A fix for cluster_write() issues reported by multiple people is now available, so if you’re running a version of DragonFly newer than 3.0.2, you’ll want to update.
Month: April 2012
04/29/2012
Lazy Reading for 2012/04/29
I go a bit beyond presenting links and comment on them too, this week. Not too much! Enjoy.
- Best ad for a front-end designer ever. (via) It will make sense if you used the Web in 1995.
- A while back I linked to a article about Valve’s development process. Now, here’s the Handbook. (PDF, via) As I said before, they’ve arguably taken the best parts of open source development work and used then to create a workspace. These best parts are not the ones usually talk about when they say, “open source company”, though. There’s a Harvard Business School paper that talks about the carrot or stick approach to motivation, and I think Valve nailed it. Read the PDF, cause it’s more fun than this.
- Animated Engines. (via) Animations that show how different engine types work. I find them oddly soothing. Also, I finally know more about a Wankel Rotary Engine outside of its existence as a punchline in a Monty Python sketch.
- The best reaction to space mining. (via)
- LOL memory, to the moon.
- A BSD-specific fork of ekg2. Never used it; just saw the BSD part of the name.
- “Imagine that you’re crazy enough to think about building a search engine.” (via)
- “Before you write a patch, write an email“.
- If you’re going to fund open source work, you should fund the boring stuff for maximum effectiveness.
- Volatile Software (via) You may or may not agree with the strategy, but I can agree with the sentiment. For better or worse, BSD is generally a more sane/stable platform.
- Twitter CLI. (via) Ruby-based, and seems like an actual good idea, not just a hack to see if it can be done.
- “FreeBSD Device Drivers” for a pre-release 40% off. Some of the contents may apply to DragonFly. Or perhaps you enjoy device driver documentation?
- Go Right (via), for anyone who played a game console more than 10 years ago.
- VIM Adventures. (via) Surprisingly fun.
Your unrelated link of the week. Youtube Poop. As far as I can tell, ‘Youtube Poop’ are glitched videos made from Youtube content but with segments repeated, frames modified, or new sentences constructed from reassembling the frames. Sometimes noisy, sometimes rude. Also, an art form that can only exist now, and never really before. Reminds me of the old Fensler Films, or that odd series out of Japan. I find the idea of assembling new rhythms and music out of non-musical items fascinating, but I would, wouldn’t I?
(Turn your volume down before trying some of those links.)
04/27/2012
OpenSSL 1.0.1b updated
Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL, though this version is apparently a bugfix, not a security fix. Still need it anyway, since it disabled TLS 1.1 in an unexpected way. See the OpenSSL changelog entry at “[26 Apr 2012]” for details.
04/26/2012
Google Summer of Code: the projects
Each of the 4 DragonFly participants for Summer of Code have posted an introductory email and details of their projects. Here’s direct links to their posts for your reading convenience:
- Vishesh Yadav - Implement inotify interface and Indexing Service for Filesystem
- Mihai Carabas - Add SMT/HT awareness to DragonFlyBSD scheduler
- Loganaden Velvindron - Privilege Separation in DragonflyBSD
- Ivan Sichmann Freitas - 32 bit API for 64 bit kernels
(Yes, same format as my last post, but now the links are to their posts, not the sparse Google info pages.)
04/25/2012
SACK retransmission added
Sepherosa Ziehau added ”Rescue Retransmission for SACK-based Loss Recovery Algorithm” in a commit, where he details just where this would be handy. It’s on by default and the sysctl net.inet.tcp.rescuesack can be used to turn it off.
04/24/2012
Packages that will go, and packages that might go
There’s a few pkgsrc packages that might be going the way of the dodo, soon. There’s a few more that need love, so speak up if you use them. Maybe you can be the Somebody™ that fixes them?
New committer: Markus Pfeiffer
Welcome our newest committer: Markus Pfeiffer. He’s ‘profmakx’ on EFNet #dragonfly, and has been working on a port of FreeBSD’s USB infrastructure – which I am looking forward to, tremendously.
