Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• We didn't have the week in the TTY
  https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/without-gui-how-live-entirely-terminal

  I was out of the picture in June, maybe we should reschule it for this month. What do you say, bump the previous thread on the forums with your opinion (https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2205).

• Branch prediction
  https://danluu.com/branch-prediction/

  An overview of the algorithm used for branch prediction in the 90s.

• Random oh random
  https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/random-in-the-wild
  https://lwn.net/Articles/686033/
  https://blog.demofox.org/2019/05/25/generating-random-numbers-from-a-specific-distribution-with-the-metropolis-algorithm-mcmc/
  http://qrng.anu.edu.au/

  That first article is epic, a must read. The sort of stuffs you can come up with to create pseudo-random algorithms is insane. The other posts are related to randomness in general, feeding you the seeds you need for this week. That last blog has a lot of articles related to all kinds of RNGs.

• All you need about eBPF
  https://qmonnet.github.io/whirl-offload/2016/09/01/dive-into-bpf/

  I'm new to bpf and started going through the resources provided here. It's a real gold mine.

• Trusted BGP
  https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6480
  https://medium.com/@jobsnijders/a-proposal-for-a-new-rpki-validator-openbsd-rpki-client-1-15b74e7a3f65
  https://github.com/openbsd/src/tree/master/usr.sbin/rpki-client
  https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=156078373619043&w=2

  Validating route statements, origin validation, RPKI is fascinating. I love how we're moving in a direction of secure by default, at all layers, now IP included. Great job OpenBSD, making the internet, and by consequence, the world a better place.

• Networking from the ground up
  https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2016/01/linux-networking-stack-from-the-ground-up-part-1/
  https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2016/01/linux-networking-stack-from-the-ground-up-part-2/
  https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2016/01/linux-networking-stack-from-the-ground-up-part-3/
  https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2016/01/linux-networking-stack-from-the-ground-up-part-4/
  https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2016/02/linux-networking-stack-from-the-ground-up-part-4-2/

  We've seen this blog in issue 63 "Privacy, confidentiality, and anonymity", this time we're diving into the network stack. A really insightful series, plenty of information I had no idea about.

• Replace ZFS disk
  https://imil.net/blog/2019/07/02/Replacing-a-silently-failing-disk-in-a-ZFS-pool/

  Probably the most humane way to explain how to replace a disk in a ZFS pool. A well written tutorial.

• A debug story
  https://rkeene.org/projects/info/wiki/173

  Yet another debug story. Oh how it's funny when it ends with "it magically started working again".

• Waypipe
  https://mstoeckl.com/notes/gsoc/blog.html
  https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/

  Looks like it is quite tricky to implement a message and data passing/proxy way between Wayland client and compositor such that it can be used over sockets. Hint: Read from bottom up.

• IRC is fine
  https://drewdevault.com//2019/07/01/Absence-of-features-in-IRC.html

  Also from someone contributing heavily to Wayland but unrelated. Ever used IRC? If you're reading this email then you must have. Do you agree with what's being said in this post?

Thoughts

https://theblog.adobe.com/the-half-life-of-your-skills-is-shrinking-heres-what-you-can-do-about-it/

Keep learning, whatever it is, keep moving.

Have a great week!

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Slow computer optimizations
  http://www.akitaonrails.com/2017/01/17/optimizing-linux-for-slow-computers

  A reminder of all our talk about real time, what it means for the desktop users. There are lots of great little tricks in this article, they'd need more in depth explanation but it suffices for the job. It's my first time hearing of Ananicy.

• Desktop environment research
  https://desktop.institute/

  Still a WIP but I'm highly looking forward to what this could lead to. I know a lot of my readers could actually help by providing some content to the author of the website.

• Another OS for phones
  https://postmarketos.org/blog/2019/06/23/two-years/

  You caught me at "Wouldn't it be great if you could take any obsolete smartphone from the past ten years and replace its outdated and insecure software with a maintained, modular free software stack". This sounds promising.

• The CLI as a relational DB
  https://spin.atomicobject.com/2019/06/16/unix-cli-relational-database/

  It's the usual cli as a data manipulation tool talk but taken from the perspective and mapping with relational DB. Though there's a little misinterpretation of what sum(1) does.

• Groups in namespaces
  http://ifeanyi.co/posts/linux-namespaces-part-1/

  A typical "build your own container to learn how they are made" type of article. This one emphasizes on cgroups and their utility.

• Eyecandy for ssh-askpass
  https://adi.tilde.institute/Customize%20ssh-askpass%281%29%27s%20appearance.html

  I'm a fan of the old school blocky GUI. They are clean in my opinion. But if you want something more minimal you can get inspired by the config shared here.

• File creation time
  https://www.anmolsarma.in/post/linux-file-creation-time/

  It's the normal writeup about why there's no creation time on Linux. The whole story behind why it took so much to add changes to the kernel, the filesystems, and libc.

• libc using LLVM
  http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2019-June/133308.html
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Google-New-LLVM-Libc-Thoughts

  A team at Google wants to create their own libc, as an LLVM libc. Lots of ups in downs in the talk. I'm personally not sure it's a good idea, there are a lot of toy project libc that gets thrown away or live as historical monuments.

• Demystifying firmware linker scripts
  https://interrupt.memfault.com/blog/how-to-write-linker-scripts-for-firmware

  Ever wondered what those linkers scripts with their weird syntaxes were about, this is for you. It's not a full coverage of the topic but it's a start, extra cool in my opinion, especially when speaking of embedded solutions.

• Recovering corrupted zip files
  https://www.7-zip.org/recover.html

  Oh the world of formats and specifications. Want to fix your 7z archive manually, then here's the guide.

