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4 episodes with x window system
2 episodes with x window system
2 episodes with x window system
An airhacks.fm conversation with Volker Simonis (@volker_simonis) about: early computing experiences with Schneider CPC (Amstrad in UK) with Z80 CPU, CP/M operating system as an add-on that provided a real file system, programming in Basic and Turbo Pascal on early computers, discussion about gaming versus programming interests, using a 9-pin needle printer for school work, programming on pocket computers with BASIC in school, memories of Digital Research's CP/M and DR-DOS competing with MS-DOS, HiMEM memory management in early operating systems, programming in Logo language with turtle graphics and fractals, fascination with Lindenmayer systems (L-systems) for simulating biological growth patterns, interest in biology and carnivorous plants, transition to PCs with floppy disk drives, using SGI Iris workstations at university with IRIX operating system, early experiences with Linux installed from floppy disks, challenges of configuring X Window System, programming graphics on interlaced monitors, early work with HP using Tickle/Tk and python around 1993, first experiences with Java around version 0.8/0.9, attraction to Java's platform-independent networking and graphics capabilities, using Blackdown Java for Linux created by Johan Vos, freelance work creating Java applets for accessing databases of technical standards, PhD work creating software for analyzing parallel text corpora in multiple languages, developing internationalization and XML capabilities in Java Swing applications, career at Sun Microsystems porting MaxDB to Solaris, transition to SAP to work on JVM development, Adabas and MaxDB, reflections on ABAP programming language at SAP and its database-centric nature Volker Simonis on twitter: @volker_simonis
X Window System At 40, Lessons from Ancient File Systems, HardenedBSD July 2024 Status Report, FreeBSD's 'root on ZFS' is appealing, I Miss BSD/Linux, Simple automated deployments using git NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines X Window System At 40 (https://blog.dshr.org/2024/07/x-window-system-at-40.html) Lessons from Ancient File Systems (https://madcompiler.blogspot.com/2024/02/lessons-from-ancient-file-systems.html) News Roundup HardenedBSD July 2024 Status Report (https://hardenedbsd.org/article/shawn-webb/2024-08-03/hardenedbsd-july-2024-status-report) FreeBSD's 'root on ZFS' default appeals to me for an odd reason (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/FreeBSDZFSRootAppeal) I Miss BSD/Linux (https://brainbaking.com/post/2024/05/i-miss-bsd-linux/) Simple automated deployments using git push (https://garrido.io/notes/simple-automated-deployments-git-push/) Beastie Bits EuroBSDCon 2024 (https://2024.eurobsdcon.org) Ebook of “Run Your Own Mail Server” off to early backers (https://mwl.io/archives/23731) Interactive UNIX (https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/interactive-unix) Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)
It's another Linux laptop, and this time Framework is bringing the RISC-V heat. There's an LTS battle brewing, KDE pushes 6.1 with more fixes, and X Windows turns 40. And don't forget the Firefox beta, Raspberry Pi going Monochrome, and more news about Kaspersky. For tips, we have a tiling shell in Gnome, the fuser command for finding what's using that file, nproc for showing off how many cores your new machine has, and how to convince your browser to visit that IPv6 address instead of just searching it. The notes are available at https://bit.ly/4ewEzRF Host: Jonathan Bennett Co-Hosts: Rob Campbell, Jeff Massie, and Ken McDonald Want access to the video version and exclusive features? Become a member of Club TWiT today! https://twit.tv/clubtwit Club TWiT members can discuss this episode and leave feedback in the Club TWiT Discord.
While hearing how Elixir is being used in the Royal Bank of Canada's Capital Markets, we learned a lot of extra things we didn't expect! Thanos Vassilakis, head of R&D in the CM group, explained how middle managers talk about “scaling” to mean hiring staff with the goal of using all of their budgets. Not the kind of scaling we typically think about! Thanos identified the biggest problem limiting Elixir's adoption at large financial institutions and it wasn't what we expected. He also shared stories of how LiveView greatly out performed React when rendering hundreds of live updating financial charts and, after experimenting with it, the React devs fully adopted LiveView! Lots of great insights and stories in this one! Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/125 (http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/125) Elixir Community News - https://phoenixframework.org/blog/phoenix-1.7-released (https://phoenixframework.org/blog/phoenix-1.7-released) – Phoenix 1.7.0-rc.0 released! - https://twitter.com/chris_mccord/status/1589721565692067840 (https://twitter.com/chris_mccord/status/1589721565692067840) – Chris McCord's Twitter announcement - https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/blob/v1.7.0-rc.0/CHANGELOG.md (https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/blob/v1.7.0-rc.0/CHANGELOG.md) – Phoenix 1.7.0-rc.0 changelog - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-rqBLjr5Eo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-rqBLjr5Eo) – Chris McCord's keynote - https://twitter.com/clarkware/status/1587894081572569089 (https://twitter.com/clarkware/status/1587894081572569089) – Mike Clark shows how params can be added in embedded in Sigil P routes - https://hex.pm/packages/heroicons (https://hex.pm/packages/heroicons) – Heroicons - https://github.com/mtrudel/bandit (https://github.com/mtrudel/bandit) – Alternative webservers like Bandit become possible - https://twitter.com/bernheisel/status/1589803460320710656 (https://twitter.com/bernheisel/status/1589803460320710656) – David's diff of for going to new Phoenix 1.7 - https://utils.zest.dev/gendiff (https://utils.zest.dev/gendiff) – David's free Diff Generator tool for Phoenix projects - https://twitter.com/josevalim/status/1589738157196869634 (https://twitter.com/josevalim/status/1589738157196869634) – Jose Valim's summation of new Phoenix release - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOeONt6Hkf8&list=PLqj39LCvnOWbmaPrkGCAzFMC_FYZUkmSr&index=15 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOeONt6Hkf8&list=PLqj39LCvnOWbmaPrkGCAzFMC_FYZUkmSr&index=15) – New batch of ElixirConf 2022 videos were released Do you have some Elixir news to share? Tell us at @ThinkingElixir (https://twitter.com/ThinkingElixir) or email at show@thinkingelixir.com (mailto:show@thinkingelixir.com) Discussion Resources - https://www.rbccm.com/en/ (https://www.rbccm.com/en/) - https://shapeshift.com/ (https://shapeshift.com/) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada(programminglanguage) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_(programming_language)) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JoeArmstrong(programmer) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Armstrong_(programmer)) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope(programminglanguage) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope_(programming_language)) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda(programminglanguage) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_(programming_language)) - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/capitalmarkets.asp (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/capitalmarkets.asp) - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/financialrisk.asp (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/financialrisk.asp) - https://couchdb.apache.org/ (https://couchdb.apache.org/) - https://www.ericsson.com/en (https://www.ericsson.com/en) - https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E1526101/tuxedo/docs11gr1/techarticles/CORBA.html (https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E15261_01/tuxedo/docs11gr1/tech_articles/CORBA.html) - https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Erlang-Concurrent-Pragmatic-Programmers/dp/193778553X (https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Erlang-Concurrent-Pragmatic-Programmers/dp/193778553X) - https://www.postgresql.org/ (https://www.postgresql.org/) - https://github.com/absinthe-graphql/absinthe (https://github.com/absinthe-graphql/absinthe) - https://github.com/lasp-lang/partisan (https://github.com/lasp-lang/partisan) - https://github.com/devinus/poolboy (https://github.com/devinus/poolboy) - https://docs.python.org/3/library/multiprocessing.html (https://docs.python.org/3/library/multiprocessing.html) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XWindowSystem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System) - https://openwhisk.apache.org/ (https://openwhisk.apache.org/) - https://www.drools.org/ (https://www.drools.org/) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rete_algorithm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rete_algorithm) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL) - https://sqlite.org/src4/doc/trunk/www/bt.wiki (https://sqlite.org/src4/doc/trunk/www/bt.wiki) - https://www.honeybadger.io/blog/elixir-memory-structure/ (https://www.honeybadger.io/blog/elixir-memory-structure/) - https://docs.python.org/3/library/multiprocessing.shared_memory.html (https://docs.python.org/3/library/multiprocessing.shared_memory.html) - https://github.com/membraneframework/shmex (https://github.com/membraneframework/shmex) - https://semiengineering.com/the-rise-of-smartnics/ (https://semiengineering.com/the-rise-of-smartnics/) - https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/networking/ethernet-adapters/ (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/networking/ethernet-adapters/) - https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/networking/products/data-processing-unit/hpc/ (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/networking/products/data-processing-unit/hpc/) - https://github.com/zeroc-ice/ice (https://github.com/zeroc-ice/ice) - https://github.com/afiniate/seresye (https://github.com/afiniate/seresye) Guest Information - https://twitter.com/thanos_tweets (https://twitter.com/thanos_tweets) – on Twitter - thanos.vassilakis@rbccm.com (thanos.vassilakis@rbccm.com) – Email - https://www.rbccm.com/en/ (https://www.rbccm.com/en/) – Royal Bank of Canada Capital Markets - https://elixirforum.com/u/thanos/summary (https://elixirforum.com/u/thanos/summary) – Thanos on Elixir Forum Find us online - Message the show - @ThinkingElixir (https://twitter.com/ThinkingElixir) - Email the show - show@thinkingelixir.com (mailto:show@thinkingelixir.com) - Mark Ericksen - @brainlid (https://twitter.com/brainlid) - David Bernheisel - @bernheisel (https://twitter.com/bernheisel) - Cade Ward - @cadebward (https://twitter.com/cadebward)
Some highlights from Linus' recent fireside chat, Qt gets a new leader and a Linux botnet we should probably take seriously.
Some highlights from Linus' recent fireside chat, Qt gets a new leader and a Linux botnet we should probably take seriously.
