DragonFly BSD

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.

As part of another thread, Steve Petrie posted an in-depth description of how and where and why he’s using DragonFly.  Worth looking at either for workflow tips or for just seeing the use case.

BSDTalk 249 is an 11 minute interview with Scott Long, who is involved with Netflix’s FreeBSD-based local caching appliances.  This conversation is from MeetBSD 2014, though I heard Scott talk about the same subject at the last NYCBSDCon – it’s an astounding amount of data flowing through those machines.

I am slightly confused about which day it is. Dinosaur’s Pen, excellent old technology pictures.  (via) Ultima Ratio Regum, a roguelike walking simulator in development.  Currently Windows-only. 2014 Cacowards winners.  These will probably run on ... [More] most any BSD with a Doom port.  (via) Effectively Managing Memory at Gmail Scale.  All the management issues were in the […] [Less]

I sort of lost a day this week because of an accidental 20-hour workday, but I still have the links: I love cross-pollination. (plus) “Why I (mostly) hack on BSD licenced stuff: so I don’t have to deal with this.“ Tips on pkgsrc packaging. Kerberos IV is going away in pkgsrc. The pkgsrc-2014Q4 freeze is […]

BSDNow 068 has a large number video links to various BSD conference videos, a bunch of other article links,, and an interview of Michael W. Lucas about his new FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials book.

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.

I had to type it that way because it rhymes.  Sascha Wildner has committed an IPMI driver port, tested/watchdogged by Markus Pfeiffer.  What’s it do?  It’s a machine management standard.

Minimal link text this week.  It just happened that way. random in the wild Best Unix time-savers Where apps end and the system begins. The password?  You changed it, right? Live network attack map.  (via) Playing with my son. At the computer farm.  (via) Typography in sci-fi: Alien.  (via) Turing Complete User.  (via) XLennart.  XBill […]