DragonFly builds two compilers by default.  If you weren’t interesting in building both, there were switches to build only the default, like NO_GCC47.  This changed with every compiler update.

With the switch to GCC 5, the new switch is “NO_ALTCOMPILER”.  That will last through compiler changes.  I’m mentioning this now because sooner or later, you’ll want to gain back some time on a buildworld.

I have had trouble with my daily/weekly periodic reports never making it to my GMail account.  Sascha Wildner pointed out to me that periodic.conf has its own answer already:

daily_output=”/var/log/daily.log”
daily_status_security_output=”/var/log/security.log”
weekly_output=”/var/log/weekly.log”
monthly_output=”/var/log/monthly.log”

… and newsyslog is already set to take care of them.  There’s more in the periodic.conf man page.

John Marino’s written an extensive page about wireless and DragonFly, on dragonflybsd.org.

It’s been a quiet week in BSD-land, at least in terms of me finding links.

• “I know BSD isn’t secure because I can’t install Norton.“
• “Oops” and there’s D-Link DIR-655 support in FreeBSD.
• The ata driver in FreeBSD is removed modified.  (see comments)
• Steam available on PC-BSD.  Old news, but always good.
• service(8) now available in NetBSD too.
• How to check out older revisions of pkgsrc packages.
• Tips on a DB9-RJ45 serial cable for Sun hardware, from OpenBSD.
• URL blacklisting in OpenBSD.
• lmc(4) and san(4), removed from OpenBSD.
• RFC7427 support in OpenBSD.
• DiscoverBSD for 2015/03/23.

If you’re looking to change your DragonFly system’s keymapping to support a non-US character set, use this users@ post from Adolf Augustin as a cheat sheet to make all the right changes.

Matthew Dillon has rewritten the Locking and Synchronization documentation for DragonFly.  Keep this in mind the next time you say “Which lock should I use for this new software/ported software?”  There’s also locking(9).

The other day, I updated some packages using pkg.  The default version of PHP went from 5.4 to 5.6.  I ended up doing what /usr/dports/UPGRADING says and making a list of all PHP packages on my system, before removing PHP and its dependencies.  I then reinstalled the packages that used PHP, bringing the needed packages back in at the right version.  pkg 1.4 didn’t handle the transition cleanly, unfortunately.  I also had to specify mod_php56 because pkg was trying to get the 5.4 version despite it not being default.

None of these are insurmountable problems, but it never hurts to be forewarned.  pkg 1.5 is on the horizon and may have an easier time with sorting these types of dependency/version changes.  This may apply to FreeBSD in addition to DragonFly.

If you have a HDMI-connected monitor, but no sound, this trick about increasing available memory may help.

This bites many people sooner or later: you think you’ve turned sendmail off, but it still gets opened up on your system.  The answer: sendmail_enable=”NONE”.

(It should support sendmail_enable=”NOPE”.)

DragonFly is the only BSD, I think, to switch fully to Git for version control, and Matthew Dillon wrote up how DragonFly uses Git.

John Marino has written up an extensive how-to for slider, the history tool for Hammer filesystems, including screenshots.

For whatever reason, I’ve seen several people in the last week or so have mouse problems on install, and they were often solved by running moused.  So, there’s your little reminder.

Matthew Dillon’s added a sshlockout utility, to temporarily block SSH traffic from repeated brute force SSH login attempts.  It’s been mentioned before, but it’s in the system now.  It’s been refashioned to work with pf.

John Marino has created something very useful: a graphical tool for Hammer file history.  It’s called ‘Slider’, and it uses curses to work in a terminal.  It shows historic versions of files and can restore those old versions as needed.  This was already possible in Hammer, of course, but it required a sequence of commands that were not straight-forward.  I’ve been slow enough posting it that version 2.0 is already out, offering a way to see files that no longer exist, but are still in history.  (i.e. deleted some time ago)  ‘Time Machine’ sounds like the best name, but that seems to be taken.

One way to keep file history on an very active Hammer disk from eating up all the space: more snapshots.  This may seem counterproductive, but disk pruning eliminates historical data between snapshots, so you can keep older data at the cost of some temporal accuracy.

From a question about mixing in a SSD and a very slow disk: swapcache can make things better, though I suggest other crazy arrangements.

If you really, really want to make sure you aren’t pulling in any parts of X when installing dports, and you’re building from source, there’s a few options you can set to keep X11 off your system.  You can even go farther.

Get ready for some reading.

• There’s some packages moving from pkgsrc-wip to pkgsrc proper.
• pkgsrc-2014Q4 branching is planned for Monday the 15th.
• PC-BSD now has an automatic package/security patch upgrade mechanism.
• Steam on PC-BSD.  Holy grail, there.
• PC-BSD needs testers for the new Update Manager, for moving from 10 to 10.1
• NetBSD has imported BIND 9.10.1-P1.
• OpenBSD has added skgpio(4), a driver for the Soekris net6501 GPIO port and LEDs.
• OpenBSD has updated Unbound to 1.5.1.
• Some Japanese input methods for OpenBSD that may work on other BSDs, too.
• pfqstat, a replacements for pfstat designed to work with Charted.
• I don’t know what the ‘BERI Virtio Networking Frontend’ is, but FreeBSD’s got it.
• fstyp(8), the filesystem detector.
• FreeBSD has added AES-ICM and AES-GCM modes to OpenCrypto.
• If you’re stopping in NYC, NYCBUG would like to hear you talk on a topic of interest.
• The case for distributed operating systems in the data center.  Sounds like DragonFly’s original charter.  (via)
• BSDNow wants to hear your getting-into-BSD story.
• OpenBSD libc version 78.
• There’s a lot of FreeBSD systems at NYI.
• “FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials” is now in physical print.
• “Networking for System Administrators” is next to come out.
• And “Tarsnap Mastery” is next to be written.
• …We’re all benefiting from Michael Lucas going full-time on writing.