Freedesktop.org, X System. Free software legend, Keith Packard, the prime mover behind the X Window System and Freedesktop.org joins Doc Searls and Simon Phipps on FLOSS Weekly. A range of topics are discussed including the controversy of Richard Stallman returning to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) board of directors. Packard also shares why it's important to get involved with hardware, working operating systems versus containers and even his rocketry hobby. Hosts: Doc Searls and Simon Phipps Guest: Keith Packard Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly Think your open source project should be on FLOSS Weekly? Email floss@twit.tv. Thanks to Lullabot's Jeff Robbins, web designer and musician, for our theme music. Sponsor: Melissa.com/twit
Freedesktop.org, X System. Free software legend, Keith Packard, the prime mover behind the X Window System and Freedesktop.org joins Doc Searls and Simon Phipps on FLOSS Weekly. A range of topics are discussed including the controversy of Richard Stallman returning to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) board of directors. Packard also shares why it's important to get involved with hardware, working operating systems versus containers and even his rocketry hobby. Hosts: Doc Searls and Simon Phipps Guest: Keith Packard Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly Think your open source project should be on FLOSS Weekly? Email floss@twit.tv. Thanks to Lullabot's Jeff Robbins, web designer and musician, for our theme music. Sponsor: Melissa.com/twit
Freedesktop.org, X System. Free software legend, Keith Packard, the prime mover behind the X Window System and Freedesktop.org joins Doc Searls and Simon Phipps on FLOSS Weekly. A range of topics are discussed including the controversy of Richard Stallman returning to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) board of directors. Packard also shares why it's important to get involved with hardware, working operating systems versus containers and even his rocketry hobby. Hosts: Doc Searls and Simon Phipps Guest: Keith Packard Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly Think your open source project should be on FLOSS Weekly? Email floss@twit.tv. Thanks to Lullabot's Jeff Robbins, web designer and musician, for our theme music. Sponsor: Melissa.com/twit
Freedesktop.org, X System. Free software legend, Keith Packard, the prime mover behind the X Window System and Freedesktop.org joins Doc Searls and Simon Phipps on FLOSS Weekly. A range of topics are discussed including the controversy of Richard Stallman returning to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) board of directors. Packard also shares why it's important to get involved with hardware, working operating systems versus containers and even his rocketry hobby. Hosts: Doc Searls and Simon Phipps Guest: Keith Packard Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly Think your open source project should be on FLOSS Weekly? Email floss@twit.tv. Thanks to Lullabot's Jeff Robbins, web designer and musician, for our theme music. Sponsor: Melissa.com/twit
Freedesktop.org, X System. Free software legend, Keith Packard, the prime mover behind the X Window System and Freedesktop.org joins Doc Searls and Simon Phipps on FLOSS Weekly. A range of topics are discussed including the controversy of Richard Stallman returning to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) board of directors. Packard also shares why it's important to get involved with hardware, working operating systems versus containers and even his rocketry hobby. Hosts: Doc Searls and Simon Phipps Guest: Keith Packard Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly Think your open source project should be on FLOSS Weekly? Email floss@twit.tv. Thanks to Lullabot's Jeff Robbins, web designer and musician, for our theme music. Sponsor: Melissa.com/twit
Freedesktop.org, X System. Free software legend, Keith Packard, the prime mover behind the X Window System and Freedesktop.org joins Doc Searls and Simon Phipps on FLOSS Weekly. A range of topics are discussed including the controversy of Richard Stallman returning to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) board of directors. Packard also shares why it's important to get involved with hardware, working operating systems versus containers and even his rocketry hobby. Hosts: Doc Searls and Simon Phipps Guest: Keith Packard Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly Think your open source project should be on FLOSS Weekly? Email floss@twit.tv. Thanks to Lullabot's Jeff Robbins, web designer and musician, for our theme music. Sponsor: Melissa.com/twit
Freedesktop.org, X System. Free software legend, Keith Packard, the prime mover behind the X Window System and Freedesktop.org joins Doc Searls and Simon Phipps on FLOSS Weekly. A range of topics are discussed including the controversy of Richard Stallman returning to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) board of directors. Packard also shares why it's important to get involved with hardware, working operating systems versus containers and even his rocketry hobby. Hosts: Doc Searls and Simon Phipps Guest: Keith Packard Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly Think your open source project should be on FLOSS Weekly? Email floss@twit.tv. Thanks to Lullabot's Jeff Robbins, web designer and musician, for our theme music. Sponsor: Melissa.com/twit
Freedesktop.org, X System. Free software legend, Keith Packard, the prime mover behind the X Window System and Freedesktop.org joins Doc Searls and Simon Phipps on FLOSS Weekly. A range of topics are discussed including the controversy of Richard Stallman returning to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) board of directors. Packard also shares why it's important to get involved with hardware, working operating systems versus containers and even his rocketry hobby. Hosts: Doc Searls and Simon Phipps Guest: Keith Packard Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly Think your open source project should be on FLOSS Weekly? Email floss@twit.tv. Thanks to Lullabot's Jeff Robbins, web designer and musician, for our theme music. Sponsor: Melissa.com/twit
50 procent av panelen är osedvanligt trött i detta avsnitt. Samma 50 procent beklagar eventuell olägenhet vid lyssning. Jockes hatkärlek till Cisco - Ciscos värld är ett helt eget universum Jocke ska bygga databaskluster - varning för nördigt innehåll Ett år sedan jocke skrev sista texten på Macpro. T ankar och funderingar Fedora 31 - intryck Jocke har blivit med Trådfri. Immersed - Fredrik tittar på sin dator i VR Netnewswire 5 är här, borde man skaffa Feedbinkonto? Peaky Blinders säsong fem! Teaser: I ett kommande Kodsnack blir det mer Mastodon Googles bildsökningsfunktion har blivit sämre. Igen Fredrik programmerar sitt minitangentbord och använder det på jobbet TRAPPEN! Länkar ASA 5520 Mysql Mariadb Databaskluster med Mysql Galera Gnome Cinnamon Weyland X11 Trådfri Immersed Netnewswire 5 Feedbin Freshrss Brent Simmons blogg OPML Peaky blinders Cillian Murphy Westworld Nolan Lawson - driver Mastodoninstans och skriver intressanta saker Pinafore Flickr Fredriks tangentbord och dess just då aktuella layout Das keyboard - Fredrik har en helsvart variant med blanka tangenter TRAPPEN! Två nördar - en podcast. Fredrik Björeman och Joacim Melin diskuterar allt som gör livet värt att leva. Fullständig avsnittsinformation finns här: https://www.bjoremanmelin.se/podcast/avsnitt-177-mycket-cisco-idag.html.
Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because by understanding the past, we're able to be prepared for the innovations of the future! Today we're going to look at the emergence of the web through the lens of Netscape, the browser that pushed everything forward into the mainstream. The Netscape story starts back at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana where the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (or NCSA) inspired Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina to write Mosaic, which was originally called xmosaic and built for X11 or the X Window System. In 1992 there were only 26 websites in the world. But that was up from the 1 that Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee built at info.cern.ch in 1991. The internet had really only been born a few years earlier in 1989. But funded by the Gore Bill, Andreessen and a team of developers released the Alpha version of the NCSA Mosaic browser in 1993 and ported it to Windows, Mac, and of course the Amiga. At this point there were about 130 websites. Version two of Mosaic came later that year and then the National Science Foundation picked up the tab to maintain Mosaic from 94 to 97. James Clark, a co-founder of Silicon Graphics and a legend in Silicon Valley, took notice. He recruited some of the Mosaic team, led by Marc Andreessen, to start Mosaic Communications Corporation, which released Netscape Navigator in 1994, the same year Andreessen graduated from college. By then there were over 2,700 websites, and a lot of other people were taking notice after 2 four digit growth years. Yahoo! and EXCITE were released in 1994 and enjoyed an explosion in popularity, entering a field with 25 million people accessing such a small number of sites. Justin Hall was posting personal stuff on links.net, one of the earliest forms of what we now call blogging. Someone else couldn't help but notice: Bill Gates from Microsoft. He considered cross-platform web pages and the commoditization of the operating system to be a huge problem for his maturing startup called Microsoft, and famously sent The Internet Tidal Wave memo to his direct reports, laying out a vision for how Microsoft would respond to this thread. We got Netscape for free at the University, but I remember when I went to the professional world we had to pay for it. The look and feel of Navigator then can still be seen in modern browsers today. There was an address bar, a customizable home page, a status bar, and you could write little javascripts to do cutesy things like have a message scroll here and there or have blinked things. 1995 also brought us HTML frames, fonts on pages, the ability to change the background color, the ability to embed various forms of media, and image maps. Building sites back then was a breeze. And with an 80% market share for browsers, testing was simple: just open Netscape and view your page! Netscape was a press darling. They had insane fans that loved them. And while they hadn't made money yet, they did something that a lot of companies do now, but few did then: they went IPO early and raked in $600 million in their first day, turning Marc Andreessen the poster child into an overnight sensation. They even started to say that the PC would live on the web - and it would do so using Netscape. Andreessen then committed the cardinal sin that put many in tech out of a job: he went after Microsoft claiming they'd reduce Microsoft to a set of “poorly debugged device drivers.” Microsoft finally responded. They had a meeting with Netscape and offered to acquire the company or they would put them out of business. Netscape lawyered up, claiming Microsoft offered to split the market up where they owned Windows and left the rest to Netscape. Internet Explorer 1 was released by Microsoft in 1995 - a fork of Mosaic which had been indirectly licensed from the code Andreessen had written while still working with the NCSA in college. And so began the “Browser Wars” with Netscape 2 being released and Internet Explorer 2, the same year. 1995 saw the web shoot up to over 23,000 sites. Netscape 2 added Netscape Mail, an email program with about as simple a name as Microsoft Mail, which had been in Windows since 1991. In 1995, Brendan Eich, a developer at Netscape wrote SpiderMonkey, the original JavaScript engine, a language many web apps still use today (just look for the .jsp extension). I was managing labs at the University of Georgia at the time and remember the fast pace that we were upgrading these browsers. NCSA telnet hadn't been updated in years but it had never been as cool as this Netscape thing. Geocities popped up and I can still remember my first time building a website there and accessing incredible amounts of content being built - and maybe even learning a thing or two while dinking around in those neighborhoods. 