Michael W. Lucas has two bits of mostly-BSD-centric publishing news. One is that a physical version of his DNSSEC Mastery book is now available through Amazon.
The other bit is that, having just released an Absolute OpenBSD update, his Absolute FreeBSD book will not see an update… until the FreeBSD installer gets more coherent.
(If you manage DNS in any fashion, buy DNSSEC Mastery.)
As seen on Author Michael W. Lucas’s blog: Absolute OpenBSD 2nd edition is 50% off in a sort of ‘flash deal’. Grab it today if you are interested, cause I think it’s only for today.
Peter N. M. Hansteen has a long writeup about using and creating ports on OpenBSD, which is apparently a reprint of an article he wrote for BSD Magazine back in 2008. I don’t remember if I read it, so it’s new to me, in any case. Port and package creation across the BSDs is juuuust close enough that reading about one version will leave you with a good guess about the others.
Peter Hansteen has an extensive writeup of how he has managed the bsdly.net spam blacklists. Normally I’d stick this article in the Lazy Reading links, but the article is good enough to call out separately. It’s excellent not just for the mechanical aspects of how the blacklists were maintained, but for his strict description on how the process is simple, verifiable, and transparent. That last item, transparency, is how many anti-spam groups fall down.
The very first copy of Absolute OpenBSD (2nd edition), signed by Michael W. Lucas, is being auctioned off in a charity event for OpenBSD. There’s 5 days left to bid, though the price is already somewhere north of $2 per page.
It’s a week past Easter and I’m actually tired of eating chocolate. I never thought I’d say that.
Your unrelated link of the week: nothing. I didn’t find anything off-the-wall enough to use here. Geez.
OpenBSD has a new identd daemon. Is identd used for anything other than verification when connecting to an IRC network? I’ve never seen it in another context.
I am all over the place with links this week – some of them pretty far off the path. There’s a lot, too, so enjoy!
Your unrelated link of the week: I’ve already been offbeat enough in this Lazy Reading; I don’t have anything else.
For once, I got to read the commit logs for other BSDs…
The OpenBSD ‘Papers’ page has some videos listed to match the OpenBSD-related presentations from EuroBSDCon 2012.
Not only does NetBSD support the BeagleBoard, but Michael Lorenz is committing from it.
FreeBSD has brought in a new version of bmake and jemalloc. I’ve seen a number of other commits recently attributed to ‘NetApp’, which is good to see. Also, preliminary USB support for boot loaders.
PC-BSD is looking to use pkgng, the same binary package manager used in John Marino’s DPorts. It’s proving quite popular.
Right in time for the end of the year, BSDTalk 221 is out, with Michael Dexter interviewing Matthieu Herrb at EuroBSDCon 2012 for 11 minutes about Xenocara.
Michael W. Lucas has a coupon code for his new edition of Absolute OpenBSD, so jump on it now. I haven’t read his first edition, but his other books are certainly good.
BSDTalk 220 is up. It’s a conversation with Eric Oyen, OpenBSD user. It’s about 20 minutes and I don’t know the subject past “OpenBSD” cause I haven’t listened to it – yet.
Life is busy, busy, busy. But there’s always time for Lazy Reading!
Your unrelated link of the week: Delilah Dirk. It’s a comic, and the story available to read online is about a tea merchant, which makes it exactly right.
I lost 12 18 hours of my life fighting with an Exchange 2010 upgrade this week. To compensate, I will never complain about Sendmail wonkiness ever.
Your unrelated link of the week: A CD that comes with its own turntable and record. Kid Koala scrapes over culture to find mentions of vinyl and DJing the same way I scrounge the Internet for mention of BSD. His “Nerdball” from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is an astonishing display of turntable skill.
Antonio Huete has updated dhclient(8) to match the OpenBSD version from whence it comes. I think all (most?) the BSDs use the OpenBSD dhcp client as a base now. The only user-facing change I see in a quick reading of the changes is a new ‘egress’ command line option.
It’s a short week this week, but that’s OK. The last few weeks have been a deluge of links.
Your unrelated link of the week: Crane Recursion. (via)
This is the version that the OpenBSD Project is selling, so the profit goes to the people who made OpenSSH. It’s an excellent idea.
Since I’m already talking about imports, several changes from FreeBSD and OpenBSD for NFS, plus more original material, have been brought in by Venkatesh Srinivas. Those changes from FreeBSD apparently improve NFS write performance, though I don’t have numbers to show.
