Sepherosa Ziehau has added netblast, a tool originally from FreeBSD that, if I’m reading the commit right, flings packets of a given size at an IP/port of your choosing, for as long as you want.
Month: May 2012
crypt(3) and DES fix
It’s possible to accidentally truncate your password when using DES encryption and 0×80 in UTF-8 encoding. It’s fixed.
BSDTalk 216: Kris Moore and PC-BSD
BSDCan 2012 spawned a lot of interviews. We all benefit from that. For example, another BSDTalk interview, talking with Kris Moore of iXSystems about what’s in the next version of PC-BSD.
Phoronix benchmarks revisited
There were some benchmarks of DragonFly 3.0 some time ago on Phoronix. (You may recall it being mentioned here previously.) The disk numbers always seemed weird to me, so I repeated that part of the test, and here’s my writeup.
SIOCGIFDATA renumbered, pflogd needs recompilation
Sepherosa Ziehau has made some changes to SIOCGIFDATA, so if you are using DragonFly-master and pf, you will need a full rebuild. Also pftop, if you use it.
More Summer of Code status
Three more weekly status updates from DragonFly/GSoC students: Mihai Carabas, Vishesh Yadav, and Ivan Sichmann Freitas. That’s all for the past/first week.
Lazy Reading for 2012/05/27
Let’s get right down to it:
- Hey, Nmap 6 is out. It’s one of those always-useful tools, similar to wireshark.
- Biculturalism, a fair assessment. (via) The generalizations are a little extreme (1 Unix-based author who Got Religion, vs. a diffused Windows developer stereotype) but still has value.
- A Git Horror Story. (via) Not a true story, but useful for describing how git commits can be GPG-signed.
- A recent Google Doodle, a playable Moog synthesizer, done for Bob Moog’s birthday. The Moog Music site has instructions. I happened to notice they’re using FreeBSD as the server – cool! Maybe it’s just the hosting org? Anyway, I link to it because Bob Moog’s cousin was for a while my father’s employer.
- “Google is transitive, whereas Facebook is reflexive.” (via) This sums up the practical difference between Google and Facebook rather well.
- I did not know this existed: OpenBSD Network Shell. (via) Interface like a Cisco-ish router, internals are OpenBSD.
- There’s been recent news articles about how programmers over 35 tend to not get hired. Here’s one of the reasons: younger programmers discount the value of their own time. Anything where all the benefits (cheaper labor, more products) accrue to the company, and all the costs go to the employee (time lost, extra work) is not a good idea in the long run.
- “Now I’ve met the other DragonFly BSD user, too.” That’s two more than I expected for any given project, really.
- Undeadly.org has an extensive interview/article about OpenSMTPd. It’s OpenBSD’s implementation of a SMTP daemon, which is something I haven’t heard much about before. Compare with DragonFly’s much-smaller-in-scope dma.
- Van Jacobsen Saved the Internet. Or just fixed a timing bug. Depends on whether you listen to Wired or to him. The interesting part is that he had to build the tools to troubleshoot the problem.
- Here’s something I don’t think anyone’s noticed yet: Microsoft is responsible for half of Google’s DMCA notices last month. My employer recently was audited by Microsoft (technically by Accenture contractors for Microsoft) for license compliance. My Dell sales representative, when I asked him for a list of what Microsoft-licensed OEM devices we had bought, said many of his customers were asking for the same thing. He joked that Microsoft was trying to improve its profitability numbers for the quarter. Given that they are trying to push to Windows 8, that might just be true, and they are trying to enforce their way to it, not sell their way to it.
Your unrelated link of the week: MAD GOD, the film.
Summer of Code project updates
Loganaden Velvindron posted a terse update on the state of his Summer of Code work for DragonFly. I’m still waiting on the other students.
BSDCan 2012 videos
The presentations from BSDCan 2012 are up in video form. I was going to link to this in a Lazy Reading post, but there’s a lot of video there. (via) Of interest: Intro to DNSSEC and FreeBSD’s new package manager. Check the list, cause there’s a lot more.
BSDTalk 215: NetBSD update
BSDTalk 215 is out, with several NetBSD folks being interviewed at BSDCan 2012 about NetBSD 6.
Have i386 DragonFly? Want to try wine?
If you have a i386 DragonFly machine, emulators/wine-devel should now work.
Is anyone playing these games?
John Marino proposed cutting several game demos from pkgsrc. I don’t think they are playable at this point, even if you have the missing source files.
acpica-unix 20110527 added
Thanks to Magliano Andrea Andrea Magliano, a new version of ACPI has been added to DragonFly, acpica-unix 20110527.
libpthreadbroken, fixed
If you are running bleeding-edge DragonFly, libpthread was broken for a short period. If you built anything in the last … 12 hours? You may want to rebuild it. If that doesn’t describe you, it’s a nonevent.
It’s funny that I’m reporting a short-term break in bleeding-edge operating system code as any sort of surprise. It shows something about how stable DragonFly-master is most of the time.
igb(4) added
Sepherosa Ziehau has added igb(4) version 2.2.3 direct from Intel, for support of their 82575 and 82576 Ethernet controller chips. It now shares a hardware abstraction layer with the em(4) driver, too.
