NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

Lessons learned from a 27 years old UNIX book

One of the Amazon reviewers of "Sun Performance and Tuning: Java and the Internet" gave it 3/5 stars. While still a nice introduction, the book by Adrian Cockcroft has become dated — claimed Roland in 2003, which believe it or not was 18 years ago...

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dRAID, Finally!

Admins will often use wide RAID stripes to maximize usable storage given a number of spindles. RAID-Z deployments with large stripe widths, ten or larger, are subject to poor resilver performance for a number of reasons. Resilvering a full vdev means reading from every healthy disk and continuously writing to the new spare. This will saturate the replacement disk with writes while scattering seeks over the rest of the vdev. For 14 wide RAID-Z2 vdevs using 12TB spindles, rebuilds can take weeks. Resilver I/O activity is deprioritized when the system has not been idle for a minimum period. Full zpools get fragmented and require additional I/O’s to recalculate data during reslivering. A pool can degenerate into a never ending cycle of rebuilds or loss of the pool Aka: the Death Spiral.

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News Roundup

Setting up a Signal Proxy using FreeBSD

With the events that the private messaging app Signal has been blocked in Iran, Signal has come up with an “proxy” solution akin to Tor’s Bridges, and have given instructions on how to do it.
For people who prefer FreeBSD over Linux like myself, we obviously can’t run Docker, which is what Signal’s instructions focus on.
Fortunately, the Docker image is just a fancy wrapper around nginx, and the configs can be ported to any OS. Here, I’ll show you how to set up a Signal Proxy on FreeBSD.

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Annotate your PDF files on OpenBSD

On my journey to leave macOS, I regularly look to mimic some of the features I use. Namely, annotating (or signing) PDF files is a really simple task using Preview. I couldn’t do it on OpenBSD using Zathura, Xpdf etc. But there is a software in the ports that can achieve this: Xournal.
Xournal is “an application for notetaking, sketching, keeping a journal using a stylus“. And now that my touchscreen is calibrated, highlighting can even be done with the fingers :)

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Things You Should Do Now

Describes things you should do now when building software, because the cost to do them increases over time and eventually becomes prohibitive or impossible.

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Just: A command runner. More unixy than Make because it does even less.

I think it's in the do-one-thing-well spirit of Unix, because it's just a command runner, no build system at all. Just has a bunch of nice features:

• Can be invoked from any subdirectory
• Arguments can be passed from the command line
• Static error checking that catches syntax errors and typos
• Excellent error messages with source context
• The ability to list recipes from the command line
• Recipes can be written in any language
• Works on Linux, macOS, and Windows
• And much more!

Just doesn't replace Make, or any other build system, but it does replace reverse-searching your command history, telling colleagues the weird flags they need to pass to do the thing, and forgetting how to run old projects.

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

• Marc - Confused about Snapshots Dan’s gist: https://gist.github.com/dlangille/3140e60a816226ed75365ba8af185085
• Pete - A Question
• Rick - ZFS Idea

• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv ***

Special Guest: Dan Langille.

NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

Follow-up about FreeBSD jail advantages

I’ll admit I ran a lot of justifications together into a single paragraph because I wanted to get to configuring the jails themselves. They’re also, by and large, not specific to FreeBSD’s flavour of containerisation, though I still think it’s easily the most elegant implementation. Sometimes the simplest solution really is the best one.

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History of FreeBSD part 4: TCP/IP

• How TCP/IP evolved and BSDs special contribution to the history of the Internet ***

FreeBSD: Install Prometheus, Node Exporter and Grafana

FreeBSD comes out of the box with three great tools for monitoring. If you need more info about how these tools work, please read the official documentation. I’ll explain the installation only and creating a simple dashboard.

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News Roundup

Calibrate your touch-screen on OpenBSD

I didn’t expected it but my refurbished T460s came with a touch-screen. It is recognized by default on OpenBSD and not well calibrated as-is. But that’s really simple to solve.

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Lets all shed a Tear for 386

FreeBSD is designating i386 as a Tier 2 architecture starting with FreeBSD 13.0. The Project will continue to provide release images, binary updates, and pre-built packages for the 13.x branch. However, i386-specific issues (including SAs) may not be addressed in 13.x. The i386 platform will remain Tier 1 on FreeBSD 11.x and 12.x.

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OPNsense 21.1 Marvelous Meerkat Released

For more than 6 years, OPNsense is driving innovation through modularising and hardening the open source firewall, with simple and reliable firmware upgrades, multi-language support, HardenedBSD security, fast adoption of upstream software updates as well as clear and stable 2-Clause BSD licensing.

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NomadBSD 1.4-RC1

We are pleased to present the first release candidate of NomadBSD 1.4.

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find mostly doesn't need xargs today on modern Unixes

I've been using Unix for long enough that 'find | xargs' is a reflex. When I started and for a long time afterward, xargs was your only choice for efficiently executing a command over a bunch of find results.

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OpenBSD KDE Status Report

OpenBSD has managed to drop KDE3 and KDE4 in the 6.8 -> 6.9 release cycle. That makes me very happy because it was a big piece of work and long discussions. This of course brings questions: Kde Plasma 5 package missing.
After half a year of work, I managed to successfully update the Qt5 stack to the last LTS version 5.15.2. On the whole, the most work was updating QtWebengine. What a monster! With my CPU power at home, I can build it 1-2 times a day which makes testing a little bit annoying and time intensive.

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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

• Karl - Firefox webcam audio solution
• Michal - openzfs
• Dave - bufferbloat

• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv ***