Dru Lavigne has posted a pile of links to various things – click through and eat up an hour or two.

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.

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.)

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).

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.

Dru Lavigne spotted this entertaining (and sad) blooper on the ITWorld Canada site.

Murray Stokely has some nice details on BSD-related non-profit corporations, in terms of spending and money earned in both this year and last.

The Open Source Census is apparently open for testing; it looks to be an attempt to quantify the usage of open source software, worldwide – a difficult goal, but nothing worthwhile is ever easy.  (Via A Year in the Life…)  Someone want to see if their Discovery Tool works on DragonFly?

Matthias Schmidt ported PAM support in cron and pam_nologin from FreeBSD, which has some obvious benefits.

It’s not done yet, but other people would like the features.

As we approach the end of the fiscal year, keep in mind that it’s possible to give money in potentially tax-reducing ways to FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.

GCC 4.1 seems to have an overflow bug. 4.2 has a bug where code just gets skipped. 4.3 is not yet out. This seems to be a problem with no answer yet.

Update: commenters have pointed out GPL v3, which comes with GCC 4.3, should not cause problems, contrary to the offhand mention in Stanislav Sedov’s post, linked above.

Michael Neumann suggested this interesting alternative to libevent.

Larry Wall’s most recent State of the Onion on perl.com gives an interesting rundown of his experience with scripting languages. No Perl experience required to get the history lesson. His description of PHP is especially good:

We’ve also seen the rise of PHP, which takes the worse-is-better approach to dazzling new depths, as it were. By and large PHP seems to be making the same progression of mistakes as early Perl did, only slower.

Hasso Tepper has been looking at the bugs database for DragonFly and started to categorize some of the remaining issues.  If you posted any of these bugs (i.e. through a mail to the bugs@ mailing list), please check through his message and mention if the issue is still current.

Robert de Bock has a number of OpenSSH tricks up on Undeadly.  The first one, ‘Using SSH Keys‘, should be required reading.

The Call for Papers is out for the 2008 USENIX technical conference,  and  registration is open for Software Development West 2008.  The papers for USENIX are due in early January.

Francois Tigeot posted a writeup on how to get Qemu running well on DragonFly.

It was recently noted that the BBC created their own version of an “On Rails” system, using Perl.  While it’s not that dramatic, as similar and highly polished systems already exist, it’s interesting to see that larger corporations seem to always progress towards, not away from, open source and sharing code.