Even better pkgsrc status
John Marino posted a report of pkgsrc-currentbuilding on DragonFly i386. The success rate for package building is so good that the “top” package break was security/libpreludedb, with only 9 dependencies. Everything else was less than that. I have never seen a pkgsrc build report before with only single-digit figures for dependent breakage; this is fantastic.
Lazy Reading for 2012/05/20
There’s been so much activity this week in DragonFly that I’m having a hard time keeping up. There’s always time for Lazy Reading, though.
- The March of Progress. (via)
- My Third Attempt at Vim. Follow the link to pathogen, if you haven’t heard of it.
- From the same article, Destroy All Software screencasts. They look interesting, though I’ve found the web has eradicated my ability to watch videos over a minute in length, unless they contain squeaking guinea pigs or running bunnies.
- How Pixar Almost Lost Toy Story 2 to a Bad Backup. (via) You can nitpick details (rm * isn’t recursive) but it’s funny in a nearly catastrophic disaster kind of way. Also, now is a good time to check your backups.
- Here’s a video trailer for that WIZZYWIG comic I mentioned in a previous Lazy Reading.
- This post about ROFLCon 3 makes a good point: Much of what we expect to do on the Internet, from installing your own operating system to captioning pictures of kittens, requires a computer. Increased phone and tablet use kills that, cause it’s not convenient. As the article notes by way of Chris Poole, things like Facebook are friend-based, not interest-based. Think about that for a bit. It’s important to me because that’s exactly what this site is – interest-based, rather than a social app.
- The truth about system bottlenecks.
Your unrelated link of the week: Captain Forever. A game. Mentioned most recently on Verge, but read Rock, Paper, Shotgun for context.
More on HAMMER2 progress
As noted in a recent commit, it’s possible to set up a HAMMER2 /usr/obj and survive a buildworld. That’s good progress.
Note that this is basic work, so features like multi-master and deduplication are not present yet, and it’s still work in progress, so don’t try HAMMER2 unless you like losing data. Watch the branch for changes, though.
(I’m going with “HAMMER2″ for the name.)
PHP 5.4 status in pkgsrc
Takahiro Kambe is bringing PHP 5.4 into pkgsrc, probably as lang/php54. Follow the whole thread for a discussion of version numbering. As a side effect of this, PHP 5.2 will leave pkgsrc by the next quarterly pkgsrc release. If you’re using that older flavor, you’ll want to upgrade.
Recent networking updates
Sepherosa Ziehau has been making various updates that conform to standards lately, including “RFC4653 Non-Congestion Robustness (NCR)” and “RFC3517bis“. I’m not familiar with what they do, but you can follow the links and read the RFCs if you are curious.
(Not sure if I got that 3517 one correct…)
TUI mode added to kgdb
TUI mode is available now for kgdb on DragonFly, thanks to John Marino. It’s apparently a Text User Interface for debugging core files. I haven’t used it, so I’m relying on the testimony of others.
An Apache 2.4 bug, worked around
Apparently Apache 2.4 has a bug that will cause network stalls when sending data that doesn’t line up with segment size. Sepherosa Ziehau has put in a workaround for the issue. Alternately, you can use www/apache22.
Hammer 2 progress
Matthew Dillon’s recently added getaddr/setaddr support, dumping, and session encryption, among other things, to Hammer 2. Or is it HAMMER2? I’m not sure.
BSDTalk 214: Peter Hansteen and Henning Brauer
BSDTalk 214 has nearly an hour of conversation with Peter Hansteen and Henning Brauer, all from the recent BSDCan.
Vendor branch updates: libedit, libncurses, libgmp, zlib, gdb
John Marino has updated libncurses, libedit, gdb, libgmp, and zlib. The release notes are helpfully contained within each commit. If that wasn’t enough, he’s also added terminfo, a future replacement for termcap, if I understand correctly.
OpenSSL updated two different ways
Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL in two different places:. The 3.0 release now has OpenSSL 1.0.0j, which fixes several security issues (see link for CVE IDs). DragonFly 3.1 now has OpenSSL 1.0.1c. As for a changelog… this, maybe?
“Level/low” USB fix
If you are having USB issues on boot with DragonFly, Sepherosa Ziehau’s sysctl suggestions may help you.
Lazy Reading for 2012/05/13
I’m starting to pack these full enough that I might have to go biweekly.
- “My 10 Unix command-line mistakes“. (via) You will have done at least a few of these – see comments on that article for even more. I know I’ve shut down the interface I’m connected on a few times…
- BSD vs. Linux. (via) Maybe you know the details, maybe you don’t.
- Git now has subtree support. You can now stuff git repositories into other git repositories, but they remain ‘normal’ repos that can be split back off later. I’m sure I’m oversimplifying. Also, the git website has gone through a redesign.
- A BSD daemon patch, $3. (via) No Puffy or Fred ones that I’ve seen.
- Here’s a puppet fix for DragonFly.
- The Grammar of Vim. (via)
- Rob Pike vs. Richard Stallman. (via the same place) Not enough drama, guys, come on!