1995 had been a huge and eventful year, with nearly 45 million people now “on the web.” Amazon, early search engine Altavista, LYCOS, and eBay launching as well. The search engine space sure was heating up… Then came 1996. Things got fun. Point releases of browsers came monthly. New features dropped with each release. Plugins for Internet Explorer leveraged API hooks into the Windows operating system that made pages only work on IE. Those of us working on pages had to update for both, and test for both. By the end of 1996 there were over a quarter million web pages and over 77 million people were using the web. Apple, The New York Times, Dell.com appeared on the web, but 41 percent of people checked AOL regularly and other popular sites would be from ISPs for years to come. Finally, after a lot of talk and a lot of point releases, Netscape 3 was released in 1997. Javascript got a rev, a lot of styling elements some still use today like tables and frames came out and forms could be filled out automatically. There was also a gold version of Netscape 3 that allowed editing pages. But Dreamweaver gave us a nice WYSIWIG to build web pages that was far more feature rich. Netscape got buggier, they bit on more and more thus spreading developers thing. They just couldn't keep up. And Internet Explorer was made free in Windows as of IE 3, and had become equal to Netscape. It had a lot of plugins for Windows that made it work better on that platform, for better or worse. The Browser Wars ended when Netscape decided to open source their code in 1998, creating the Mozilla project by open sourcing the Netscape Browser Suite source code. This led to Waterfox, Pale Moon, SeaMonkey, Ice Weasel, Ice Cat, Wyzo, and of course, Tor Browser, Swiftfox, Swift Weasel, Timberwolf, TenFourFox, Comodo IceDragon, CometBird, Basilisk, Cliqz, AT&T Pogo, IceCat, and Flock. But most importantly, Mozilla released Firefox themselves, which still maintains between 8 and 10 percent marketshare for browser usage according to who you ask. Of course, ultimately everyone lost the browser wars now that Chrome owns a 67% market share! Netscape was sold to AOL in 1999 for $4.2 billion, the first year they dropped out of the website popularity contest called the top 10. At this point, Microsoft controlled the market with an 80% market share. That was the first year Amazon showed up on the top list of websites. The Netscape problems continued. AOL released Netscape 6 in 2000, which was buggy and I remember a concerted effort at the time to start removing Netscape from computers. In 2003, after being acquired by Time Warner, AOL finally killed off Netscape. This was the same year Apple released Safari. They released 7.2 in 2004 after outsourcing some of the development. Netscape 9, a port of Firefox, was released in 2007. The next year Google Chrome was released. Today, Mozilla is a half-billion dollar a year not-for profit. They ship the Firefox browser, the Firefox OS mobile OS, the online file sharing service Firefox Send, the Bugzilla bug tracking tool, the Rust programming language, the Thunderbird email client, and other tools like SpiderMonkey, which is still the javascript engine embedded into Firefox and Thunderbird. If the later stage of Netscape's code in the form of the open source Mozilla projects appeal to you, consider becoming a Mozilla Rep. You can help contribute, promote, document, and build the community with other passionate and knowledgeable humans that are on the forefront of pushing the web into new and beautiful places. For more on that, go to reps.mozilla.org. Andreessen went on to build Opsware with Ben Horowitz (who's not a bad author) and others. He sold the hosting business and in 2005 continued on with Horowitz founded Andreessen Horowitz which were early investors of Facebook, Foursquare, GitHub, Groupon, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, Jawbone, Zynga, Skype, and many, many others. He didn't win the browser wars, but he has been at the center of helping to shape the Internet as we know it today, and due to the open sourcing of the source code many other browsers popped up. The advent of the cloud has also validated many of his early arguments about the web making computer operating systems more of a commodity. Anyone who's used Office 365 online or Google apps can back that up. Ultimately, the story of Netscape could be looked at as yet another “Bill Gates screwed us” story. But I'm not sure that does it justice. Netscape did as much to shape the Internet in those early days as anything else. Many of those early contributions, like the open nature of the Internet, various languages and techniques, and of course the code in the form of Mozilla, live on today. There were other browsers, and the Internet might have grown to what it is today. But we might not have had as much of the velocity without Andreessen and Netscape and specifically the heated competition that led to so much innovation in such a short period of time - so we certainly owe them our gratitude that we've come as far as we have. And I owe you my gratitude. Thank you so very much for tuning into another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We're lucky to have you. Have a great day!
Website protection with OPNsense, FreeBSD Support Pull Request for ZFS-on-Linux, How much has Unix changed, Porting Wine to amd64 on NetBSD, FreeBSD Enterprise 1 PB Storage, the death watch for X11 has started, and more. Headlines Website protection with OPNsense (https://medium.com/@jccwbb/website-protection-with-opnsense-3586a529d487) with nginx plugin OPNsense become a strong full featured Web Application Firewall (WAF) The OPNsense security platform can help you to protect your network and your webservers with the nginx plugin addition. In old days, install an open source firewall was a very trick task, but today it can be done with few clicks (or key strokes). In this article I'll not describe the detailed OPNsense installation process, but you can watch this video that was extracted from my OPNsense course available in Udemy. The video is in portuguese language, but with the translation CC Youtube feature you may be able to follow it without problems (if you don't are a portuguese speaker ofcourse) :-) + See the article for the rest of the writeup FreeBSD Support Pull Request against the ZFS-on-Linux repo (https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/pull/8987) This pull request integrates the sysutils/openzfs port’s sources into the upstream ZoL repo > Adding FreeBSD support to ZoL will make it easier to move changes back and forth between FreeBSD and Linux > Refactor tree to separate out Linux and FreeBSD specific code > import FreeBSD's SPL > add ifdefs in common code where it made more sense to do so than duplicate the code in separate files > Adapted ZFS Test Suite to run on FreeBSD and all tests that pass on ZoL passing on ZoF The plan to officially rename the common repo from ZFSonLinux to OpenZFS was announced at the ZFS Leadership Meeting on June 25th Video of Leadership Meeting (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJwykiJmH0M) Meeting Agenda and Notes (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w2jv2XVYFmBVvG1EGf-9A5HBVsjAYoLIFZAnWHhV-BM/edit) This will allow improvements made on one OS to be made available more easily (and more quickly) to the other platforms For example, mav@’s recent work: Add wakeupany(), cheaper version of wakeupone() for taskqueue(9) (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=349220) > As result, on 72-core Xeon v4 machine sequential ZFS write to 12 ZVOLs with 16KB block size spend 34% less time in wakeupany() and descendants then it was spending in wakeupone(), and total write throughput increased by ~10% with the same as before CPU usage. News Roundup Episode 5 Notes - How much has UNIX changed? (http://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/episode-5-notes-how-much-has-unix-changed) UNIX-like systems have dominated computing for decades, and with the rise of the internet and mobile devices their reach has become even larger. True, most systems now use more modern OSs like Linux, but how much has the UNIX-like landscape changed since the early days? So, my question was this: how close is a modern *NIX userland to some of the earliest UNIX releases? To do this I'm going to compare a few key points of a modern Linux system with the earliest UNIX documentation I can get my hands on. The doc I am going to be covering(https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Dennisv1/UNIXProgrammersManual_Nov71.pdf) is from November 1971, predating v1 of the system. I think the best place to start this comparison is to look at one of the highest-profile parts of the OS, that being the file system. Under the hood modern EXT file systems are completely different from the early UNIX file systems. However, they are still presented in basically the same way, as a heirerarchicat structure of directories with device files. So paths still look identical, and navigating the file system still functions the same. Often used commands like ls, cp, mv, du, and df function the same. So are mount and umount. But, there are some key differences. For instance, cd didn't exist, yet instead chdir filled its place. Also, chmod is somewhat different. Instead of the usual 3-digit octal codes for permissions, this older version only uses 2 digits. Really, that difference is due to the underlying file system using a different permission set than modern systems. For the most part, all the file handling is actually pretty close to a Linux system from 2019. See the article for the rest of the writeup Porting Wine to amd64 on NetBSD (https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/porting_wine_to_amd64_on) I have been working on porting Wine to amd64 on NetBSD as a GSoC 2019 project. Wine is a compatibility layer which allows running Microsoft Windows applications on POSIX-complaint operating systems. This report provides an overview of the progress of the project during the first coding period. Initially, when I started working on getting Wine-4.4 to build and run on NetBSD i386 the primary issue that I faced was Wine displaying black windows instead of UI, and this applied to any graphical program I tried running with Wine. I suspected it , as it is related to graphics, to be an issue with the graphics driver or Xorg. Subsequently, I tried building modular Xorg, and I tried running Wine on it only to realize that Xorg being modular didn't affect it in the least. After having tried a couple of configurations, I realized that trying to hazard out every other probability is going to take an awful lot of time that I didn't have. This motivated me to bisect the repo using git, and find the first version of Wine which failed on NetBSD. + See the article for the rest of the writeup FreeBSD Enterprise 1 PB Storage (https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2019/06/19/freebsd-enterprise-1-pb-storage/?utm_source=discoverbsd) Today FreeBSD operating system turns 26 years old. 19 June is an International FreeBSD Day. This is why I got something special today :). How about using FreeBSD as an Enterprise Storage solution on real hardware? This where FreeBSD shines with all its storage features ZFS included. Today I will show you how I have built so called Enterprise Storage based on FreeBSD system along with more then 1 PB (Petabyte) of raw capacity. This project is different. How much storage space can you squeeze from a single 4U system? It turns out a lot! Definitely more then 1 PB (1024 TB) of raw storage space. See the article for the rest of the writeup The death watch for the X Window System (aka X11) has probably started (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/XDeathwatchStarts) Once we are done with this we expect X.org to go into hard maintenance mode fairly quickly. The reality is that X.org is basically maintained by us and thus once we stop paying attention to it there is unlikely to be any major new releases coming out and there might even be some bitrot setting in over time. We will keep an eye on it as we will want to ensure X.org stays supportable until the end of the RHEL8 lifecycle at a minimum, but let this be a friendly notice for everyone who rely the work we do maintaining the Linux graphics stack, get onto Wayland, that is where the future is. I have no idea how true this is about X.org X server maintenance, either now or in the future, but I definitely think it's a sign that developers have started saying this. If Gnome developers feel that X.org is going to be in hard maintenance mode almost immediately, they're probably pretty likely to also put the Gnome code that deals with X into hard maintenance mode. And public Gnome statements about this (and public action or lack of it) provide implicit support for KDE and any other desktop to move in this direction if they want to (and probably create some pressure to do so). I've known that Wayland was the future for some time, but I would still like it to not arrive any time soon. Beastie Bits Porting NetBSD to Risc-V -- Video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vQXGomKoxA) FreeBSD 11.3RC3 Available (https://www.freebsd.org/news/newsflash.html#event20190628:01) Open Source Could Be a Casualty of the Trade War (https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5590) Celebrate UNIX50 and SDF32 (https://sdf.org/sdf32/) doas environmental security (https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20190621104048) Feedback/Questions Matt - BSD or Older Hardware (http://dpaste.com/1RP09F0#wrap) MJRodriguez - Some Playstation news (http://dpaste.com/046SPPB#wrap) Moritz - bhyve VT-x passthrough (http://dpaste.com/1H4PJXW) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Your browser does not support the HTML5 video tag.
Thoughts on NetBSD 8.0, Monitoring love for a GigaBit OpenBSD firewall, cat’s source history, X.org root permission bug, thoughts on OpenBSD as a desktop, and NomadBSD review. ##Headlines Some thoughts on NetBSD 8.0 NetBSD is a highly portable operating system which can be run on dozens of different hardware architectures. The operating system’s clean and minimal design allow it to be run in all sorts of environments, ranging from embedded devices, to servers, to workstations. While the base operating system is minimal, NetBSD users have access to a large repository of binary packages and a ports tree which I will touch upon later. I last tried NetBSD 7.0 about three years ago and decided it was time to test drive the operating system again. In the past three years NetBSD has introduced a few new features, many of them security enhancements. For example, NetBSD now supports write exclusive-or execute (W^X) protection and address space layout randomization (ASLR) to protect programs against common attacks. NetBSD 8.0 also includes USB3 support and the ability to work with ZFS storage volumes. Early impressions Since I had set up NetBSD with a Full install and enabled xdm during the setup process, the operating system booted to a graphical login screen. From here we can sign into our account. The login screen does not provide options to shut down or restart the computer. Logging into our account brings up the twm window manager and provides a virtual terminal, courtesy of xterm. There is a panel that provides a method for logging out of the window manager. The twm environment is sparse, fast and devoid of distractions. Software management NetBSD ships with a fairly standard collection of command line tools and manual pages, but otherwise it is a fairly minimal platform. If we want to run network services, have access to a web browser, or use a word processor we are going to need to install more software. There are two main approaches to installing new packages. The first, and easier approach, is to use the pkgin package manager. The pkgin utility works much the same way APT or DNF work in the Linux world, or as pkg works on FreeBSD. We can search for software by name, install or remove items. I found pkgin worked well, though its output can be terse. My only complaint with pkgin is that it does not handle “close enough” package names. For example, if I tried to run “pkgin install vlc” or “pkgin install firefox” I would quickly be told these items did not exist. But a more forgiving package manager will realize items like vlc2 or firefox45 are available and offer to install those. The pkgin tool installs new programs in the /usr/pkg/bin directory. Depending on your configuration and shell, this location may not be in your user’s path, and it will be helpful to adjust your PATH variable accordingly. The other common approach to acquiring new software is to use the pkgsrc framework. I have talked about using pkgsrc before and I will skip the details. Basically, we can download a collection of recipes for building popular open source software and run a command to download and install these items from their source code. Using pkgsrc basically gives us the same software as using pkgin would, but with some added flexibility on the options we use. Once new software has been installed, it may need to be enabled and activated, particularly if it uses (or is) a background service. New items can be enabled in the /etc/rc.conf file and started or stopped using the service command. This works about the same as the service command on FreeBSD and most non-systemd Linux distributions. Hardware I found that, when logged into the twm environment, NetBSD used about 130MB of RAM. This included kernel memory and all active memory. A fresh, Full install used up 1.5GB of disk space. I generally found NetBSD ran well in both VirtualBox and on my desktop computer. The system was quick and stable. I did have trouble getting a higher screen resolution in both environments. NetBSD does not offer VirtualBox add-on modules. There are NetBSD patches for VirtualBox out there, but there is some manual work involved in getting them working. When running on my desktop computer I think the resolution issue was one of finding and dealing with the correct video driver. Screen resolution aside, NetBSD performed well and detected all my hardware. Personal projects Since NetBSD provides users with a small, core operating system without many utilities if we want to use NetBSD for something we need to have a project in mind. I had four mini projects in mind I wanted to try this week: install a desktop environment, enable file sharing for computers on the local network, test multimedia (video, audio and YouTube capabilities), and set up a ZFS volume for storage. I began with the desktop. Specifically, I followed the same tutorial I used three years ago to try to set up the Xfce desktop. While Xfce and its supporting services installed, I was unable to get a working desktop out of the experience. I could get the Xfce window manager working, but not the entire session. This tutorial worked beautifully with NetBSD 7.0, but not with version 8.0. Undeterred, I switched gears and installed Fluxbox instead. This gave me a slightly more powerful graphical environment than what I had before with twm while maintaining performance. Fluxbox ran without any problems, though its application menu was automatically populated with many programs which were not actually installed. Next, I tried installing a few multimedia applications to play audio and video files. Here I ran into a couple of interesting problems. I found the music players I installed would play audio files, but the audio was quite slow. It always sounded like a cassette tape dragging. When I tried to play a video, the entire graphical session would crash, taking me back to the login screen. When I installed Firefox, I found I could play YouTube videos, and the video played smoothly, but again the audio was unusually slow. I set up two methods of sharing files on the local network: OpenSSH and FTP. NetBSD basically gives us OpenSSH for free at install time and I added an FTP server through the pkgin package manager which worked beautifully with its default configuration. I experimented with ZFS support a little, just enough to confirm I could create and access ZFS volumes. ZFS seems to work on NetBSD just as well, and with the same basic features, as it does on FreeBSD and mainstream Linux distributions. I think this is a good feature for the portable operating system to have since it means we can stick NetBSD on nearly any networked computer and use it as a NAS. Conclusions NetBSD, like its close cousins (FreeBSD and OpenBSD) does not do a lot of hand holding or automation. It offers a foundation that will run on most CPUs and we can choose to build on that foundation. I mention this because, on its own, NetBSD does not do much. If we want to get something out of it, we need to be willing to build on its foundation - we need a project. This is important to keep in mind as I think going into NetBSD and thinking, “Oh I’ll just explore around and expand on this as I go,” will likely lead to disappointment. I recommend figuring out what you want to do before installing NetBSD and making sure the required tools are available in the operating system’s repositories. Some of the projects I embarked on this week (using ZFS and setting up file sharing) worked well. Others, like getting multimedia support and a full-featured desktop, did not. Given more time, I’m sure I could find a suitable desktop to install (along with the required documentation to get it and its services running), or customize one based on one of the available window managers. However, any full featured desktop is going to require some manual work. Media support was not great. The right players and codecs were there, but I was not able to get audio to play smoothly. My main complaint with NetBSD relates to my struggle to get some features working to my satisfaction: the documentation is scattered. There are four different sections of the project’s website for documentation (FAQs, The Guide, manual pages and the wiki). Whatever we are looking for is likely to be in one of those, but which one? Or, just as likely, the tutorial we want is not there, but is on a forum or blog somewhere. I found that the documentation provided was often thin, more of a quick reference to remind people how something works rather than a full explanation. As an example, I found a couple of documents relating to setting up a firewall. One dealt with networking NetBSD on a LAN, another explored IPv6 support, but neither gave an overview on syntax or a basic guide to blocking all but one or two ports. It seemed like that information should already be known, or picked up elsewhere. Newcomers are likely to be a bit confused by software management guides for the same reason. Some pages refer to using a tool called pkg_add, others use pkgsrc and its make utility, others mention pkgin. Ultimately, these tools each give approximately the same result, but work differently and yet are mentioned almost interchangeably. I have used NetBSD before a few times and could stumble through these guides, but new users are likely to come away confused. One quirk of NetBSD, which may be a security feature or an inconvenience, depending on one’s point of view, is super user programs are not included in regular users’ paths. This means we need to change our path if we want to be able to run programs typically used by root. For example, shutdown and mount are not in regular users’ paths by default. This made checking some things tricky for me. Ultimately though, NetBSD is not famous for its convenience or features so much as its flexibility. The operating system will run on virtually any processor and should work almost identically across multiple platforms. That gives NetBSD users a good deal of consistency across a range of hardware and the chance to experiment with a member of the Unix family on hardware that might not be compatible with Linux or the other BSDs. ###Showing a Gigabit OpenBSD Firewall Some Monitoring Love I have a pretty long history of running my home servers or firewalls on “exotic” hardware. At first, it was Sun Microsystem hardware, then it moved to the excellent Soekris line, with some cool single board computers thrown in the mix. Recently I’ve been running OpenBSD Octeon on the Ubiquiti Edge Router Lite, an amazing little piece of kit at an amazing price point. Upgrade Time! This setup has served me for some time and I’ve been extremely happy with it. But, in the #firstworldproblems category, I recently upgraded the household to the amazing Gigabit fibre offering from Sonic. A great problem to have, but also too much of a problem for the little Edge Router Lite (ERL). The way the OpenBSD PF firewall works, it’s only able to process packets on a single core. Not a problem for the dual-core 500 MHz ERL when you’re pushing under ~200 Mbps, but more of a problem when you’re trying to push 1000 Mbps. I needed something that was faster on a per core basis but still satisfied my usual firewall requirements. Loosely: small form factor fan-less multiple Intel Ethernet ports (good driver support) low power consumption not your regular off-the-shelf kit relatively inexpensive After evaluating a LOT of different options I settled on the Protectli Vault FW2B. With the specs required for the firewall (2 GB RAM and 8 GB drive) it comes in at a mere $239 USD! Installation of OpenBSD 6.4 was pretty straight forward, with the only problem I had was Etcher did not want to recognize the ‘.fs’ extension on the install image as bootable image. I quickly fixed this with good old Unix dd(1) on the Mac. Everything else was incredibly smooth. After loading the same rulesets on my new install, the results were fantastic! Monitoring Now that the machine was up and running (and fast!), I wanted to know what it was doing. Over the years, I’ve always relied on the venerable pfstat software to give me an overview of my traffic, blocked packets, etc. It looks like this: As you can see it’s based on RRDtool, which was simply incredible in its time. Having worked on monitoring almost continuously for almost the past decade, I wanted to see if we could re-implement the same functionality using more modern tools as RRDtool and pfstat definitely have their limitations. This might be an opportunity to learn some new things as well. I came across pf-graphite which seemed to be a great start! He had everything I needed and I added a few more stats from the detailed interface statistics and the ability for the code to exit for running from cron(8), which is a bit more OpenBSD style. I added code for sending to some SaaS metrics platforms but ultimately stuck with straight Graphite. One important thing to note was to use the Graphite pickle port (2004) instead of the default plaintext port for submission. Also you will need to set a loginterface in your ‘pf.conf’. A bit of tweaking with Graphite and Grafana, and I had a pretty darn good recreation of my original PF stats dashboard! As you can see it’s based on RRDtool, which was simply incredible in its time. Having worked on monitoring almost continuously for almost the past decade, I wanted to see if we could re-implement the same functionality using more modern tools as RRDtool and pfstat definitely have their limitations. This might be an opportunity to learn some new things as well. I came across pf-graphite which seemed to be a great start! He had everything I needed and I added a few more stats from the detailed interface statistics and the ability for the code to exit for running from cron(8), which is a bit more OpenBSD style. I added code for sending to some SaaS metrics platforms but ultimately stuck with straight Graphite. One important thing to note was to use the Graphite pickle port (2004) instead of the default plaintext port for submission. Also you will need to set a loginterface in your ‘pf.conf’. A bit of tweaking with Graphite and Grafana, and I had a pretty darn good recreation of my original PF stats dashboard! ###The Source History of Cat I once had a debate with members of my extended family about whether a computer science degree is a degree worth pursuing. I was in college at the time and trying to decide whether I should major in computer science. My aunt and a cousin of mine believed that I shouldn’t. They conceded that knowing how to program is of course a useful and lucrative thing, but they argued that the field of computer science advances so quickly that everything I learned would almost immediately be outdated. Better to pick up programming on the side and instead major in a field like economics or physics where the basic principles would be applicable throughout my lifetime. I knew that my aunt and cousin were wrong and decided to major in computer science. (Sorry, aunt and cousin!) It is easy to see why the average person might believe that a field like computer science, or a profession like software engineering, completely reinvents itself every few years. We had personal computers, then the web, then phones, then machine learning… technology is always changing, so surely all the underlying principles and techniques change too. Of course, the amazing thing is how little actually changes. Most people, I’m sure, would be stunned to know just how old some of the important software on their computer really is. I’m not talking about flashy application software, admittedly—my copy of Firefox, the program I probably use the most on my computer, is not even two weeks old. But, if you pull up the manual page for something like grep, you will see that it has not been updated since 2010 (at least on MacOS). And the original version of grep was written in 1974, which in the computing world was back when dinosaurs roamed Silicon Valley. People (and programs) still depend on grep every day. My aunt and cousin thought of computer technology as a series of increasingly elaborate sand castles supplanting one another after each high tide clears the beach. The reality, at least in many areas, is that we steadily accumulate programs that have solved problems. We might have to occasionally modify these programs to avoid software rot, but otherwise they can be left alone. grep is a simple program that solves a still-relevant problem, so it survives. Most application programming is done at a very high level, atop a pyramid of much older code solving much older problems. The ideas and concepts of 30 or 40 years ago, far from being obsolete today, have in many cases been embodied in software that you can still find installed on your laptop. I thought it would be interesting to take a look at one such old program and see how much it had changed since it was first written. cat is maybe the simplest of all the Unix utilities, so I’m going to use it as my example. Ken Thompson wrote the original implementation of cat in 1969. If I were to tell somebody that I have a program on my computer from 1969, would that be accurate? How much has cat really evolved over the decades? How old is the software on our computers? Thanks to repositories like this one, we can see exactly how cat has evolved since 1969. I’m going to focus on implementations of cat that are ancestors of the implementation I have on my Macbook. You will see, as we trace cat from the first versions of Unix down to the cat in MacOS today, that the program has been rewritten more times than you might expect—but it ultimately works more or less the same way it did fifty years ago. Research Unix Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie began writing Unix on a PDP 7. This was in 1969, before C, so all of the early Unix software was written in PDP 7 assembly. The exact flavor of assembly they used was unique to Unix, since Ken Thompson wrote his own assembler that added some features on top of the assembler provided by DEC, the PDP 7’s manufacturer. Thompson’s changes are all documented in the original Unix Programmer’s Manual under the entry for as, the assembler. The first implementation of cat is thus in PDP 7 assembly. I’ve added comments that try to explain what each instruction is doing, but the program is still difficult to follow unless you understand some of the extensions Thompson made while writing his assembler. There are two important ones. First, the ; character can be used to separate multiple statements on the same line. It appears that this was used most often to put system call arguments on the same line as the sys instruction. Second, Thompson added support for “temporary labels” using the digits 0 through 9. These are labels that can be reused throughout a program, thus being, according to the Unix Programmer’s Manual, “less taxing both on the imagination of the programmer and on the symbol space of the assembler.” From any given instruction, you can refer to the next or most recent temporary label n using nf and nb respectively. For example, if you have some code in a block labeled 1:, you can jump back to that block from further down by using the instruction jmp 1b. (But you cannot jump forward to that block from above without using jmp 1f instead.) The most interesting thing about this first version of cat is that it contains two names we should recognize. There is a block of instructions labeled getc and a block of instructions labeled putc, demonstrating that these names are older than the C standard library. The first version of cat actually contained implementations of both functions. The implementations buffered input so that reads and writes were not done a character at a time. The first version of cat did not last long. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were able to persuade Bell Labs to buy them a PDP 11 so that they could continue to expand and improve Unix. The PDP 11 had a different instruction set, so cat had to be rewritten. I’ve marked up this second version of cat with comments as well. It uses new assembler mnemonics for the new instruction set and takes advantage of the PDP 11’s various addressing modes. (If you are confused by the parentheses and dollar signs in the source code, those are used to indicate different addressing modes.) But it also leverages the ; character and temporary labels just like the first version of cat, meaning that these features must have been retained when as was adapted for the PDP 11. The second version of cat is significantly simpler than the first. It is also more “Unix-y” in that it doesn’t just expect a list of filename arguments—it will, when given no arguments, read from stdin, which is what cat still does today. You can also give this version of cat an argument of - to indicate that it should read from stdin. In 1973, in preparation for the release of the Fourth Edition of Unix, much of Unix was rewritten in C. But cat does not seem to have been rewritten in C until a while after that. The first C implementation of cat only shows up in the Seventh Edition of Unix. This implementation is really fun to look through because it is so simple. Of all the implementations to follow, this one most resembles the idealized cat used as a pedagogic demonstration in K&R C. The heart of the program is the classic two-liner: while ((c = getc(fi)) != EOF) putchar(c); There is of course quite a bit more code than that, but the extra code is mostly there to ensure that you aren’t reading and writing to the same file. The other interesting thing to note is that this implementation of cat only recognized one flag, -u. The -u flag could be used to avoid buffering input and output, which cat would otherwise do in blocks of 512 bytes. BSD After the Seventh Edition, Unix spawned all sorts of derivatives and offshoots. MacOS is built on top of Darwin, which in turn is derived from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), so BSD is the Unix offshoot we are most interested in. BSD was originally just a collection of useful programs and add-ons for Unix, but it eventually became a complete operating system. BSD seems to have relied on the original cat implementation up until the fourth BSD release, known as 4BSD, when support was added for a whole slew of new flags. The 4BSD implementation of cat is clearly derived from the original implementation, though it adds a new function to implement the behavior triggered by the new flags. The naming conventions already used in the file were adhered to—the fflg variable, used to mark whether input was being read from stdin or a file, was joined by nflg, bflg, vflg, sflg, eflg, and tflg, all there to record whether or not each new flag was supplied in the invocation of the program. These were the last command-line flags added to cat; the man page for cat today lists these flags and no others, at least on Mac OS. 4BSD was released in 1980, so this set of flags is 38 years old. cat would be entirely rewritten a final time for BSD Net/2, which was, among other things, an attempt to avoid licensing issues by replacing all AT&T Unix-derived code with new code. BSD Net/2 was released in 1991. This final rewrite of cat was done by Kevin Fall, who graduated from Berkeley in 1988 and spent the next year working as a staff member at the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG). Fall told me that a list of Unix utilities still implemented using AT&T code was put up on a wall at CSRG and staff were told to pick the utilities they wanted to reimplement. Fall picked cat and mknod. The cat implementation bundled with MacOS today is built from a source file that still bears his name at the very top. His version of cat, even though it is a relatively trivial program, is today used by millions. Fall’s original implementation of cat is much longer than anything we have seen so far. Other than support for a -? help flag, it adds nothing in the way of new functionality. Conceptually, it is very similar to the 4BSD implementation. It is only longer because Fall separates the implementation into a “raw” mode and a “cooked” mode. The “raw” mode is cat classic; it prints a file character for character. The “cooked” mode is cat with all the 4BSD command-line options. The distinction makes sense but it also pads out the implementation so that it seems more complex at first glance than it actually is. There is also a fancy error handling function at the end of the file that further adds to its length. MacOS The very first release of Mac OS X thus includes an implementation of cat pulled from the NetBSD project. So the first Mac OS X implementation of cat is Kevin Fall’s cat. The only thing that had changed over the intervening decade was that Fall’s error-handling function err() was removed and the err() function made available by err.h was used in its place. err.h is a BSD extension to the C standard library. The NetBSD implementation of cat was later swapped out for FreeBSD’s implementation of cat. According to Wikipedia, Apple began using FreeBSD instead of NetBSD in Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther). But the Mac OS X implementation of cat, according to Apple’s own open source releases, was not replaced until Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) was released in 2007. The FreeBSD implementation that Apple swapped in for the Leopard release is the same implementation on Apple computers today. As of 2018, the implementation has not been updated or changed at all since 2007. So the Mac OS cat is old. As it happens, it is actually two years older than its 2007 appearance in MacOS X would suggest. This 2005 change, which is visible in FreeBSD’s Github mirror, was the last change made to FreeBSD’s cat before Apple pulled it into Mac OS X. So the Mac OS X cat implementation, which has not been kept in sync with FreeBSD’s cat implementation, is officially 13 years old. There’s a larger debate to be had about how much software can change before it really counts as the same software; in this case, the source file has not changed at all since 2005. The cat implementation used by Mac OS today is not that different from the implementation that Fall wrote for the 1991 BSD Net/2 release. The biggest difference is that a whole new function was added to provide Unix domain socket support. At some point, a FreeBSD developer also seems to have decided that Fall’s rawargs() function and cookargs() should be combined into a single function called scanfiles(). Otherwise, the heart of the program is still Fall’s code. I asked Fall how he felt about having written the cat implementation now used by millions of Apple users, either directly or indirectly through some program that relies on cat being present. Fall, who is now a consultant and a co-author of the most recent editions of TCP/IP Illustrated, says that he is surprised when people get such a thrill out of learning about his work on cat. Fall has had a long career in computing and has worked on many high-profile projects, but it seems that many people still get most excited about the six months of work he put into rewriting cat in 1989. The Hundred-Year-Old Program In the grand scheme of things, computers are not an old invention. We’re used to hundred-year-old photographs or even hundred-year-old camera footage. But computer programs are in a different category—they’re high-tech and new. At least, they are now. As the computing industry matures, will we someday find ourselves using programs that approach the hundred-year-old mark? Computer