Posts in category www.shiningsilence.com/dbsdlog
What new server should I buy?
The server that hosts shiningsilence.com is getting old, and it’s time for me to go to 64-bit DragonFly. It’s audience opinion time: what have you purchased lately, and liked? What would you suggest?
Lazy Reading for 2014/08/31
A relatively trim list for the holiday weekend.
You have ruined HTML. (via)
Do you want to enjoy this? (via)
Useful Unix commands for exploring data. (via)
The most unintentionally tragic tech advert we’ve ever seen.
Doom 3 in Ada. (via)
The Beauty of Roots. ( (Read more...)
In Other BSDs for 2014/08/30
I went from 1 link to lots all in one night.
DiscoverBSD’s news roundup for 2014/08/25.
The Bitrig website has been redesigned, probably to prep for a 1.0 version “soon”.
Do any of the BSDs have an equivalent to initramfs?
FreeBSD now has /etc/rc.conf.d/<service> subdirectories.
PC-BSD 10.0.3-RC2 has been tagged.
The [...]
Special procedure to update pkg 1.3.6
It seems pkg 1.3.6 was slightly scrambled. If you happen to have built and installed it, John Marino has special instructions on how to update to 1.3.7. If you are on DragonFly 3.8, you can follow those instructions now, and if you are on 3.9, that repo should be ready for an update in the next few days.
BSDTalk 244: Ken Moore and Lumina
BSDTalk 244 is 28 minutes of conversation with Ken Moore about Lumina, the new BSD-specific desktop environment for PC-BSD. I’ve been watching the PC-BSD source updates, and there’s a lot of activity.
BSDNow 052: Reverse Takeover
It’s not about taxes, but reverse SSH tunnels. Episode 052 is also an interview with Shawn Webb about ASLR in FreeBSD, along with the normal commentary and news.
They also catch BIND’s removal in FreeBSD and OpenBSD, but not in DragonFly, which I just realized I should have linked before.
Oops, had some cleanup to do
I ended up with this server rebooting as we were affected by Time Warner’s giant outage. In the process of rebooting, I found I must have done an upgrade and forgotten to reboot to make sure everything still worked, as mod_php had disappeared and mysql decided it didn’t want to work. Things appear to be OK now…
New kernel and new target
You should perform a full world and kernel install if on master.
Several people (including me) have been getting bit by a problem: when performing an installworld with a changed kernel, the vn kernel module is loaded, but it was built by the previous kernel and may cause problems when it doesn’t match up.
To fix that, vn is now built ( [...]
Lazy Reading for 2014/08/24
I hope you like your links eclectic!
A Tale of Postmortems. As a work strategy, this strategy can restore trust that would otherwise be lost when people outside IT/Engineering experience problems. (via)
Unix: Viewing your processes through the eyes of /proc.
“Writing Aliens”, or, “Duchamp, Markov, Queneau: A Mostly Deligh [...]
In Other BSDs for 2014/08/23
Another long list. These are making my Friday nights take some extra effort.
Oolite, an open source game based on Elite. Yes, it runs on BSD. I’m surprised I haven’t posted about it before. (via)
My Experience Switching from Slackware Linux to FreeBSD.
A week of pkgsrc, #3.
DiscoverBSD for 2014/08/18.
OpenBSD is (Read more. [...]
Acer Chromebook c720p support
If you remember the earlier work to support DragonFly on An Acer c720 Chromebook, it’s been repeated for the c720p. The “p” means it’s a touchscreen.
pkg upgrade tip for pkg 1.3
DragonFly’s using pkg 1.3, at least on master, and I’ve seen a few people report an error message when performing ‘pkg upgrade’. The error message usually includes something like:
pkg: need to re-create repo Avalon to upgrade schema vers
If you get this, do ‘pkg update -f’ and it will complete.
BSDNow 051: Engineering Nginx
I didn’t get the pun until I said the title out loud. BSDNow 051 has an interview with Eric Le Blan of Xinuos, a webserver-building tutorial, and of course more material.
New dhclient and other improvements
DragonFly’s dhclient will now retry failed interfaces and handle being re-run gracefully. This is a blessing for anyone who has had a flaky link. Matthew Dillon’s made two other improvements for booting that will also improve boot time when networks go missing.
Moving past ports
Here’s a nice advantage for dports and DragonFly: since it’s an overlay on FreeBSD ports, it’s possible to move to newer or different versions of software without waiting for it to happen in FreeBSD. For example: there’s a newer version of the xorg intel driver now in dports - newer than what’s in ports.
Full kernel build for DragonFly
If you are tracking DragonFly master, your next kernel build should be full, not quick.
iwn trick: ifconfig wlan0 -ht
If you have a DragonFly system with an iwn wireless chipset, and you are having trouble connecting and running in the 5Ghz part of the spectrum only, here’s a tip: the -ht switch may fix it.
Lazy Reading for 2014/08/17
For once, a shorter week.
One of the better telemarketer things I’ve ever read… and I realized what he was trying halfway through, cause I maintain the same models. (via)
Password Gropers Take the Spamtrap Bait. Peter Hansteen is the same person who found the Hail Mary Cloud.
Pseudo Automata, Fakes & Robot costumes. (via [...]
In Other BSDs for 2014/08/16
A calm week, for once.
mandoc 1.13.1 is out.
The July/August issue of the FreeBSD Journal is out.
A week of pkgsrc #2.
Thinking about coming to FreeBSD from Arch.
Steam client on FreeBSD?
NetBSD sysinst now supports extended partitions, from an older GSoC project.
NetBSD has a nouveau importing script.
NetBSD has Embedded (Read more...)
DragonFly 3.8.2 images uploaded
It took me a little while, but DragonFly 3.8.2 images are uploaded now to the main site. Check the 3.8.2 changelog if you didn’t before. This is a recommended upgrade for the newer OpenSSL, and should otherwise have little impact on the programs you have installed.