04/23/2012
Google Summer of Code projects announced
Google has announced their projects accepted for Summer of Code: DragonFly has 4 projects of the 1,212 funded:
- Vishesh Yadav - Implement inotify interface and Indexing Service for Filesystem
- Mihai Carabas - Add SMT/HT awareness to DragonFlyBSD scheduler
- Loganaden Velvindron - Privilege Separation in DragonflyBSD
- Ivan Sichmann Freitas - 32 bit API for 64 bit kernels
(Hopefully those links are to visible pages) We had way more good proposals than available mentors/slot, unfortunately. So if you didn’t get in, think about next year, or maybe look at doing the work on your own; there’s some great ideas out there that I’d like to see happen.
Mosh for DragonFly developers
Mosh, mentioned on this Digest a few weeks back, is now installed on leaf.dragonflybsd.org. If you’re doing any development work there but dealing with a relatively high latency, this should help. (Thanks Venkatesh Srinivas.)
Where are the pkgsrc-2012Q1 binary packages for DragonFly?
I’m still working on building them. I kept getting panics, which seem to be fixed by this commit, so I should have something soon. Sorry!
04/22/2012
Lazy Reading for 2012/04/22
Enjoy!
- I like the sentiments here about Instagram. (via) I can see why it was popular, but not how it represented anything but a cosmetic tool, dependent on other services.
- Waxy.org turns 10. I relink (reblog? I don’t know) material from the links page on waxy.org, because Andy Baio has a keen eye. That article has links to various high points over the last 10 years, so it’s worth setting aside some of your time and looking at previous features. Come to think of it, he started that only a year before I started this Digest.
- Supercomputers installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. All the way back to UNIVAC. (via swildner on EFNet #dragonflybsd) This picture is one of the more realistic I’ve ever seen about rack installation.
- RFC6540: IPv6 Support Required for All IP-Capable Nodes. (via) YES.
- The Story of BSD and Open-Source Linux, unfortunately incorrect, starting with the headline.
- 40 years on: Why Unix standards still matter. A brief note about the Single Unix Specification. There’s some implication that Unix was involved in the moon landings; was that the case? I didn’t think so, since at least a chunk of the moon landings predate Unix existing. (i.e. before the Epoch.)
- A photo followup on the one PHP article from last week. (via aggelos on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- From the same site as the PHP article, tmux is sweet as heck. It’s nice to see the positive points of tmux defined outside of licensing. Also, it serves as a good tmux configuration checklist.
Your unrelated link of the week: One Thing Well. The BSD tag might be the most useful.
04/21/2012
OpenSSL updated to 1.0.1a
Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL in DragonFly to version 1.0.1a, to fix the recent vulnerability CVE-2012-2110. Thanks Peter!
04/20/2012
Cheap SSH Mastery
Michael Lucas’s worthwhile book, SSH Mastery, is currently having one of those sudden price cuts on Amazon – for the paperback version, about 25%. Now it a good time to nab it before the price bounces back up.
04/19/2012
Disk quotas, the details
Francois Tigeot has followed up with a description of how to enable and disable quotas on DragonFly, which will work for most any local file system, unless rebooted. There’s also the vquota(8) man page.
04/16/2012
OpenJDK7 building
Based on a recent post from Chris Turner to the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list, here’s a bug report that should get you to a working lang/OpenJDK7 pkgsrc package.
04/15/2012
Lazy Reading for 2012/04/15
It’s a good week when I can start collecting new Lazy Reading material right after posting the previous week’s summary.
- There’s a ‘flickr doomsday clock‘. The concept is entertaining, even though the result it warns about is pretty bad. (via) There’s a sort of assumption that external sites hosting huge amounts of our personal data will never go away, or that there’s always an easy way to deal with it if they do.
- Dragonfly – the knife.
- Jack Tramiel died this past week. He’s responsible for Commodore, and the Amiga, and later owned Atari. There’s a DragonFly connection; Matthew Dillon was known for his DICE Amiga C compiler, among other things.
- Bufferbloat: Dark Buffers on the Internet. (pdf, from sephe on EFNet #dragonflybsd) Hopefully I’m summing this up correctly: too many devices buffer network data when there’s congestion (and even when there isn’t congestion) instead of saying “It’s congested” through the normal TCP mechanisms, with the end result of much higher latency for everything. bufferbloat.net talks about it more, and Matthew Dillon found a good paper about it.