hardware will presumably change enough that we won’t be able to take an executable compiled today and run it on hardware a century from now. Perhaps advances in programming language design will also mean that nobody will understand C in the future and cat will have long since been rewritten in another language. (Though C has already been around for fifty years, and it doesn’t look like it is about to be replaced any time soon.) But barring all that, why not just keep using the cat we have forever? I think the history of cat shows that some ideas in computer science are in fact very durable. Indeed, with cat, both the idea and the program itself are old. It may not be accurate to say that the cat on my computer is from 1969. But I could make a case for saying that the cat on my computer is from 1989, when Fall wrote his implementation of cat. Lots of other software is just as ancient. So maybe we shouldn’t think of computer science and software development primarily as fields that disrupt the status quo and invent new things. Our computer systems are built out of historical artifacts. At some point, we may all spend more time trying to understand and maintain those historical artifacts than we spend writing new code. ##News Roundup Trivial Bug in X.Org Gives Root Permission on Linux and BSD Systems A vulnerability that is trivial to exploit allows privilege escalation to root level on Linux and BSD distributions using X.Org server, the open source implementation of the X Window System that offers the graphical environment. The flaw is now identified as CVE-2018-14665 (credited to security researcher Narendra Shinde). It has been present in xorg-server for two years, since version 1.19.0 and is exploitable by a limited user as long as the X server runs with elevated permissions. Privilege escalation and arbitrary file overwrite An advisory on Thursday describes the problem as an “incorrect command-line parameter validation” that also allows an attacker to overwrite arbitrary files. Privilege escalation can be accomplished via the -modulepath argument by setting an insecure path to modules loaded by the X.org server. Arbitrary file overwrite is possible through the -logfile argument, because of improper verification when parsing the option. Bug could have been avoided in OpenBSD 6.4 OpenBSD, the free and open-source operating system with a strong focus on security, uses xorg. On October 18, the project released version 6.4 of the OS, affected by CVE-2018-14665. This could have been avoided, though. Theo de Raadt, founder and leader of the OpenBSD project, says that X maintainer knew about the problem since at least October 11. For some reason, the OpenBSD developers received the message one hour before the public announcement this Thursday, a week after their new OS release. “As yet we don’t have answers about why our X maintainer (on the X security team) and his team provided information to other projects (some who don’t even ship with this new X server) but chose to not give us a heads-up which could have saved all the new 6.4 users a lot of grief,” Raadt says. Had OpenBSD developers known about the bug before the release, they could have taken steps to mitigate the problem or delay the launch for a week or two. To remedy the problem, the OpenBSD project provides a source code patch, which requires compiling and rebuilding the X server. As a temporary solution, users can disable the Xorg binary by running the following command: chmod u-s /usr/X11R6/bin/Xorg Trivial exploitation CVE-2018-14665 does not help compromise systems, but it is useful in the following stages of an attack. Leveraging it after gaining access to a vulnerable machine is fairly easy. Matthew Hickey, co-founder, and head of Hacker House security outfit created and published an exploit, saying that it can be triggered from a remote SSH session. Three hours after the public announcement of the security gap, Daemon Security CEO Michael Shirk replied with one line that overwrote shadow files on the system. Hickey did one better and fit the entire local privilege escalation exploit in one line. Apart from OpenBSD, other operating systems affected by the bug include Debian and Ubuntu, Fedora and its downstream distro Red Hat Enterprise Linux along with its community-supported counterpart CentOS. ###OpenBSD on the Desktop: some thoughts I’ve been using OpenBSD on my ThinkPad X230 for some weeks now, and the experience has been peculiar in some ways. The OS itself in my opinion is not ready for widespread desktop usage, and the development team is not trying to push it in the throat of anybody who wants a Windows or macOS alternative. You need to understand a little bit of how *NIX systems work, because you’ll use CLI more than UI. That’s not necessarily bad, and I’m sure I learned a trick or two that could translate easily to Linux or macOS. Their development process is purely based on developers that love to contribute and hack around, just because it’s fun. Even the mailing list is a cool place to hang on! Code correctness and security are a must, nothing gets committed if it doesn’t get reviewed thoroughly first - nowadays the first two properties should be enforced in every major operating system. I like the idea of a platform that continually evolves. pledge(2) and unveil(2) are the proof that with a little effort, you can secure existing software better than ever. I like the “sensible defaults” approach, having an OS ready to be used - UI included if you selected it during the setup process - is great. Just install a browser and you’re ready to go. Manual pages on OpenBSD are real manuals, not an extension of the “–help” command found in most CLI softwares. They help you understand inner workings of the operating system, no internet connection needed. There are some trade-offs, too. Performance is not first-class, mostly because of all the security mitigations and checks done at runtime3. I write Go code in neovim, and sometimes you can feel a slight slowdown when you’re compiling and editing multiple files at the same time, but usually I can’t notice any meaningful difference. Browsers are a different matter though, you can definitely feel something differs from the experience you can have on mainstream operating systems. But again, trade-offs. To use OpenBSD on the desktop you must be ready to sacrifice some of the goodies of mainstream OSes, but if you’re searching for a zen place to do your computing stuff, it’s the best you can get right now. ###Review: NomadBSD 1.1 One of the most recent additions to the DistroWatch database is NomadBSD. According to the NomadBSD website: “NomadBSD is a 64-bit live system for USB flash drives, based on FreeBSD. Together with automatic hardware detection and setup, it is configured to be used as a desktop system that works out of the box, but can also be used for data recovery.” The latest release of NomadBSD (or simply “Nomad”, as I will refer to the project in this review) is version 1.1. It is based on FreeBSD 11.2 and is offered in two builds, one for generic personal computers and one for Macbooks. The release announcement mentions version 1.1 offers improved video driver support for Intel and AMD cards. The operating system ships with Octopkg for graphical package management and the system should automatically detect, and work with, VirtualBox environments. Nomad 1.1 is available as a 2GB download, which we then decompress to produce a 4GB file which can be written to a USB thumb drive. There is no optical media build of Nomad as it is designed to be run entirely from the USB drive, and write data persistently to the drive, rather than simply being installed from the USB media. Initial setup Booting from the USB drive brings up a series of text-based menus which ask us to configure key parts of the operating system. We are asked to select our time zone, keyboard layout, keyboard model, keyboard mapping and our preferred language. While we can select options from a list, the options tend to be short and cryptic. Rather than “English (US)”, for example, we might be given “enUS”. We are also asked to create a password for the root user account and another one for a regular user which is called “nomad”. We can then select which shell nomad will use. The default is zsh, but there are plenty of other options, including csh and bash. We have the option of encrypting our user’s home directory. I feel it is important to point out that these settings, and nomad’s home directory, are stored on the USB drive. The options and settings we select will not be saved to our local hard drive and our configuration choices will not affect other operating systems already installed on our computer. At the end, the configuration wizard asks if we want to run the BSDstats service. This option is not explained at all, but it contacts BSDstats to provide some basic statistics on BSD users. The system then takes a few minutes to apply its changes to the USB drive and automatically reboots the computer. While running the initial setup wizard, I had nearly identical experiences when running Nomad on a physical computer and running the operating system in a VirtualBox virtual machine. However, after the initial setup process was over, I had quite different experiences depending on the environment so I want to divide my experiences into two different sections. Physical desktop computer At first, Nomad failed to boot on my desktop computer. From the operating system’s boot loader, I enabled Safe Mode which allowed Nomad to boot. At that point, Nomad was able to start up, but would only display a text console. The desktop environment failed to start when running in Safe Mode. Networking was also disabled by default and I had to enable a network interface and DHCP address assignment to connect to the Internet. Instructions for enabling networking can be found in FreeBSD’s Handbook. Once we are on-line we can use the pkg command line package manager to install and update software. Had the desktop environment worked then the Octopkg graphical package manager would also be available to make browsing and installing software a point-n-click experience. Had I been able to run the desktop for prolonged amounts of time I could have made use of such pre-installed items as the Firefox web browser, the VLC media player, LibreOffice and Thunderbird. Nomad offers a fairly small collection of desktop applications, but what is there is mostly popular, capable software. When running the operating system I noted that, with one user logged in, Nomad only runs 15 processes with the default configuration. These processes require less than 100MB of RAM, and the whole system fits comfortably on a 4GB USB drive. Conclusions Ultimately using Nomad was not a practical option for me. The operating system did not work well with my hardware, or the virtual environment. In the virtual machine, Nomad crashed consistently after just a few minutes of uptime. On the desktop computer, I could not get a desktop environment to run. The command line tools worked well, and the system performed tasks very quickly, but a command line only environment is not well suited to my workflow. I like the idea of what NomadBSD is offering. There are not many live desktop flavours of FreeBSD, apart from GhostBSD. It was nice to see developers trying to make a FreeBSD-based, plug-and-go operating system that would offer a desktop and persistent storage. I suspect the system would work and perform its stated functions on different hardware, but in my case my experiment was necessarily short lived. ##Beastie Bits FreeBSD lockless algorithm - seq Happy Bob’s Libtls tutorial Locking OpenBSD when it’s sleeping iio - The OpenBSD Way Installing Hugo and Hosting Website on OpenBSD Server Fosdem 2019 reminder: BSD devroom CfP OpenBGPD, gotta go fast! - Claudio Jeker Project Trident RC3 available FreeBSD 10.4 EOL Play “Crazy Train” through your APU2 speaker ##Feedback/Questions Tobias - Satisfying my storage hunger and wallet pains Lasse - Question regarding FreeBSD backups https://twitter.com/dlangille https://dan.langille.org/ Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Ur veckans avsnitt: Det korta avsnittet avhandlas följande och något mer därtill: Dune II - ett av världens bästa spel, och hur det kom sig att Jocke hade det på i bakgrunden Fredrik blir Com hem-kund och därmed också bitter Jockes nya Amiga: Amiga 600 Android med mus - det lever! Fredrik tar kort paus - Jocke snackar servrar, spel och choklad med Iller Proxmox - Jocke bygger virtualiseringskluster (vad ska man annars göra på semestern?) Firefox-pluginet Advance: obehaget växer per minut … Låta Plex analysera hela bildbiblioteket - en process med tid för den inre resan Jocke byter lastbalanserare till Haproxy, Let’s encrypt till Exchange server och en del andra hack som gjorts under den senaste tiden. Fredrik är bitter över Twitter. Men vi begränsar oss inte, utan är bittra över andra sociala plattformar också Mission impossible: fallout, 4/5 Jockes filmtips: The boat that rocked Eye-friendly - mer utrymme på din retinaskärm, och tangentbordsgenvägar Länkar Dune II Huset Atreides Dune - filmen Rutger Hauers slutmonolog i Blade runner Atari 1040STE SUGA - Swedish user group of Amiga Amiga 600 Furia-acceleratorkort Sysinfo Rise of the robots Det första Dune-spelet Dune 2000 Emperor: battle for Dune One must fall 2097 - soundtracket Proxmox Haproxy Nginx Xwindows Xfree Advance Mission impossible - fallout The boat that rocked Eye-friendly Fredriks skärmdump Två nördar - en podcast. Fredrik Björeman och Joacim Melin diskuterar allt som gör livet värt att leva. Fullständig avsnittsinformation finns här: https://www.bjoremanmelin.se/podcast/avsnitt-134-vi-vek-rymden-vid-ix.html.
