The Month in BSD: March 2005

by Sam Smith
04/07/2005

A month dominated by openness and ETech.

Miscellaneous

Worth reading
(I like the cottages)

• Very cool description of Pixar's headquarters
• Make: technology on your own time
• Should error checking be included in printed books?
• Second sight: "Yahoo is the new Google"

BSD certification
(may be promising)

• BSDCert
• The people behind it

AOL changes terms of service of AIM
(change, deny it was changed, change it back in a few days)

• "You waive any right to privacy"
• "AOL weasels about its Terms of Service"
• AOL changes them back
• What started it all

New FreeBSD and OpenBSD book
(from O'Reilly; looks good)

• Mastering FreeBSD and OpenBSD Security
• Sample chapter (PDF)

Miscellaneous reading

Related Reading Mastering FreeBSD and OpenBSD Security By Yanek Korff, Paco Hope, Bruce Potter

• Sowing the Seeds of Open Source Advocacy
• The Gnome Journal
• Secure Batch Email with UUCP and SSH
• An Implementation of Perl 6 in Haskell
• Microsoft on NetBSD
• Monitoring RAID with NetSaint
• Make for Nonprogrammers
• December's DaemonNews e-zine
• November's DaemonNews e-zine
• Helpful tip when changing CVS servers
• Apple wants to hear from iPod-using switchers
• Regular Expressions: Ten Years for Overnight Success
• Laura K. Krishna is a Plagiarist. Comedy.

Emerging Technology Conference (and others)

ETech

• O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference
• O'Reilly Network coverage
• NotCon 2005: ETech(alike) in the UK. Probably June/July. Interested?

Mind hacks

• It's Not Rocket Science: The Brain for Designers
• Mind Hacks Live (London)

"It should not be viewed by anyone"
(fun talk requiring a South Park-esque disclaimer)

• Hardware Hacks from the Far Side"
• Make Magazine notes
• Previous talk at last year's NotCon in the UK

The Tech Buzz game

• Place bets on technology futures (Celebdaq/Slapdaq/Polidex style)
• eWeek article

Miscellaneous/around ETech

• Life Hacks Live notes
• Some of Google's source code
• Blogging ETech
• Matt Webb's notes
• Apple streaming can sometimes have its bad/humorous sides
• ETech recordings from the Podcast Network (listen; it's great)

SXSW
(South by Southwest)

• SXSW Geekout
• Blog and discussion of the event

Future events

• NotCon 2005 - ETech(alike) in the UK. Probably June/July. Interested?
• LISA '05 Call for Papers
• BSDCan 2005 Schedule
• UKUUG Linux 2005 (August, Swansea)--with a BSD session

OpenBSD

Adaptec refuses to give documentation on rebuilding its RAID arrays
(hope and pray any discs you have on an Adaptec kit don't fail)

• Theo's public request
• Adaptec (again) deliberately misunderstands "documentation" as "support"
• "The hardware is tricky to get right and there are bugs in different cards and different firmware versions that often need to be worked around."
• Adaptec doesn't want to hear from its customers
• BSDnews.com story
• Undeadly.org summary

Wireless support
(eleven manufacturers are supported, but Intel, Broadcom, and Conextant refuse to give documentation)

• Kerneltrap discussion of the situation
• Sydney Morning Herald article
• New driver: ural

cvs.openbsd.org RAID array failing; funds needed
(no, it's not on an Adaptec card)

• Initial announcement
• Three days later, donations reach target; mostly from individuals

3.7 preorders and graphics
(CD and T-shirt sales fund the project; without it, none of the above happens)

• 3.7 artwork sneak peek and preorders
• CD cover graphic
• What's new in 3.7

Free and NetBSD

Xen stuff

• NetBSD using Xen for many project servers
• Xen 2.0 supported

Miscellaneous

• NetBSD version numbering explanation
• XFS for FreeBSD-Current (GPL, unfortunately)

DragonFlyBSD

Filesystem changes
(no background fsck; journaling instead)

• Outline from Matt Dillon
• "Hoping to get the journaling code well enough along to actually be useable as a backup medium prior to the next release"
• 3Ware speed comparisons with FreeBSD

Future work

• "This release is going to be a laundry list of 'very close' things that we can't quite turn on, which means that the next release is going to huge."

Blocking SSH scanners

• How DragonFly does it

Sam Smith lives in Manchester, England, and works on interfaces to data. When he's not in front of a computer, he's usually in a theater, probably with MUGSS.

---

Return to the BSD DevCenter.