- “PHP is a programming language like scrapple is a meat.” (via) I’m just enjoying the metaphors in the third paragraph.
- And that led me to this: PHP: A fractal of bad design. The list of problems is larger than I thought. As in, it went from comedy to tragedy in the same document.
- Peter Hansteen talks about port knocking. (via) As a side effect, the article provides a good checklist of how to make your system more secure. ”No root login” is already implemented on DragonFly.
- Computers Brochures, 50s-70s. (via swildner on EFNet #dragonflybsd) There’s a whole bunch of desktop wallpapers in a zip file down at the end. The scans are a bit noisy, but fun to see. I like the layout of the PDP issues.
- Whatever happened to UNIX? We’re soaking in it.
- I mentioned RetroBSD on PIC32 last week, and now here’s a picture.
- Valve’s internal structure sounds astonishingly like an open source project. Everyone has access to the code, project direction is determined by interest, and it’s up to you to coordinate with others.
- Google as a 1980s BBS. (via, via) It totally works.
Your unrelated link of the week: Quigley’s Cabinet Followups. There’s about a bazillion links there to follow about weird history.
04/14/2012
Optimized scoreboard for SACK
DragonFly now has a optimized scoreboard for SACK, thanks to Sepherosa Ziehau. What’s that mean? SACK is a way to make sure only the needed parts of a TCP transmission get retransmitted, when multiple packets are lost. The scoreboard is where the packets needing retransmission are tracked. So, the result of these improvements is better performance in packet-lossy situations.
(Please correct me if your understanding is better than mine; my explanation is based on stumbling around the Internet for a few minutes of reading.)
04/13/2012
em(4) update
Sepherosa Ziehau has updated the em(4) driver from Intel; it only matters if you are using the specific chipsets mentioned in the commit message.
Hammer2 messaging
If you’re curious about Hammer2 development, it’s been ongoing, but there haven’t been any more juicy commits to point at. Here’s one – the start of the messaging system.
04/12/2012
DragonFly time
DragonFly now has its own ntp.org zone. What’s this mean? Nothing material, but it’s nice to do.
IW changes wiill need a buildworld
Sepherosa Ziehau has made changes to the initial TCP congestion window, based on a number of papers he links to in his post. The immediate effect is if you’re on DragonFly-current, you will need to do a full buildworld on your next upgrade. The long term effect could be improvements in latency by improving reactions to bufferbloat. Or not; this is pretty technical.
04/11/2012
6 slots for Summer of Code
DragonFly has been given 6 slots (i.e. spaces for students) by Google for this year’s Summer of Code. That’s great! We have a crop of great student proposals this year, so far, so the biggest worry at this point is how to get to them all.
pkginteractive: graphical pkgin
Julian Fagir has put together a graphical – meaning it works under curses in a terminal, or under X - interface to pkgin, the binary package manager. Can someone try it and describe how well it works?
04/09/2012
Have Areca RAID? Now you can use MSI
Thanks to Sascha Wildner, the Areca RAID controller driver, arcmsr(4), now supports MSI. It should only make things better, but if it doesn’t, you can turn it off.
Some more pkgsrc expunging
There’s several packages that will be removed from pkgsrc after the 2012Q2 branch, since they haven’t worked in a long time. Also, Python 2.4 has been removed from pkgsrc-current and 2.5 will go the same way before the end of the year.
04/08/2012
Lazy Reading for 2012/04/08
The links are all over the map this week, which is fine. Enjoy!
- This makes me laugh every time. (via)
- Etsy has an astonishingly good internal development practice. And open source code? (via)
- For contrast, Facebook’s release engineering process. (via I lost it, sorry) Not as interesting but I can’t tell why.
- Mosh, a program designed for the persistence of screen but differently. (via) Dunno if it builds on DragonFly, but it looks neat.
- I’m getting more paranoid as I get older. Things like this Javascript ad injection on hotel wi-fi may be a reason. (via)
- “I just ran emacs. LOL!“
- 0x10c, a sci-fi game set in the future with spaceships running a 16-bit CPU. That you can program.
- I wish I could write here with the same mix of loathing and excitement found in this comics review. Warning: mildly… gonzo?