Fanless server setup with FreeBSD, NetBSD on pinebooks, another BSDCan trip report, transparent network audio, MirBSD's Korn Shell on Plan9, static site generators on OpenBSD, and more. ##Headlines Silent Fanless FreeBSD Desktop/Server Today I will write about silent fanless FreeBSD desktop or server computer … or NAS … or you name it, it can have multiple purposes. It also very low power solution, which also means that it will not overheat. Silent means no fans at all, even for the PSU. The format of the system should also be brought to minimum, so Mini-ITX seems best solution here. I have chosen Intel based solutions as they are very low power (6-10W), if you prefer AMD (as I often do) the closest solution in comparable price and power is Biostar A68N-2100 motherboard with AMD E1-2100 CPU and 9W power. Of course AMD has even more low power SoC solutions but finding the Mini-ITX motherboard with decent price is not an easy task. For comparison Intel has lots of such solutions below 6W whose can be nicely filtered on the ark.intel.com page. Pity that AMD does not provide such filtration for their products. I also chosen AES instructions as storage encryption (GELI on FreeBSD) today seems as obvious as HTTPS for the web pages. Here is how the system look powered up and working This motherboard uses Intel J3355 SoC which uses 10W and has AES instructions. It has two cores at your disposal but it also supports VT-x and EPT extensions so you can even run Bhyve on it. Components Now, an example system would look like that one below, here are the components with their prices. $49 CPU/Motherboard ASRock J3355B-ITX Mini-ITX $14 RAM Crucial 4 GB DDR3L 1.35V (low power) $17 PSU 12V 160W Pico (internal) $11 PSU 12V 96W FSP (external) $5 USB 2.0 Drive 16 GB ADATA $4 USB Wireless 802.11n $100 TOTAL The PSU 12V 160W Pico (internal) and PSU 12V 96W FSP can be purchased on aliexpress.com or ebay.com for example, at least I got them there. Here is the 12V 160W Pico (internal) PSU and its optional additional cables to power the optional HDDs. If course its one SATA power and one MOLEX power so additional MOLEX-SATA power adapter for about 1$ would be needed. Here is the 12V 96W FSP (external) PSU without the power cord. This gives as total silent fanless system price of about $120. Its about ONE TENTH OF THE COST of the cheapest FreeNAS hardware solution available – the FreeNAS Mini (Diskless) costs $1156 also without disks. You can put plain FreeBSD on top of it or Solaris/Illumos distribution OmniOSce which is server oriented. You can use prebuilt NAS solution based on FreeBSD like FreeNAS, NAS4Free, ZFSguru or even Solaris/Illumos based storage with napp-it appliance. ###An annotated look at a NetBSD Pinebook’s startup Pinebook is an affordable 64-bit ARM notebook. Today we’re going to take a look at the kernel output at startup and talk about what hardware support is available on NetBSD. Photo Pinebook comes with 2GB RAM standard. A small amount of this is reserved by the kernel and framebuffer. NetBSD uses flattened device-tree (FDT) to enumerate devices on all Allwinner based SoCs. On a running system, you can inspect the device tree using the ofctl(8) utility: Pinebook’s Allwinner A64 processor is based on the ARM Cortex-A53. It is designed to run at frequencies up to 1.2GHz. The A64 is a quad core design. NetBSD’s aarch64 pmap does not yet support SMP, so three cores are disabled for now. The interrupt controller is a standard ARM GIC-400 design. Clock drivers for managing PLLs, module clock dividers, clock gating, software resets, etc. Information about the clock tree is exported in the hw.clk sysctl namespace (root access required to read these values). # sysctl hw.clk.sun50ia64ccu0.mmc2 hw.clk.sun50ia64ccu0.mmc2.rate = 200000000 hw.clk.sun50ia64ccu0.mmc2.parent = pllperiph02x hw.clk.sun50ia64ccu0.mmc2.parent_domain = sun50ia64ccu0 Digital Ocean http://do.co/bsdnow ###BSDCan 2018 Trip Report: Mark Johnston BSDCan is a highlight of my summers: the ability to have face-to-face conversations with fellow developers and contributors is invaluable and always helps refresh my enthusiasm for FreeBSD. While in a perfect world we would all be able to communicate effectively over the Internet, it’s often noted that locking a group of developers together in a room can be a very efficient way to make progress on projects that otherwise get strung out over time, and to me this is one of the principal functions of BSD conferences. In my case I was able to fix some kgdb bugs that had been hindering me for months; get some opinions on the design of a feature I’ve been working on for FreeBSD 12.0; hear about some ongoing usage of code that I’ve worked on; and do some pair-debugging of an issue that has been affecting another developer. As is tradition, on Tuesday night I dropped off my things at the university residence where I was staying, and headed straight to the Royal Oak. This year it didn’t seem quite as packed with BSD developers, but I did meet several long-time colleagues and get a chance to catch up. In particular, I chatted with Justin Hibbits and got to hear about the bring-up of FreeBSD on POWER9, a new CPU family released by IBM. Justin was able to acquire a workstation based upon this CPU, which is a great motivator for getting FreeBSD into shape on that platform. POWER9 also has some promise in the server market, so it’s important for FreeBSD to be a viable OS choice there. Wednesday morning saw the beginning of the two-day FreeBSD developer summit, which precedes the conference proper. Gordon Tetlow led the summit and did an excellent job organizing things and keeping to the schedule. The first presentation was by Deb Goodkin of the FreeBSD Foundation, who gave an overview of the Foundation’s role and activities. After Deb’s presentation, present members of the FreeBSD core team discussed the work they had done over the past two years, as well as open tasks that would be handed over to the new core team upon completion of the ongoing election. Finally, Marius Strobl rounded off the day’s presentations by discussing the state and responsibilities of FreeBSD’s release engineering team. One side discussion of interest to me was around the notion of tightening integration with our Bugzilla instance; at moment we do not have any good means to mark a given bug as blocking a release, making it easy for bugs to slip into releases and thus lowering our overall quality. With FreeBSD 12.0 upon us, I plan to help with the triage and fixes for known regressions before the release process begins. After a break, the rest of the morning was devoted to plans for features in upcoming FreeBSD releases. This is one of my favorite discussion topics and typically takes the form of have/need/want, where developers collectively list features that they’ve developed and intend to upstream (have), features that they are missing (need), and nice-to-have features (want). This year, instead of the usual format, we listed features that are intended to ship in FreeBSD 12.0. The compiled list ended up being quite ambitious given how close we are to the beginning of the release cycle, but many individual developers (including myself) have signed up to deliver work. I’m hopeful that most, if not all of it, will make it into the release. After lunch, I attended a discussion led by Matt Ahrens and Alexander Motin on OpenZFS. Of particular interest to me were some observations made regarding the relative quantity and quality of contributions made by different “camps” of OpenZFS users (illumos, FreeBSD and ZoL), and their respective track records of upstreaming enhancements to the OpenZFS project. In part due to the high pace of changes in ZoL, the definition of “upstream” for ZFS has become murky, and of late ZFS changes have been ported directly from ZoL. Alexander discussed some known problems with ZFS on FreeBSD that have been discovered through performance testing. While I’m not familiar with ZFS internals, Alexander noted that ZFS’ write path has poor SMP scalability on FreeBSD owing to some limitations in a certain kernel API called taskqueue(9). I would like to explore this problem further and perhaps integrate a relatively new alternative interface which should perform better. Friday and Saturday were, of course, taken up by BSDCan talks. Friday’s keynote was by Benno Rice, who provided some history of UNIX boot systems as a precursor to some discussion of systemd and the difficulties presented by a user and developer community that actively resist change. The rest of the morning was consumed by talks and passed by quickly. First was Colin Percival’s detailed examination of where the FreeBSD kernel spends time during boot, together with an overview of some infrastructure he added to track boot times. He also provided a list of improvements that have been made since he started taking measurements, and some areas we can further improve. Colin’s existing work in this area has already brought about substantial reductions in boot time; amusingly, one of the remaining large delays comes from the keyboard driver, which contains a workaround for old PS/2 keyboards. While there seems to be general agreement that the workaround is probably no longer needed on most systems, the lingering uncertainty around this prevents us from removing the workaround. This is, sadly, a fairly typical example of an OS maintenance burden, and underscores the need to carefully document hardware bug workarounds. After this talk, I got to see some rather novel demonstrations of system tracing using dwatch, a new utility by Devin Teske, which aims to provide a user-friendly interface to DTrace. After lunch, I attended talks on netdump, a protocol for transmitting kernel dumps over a network after the system has panicked, and on a VPC implementation for FreeBSD. After the talks ended, I headed yet again to the hacker lounge and had some fruitful discussions on early microcode loading (one of my features for FreeBSD 12.0). These led me to reconsider some aspects of my approach and saved me a lot of time. Finally, I continued my debugging session from Wednesday with help from a couple of other developers. Saturday’s talks included a very thorough account by Li-Wen Hsu of his work in organizing a BSD conference in Taipei last year. As one of the attendees, I had felt that the conference had gone quite smoothly and was taken aback by the number of details and pitfalls that Li-Wen enumerated during his talk. This was followed by an excellent talk by Baptiste Daroussin on the difficulties one encounters when deploying FreeBSD in new environments. Baptiste offered criticisms of a number of aspects of FreeBSD, some of which hit close to home as they involved portions of the system that I’ve worked on. At the conclusion of the talks, we all gathered in the main lecture hall, where Dan led a traditional and quite lively auction for charity. I managed to snag a Pine64 board and will be getting FreeBSD installed on it the first chance I get. At the end of the auction, we all headed to ByWard for dinner, concluding yet another BSDCan. Thanks to Mark for sharing his experiences at this years BSDCan ##News Roundup Transparent network audio with mpd & sndiod Landry Breuil (landry@ when wearing his developer hat) wrote in… I've been a huge fan of MPD over the years to centralize