• Deprecating a.out
  https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/deprecating-aout-binaries

  This is something we've already seen in "Removing a.out" of issue 118. This post adds the background story behind the change, the intricacies and discussions happening.

• Fresh administrators
  https://www.linuxforfreshers.com/

  A blog dedicated to learning all sorts of topics for Linux administration. Some topics are super basic while others are kind of advanced. Take a look at the sidebar and see if something interests you.

Thoughts

Just go back from vacations.
This newsletter was super hard to put together but I did it.

Also, I'm surprised that after 2 weeks nobody has even started the scavenger hunt: https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2275

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Why does it have its current name
  https://wiki.debian.org/WhyTheName

  A little follow up on the pronunciation guide from last issue (129). Linguistic is important ladies and gentlemen, you got to get your things right. You'd be surprised by some of the names, most acronyms, most cryptic inside jokes, oh Unix.

• Files
  https://linuxmeerkat.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/file-descriptors-explained/
  https://www.devever.net/~hl/objectworld
  https://eklitzke.org/efficient-file-copying-on-linux
  https://www.networkworld.com/article/2931534/what-are-unix-swap-swp-files.html
  https://www.networkworld.com/article/2704805/unix---when-pipes-get-names.html
  http://events17.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/fd_0.pdf

  Getting sick already of always discussing about files, don't be because there's much more content to come. From discussions about file descriptors, to what a nexus is, to filesystem and HDD readahead cache buffer, to swap files, and much more.

• File manip
  https://medium.com/@jmsmistral/on-transposing-data-884a04a8c1bf

  Data science fans will enjoy this article. It has a good rundown on all the solutions to a specific issue.

• Chroot history
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/ChrootHistory https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/ChrootHistory?showcomments#comments
  https://lwn.net/Articles/252794/

  Quite an old syscall that has arguably changed its original meaning and purpose over time. There's some argument that the security aspect of it was taken in consideration to begin with, others argue that it wasn't the point.

• The design of find
  http://doc.cat-v.org/unix/find-history

  Following specs to the letter without discussion is one skill of its own. Until you can't change anything about it years later.

• Graduating from vim school
  https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/intermediate-vim/

  I love how the author splits the article between purist vim users and exobrains vim users. Lots of great and useful content in there, I personally know that there's 2 tricks I'm going to start using from now on.

• Still on the quest of DE/WM
  https://bitcannon.net/post/pro-desktop/
  https://www.cdevn.com/my-os/
  https://hookrace.net/blog/linux-desktop-setup/
  https://github.com/mikadosoftware/workstation

  Everyone have their opinion about desktop environments, there's discussion about the lack in some sense and the advantages in others. One thing that is recurrent these days is using docker/immutable/nixOS as a base. Reproducibility is key.

• GNOME profiling
  https://feaneron.com/2019/05/31/profiling-gnome-shell/

  An example of profiling Gnome shell using sysprof 3. This is cool, similar to the profiling tool found in popular web browsers.

• Package management done the right way
  https://www.getlazarus.org/apps/makedeb/
  https://github.com/ceejbot/economics-of-package-management/blob/master/essay.md

  I'd like to see a command line version of the makedeb program, it's simple enough that it doesn't require a GUI. That second post is about package management intermixed with ownership and money making.

• Slowing down your internet
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/04/01/slow-down-your-internet-with-tc/

  That's what the bloated websites of today should try. Some of us are on awfully slow connections. Also, nice to remind us of HTTP2.

• PCI devices on Linux
  https://codeofconnor.com/2019/06/01/how-the-linux-kernel-detects-pci-devices-and-pairs-them-with-their-drivers/

  A walkthrough some stacktrace to understand how the Linux kernel decides which device is handled by which driver.

• Asking the time server
  http://seriot.ch/ntp.php
  http://yellerapp.com/posts/2015-01-12-the-worst-server-setup-you-can-make.html

  Again, a continuation of the time and date series. A small command line implementation of an ntp client to fetch time and a recommendation for server admins.

• Tech veganism
  https://nolanlawson.com/2019/05/31/tech-veganism/

  Here's a new term for you, like it or not.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

• OmniOS Installation in the Amazon Cloud.
  https://omniosce.org/setup/aws

• Golang Web Server in chroot(8) in OpenBSD.
  https://vetelko.gitlab.io/openbsd-golang-web-server-chroot.html

• Docker Bug Allows Root Access to Host File System.
  https://duo.com/decipher/docker-bug-allows-root-access-to-host-file-system

• Broken by Default - You Should Avoid Most DOCKERFILE Examples.
  https://pythonspeed.com/articles/dockerizing-python-is-hard/

• Running WordPress on OpenBSD.
  https://besirovic.com/post/wordpress-on-openbsd/

• FreeBSD 12-STABLE has Working Console on EC2 a1. and .metal Instances.
  https://twitter.com/cperciva/status/1133499607835537408
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=348342

• BSD Now 300 - Big Three.
  https://www.bsdnow.tv/300

• FreeBSD Foundation 2019 Q1 Status Update.
  https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/freebsd-foundation-q1-2019-status-update/

• Smartisan.com made $400,000 CAD donation to OpenBSD.
  https://twitter.com/canadianbryan/status/1134442873716387840
  https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html

• DragonFly BSD | FreeBSD | Linux Benchmarks on AMD Threadripper.
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=dragonfly-55-threadripper

• Drupal on OpenBSD.
  https://dev.to/nabbisen/drupal-on-openbsd-4n39

• Jailer is simple Proof of Concept of build system for building FreeBSD jJails from Jailfiles.
  https://gitlab.com/kwiat/jailer

• FreeBSD 11.3-BETA2 Available.
  https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2019-May/091227.html

• GOG.com Summer Sale - OpenBSD Highlights.
  https://www.reddit.com/r/openbsd_gaming/comments/bvagkt/gogcom_summer_sale_openbsd_highlights/

• Check Hard Drive Health on FreeBSD.
  https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-to-check-hard-drive-health-on-freebsd/

Hardware

• USB Stick as SSD - New Silicon Motion SM3282 Single-Chip Controller for USB SSDs.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/14439/silicon-motion-sm3282-usb-ssds

Life & Others

• Kids of 1% are 10 Times More Likely to Become Inventors.
  https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/lost-einsteins-which-kids-become-innovators

• Twitter Bans Analyst Who Revealed AntiFa Connections with Journalists.
  https://humanevents.com/2019/05/29/twitter-bans-analyst-who-revealed-journalists-antifa-connections/

• Google uses Gmail to Track History of Things You Buy.
  https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/google-gmail-tracks-purchase-history-how-to-delete-it.html

• USA Demands Social Media Details from VISA Applicants.
  https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48486672

• Why I Still Use jQuery in 2019.
  https://arp242.net/jquery.html

• Temporary Staging Ground for Firefox ppc64 JIT.
  https://github.com/classilla/jitpower

• Block Fingerprinting with Firefox.
  https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/how-to-block-fingerprinting-with-firefox/

• Switch from Chrome to Firefox in Just Few Minutes.
  https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/switch/

• Google Just Gave 2 Billion Chrome Users Reason to Switch to Firefox.
  https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2019/05/30/google-just-gave-2-billion-chrome-users-a-reason-to-switch-to-firefox/#1b219e42751f

• Serious Google Cloud Platform Outage - Status Dashboard.
  https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/19003

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

I'm going on a two week vacations, so there won't be any newsletter in a while. Let's wish everyone a sweet month of June.

Also, enjoy the scavenger hunt: https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2275

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• No more OS
  http://www.fixup.fi/misc/usenix-login-2015/login_oct15_02_kantee.pdf

  Is the OS layer deprecated? Can't we delegate the role to the hardware instead of having drivers? Why are we stuck?

• pronunciation guide
  https://ss64.com/bash/syntax-pronounce.html

  When in doubt refer to this guide.

• Getting pledge on Linux
  https://notabug.org/rain1/linux-seccomp-pledge/

  With all this talk about pledge on OpenBSD some people want to get it on Linux. Good news, it's already there, not the same but close enough.

• Extra on containerization, security, and control
  https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2430732
  https://web.archive.org/web/20170315162651/https://learntemail.sam.today/blog/selinux-concepts-but-for-humans/
  https://davmac.wordpress.com/2016/10/14/cgroups-v2-resource-management-done-even-worse-the-second-time-around/
  https://landlock.io
  https://www.linux.com/news/minijail-googles-tool-safely-run-untrusted-programs

  This is a popular topics that comes in go time and time again. Containing, mitigating, enforcing rules. It seems like a lot is wasted on this, why not review what is said in the first link of this issue "No more OS" and ditch everything.

• Libranet autobio
  https://danieldk.eu/Posts/2010-10-31-Libranet.html
  https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8290

  Taking part in a project, investing yourself in it, to then see it crumble slowly or quickly. It's simply life, things happen, you gotta move on and learn from the experience.

• The Janetsh project and other shell related things
  https://acha.ninja/blog/road-to-janetsh-0.1/
  https://janet-shell.org/
  https://www.oilshell.org/
  https://brennan.io/2015/01/16/write-a-shell-in-c/
  https://blog.flowblok.id.au/2013-02/shell-startup-scripts.html
  http://hoelz.ro/blog/finding-the-other-end-of-a-pipe-on-linux
  https://seashells.io/

  Why not write a new shell, we've seen in "A new shell, why?" of issue 87 and "the elvish shell" in 100 that this could be a fun endeavour. So take a look at those brand new ones, there are so many more online but those are the ones getting the most traction. Along with those links you'll find other shell related content.

• Essentials
  https://www.blockloop.io/mastering-bash-and-terminal/
  http://cb.vu/unixtoolbox.xhtml
  https://www.eriwen.com/productivity/find-is-a-beautiful-tool/
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2015/03/05/how-the-locate-command-works-and-lets-rewrite-it-in-one-minute/
  https://blog.extracheese.org/2010/05/the-tar-pipe.html

  We've been sharing a lot of beginner's guides, back to square one type of articles. Maybe it would be a good idea to gather them in a list that could be easily given to someone starting out so that they can go through it and slowly learn.

• 30s review of signals under Linux
  https://freethreads.net/2019/05/27/internals-of-linux-process-signals-2/
  http://www.linuxprogrammingblog.com/all-about-linux-signals?page=show

  I like the way this website is made, compressed and summarized explanation. Kind of like cheat sheet for explanations, the sort you'd take before an exam. The next one is the complete opposite, I used it for the research of the Unix signals podcast.

• Scheduling optimizations
  http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~sasha/papers/eurosys16-final29.pdf

  NUMA, if you've never heard about this acronym then welcome to the world of big machines. The bug described in this paper (You can skim a bit if you're already aware of scheduling and go directly to section 3) reminds us of how tricky scheduling is and how depending on the hardware architecture it can be.

• More on the time series and NTP
  https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1967009
  https://news.ntppool.org/2012/06/more-servers-please/

  Back with the leap second issue we've seen in "Keeping time and date". The discussion for leap second abolishment didn't got so well. And we still lack some public utility servers.

• FUSE and FUSE
  http://engineering.facile.it/write-filesystem-fuse/
  https://www.tagsistant.net
  https://github.com/johang/btfs
  https://github.com/immobiliare/sfs

  FUSE can be so much fun, see "I Made MPD Index SoundCloud." and "DungeonFS" in 78. "Semantic filesystem for Linux, with relation reasoner, autotagging plugins and a deduplication service" that sounds better than tagsistant. Those are all fine examples of usage of FUSE.

