYSLINK protocol.  (Also available as a PDF, thanks to Sascha Wildner.)  SYSLINK is the inter-system communication method for DragonFly clusters.

If you read carefully, you may notice that the proposed clustering file system for DragonFly is named in the document as “ANVIL”.

BSDCan 2007‘s schedule is posted, and registration is now possible.  (Thanks, BSDNews.)

leaf.dragonflybsd.org is going down for a hardware change tonight, which means the mail archive and man pages will be temporarily unavailable.

I’m trying to get together the ideas, mentors, students, and etc. needed to participate in Google’s Summer of Code 2007.  If you’re interested, please mention it on the mailing lists.

As part of a larger discussion about logging IRC channels, Dmitri Nikulin wrote an interesting pasage on security and encryption, and how governments tend to work around rather than break encryption.

On UnixReview.com this week, Shell Corner has “Epoch to UTC Time Conversion“, a script that may be very useful to U.S. and Canadian residents this upcoming weekend, a (digital) book review of “Cisco Firewall Technologies“, and a hardware review of the “Adderlink IP”, which works as a VNC station for attaching to a KVM.

Antonio Huete Jiménez has written a new wiki article on how to set up a network card using WPA, on DragonFly.

YONETANI Tomokazu has managed to get DragonFly partially booting on an Intel Mac.

As part of a larger discussion, ‘walt’ posted a link to a description of Logical Block Addressing and how it’s slightly less annoying than using CHS (Cylinder, Head, Sector).

Adrian Michael Nida cobbled together a bot to watch the EFNet channel #dragonflybsd and keep a running log, available via the web.  He still has some features he wants to add – if you know python, please contribute.

OnLAMP.com has a new article up about Multiboot; it focuses on NetBSD, but it’s the same i386 hardware as DragonFly.