my audio collection, and i've been using it with the http output to stream the music as a radio on the computer i'm currently using… audio_output { type "sndio" name "Local speakers" mixer_type "software" } audio_output { type "httpd" name "HTTP stream" mixer_type "software" encoder "vorbis" port "8000" format "44100:16:2" } this setup worked for years, allows me to stream my home radio to $work by tunnelling the port 8000 over ssh via LocalForward, but that still has some issues: a distinct timing gap between the 'local output' (ie the speakers connected to the machine where MPD is running) and the 'http output' caused by the time it takes to reencode the stream, which is ugly when you walk through the house and have a 15s delay sometimes mplayer as a client doesn't detect the pauses in the stream and needs to be restarted i need to configure/start a client on each computer and point it at the sound server url (can do via gmpc shoutcast client plugin…) it's not that elegant to reencode the stream, and it wastes cpu cycles So the current scheme is: mpd -> http output -> network -> mplayer -> sndiod on remote machine | -> sndio output -> sndiod on soundserver Fiddling a little bit with mpd outputs and reading the sndio output driver, i remembered sndiod has native network support… and the mpd sndio output allows you to specify a device (it uses SIO_DEVANY by default). So in the end, it's super easy to: enable network support in sndio on the remote machine i want the audio to play by adding -L to sndiod_flags (i have two audio devices, with an input coming from the webcam): sndiod_flags="-L10.246.200.10 -f rsnd/0 -f rsnd/1" open pf on port 11025 from the sound server ip: pass in proto tcp from 10.246.200.1 to any port 11025 configure a new output in mpd: audio_output { type "sndio" name "sndio on renton" device "snd@10.246.200.10/0" mixer_type "software" } and enable the new output in mpd: $mpc enable 2 Output 1 (Local speakers) is disabled Output 2 (sndio on renton) is enabled Output 3 (HTTP stream) is disabled Results in a big win: no gap anymore with the local speakers, no reencoding, no need to configure a client to play the stream, and i can still probably reproduce the same scheme over ssh from $work using a RemoteForward. mpd -> sndio output 2 -> network -> sndiod on remote machine | -> sndio output 1 -> sndiod on soundserver Thanks ratchov@ for sndiod :) ###MirBSD’s Korn Shell on Plan9 Jehanne Let start by saying that I’m not really a C programmer. My last public contribution to a POSIX C program was a little improvement to the Snort’s react module back in 2008. So while I know the C language well enough, I do not know anything about the subtleness of the standard library and I have little experience with POSIX semantics. This is not a big issue with Plan 9, since the C library and compiler are not standard anyway, but with Jehanne (a Plan 9 derivative of my own) I want to build a simple, loosely coupled, system that can actually run useful free software ported from UNIX. So I ported RedHat’s newlib to Jehanne on top of a new system library I wrote, LibPOSIX, that provides the necessary emulations. I wrote several test, checking they run the same on Linux and Jehanne, and then I begun looking for a real-world, battle tested, application to port first. I approached MirBSD’s Korn Shell for several reason: it is simple, powerful and well written it has been ported to several different operating systems it has few dependencies it’s the default shell in Android, so it’s really battle tested I was very confident. I had read the POSIX standard after all! And I had a test suite! I remember, I thought “Given newlib, how hard can it be?” The porting begun on September 1, 2017. It was completed by tg on January 5, 2018. 125 nights later. Turn out, my POSIX emulation was badly broken. Not just because of the usual bugs that any piece of C can have: I didn’t understood most POSIX semantics at all! iXsystems ###Static site generator with rsync and lowdown on OpenBSD ssg is a tiny POSIX-compliant shell script with few dependencies: lowdown(1) to parse markdown, rsync(1) to copy temporary files, and entr(1) to watch file changes. It generates Markdown articles to a static website. It copies the current directory to a temporary on in /tmp skipping .* and _*, renders all Markdown articles to HTML, generates RSS feed based on links from index.html, extracts the first tag from every article to generate a sitemap and use it as a page title, then wraps articles with a single HTML template, copies everything from the temporary directory to $DOCS/ Why not Jekyll or “$X”? ssg is one hundred times smaller than Jekyll. ssg and its dependencies are about 800KB combined. Compare that to 78MB of ruby with Jekyll and all the gems. So ssg can be installed in just few seconds on almost any Unix-like operating system. Obviously, ssg is tailored for my needs, it has all features I need and only those I use. Keeping ssg helps you to master your Unix-shell skills: awk, grep, sed, sh, cut, tr. As a web developer you work with lots of text: code and data. So you better master these wonderful tools. Performance 100 pps. On modern computers ssg generates a hundred pages per second. Half of a time for markdown rendering and another half for wrapping articles into the template. I heard good static site generators work—twice as fast—at 200 pps, so there’s lots of performance that can be gained. ;) ###Why does FreeBSD have virtually no (0%) desktop market share? Because someone made a horrible design decision back in 1984. In absolute fairness to those involved, it was an understandable decision, both from a research perspective, and from an economic perspective, although likely not, from a technology perspective. Why and what. The decision was taken because the X Window System was intended to run on cheap hardware, and, at the time, that meant reduced functionality in the end-point device with the physical display attached to it. At the same time, another force was acting to also limit X displays to display services only, rather than rolling in both window management and specific widget instances for common operational paradigms. Mostly, common operational paradigms didn’t really exist for windowing systems because they also simply didn’t exist at the time, and no one really knew how people were going to use the things, and so researchers didn’t want to commit future research to a set of hard constraints. So a decision was made: separate the display services from the application at the lowest level of graphics primitives currently in use at the time. The ramifications of this were pretty staggering. First, it guaranteed that all higher level graphics would live on the host side of the X protocol, instead of on the display device side of the protocol. Despite a good understanding of Moore’s law, and the fact that, since no X Terminals existed at the time as hardware, but were instead running as emulations on workstations that had sufficient capability, this put the higher level GUI object libraries — referred to as “widgets” — in host libraries linked into the applications. Second, it guaranteed that display organization and management paradigms would also live on the host side of the protocol — assumed, in contradiction to the previous decision, to be running on the workstation. But, presumably, at some point, as lightweight X Terminals became available, to migrate to a particular host computer managing compute resource login/access services. Between these early decisions reigned chaos. Specifically, the consequences of these decisions have been with us ever since: Look-and-feel are a consequence of the toolkit chosen by the application programmer, rather than a user decision which applies universally to all applications. You could call this “lack of a theme”, and — although I personally despise the idea of customizing or “theming” desktops — this meant that one paradigm chosen by the user would not apply universally across all applications, no matter who had written them. Window management style is a preference. You could call this a more radical version of “theming” — which you will remember, I despise — but a consequence to this is that training is not universal across personnel using such systems, nor is it transferrable. In other words, I can’t send someone to a class, and have them come back and use the computers in the office as a tool, with the computer itself — and the elements not specific to the application itself — disappearing into the background. Both of these ultimately render an X-based system unsuitable for desktops. I can’t pay once for training. Training that I do pay for does not easily and naturally translate between applications. Each new version may radically alter the desktop management paradigm into unrecognizability. Is there hope for the future? Well, the Linux community has been working on something called Wayland, and it is very promising… …In the same way X was “very promising” in 1984, because, unfortunately, they are making exactly the same mistakes X made in 1984, rather than correcting them, now that we have 20/20 hindsight, and know what a mature widget library should look like. So Wayland is screwing up again. But hey, it only took us, what, 25 years to get from X in 1987 to Wayland in in 2012. Maybe if we try again in 2037, we can get to where Windows was in 1995. ##Beastie Bits New washing machine comes with 7 pages of open source licenses! BSD Jobs Site FreeBSD Foundation Update, May 2018 FreeBSD Journal looking for book reviewers zedenv ZFS Boot Environment Manager Tarsnap ##Feedback/Questions Wouter - Feedback Efraim - OS Suggestion kevr - Raspberry Pi2/FreeBSD/Router on a Stick Vanja - Interview Suggestion Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
chikoskiさんをゲストにお迎えして、Unix、C言語、研究員、Firefox、WeJS、ヒルクライム項、などについて話しました。 【Show Notes】 We Are JavaScripters! - connpass html5j ― 「つながる」「学べる」「盛り上がる」 #しがないラジオmeetup 1 - connpass NetBSD - Wikipedia File Allocation Table - Wikipedia X Window System - Wikipedia VMware World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) 岡崎市立中央図書館事件 - Wikipedia CODE―インターネットの合法・違法・プライバシー | ローレンス レッシグ | Amazon Firefox OS - Wikipedia 山登り法 - Wikipedia 配信情報はtwitter ID @shiganaiRadio で確認することができます。 フィードバックは(#しがないラジオ)でつぶやいてください！ 感想、話して欲しい話題、改善して欲しいことなどつぶやいてもらえると、今後のポッドキャストをより良いものにしていけるので、ぜひたくさんのフィードバックをお待ちしています。 【パーソナリティ】 gami@jumpei_ikegami zuckey@zuckey_17 【ゲスト】 chikoski@chikoski 【機材】 Blue Micro Yeti USB 2.0マイク 15374
Getting to know the X Window System.Make sure you are in a text only mode. You might need to change how the system boots, or boot into single user mode."startx" to make sure X is working right."X" by itself gives the basic grey screen."ctrl" and "alt" and "backspace" keys at the same time will zap X."X & xterm -display :0""xterm -geometry +300+300""twm" or "metacity"File Info: 10Min, 5MB.Ogg link:https://archive.org/download/bsdtalk104/bsdtalk104.ogg
In this episode: Dann Washko's discussion of Linux in schools in Episode 182 of The Linux Link Tech Show; the Ohio Linux Fest; a discussion of the X Window System and its configuration file, xorg.conf; several listener emails, including a mention of the Intel drivers and firmware for the 3945 wireless cards, Ralink wireless cards, and Puppy Linux.
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