The recent OpenBSD 5.0 pre-release announcement on undeadly notes that ALTQ is being replaced by new priority settings. This should make it to DragonFly at some point, since pf in DragonFly has been catching up to the current version of pf in OpenBSD, thanks to the efforts of Jan Lentfer…
This week has taught me one thing for sure: Always make sure your backup generator is working. And over-plan battery capacity. That’s actually two things, but what the heck. I’m tired, for reasons that can probably be inferred! I’m not the only one suffering these problems, it seems.
Your unrelated comic link of the week: Wonderella. This is the comic that ruined Batman for me. I can’t unthink it.
The pcc compiler is nearing 1.0. (via) This is seen as a gcc alternative, and it’s present in NetBSD/OpenBSD. I recall it didn’t work for DragonFly because of a lack of TLS support… Might be different now, if anyone wants to try. (see prior mentions on the Digest)
Entertainment, this week. There’s several items here that will be more entertaining if you’re over 25. Or maybe 35. Get clicking!
Apparently the surplus money from the recent NYCBSDCon is going to each of the BSD projects. Great news! Now, what to do with it…
Jan Lentfer, who apparently has a high tolerance for pain, has now brought the kernel part of pf up to the equivalent of the OpenBSD 4.4 version, available for testing. It’s not yet committed. pfctl’s updated too.
Siju George found no equivalent of OpenBSD’s ‘afterboot‘ quick-start page in DragonFly, so he went and created it himself. Go, read.
The 200th (yay!) episode of BSDTalk has 14 minutes of conversation with Kjell Wooding, talking about mg, a sort of teeny emacs included with OpenBSD.
BSDTalk has a 19 minute interview with Mike Larkin talking about ACPI and OpenBSD.
Jan Lentfer has updated pf (and pflogd and ftp-proxy) in DragonFly to match what was in OpenBSD 4.1. Why this intermediate step? pf went through a lot of changes after OpenBSD 4.1, so this was easier than jumping right to the current version – which he plans next.
In any case, this was a huge and difficult job, with somewhere around 10,000 lines of code added, and very useful for DragonFly. Jan also managed to keep the DragonFly-specific features working, where “no state” is the default, along with features like fairq.
Undeadly has an article up about recent work on mandoc in a mini-hackathon. It’s mentioned in context with OpenBSD in the article, but mandoc is also present in DragonFly, and is a potential groff replacement. (And I think groff is the last item in base requiring C++? I may be wrong.) Plus, as I’ve said before, I like mandoc’s output. It would be nice to use that for our online man pages, for instance.
Link catchup!
There’s an interesting article about mandoc and mdocml up on undeadly.org, talking about its history and usage in OpenBSD. It’s present in DragonFly, though it hasn’t been set to replace anything (i.e. groff), yet, that I know of. I do like the mdocml HTML output, and I’d like to see it here.
The version of pf in DragonFly is somewhat long in the tooth, but Jan Lentfer’s volunteered himself for the herculanean job of updating it. Go, Jan! Let’s hope this large task is more Nemean than Augean.
In an effort to catch up…
It’s New Year’s Eve Eve, and so here are a bunch of links I’ve built up over the past few days.
I’ve been building this entry up for a while, so some of these entries are newer than others.
Alexander Polakov has imported OpenBSD’s hotplugd(8). It monitors for hotplug-style events, like disk additions and removals, and executes corresponding scripts to handles those events.
OpenBSD developer Jacek Masiulaniec gets 14 minutes of airtime in the most recent BSDTalk podcast.
Sascha Wildner has added mandoc(1), an OpenBSD product. I like the HTML output. (I’ve said it before, come to think of it.)
Matthew Dillon has put together some new test machines, in preparation for porting the OpenBSD AHCI driver to DragonFly. Check his message if you are thinking about building a new system, as they appear to work well.
Undeadly has an brief, interesting article up, written by Mitja MuženiÄ, describing the OpenBSD releasing process. Worthwhile reading if you are involved in any sort of release cycle.
Undeadly has an article noting that OpenBSD is getting in on the LiveCD game with BSDAnywhere.
Something interesting: graphs of the commit activity for some (all?) of the OpenBSD committers. (via ‘constant’ on #dragonflybsd) I’d like to do the same for DragonFly. Plus, GIANT DAEMON HEAD.
OnLAMP.com has a 3-page interview with various OpenBSD developers about the features in the newest release. The interview goes into interesting detail, and for relevance, some of the newer wireless drivers in DragonFly came from this code work.
Seen on KernelTrap, then OpenBSD Journal and then Slashdot: BSD support (specifically OpenBSD) hardware support is improving faster than Linux in some cases.
Apparently the Mozilla Foundation donated US$10K to OpenSSH. That’s good! They still need money, though.
Daemon News has an interview of OpenBSD’s Theo deRaadt, where he mentions DragonFly. The last response in the interview is also entertaining.
