Blogging All About BSDs

BSD, BIND, and DNSSEC

justin sherrill — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 01:02:08 +0000

If you were thinking about implementing DNSSEC, Michael Lucas did it himself and wrote down his notes. You can read them and either follow along to implement it yourself, or just spectate. The one disadvantage is that it uses BIND 9.9, and I only see 9.8 and 10 in pkgsrc.

PUFFS now in DragonFly

justin sherrill — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:54:06 +0000

Nick Prokharau’s project for Google Summer of Code last year was “Port PUFFS from NetBSD/FreeBSD”. Sascha Wildner has now committed that to DragonFly. It’s experimental, so the normal caveats apply.

Summer of Code and DragonFly: who is interested?

justin sherrill — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 01:57:06 +0000

Google has announced that Summer of Code 2012 is in the works. I’ve announced that DragonFly will apply again. For that, I need to know who wants to be a student or a mentor, and what ideas people want to suggest.

Some BSD Multimedia

justin sherrill — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:28:56 +0000

Here’s several things to look at:

Michael Lucas’s “BSD Needs Books” talk from NYCBSDCon 2010, on Youtube. I’ve talked about it before because I saw it in person; it’s a good talk. Ironically, he talks about getting a publisher interested in your book, and he just self-published.

Hubert Feyrer linked to the slides of two pkgsrc talks

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GCC 4.6 now possible

justin sherrill — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 01:02:40 +0000

John Marino has made it possible to build world and kernel on DragonFly using GCC 4.6 in the form of gnat-aux. (We’re currently on GCC version 4.4) Note that version 4.6 isn’t included with DragonFly, so you would need to download and compile ~~GCC 4.6~~ a very recent version of lang/gnat-aux, and set CCVER=gcc46 before building world and kernel

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BSD Magazine for February 2012

justin sherrill — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 21:08:49 +0000

BSD Magazine for February 2012 is out, and the feature item is BSD Certification.

Customizing Your PC-BSD 9.0 Desktop

dru — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:41:34 +0000

Kris Moore has written the lead article for the February issue of BSD Magazine, which is available for free download. Kris’ article is on page 8–9 and demonstrates how to use System Manager to install and uninstall desktops and system components.

Lazy Reading for 2012/02/05

justin sherrill — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 21:46:35 +0000

It’s like early spring here in the northeast US. Which would be fine if it was actually spring. I miss snow.

An explanation of the classic UNIX hierarchy. (via thesjg on EFNet #dragonflybsd) I’m behind any explanation that uses the phrase “accretion disk” to describe an organization.
Hipster BSD. If this doesn’t make sense to you, it’s based
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Updated TCP Proposals and FreeBSD

Murray Stokely — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 23:07:00 +0000

There are a number of proposals for improving TCP performance coming out of Google that have some implications for FreeBSD. These proposals have taken the form of a group of IETF proposals, RFCs, patches to the Linux kernel, and research publications. A nice summary of the different initiatives is available from Lets Make TCP Faster on the Google Code Blog

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Google Summer of Code 2012 announced

justin sherrill — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 19:51:49 +0000

It’s on, again! Not that there was any doubt. I need to collect potential mentor names before DragonFly can be involved, so you can guess what I’ll say next…

meetBSD & EuroBSDcon!

meetBSD: meet the BSD systems — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 11:12:17 +0000

Dear Fans!

As you might know this year there were plans for two big BSD conferences in Poland. In order to avoid time conflicts we decided to join our forces and organize one giga conference under EuroBSDcon name. We are hereby inviting you to participate in this big event that will take place in Warsaw, 18-21 October 2012. More information

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Odd DVD drive issue

justin sherrill — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 04:16:44 +0000

Edward Berger found that using a LG/Hitachi DVD drive kept him from successfully booting a DragonFly install CD. Using other manufacturers worked out fine. What causes the problem? I don’t know, but it’s worth mentioning it out loud in case someone else gets bit by it.