• Files are hard
  http://danluu.com/file-consistency/

  In relation with the previous links, it's tricky to keep file consistency over a long period of time. Read up to discover why, a bit dated though, but it makes you think about all those very Unixy tools that only rely on files, they may suffer from this condition on the long run, so beware!

• Extreme programming
  https://blog.dima23.de/post/2018-12-11-tmux-pair-programming/

  I once thought, when picking up a book, that extreme programming what about cool skateboard tricks but with computers, I was wrong but gladly so. Pair programming is fun and a good learning experience when done right.

• Profiling, server management, demo gods
  http://poormansprofiler.org
  https://sysdig.com/blog/50-shades-of-system-calls/
  https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa13/technical-sessions/presentation/merlin

  Those three links are legendary. From building your own profiler using gdb, to sysdig mega demo, to a live upgrade of thousands of servers.

• Log navigation
  https://github.com/tstack/lnav
  http://goaccess.io

  Next up after the links of above, pale in comparison, two cool fancy log and weblog navigator and display. They should help in debugging weird issues, or at least monitoring. See also "Monitoring" in issue 108.

• Guide to linker
  http://www.lurklurk.org/linkers/linkers.html

  Still on the train with ELF, PLT, and GOT, we continue or probably should've started with this article. A well done and approachable summary of what linking is about, one of my recommended reading on the topic.

• Shared Memory
  http://blog.httrack.com/blog/2014/04/05/a-story-of-realloc-and-laziness/
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/789153/b21b94232f0c84fc/

  Read the section above before this one, and maybe also the malloc implementation links in the newsletter archive. We first take a look at an inspection of a specific use of memory allocation and then check what's new (or could be new) in Linux memory sharing between processes.

• The Portable C Library book and others available online
  https://archive.org/details/ThePortableCLibrary_May75/page/n16
  https://archive.org/details/ADescriptionOfTheUNIXFileSystem_Sept75/page/n13
  https://archive.org/details/@swieros

  They are so fantastically well scanned that it feels like having them in front of you.

• X11 stack
  http://www.theresistornetwork.com/2013/12/a-testament-to-x11-backwards.html
  https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/03/the-linux-graphics-stack-from-x-to-wayland/
  https://github.com/jcs/xbanish

  X11 is a fun piece of software, full of features, really full. Those three links are a testament of this.

• Reaching a dream environment for all
  https://ploum.net/195-the-aristocratic-desktop-part-1/
  https://ploum.net/201-the-aristocratic-desktop-part-2-home-is-desktop/
  https://ploum.net/219-the-aristocratic-desktop-part-3-there-s-no-tray-icon-in-gnome/
  https://ploum.net/kill-double-click/

  A series of articles very in line with the ideas shared in "OpenBSD laptop @ BSDCan" of 128, "Ever installed a Unix-like system for a friend who's not technie?" with the aunt in 54, "Usability" in 71, and "When will be created great desktop experience for OpenBSD." in this same issue. Building a sensible, default, basic environment for non-tech-enthusiast that only want to use the computer as a tool, this sounds easier than it actually is.

• Logical fallacies in development
  https://artur-martsinkovskyi.github.io/2018/logical-fallacies-in-programming/

  Not really Unix related, but there's some hint that could somewhat be associated to it. A straight forward list of behaviors we've most probably encountered in our day to day.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

• Xfce 4.14pre1 Released.
  https://simon.shimmerproject.org/2019/05/19/xfce-4-14pre1-released/
  https://simon.shimmerproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/xfce4-settings-4-14pre1-300x214.png

• NetBSD 8.1 RC1 Available.
  https://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-8/NetBSD-8.1.html

• LibreSSL 2.9.2 Available.
  https://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/LibreSSL/libressl-2.9.2-relnotes.txt

• OPNsense 19.1.8 Released.
  https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=12787.0

• Virtual Machines Manager for Bhyve. Made with <3 in Poland.

• Linux kernel RDS flaw affects Red Hat/Ubuntu/Debian/SUSE.
  https://betanews.com/2019/05/20/linux-kernel-rds-flaw/

• Lucee Installation on Solaris 11 (SPARC).
  https://youngmumpster.wordpress.com/2019/05/21/lucee-installation-on-solaris-11-sparc/

• Signal on OpenBSD.
  https://h3artbl33d.nl/communication/2019/05/20/signal-openbsd/

• DragonFly BSD 5.4.3 Released.
  https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release54/

• BSD Now 299 - NAS Fleet.
  https://www.bsdnow.tv/299

• OpenZFS ZoL 0.8.0 Released.
  https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/releases/tag/zfs-0.8.0

• FreeBSD adds Chacha20 mode to Encrypted Kernel Crash Dumps.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=348197

• FreeBSD vm-bhyve config for CentOS 7.6.
  https://davidpdischer.com/2019/05/23/freebsd-vm-bhyve-config-for-centos-7-6-1810/

• Serenity - Graphical Unix-like Operating System for x86 Computers.
  https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/awesomekling/serenity/master/Meta/screenshot-d727005.png

• Applied FreeBSD - Basic iSCSI.
  https://globalengineer.wordpress.com/2017/03/05/applied-freebsd-basic-iscsi/

• Talospace - Firefox 67 on POWER.
  https://www.talospace.com/2019/05/firefox-67-on-power.html

• The zrepl 0.1.1 Available.
  https://zrepl.github.io/changelog.html

• OmniOS Community Edition r151030c/r151028ac/r151022da Available.
  https://omniosce.org/article/030c-028ac-022da