- Anatomy of a Scam. I link to it because my employer just received one of the bogus invoices mentioned in the article.
- Computing Fossils. (via) If you follow one link from that article, make it this one about a punchcard IBM from 1948, still in use.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Wizzywig. A self-contained comic about the early days of phone phreaking and hacking, written and drawn by Ed Piskor. The first two chapters are available as a PDF. Read and if you like it, order the whole thing. Also: Steve and Steve. If you know your history, you’ll get the cartoon.
Ed Piskor is currently cartooning the origin of hip-hop at BoingBoing; it’s a good read.
BSDTalk 213: Paul Schenkeveld and EuroBSDCon
BSDTalk 213 is out, with 14 minutes of conversation with Paul Schenkeveld about EuroBSDCon. EuroBSDCon is happening in late October, in Poland. Also, the BSDTalk website has a new layout.
Virtio drivers, an explanation
Venkatesh Srinivas posted an explanation of the virtio update he’s working on. I linked to the work before, but not his explanation, which goes into the ‘vm_balloon’ device.
Update, Asus G2K users
Sascha Wildner’s posted an update to the acpi_asus(4) module, so it’s worth updating if you have an appropriate Asus machine and are running DragonFly-current.
Pkgsrc doing better on DragonFly
Thanks to the efforts of John Marino and others, pkgsrc is having possibly the highest success rate ever of successful package software builds. If only I could get a pkgsrc-2012Q1 build to complete and upload…
Something new under the sun
You’d think everything that could be done with grep has already been done, but no: grep, which is an externally-produced program, has been updated in DragonFly to version 2.12 by John Marino.
Recent syncs from FreeBSD and back again
A few recent updates imported to DragonFly from FreeBSD: Francois Tigeot updated amdsbwd(4), an AMD south bridge watchdog. Sascha Wildner updated arcmsr(4), the Areca RAID controller driver, and Peter Avalos updated pw(8).
In the other direction, FreeBSD now has GNU hash support for rtld, based on John Marino’s work in DragonFly.
Lazy Reading for 2012/05/06
Drowning in links this week. Is that so bad? No.
- I pity people that had to make illustrations about abstract concepts like the Internet, especially in the 1990s.
- Slashdot jumps the shark. I’m not really knocking what they are adding – I could use it for work – but Slashdot has gone corporate, in the bland sense of the word. There’s no clear voice behind what they talk about. Even if you don’t like what they are posting, there’s no longer a specific author to disagree with. Younger folks may shrug and say “So what?”, but Slashdot used to be nearly the only decent source for nerdity online.
- A sensible discussion of open source and how it relates to obsolescence and access.
- Jan Schaumann’s NYCBUG presentation in mp3 form: “The Useless Use of *“
- Winning entries in the 2011 International Obfuscated C Code Contest. (via)
- Hyperrogue III (Zeno Rogue). (via) It’s a roguelike, with vi-based directional controls and a non-Euclidian hyperbolic plane world, or at least that’s what the description says. It might compile on DragonFly.
- “Why don’t more developers contribute to open source?“
- Spam-merican Apparel (via) Spambots and T-shirts; that combination seems to be a natural growth of the internet.
- XFCE 4.8 is on the way in pkgsrc. I know this will please some people.
- The smallest (ELF) Hello World possible. (via profmakx onEFNet #dragonflybsd)
- A SSD roundup. I have one in my work laptop right now and it makes a huge difference.
- DuckDuckHack. (via) Quick, someone make a plugin for pkgsrc packages.
Your unrelated links of the week: Turntablism. I was talking about assembled music last week, and this is a whole area to itself. Watch Kid Koala turn a few seconds of trumpet playing into an entire blues progression.
BSD Magazine for May is out
BSD Magazine for May is out, with the theme of BSD security, though of course there’s a lot more than that topic in the free PDF.
Virtual IO drivers status
Venkatesh Srinivas has been working on integration of Tim Bisson’s virtio-bhyve drivers into DragonFly. This would make throughput better in KVM/Qemu. His bug ticket has some questions that could use answers.
Ebooks sale, just today
There’s a Day Against DRM sale going on for O’Reilly. 50% off everything, and all the books are DRM-free. I found out about this through Michael Lucas, whose No Starch books are represented there too. It’s a fantastic deal and it’s today only, so strike now while you have the chance.
(I should make a ‘buy buy buy!’ tag for articles.)
ichwd(4) added, watchdog watches
Francois Tigeot has added ichwd(4), a driver for the watchdog function on some Intel ICH motherboard chipsets. Sascha Wildner has also made the kernel option for it on by default. (Look for /dev/wdog.)
Update: Francois Tigeot sent a link to an excellent page explaining hardware watchdogs.
Upgrading to pkgsrc-2012Q1
Here’s a post by yours truly, on how to move to pkgsrc-2012Q1 though building from source. This is for anyone sick of waiting for me to finish the binary build of pkgsrc.
Followup on clustering
Matthew Dillon posted a followup on that fix for clustering I noted yesterday. It describes the exact problems better than I could, though the result is the same: you should update if you’re running bleeding-edge DragonFly.