NetBSD Hackathon, February 10-12

justin sherrill — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 04:12:54 +0000

There’s a NetBSD Hackathon going on February 10th through 12th, mostly online. I mention this because it may have some effect on pkgsrc, used by both NetBSD and DragonFly. Hackathons for pkgsrc usually happen separately, but no harm in keeping an eye out for any positive benefits.

Announcing NetBSD Hackathon – February 10th to 12th, 2012

matthias scheler — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:05:32 +0000

The 16th NetBSD hackathon will be run from February 10th to February 12th. Our goal is fixing all the bugs that need fixing to get NetBSD-current ready for the creation of the NetBSD 6.0 release branch.

Everybody that has an interest in NetBSD, from developers, documentation writers, translators, to advanced users are invited to attend. To make sure that NetBSD

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Video: Introduction to PC-BSD 9 Isotope

dru — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:41:46 +0000

The first in a series of instructional videos for PC-BSD 9.0 is now available. This video demonstrates an installation and showcases some of the new features in 9.0. The links are as follows:

YouTube video
PC-BSD Community feed on YouTube.
Vimeo video.

Meet us at FOSDEM 2011

marc balmer — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:41:35 +0000

This weekend (Feb. 4 - 5), FOSDEM, The Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting will be held at the university of Brussels and NetBSD will be present with a booth and there will be NetBSD related talks and presentations in the BSD devroom on sunday.

This is a good occasion to meet and discuss with NetBSD and pkgsrc developers,

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Book Review: SSH Mastery

justin sherrill — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:12:43 +0000

I’ve reviewed Michael Lucas’s book here before, so when he offered a chance to read his newest, SSH Mastery, I jumped at the chance. Michael Lucas has published a number of technical books through No Starch Press, and started wondering out loud about self-publishing. This is, I think, his first self-published technical volume.

It’s a very straightforward book. The

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2012 Joint Documentation Summit

justin sherrill — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:11:39 +0000

There’s a single day between BSDCan and PGCon, May 13th. That day will be the 2012 Joint Documentation Summit. People from BSD projects and Postgres will get together to discuss documentation tools, projects, and so on. If you are going to either convention, I’d recommend visiting this too. This sort of cross-project pollination leads to good things.

ISDN really gone

justin sherrill — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 04:43:08 +0000

ISDN support has been removed from DragonFly. It was not useful at this point, because it’s rarely used any more. It does make me feel a little sad; this was the technology everyone said was the future before cable modems and DSL were figured out.

Updating Samba to 3.6

justin sherrill — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 04:36:33 +0000

I’m posting this because it will save someone (possibly me) an hour of aggravation someday. If you are updating Samba from version 3.0 or 3.3 to a later version, it’ll take your existing config but possibly silently break on user authentication.

PC-BSD 9 Reviews

dru — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:37:17 +0000

TechRepublic has a short review on PC-BSD 9.0 entitled PC-BSD: a BSD for the workstation.

The feature story in DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 441 is entitled Reviews: PC-BSD 9.0 “Isotope”.

If you’re aware of any other reviews, add a comment with the URL.

Foundation at FOSDEM

dru lavigne — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:51:00 +0000

Erwin Lansing from the Foundation will be at FOSDEM, in Brussels, Belgium (February 4-5). He'll have some cool swag and can accept donations to the Foundation. You can find him hanging out at the FreeBSD booth in the expo area on Saturday and in the BSD Devroom on Sunday.

BSDTalk 211: Deb Goodkin

justin sherrill — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:27:00 +0000

Deb Goodkin of the FreeBSD Foundation gets 24 minutes of interview on BSDTalk.

BSDCan call for papers extension

justin sherrill — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:16:58 +0000

The deadline for submitting papers for BSDCan has been extended, since the convention’s site suffered some downtime this past weekend. Submit proposals by tomorrow, the 31st, now.

Interview with Deb Goodkin

dru lavigne — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Episode 211 of bsdtalk has an interview with Deb Goodkin, Director of Operations for the FreeBSD Foundation. The interview is available as an mp3 or as an ogg.

Lazy reading for 2012/01/29

justin sherrill — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 20:10:35 +0000

This is the week of the funny, apparently.

I’ve linked to this site before, but not this specific feature: History of UNIX manpages. Part of the formatting that makes up man pages dates back to 1964! ‘roff’ comes from RUNOFF, the original markup! This is the perfect mix of history, nerditry, and language for me.
Hubert Feyrer says
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bsdtalk211 – The FreeBSD Foundation with Deb Goodkin

Will Backman — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 17:30:35 +0000

Interview with Deb Goodkin, Director of Operations for the FreeBSD Foundation.

The most recent newsletter, which talks about what the foundation did the last half of last year.

http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/press/2011Dec-newsletter.shtml#Letter

Their blog:

http://freebsdfoundation.blogspot.com/

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/FreeBSDFoundation

Lastly, but probably most importantly, people can donate here:

http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/

File Info: 24Min, 12MB.

Ogg Link:
http://cisx1.uma.maine.edu/~wbackman/bsdtalk/bsdtalk211.ogg

Up-to-date packages and pkgsrc

justin sherrill — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 00:08:08 +0000

Ulrich Habel wants to update some of the Perl 5 modules in pkgsrc. He published a request for comments, describing what he plans to do for changing some dependencies. He does note that Perl 5 in pkgsrc is at 5.14.2, which is very recent.

I was talking to a relative today who works at a large financial company, which

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3.0 Release Candidate images

justin sherrill — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:22:55 +0000

They are located in the normal place, in .img (USB) and .iso (CD/DVD) formats. I haven’t made the desktop DVD yet; let’s see how these untested versions do…

http://avalon.dragonflybsd.org/iso-images/

Quarterly Status Report

dru lavigne — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:28:00 +0000

The FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report is available. The Foundation has the following section in the report:

The most exciting news to report is that we raised $426,000 through our fundraising efforts. We were overwhelmed by the generosity of the FreeBSD community. We would like to thank everyone who made a contribution to FreeBSD by either making a financial donation to

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October-December, 2011 Status Report

freebsd news flash — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 08:00:00 +0000

The October-December, 2011 Status Report is now available with 32 entries.

New committer: Davide Italiano (src)

freebsd news flash — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 08:00:00 +0000

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Libpcap, tcpdump updated

justin sherrill — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 02:47:47 +0000

Peter Avalos updated libpcap and tcpdump. This is on master, not the 3.0 branch.

FreeBSD 9.0 Press Release

dru lavigne — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 13:31:00 +0000

The Foundation has written a press release for the release of FreeBSD 9.0. From PRWeb:

Release of FreeBSD 9.0 Delivers More Power to Serve

Today, the FreeBSD Foundation announced the recent release of FreeBSD 9.0. FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE raises the bar for open source operating systems in terms of file system reliability, IPv6-readiness, networking capabilities, compiler and toolchain technologies, and

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Old ATA also out

justin sherrill — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 01:02:53 +0000

A bit of symmetry in that title, there. Old ATA, which was replaced years ago, is finally gone. This should affect nobody…

Do you use ISDN?

justin sherrill — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:54:34 +0000

If you need to use ISDN with DragonFly, speak up now. I think it may get tossed otherwise.

FreeBSD – Running Puppet on FreeBSD

PsyberMonkey — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 01:22:00 +0000

The latest issue of BSD Magazine is out and guess what? It has an article that I've wrote on running Puppet on FreeBSD!

BSD Magazine is a free to download magazine that focus on BSD, be it FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, PC-BSD and others. From BSDMag.org website :

"We decided to create a magazine for BSD users, enthusiasts and

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Book review: The Linux Command Line

justin sherrill — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:46:25 +0000

I received an email from No Starch Press about reviewing this book, and my first reaction was to say no. I assumed this was essentially a book about using Bash, and therefore probably not useful to people reading the Digest.