- The journey from user to contributor, a NYCBUG talk in mp3 form. (via)
- I’ve mentioned RetroBSD before, but here’s an example of it being installed on a Duinomite board. 2.11 BSD on a super-cheap, super-small Arduino-style board! (via) I don’t know what I’d do with it, but I want one. It even has keyboard and VGA ports.
- At some point, this CPU database will be handy. (via)
- A new, slow form of brute force ssh attack. (via) What I find interesting here is not so much the new attack itself, but Peter Hansteen’s careful gathering and analysis of data around it.
Your unrelated link of the week: memepool. It’s seen some activity lately. It was a blog before there were blogs, and I was part of it.
04/07/2012
pkgsrc-2012Q1 is branched
The next quarterly release of pkgsrc, pkgsrc-2012Q1, has been branched. I’ll start building binary packages momentarily.
The branch should show up in DragonFly git later today. Once available, you can change any references to ‘pkgsrc-2011Q4′ in /usr/Makefile to ‘pkgsrc-2012Q1′, and then to switch to it:
- cd /usr/pkgsrc
- git branch pkgsrc-2012Q1 origin/pkgsrc-2012Q1
- git checkout pkgsrc-2012Q1
- git pull
At that point, you can start building and installing newer applications. For more details on that, check the pkgsrc guide on the DragonFly website.
Note that you don’t have to do that; you can stick with the 2011Q4 (or earlier) packages you have installed now, if you don’t want to deal with software changes right now, or if you want to wait for the binary packages to become available. Upgrades/security fixes only happen for the latest quarterly release, though.
Note: don’t assume I tested this before advising you to do it, or anything like that. I mean, come on.
04/06/2012
BSD Magazine for April: Clouds
BSD Magazine’s April issue is out, and it’s about the Cloud. Or clouds, depending on how you look at it. Anyway, there’s several conversations in there about BSD-based hosting services, which I’m sure everyone has wished for at some time or another.
Longest DragonFly review ever?
Steven Rosenberg is writing the longest DragonFly review ever. Here’s parts one, two, and three. There’s 3 more parts to come, 1 per day, so check back for the end of the story.
04/05/2012
Does this load for you?
I have one trouble report. I need more, especially if you’re in Australia.
04/03/2012
Packages that might go away, or not?
There’s been some discussion of packages that have been broken for a long time in pkgsrc, over on the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list. It’s interesting to see just what breaks these packages, though it still seems up in the air whether any will be removed or not. (Follow the thread if you have time.) I don’t think the discussion has ended yet.
04/01/2012
Lazy Reading for 2012/04/01
This would be the right time for an April Fools joke… but no. It’s so common it’s hard to come up with something that won’t make people roll their eyes.
- Here’s an Ultimate SSH Hacks article that isn’t actually that ultimate, or hacky. However, I found it via this Slashdot article that had a comment with this nifty trick for having a single-file Unix-portable ssh link.
- Design Disease. (via) I can sympathize. If you can’t tell what he’s objecting to in the pictures, consider yourself lucky. There’s probably a similar symptom that makes people collect old computer equipment, which I daresay a few readers are vulnerable to.
- Legit, Git workflow for humans. Slightly more sensical syntax for git, as far as I can tell. (via)
- Michael Lucas is dedicated to writing. Really dedicated.
- Also, Michael Lucas and The Value of Tech Books. He’s very right about man pages; they’re great and also not great.
- How DNS Changer was taken down and victims redirected. (via) I link to it because Paul Vixie, the author, also wrote the cron program you’re running right now. Really, look at the end of the man page.
- Look at what’s happened to DuckDuckGo’s traffic stats! (via) I’ve linked to the search engine before, and I know there’s at least a few readers who like it.
- “Let’s kill all proprietary drivers for good” (PDF, via several places) It makes me happy that it talks about drivers and acknowledges the existence of BSD. Driver unification would be great, though it really needs someone solidly behind it as with any project.
- “The problem is compounded by the way Linux has grown over the years into an ungainly edifice, built upon thousands of individual packages of computer code that have been stapled together.”
Your unrelated link of the day: a Space Shuttle launch from the point of view of the booster rocket. (via) Remember when humanity had reusable spaceships?
