Joerg Anslik posted his setup to blacklist IPs which repeatedly scan via FTP or SSH.  Some discussion ensued.

Long-time readers will remember a previous discussion like this.

pkgsrcCon for 2008 is happening June 13th-15th in Berlin.  If you are planning to present a paper there, their call for papers is up.  You have until May 25th.

DragonFly has two new committers, as an end-of-year treat: Matthias Schmidt and Nicolas Thery.  Welcome, both of you.  (Also, don’t forget ‘walt‘ earlier this month.)

Sepherosa Ziehau has imported the msk(4) driver, which supports the Marvell Yukon II networking chipset, orginally from FreeBSD.

Matthias Schmidt has tried synchronizing with FreeBSD’s /etc/periodic; he reports no issues on his DragonFly system.  He also helpfully summarizes all the improvements in his post.

• The FreeBSD Foundation has released its semi-annual newsletter for the end of 2007.
• NetBSD has released version 4.0.
• Peter Avalos has updated DragonFly’s libarchive to 2.4.8.

The latest BSDTalk has a16-minute interview with Peter N. M. Hansteen, who recently wrote The Book of PF, and apparently possesses a lot of middle names.

It’s also the 2-year anniversary of BSDTalk - Congratulations to Will Backman.

Chris Turner posted his thoughts on improving vn(4).

Peter Avalos has added the CAM_NEW_TRAN_CODE kernel option, which apparently is very helpful in an unspecified way if you are using SCSI disks via CAM.

The December issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out.

Also, Cisco is looking for some FreeBSD developers. Given Cisco’s recent announcement that they were moving to an open source operating system for their equipment, and that Juniper’s system is already BSD-based…  Hmm.

I group these together because they were both found by Dru Lavigne at AYitLoaBG.

BSDCan 2008, held in May, in Ottowa, has the initial call for papers out.  They have space for informal talks and presentations too.

Matthew Dillon chimed in with his description of how a binary update system for DragonFly could work, with an emphasis on using existing tools.

Perl’s 20 years old today, and a new release of 5.10 is out, along with a new version of Parrot, which includes the nascent Perl 6.  (Via OnLAMP)

I’d be happy to note other major programming language changes - I don’t follow, say, Ruby as closely.  Please tell me if there’s something of note.

An oldie but goodie: don’t forget that it’s possible to set up multiple virtual sound channels in DragonFly.

Matthias Schmidt has put together what I think is A Good Thing: a binary updates system for DragonFly.  There’s still some details to work on, but he has working code already.

Welcome Thomas Nikolajsen, newest DragonFly committer. (Or at least I missed mentioning him before.)

Thanks, anonymous commenter! Not only do I lack reliable short-term memory, but I can’t even use a search function.

Cisco has announced plans for a Unix-based operating system for their network equipment, near the same time as Juniper (who already has a BSD-based system for their equipment) announces third-party development abilities (PR here)  (Via the howling void)  Of course, “open” is a relative term.

Having used a variety of Cisco equipment, I can say I’d like to see their system versions at least a little more sane, as it can get quite difficult to sort out all the various point releases.

Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has made libthread_xu the default threading model for DragonFly. You can switch to it immediately with a symlink if you are not running the bleeding edge code. Caveat emptor, however.

Joerg Anslik found a strange error that turns out to have been a problem in handling floating point states; it’s fixed, but you will need to recompile kernel and libc_r if you are running bleeding edge code.