I read it despite my knee-jerk reaction, and I didn’t need to reject it so suddenly. Almost all of

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DragonFly 3.0 branched

justin sherrill — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 23:22:41 +0000

Note that it’s branched, not released. I’m building and uploading binary pkgsrc packages for it now, and hope to have a ‘release candidate’ very soon. This is the prep work before the release, really. There’s a catchall ticket for tracking remaining work.

Want to support newer Intel GPUs?

justin sherrill — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:56:06 +0000

There’s a whopping 250 euro bounty up now on the DragonFly Code Bounties page. It’s for supporting the newer Intel video chipsets, and there’s already examples in FreeBSD to start with.

(David Shao, where are you? If you’re reading this, hop into #dragonflybsd and tell us how things are going with your GEM/KMS work)

Lazy Reading for 2012/01/22

justin sherrill — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 18:49:32 +0000

I even have some comedy in here this week.

Here’s some interesting ideas on improving the standard terminal window. (via)
Hey, a Windows Phone application that aggregates BSD news! Including this one, I think. No way to test it because Windows Phones are rarer than hen’s teeth.
This article about Bruce Perens has some good quotes
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SSH Mastery: A Very Welcome Addition to Any Unix User’s Bookshelf

openbsd journal — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 18:18:22 +0000

The first paragraph of this book's afterword reads:

“ "You now know more about SSH, OpenSSH and Putty than the vast majority of IT professionals! Congratulations". ”

That claim will be true for any reader of SSH Mastery who has read the book up to that point and has incorporated at least some of the elements of the configurations it

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New book review tag

justin sherrill — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 02:05:46 +0000

I’m going to have at least 1 book review up next week, 2 if I can make it. I’ve done this several times now, so I’ve added a ‘Book review’ category so that they all can be found together.

Live deduplication marked experimental

justin sherrill — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 21:11:37 +0000

‘Live dedup’, where a DragonFly system makes a deduplicative reference to copied data instead of actually copying the data, is now off by default. There’s no definite issue linked to it yet that I know of, but it never hurts to be careful just before a release.

OpenSSL updated

justin sherrill — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 20:07:01 +0000

Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL to version 1.0.0g. It’s so new I can’t find anything in the OpenSSL changelog to describe why there was an update, but I suspect it was this.

RELRO in a BSD

justin sherrill — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 23:44:18 +0000

John Marino has added support for RELRO in DragonFly, which makes it the first BSD to have it. That’s great news! What is it? Apparently a guard against memory corruption or overflow in the linker. His commit message gives better details.

Security problem and a fix

justin sherrill — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:38:43 +0000

Matthias Schmidt found a discussion about DragonFly’s password encryption. The result, if I am reading it correctly, is that brute-forcing the password from available hashes is quicker than it should be. Matthias also found a contributed fix. Samuel Greear updated to match the reference SHA implementation also in Linux, with this very pertinent warning.

If you liked KDE3, you’ll like this

justin sherrill — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 21:50:19 +0000

If you liked KDE3, you may like Trinity. Matthias Drochner would like you to help get it in pkgsrc.

How low can you go? (with RAM and Hammer)

justin sherrill — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 21:41:55 +0000

Matthew Dillon has a very detailed commit message with changes to make sure Hammer will run overnight cleanups in situations as low as 256M of RAM. I think you can find that much RAM in breakfast cereal boxes these days.

PC-BSD Kid’s Activity Pamphlet

dru — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:12:07 +0000

This year, the Southern California Linux Expo is presenting SCALE: The Next Generation. This event is designed to introduce youth to open source and to invite children to attend and participate in an open source conference.

In addition to the usual cool booth swag, we created a kid’s colouring and activity pamphlet designed for the younger set. This is

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