• HTTPie is command line HTTP client with intuitive UI/JSON support/syntax highlighting/plugins and more.
  https://httpie.org/

• Solaris SMF and FMA Notifications.
  https://www.solaris.wtf/blog/solaris-smf-and-fma-notifications/

• When will be created great desktop experience for OpenBSD.
  https://marc.info/?t=155720553100001&r=3&w=2

• FreeBSD 11.3-BETA1 Available.
  https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2019-May/091210.html
  https://www.freebsd.org/relnotes/11-STABLE/relnotes/article.html

• FreeBSD adds AESNI optimized version of CCM/CBC cryptographic/authentication code for ZFS encryption.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=348268

• In Other BSDs for 2019/05/25.
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/05/25/22939.html

Hardware

• Speculation Behaviour in AMD CPUs Against INTEL-SA-00233 (MDS).
  https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/security-whitepaper.pdf
  https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D67gdt_XsAA_UEB.png

• Top 5 Raspberry Pi Alternatives in 2019.
  https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/05/20/raspberry-pi-alternatives-2019/

• Acromove ServerPack 35 SP3B Review with FreeNAS.
  https://www.storagereview.com/acromove_serverpack_35_sp3b_review

• Spectre/Meltdown/L1TF/MDS Mitigation Costs on Intel Dual Core Laptop.
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Spec-Melt-L1TF-MDS-Laptop-Run

• Chinese AMD's Zen Based CPU on Sale - Sugon Workstation with 8-Core Hugon Dhyana Processor.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/14380/sugon-workstation-with-hugon-dhyana-cpu?

• workstation.is - Explore and discover popular setups.
  https://workstation.is/

• AMD Confirms Zen 4 EPYC Codename and Elaborates on Frontier Supercomputer CPU.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/14419/amd-confirms-zen-4-epyc-codename-and-elaborates-frontier-cpu

• AMD Teases First Navi GPU Products - RX 5700 Series with 25% Improved Perf-Per-Clock.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/14412/amd-teases-first-navi-gpu-products-rx-5700-series-in-july-25-improved-perf

• AMD Ryzen 3000 Announced - Five CPUs - Coming 2019/07/07.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/14407/amd-ryzen-3000-announced-five-cpus-12-cores-for-499-up-to-46-ghz-pcie-40-coming-77

• ARM New Cortex-A77 CPU Micro-architecture - Evolving Performance.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/14384/arm-announces-cortexa77-cpu-ip

Life & Others

• What Happens When You Always Wear Headphones.
  https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/what-happens-if-you-always-wear-headphones/589474/

• JavaScript Sticker.
  https://samdbeckham.gitlab.io/javascript_sticker/

• Firefox 67.0 Available.
  https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/67.0/releasenotes/

• Google Has Stored Some Passwords in Plaintext Since 2005.
  https://www.wired.com/story/google-stored-gsuite-passwords-plaintext/

• Static Web - Back to the Roots?
  https://blog.callr.tech/static-web-roots/

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

Software engineers live in a world of deep introspection. They spend most of the day solving complex problems, breaking problems apart and reconstructing them. Often, when they are distracted, their subconscious can make the most bizarre leaps, connecting half-baked ideas and partially solved algorithms. This can happen in the oddest of places, for example, in the shower, or cooking in the kitchen, or driving in a car.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Unveil @ BSDCan
  https://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan2019-unveil/index.html

  A great overview of what unveil is about. If you never heard of it then it's time to take a look.

• OpenBSD laptop @ BSDCan
  https://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan2019-accessible-openbsd-laptop.pdf
  https://bharadwaj-raju.itch.io/textsuggest
  https://simon.kde.org/

  Why the hek it's so hard to give Maurice his basic laptop. A story of accessibility on OpenBSD.

• NetBSD on VAX @ BSDCan
  https://www.bsdcan.org/2019/schedule/events/1089.en.html

  It runs everywhere! That's what we comically portray it as, but it really does.

• Atari Linux
  http://www.atari-wiki.com/index.php/Using_an_Atari_ST_as_Unix/Linux_Terminal
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Working_with_the_serial_console

  In continuation with the previous link, it's really fun to run older machines as terminal. And it's how well it's supported that is impressive, so simple.

• SGI Indy UNIX
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qk_JjfeChQA

  The marketing around this machine is disturbingly awkward and cringy, but we love it. There are so many inputs to make you dizzy.

• Monitors of performance/health
  https://github.com/nokia/memory-profiler
  https://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan2019-perform-slides.pdf

  It's a pain to track things over time, especially when it's to find out why something created a bug or how something impacted the system. These are two links with some approaches to monitoring performance.

• COM
  https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2016/08/linux_loader_for_dos_like_com_files/
  http://www.dosemu.org/

  Digging into binary formats is one of the best way to get accustomed to your machine and remove mystification. It's one of my favorite things.

• No systemd
  https://ungleich.ch/en-us/cms/blog/2019/05/20/linux-distros-without-systemd/

  Talking about mystification, there's a lot surrounding systemd. However, this post isn't about this, it's about all the distros that don't have it included by default. A bit of a publicity for the datacenter of the author, so take this with a grain of salt.

• Thinking out of the box
  https://shenaniganslabs.io/2019/05/21/LXD-LPE.html

  An attach to get out of the box using/privilege escalation using systemd.

• Audio latency in OS
  https://www.mindmusiclabs.com/audio-latency-demystified-part-1/
  https://www.mindmusiclabs.com/audio-latency-demystified-part-2-4-real-time-linux-approaches/

  A fantastic series of articles I'm going to follow about demystifying audio latency. Such expert content is delightful to read.

• Remove duplicates shell
  https://iridakos.com/how-to/2019/05/16/remove-duplicate-lines-preserving-order-linux.html

  Golfing with awk, that line is a killer.

• Explaining fork
  http://mohit.athwani.net/unix/understanding-the-fork-system-call-in-unix/

  A classic explanation of how fork works and the process tree on Unix.

• Another unicode must read
  https://begriffs.com/posts/2019-05-23-unicode-icu.html

  Another link to add to our list about unicode, there's so much content written about it. This one is a must read too. See "Unicode" in issue 116 and "Plain text" in issue 57.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

• BSD Handbook.
  https://www.bsdhandbook.com/openbsd/

• Unlimited Drive Storage on Google Docs by splitting binary files into base64 files.
  https://github.com/stewartmcgown/uds

• BSDs Get Promptly Mitigated for MDS Side Channel Vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs.
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=BSD-Mitigations-MDS

• Running FreeBSD on Pinebook - Review.
  https://blog.madadipouya.com/2018/12/19/running-freebsd-on-pinebook-a-review/

• FreeBSD Updates KDE Frameworks to 5.58.0.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports?view=revision&revision=501745

• In Other BSDs for 2019/05/11.
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/05/11/22888.html

• In Other BSDs for 2019/05/18.
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/05/18/22911.html

• Make Linux Fast Again.
  https://make-linux-fast-again.com/

• BSD Now 297 - Dragonfly in the Wild.
  https://www.bsdnow.tv/297

• BSD Now 298 - BSD on the Road.
  https://www.bsdnow.tv/298

• Confusion with Used/Free Disk Space in ZFS.
  https://oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/65/

• OpenPOWER BSD - Leading Edge Development of FreeBSD on OpenPOWER.
  https://github.com/POWER9BSD/

• Keep Crashing Daemons Running on FreeBSD.
  https://www.babaei.net/blog/keep-crashing-daemons-running-on-freebsd/

• FOSS Project Spotlight - Bareos - Cross Network Open Source Backup Solution.
  https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/foss-project-spotlight-bareos-cross-network-open-source-backup-solution

• GPU Passthrough Reported Working with Bhyve on FreeBSD.
  https://passthroughpo.st/gpu-passthrough-reported-working-on-bhyve/

• FreeBSD 13-CURRENT on Pinebook.
  http://joancatala.net/node/1399

• The 9front (Plan 9 fork) got DTrace in 2018/11 as dtracy command.
  https://twitter.com/AmazingDim/status/1129790004153085952
  http://man.cat-v.org/9front/1/dtracy
  http://9front.org/

• Recent Intel CPU Bug FreeBSD-SA-19:07.mds Security Advisory.
  https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-19:07.mds.asc

• NetBSD for ODROID-C2.
  https://magazine.odroid.com/article/netbsd-for-the-the-odroid-c2/

• OpenIndiana Hipster 2019.04 Available - Release Notes.
  https://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/2019.04+Release+notes

• Connecting Amiga 4000 to World in 2019.
  https://chargen.one/steve/connecting-an-amiga-to-the-world-in-2019

• Sending Big ZFS Snapshots over SSH.
  https://cahuk.net/2019/05/19/sending-big-zfs-snapshots-over-ssh/

• FreeBSD Implements PTRACE_O_TRACESYSGOOD which Makes Linux strace(1) Work.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=347971

Hardware

• Following on from Meltdown and Spectre - TU Graz researchers discover new security flaws in Intel CPUs.
  https://www.tugraz.at/en/tu-graz/services/news-stories/tu-graz-news/singleview/article/nach-meltdown-und-spectre-tu-graz-forscher-entdecken-neue-sicherheitsluecken0/

• Gigabyte GA-IMB4100TN Mini ITX Motherboard.
  https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-IMB4100TN-rev-10

• SanDisk First 1 TB microSD Card Now Available.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/14346/the-sandisk-extreme-1-tb-microsd-card-now-available

• Operating System Compatibility List for Raptor POWER9 Based Hardware.
  https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Operating_System_Compatibility_List

• Spec'ing Out Blackbird POWER9.
  http://www.mroach.com/2019/05/14/blackbird-power9/

• How to Hack Expensive Camera and Not Get Killed by Your Wife.
  https://alexhude.github.io/2019/01/24/hacking-leica-m240.html

Life & Others

• Why Play a Music CD? - No Ads - No Privacy Terrors - No Algorithms.
  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/technology/personaltech/music-streaming-cd.html

• Comments about Iceland Sentenced Bankers to Prison for Their Part in 2008 Collapse.
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10915710

• Can we all please stop using Medium now?
  https://www.webdistortion.com/2019/05/16/can-we-all-please-stop-using-medium-now/

• Mozilla Firefox - What we do when things go wrong.
  https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/05/09/what-we-do-when-things-go-wrong/

• Banned from PayPal after 12 years of business.
  https://blog.niteo.co/paypal-ban-after-12-years/

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

Haste Makes Waste.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Daemon restart from scratch on FreeBSD
  https://www.babaei.net/blog/keep-crashing-daemons-running-on-freebsd/

  How would you do a service manager if you didn't have one. A simple tale about rewriting something that checks for PID and restarting daemons on case of crash. As can be seen at the start of the article, things can be much easier.

• Say this to my face
  https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2019/5/12_The_Dark_Side_of_GNU.html

  That's what I call taking a meme and extending it to a "serious" article. That's entertaining!

• Kernel debug in minutia
  https://www.anmolsarma.in/post/single-step-kernel/

  You can't always add printing everywhere for debugging, I know we all do sometimes. You got to get a real debugger too. Is it possible with the Linux kernel, you'll discover how to setup a VM via QEMU and do the debugging it in this post.

• Clear Linux OS
  https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/05/13/its-time-to-pay-attention-to-intels-clear-linux-os-project/amp/
  https://clearlinux.org/

  A Linux OS pushed and supported by a hardware vendor. That must mean that everything done by that vendor is optimized and fully working. What do you think? Their take on the package manager intrigues me.

• Recursive mutexes
  http://www.zaval.org/resources/library/butenhof1.html

  The horror of multithreading applications, the headaches, why would you complicate it with recursive mutexes. In this email thread you'll find a wonderful explanation of how bad this can get.

• Some bash scripting
  https://raymii.org/s/snippets/Bash_Bits_Check_if_command_is_available.html
  https://raymii.org/s/snippets/Bash_Bits_Find_all_files_containing_specific_text.html
  https://raymii.org/s/tags/bash-bits.html
  https://raymii.org/s/articles/Get_Started_With_The_Nitrokey_HSM.html
  https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/ca-software-and-hsms-used/14600
  https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/05/technical-details-on-the-recent-firefox-add-on-outage/

  Bash bits are cool tips. You should never forget about the "command" command. The author needs to reformat the website code blocks a bit but the content is valuable. I've also added articles about HSMs.

• Scratch files for the shell
  http://blog.snailtext.com/posts/no-itch-to-scratch.html

  Temporary files to take notes. Not a novel idea in my opinion. Was is similar to ctrl-x ctrl-e in most of today's Bourne shells.

• NTP
  https://networking.ringofsaturn.com/Protocols/ntp.php
  https://securityintelligence.com/news/how-the-kiss-odeath-packet-and-other-ntp-vulnerabilities-could-turn-back-the-internets-clocks/
  http://doc.ntp.org/4.1.0/ntpq.htm
  http://doc.ntp.org/4.2.8/miscopt.html
  https://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Support/AddingNTPServerVariables

  I've dabbled quite a bit with NTP this week. Setting up a server for a basic use case is straight forward but once you want to do something a bit more complex the documentation lets you down and you have to figure things out by yourself.

• Unix time and leaping
  https://alexwlchan.net/2019/05/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-unix-time/

  A reminder of our series about Keeping time and date, this one deals with Unix time and leap second.

• Tiny Curl
  https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2019/05/11/tiny-curl/

  A toned down version of curl made for embedded and low end devices.

• Transferring files for non-tech users
  https://www.addictivetips.com/ubuntu-linux-tips/quickly-send-files-between-linux-computers-with-transporter/

  What if you don't want dropbox, nor google drive, nor box, nor any of those but a simple quick and safe solution to share files locally.

• WireGuard on OpenBSD
  https://blog.jasper.la/wireguard-on-openbsd.html
  https://www.wireguard.com/

  I've never used WireGuard instead of OpenVPN but I think that after reading this maybe I've got to give it a try.

• This world of ours
  https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf
  https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs513/2005fa/NNLauthPeople.html
  http://collingreene.com/6_buckets_of_prodsec.html

  A mad meditation about the state of security. Followed by the good ol' mantra of "something you know, something you have, something you are." Then a list of the encapsulated methods of finding vulnerabilities.

• The game that was actually a tutorial
  https://www.worldvideogamehalloffame.org/games/microsoft-solitaire

  Not related to Unix but to HCI in general.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

• FreeBSD adds support for newer Lenovo ThinkPad models in acpi_ibm module. Tested on ThinkPad T480 and ThinkPad X1 Yoga 2nd Generation.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=346647

• Install PyroCMS on FreeBSD 11.
  https://www.vultr.com/docs/how-to-install-pyrocms-on-freebsd-11

• Google Summer of Code 2019 FreeBSD Projects.
  https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/organizations/6583387272249344/#5695528845705216

• Writing Exploit Resistant Code with OpenBSD.
  https://lteo.net/blog/2019/04/27/carolinacon-15-writing-exploit-resistant-code-with-openbsd/
  https://lteo.net/assets/pdf/lteo-openbsd-carolinacon15-20190427.pdf

• Packet Filter Rule Editor for OpenBSD pf Firewall.
  https://github.com/sonertari/PFRE
  https://github.com/sonertari/PFRE/wiki

• Packer/Ansible Configuration for Generation of Immutable OpenBSD Image.
  https://github.com/yannh/openbsd_immutable_router

• ZFS vs XFS.
  https://linuxhint.com/zfs_vs_xfs/

• Google Summer of Code 2019 NetBSD Projects.
  https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/announcing_google_summer_of_code1

• Installing PostgreSQL 11.2 Server on OpenBSD 6.5.
  https://dev.to/nabbisen/installing-postgresql-11-2-server-on-openbsd-6-5-4oh9

• Science of Why You Hate Your Open Office.
  https://www.fastcompany.com/90342214/the-science-of-why-you-hate-your-open-office

• FreeNAS 11.2-U3 and 11.2-U4 Vulnerabilities.
  https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/freenas-11-2-u3-vulnerabilities.75353/

• OmniOS Community Edition r151030 LTS.
  https://omniosce.org/article/release-030

Hardware

• PINE64 PINEBOOK Pro Laptop Available. Rockchip RK3399/4GB RAM/1080p IPS/m.2 NVMe SSD Slot/USB 3.0.
  https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/

• Seagate Ships 16 TB PMR Hard Drives.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/14297/seagate-starts-shipments-of-16-tb-hard-drives-preps-18-tb-smr-hdds

• DDN Announces Intent to Acquire Nexenta.
  https://nexenta.com/company/media/press-releases/ddn-acquires-nexenta-expands-ai-enterprise-footprint-enter-iot-5g-markets
  https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/07/ddn_is_buying_nexenta/

• Intel (Hopeless) Process Technology Update - 10nm Server Products in 2020H1 and Accelerated 7nm in 2021.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/14311/intel-process-technology-update-10nm-server-products-in-1h-2020-accelerated-7nm-in-2021

• 28 Cores in Mini-ITX - ASRock EPC621D4I-2M Motherboard for Xeon Scalable.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/14299/the-asrock-rack-epc621d4i2m

• ASRock EPC621D4I-2M Motherboard Review - Xeon Scalable Mini-ITX Motherboard.
  https://www.servethehome.com/asrock-rack-epc621d4i-2m-motherboard-review/

• Cray and AMD will build 1.5 Exaflop Frontier Supercomputer.
  https://www.servethehome.com/cray-and-amd-win-big-contracts-for-1-5-exaflop-frontier-supercomputer/

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones. Stephen King

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• zfs from scratch in python
  https://github.com/alcarithemad/zfsp

  An impressive feat, a pure learning experience from analysing FS structure of ZFS.

• Damn, it's irreversible
  https://sabotage-linux.github.io/blog/6/
  https://github.com/rofl0r/hardcore-utils/blob/de5a4ca/fastfind.c

  I can't remember where I've read about that technique before, the good ol' saying that you should type your filename again at the top of the file in case you loose it. However, I hadn't really tried it before, nor seen a full post about actually recovering the file manually. This sounds simple enough.

• Naming files
  https://rasmuse.github.io/i-want-to-stop-naming-files.html

  A problem we've all ran into, doing tests with something, outputting different files with different names depending on situations. You then get lost which file was used for what.

• April 2019 review of reproducible build
  https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2019-04/

  The magic of reproducibility is on its way. Lots of projects are interested in what this implies. Lovely to see this move across so many areas.

• About the Mozilla addons outage
  https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/05/technical-details-on-the-recent-firefox-add-on-outage/

  Oh I love this read, the PKI is so entertaining. However, it annoys me that Mozilla, an entity that is maintaining one of the most, if not the most, used CA trust DB to not be aware of their own system for signing addons and not have anyone tracking the intermediate certificate expiry (and probably all other sensitive assets), not even having the thought of what would happen when this expiry date is reached. I'll let you read for more info.

• CPU governor makes it to 5.1
  https://lwn.net/Articles/775618/

  TEO (Timer events oriented) governor made it to Linux 5.1. Predicting events to save up cpu usage is not an easy endeavour, from the benchmarks this is still a thing to try first hand before judging.

• GPL rights or no rights
  https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/5/3/698
  https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/5/4/334

  A huge discussion about the revocability of free licenses when those were not explicitly given to the licensee in exchange of some goods. Legal rights differ dependong on the country, the talk is very USA centered so keep this in mind.

• Polkit and dbus
  https://www.freedesktop.org/software/polkit/docs/latest/polkit-architecture.png
  http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2015/why_polkit/
  https://www.freedesktop.org/software/polkit/docs/latest/polkit.8.html
  https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/logind.conf.html
  https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/pam_systemd.html
  https://www.freedesktop.org/software/polkit/docs/latest/
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Polkit
  https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/writing-display-managers/
  https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/logind/
  https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-logind.service.html
  https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/writing-display-managers/

  Lots of documentation about polkit and logind, brace yourself for lots of dbus ipc.

• Without javascript
  https://an3223.github.io/Living-without-the-modern-browser/

  The web has become so prevalent today it's unescapable. Take a lesson from this guy for our next week in the TTY that is coming soon, probably next month.

• Did you know about this feature
  https://www.anmolsarma.in/post/bash-net-redirections/

  That's a nice feature, sort of like a simpler nc you can have for quick debugging.

• VCF East 2019 interview with Brian Kernighan and Ken Thompson
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o

  A lot of things are happenstance, listen to Ken recall his days at Bell Labs.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

• Uplod FreeBSD Image to Google Cloud Platform.
  https://fabrik.red/post/google/

• OmniOS Community Edition r151028z/r151026az/r151022cx Available.
  https://omniosce.org/article/028z-026az-022cx

• Amiga before Amiga - Amiga Development System.
  https://www.osnews.com/story/129910/the-amiga-before-the-amiga-the-amiga-development-system/
  https://learn.adafruit.com/build-your-own-sparc-with-qemu-and-solaris
  https://cdn-learn.adafruit.com/downloads/pdf/build-your-own-sparc-with-qemu-and-solaris.pdf?timestamp=1556605181

• Build your own SPARC workstation with QEMU and Solaris.
  https://learn.adafruit.com/build-your-own-sparc-with-qemu-and-solaris
  https://amigalove.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1031
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfUVgHsPoNU

• Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie will be inducted into National Inventors Hall of Fame for development of UNIX at Bell Labs.
  https://twitter.com/InventorsHOF/status/1122962516341067776
  https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D5WQdP6XkAIuoCe.jpg:large

• NomadBSD - BSD for the Road.
  https://itsfoss.com/nomadbsd

• NomadBSD 1.2 Quicklook - Installed on HDD.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqY8JlKjYpc

• Run BSD - Request a Sticker.
  https://runbsd.info/sticker/

• OpenBSD - Setup Local Auto Installation Server.
  https://www.codemadness.org/openbsd-autoinstall.html

• Commodore 900 - Workstation with Coherent UNIX could happen instead/along AMIGA.
  https://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ckb/secret/900.html
  https://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ckb/secret/cbm-clip-900.jpg

• Piping curl to S(hell).
  https://0x46.net/thoughts/2019/04/27/piping-curl-to-shell/

• FreeBSD nsysctl Version 0.9 Released.
  https://alfix.gitlab.io/bsd/2019/02/19/nsysctl-tutorial.html

• Upgrading OpenBSD from 6.4 to 6.5.
  https://dev.to/nabbisen/upgrading-openbsd-from-6-4-to-6-5-43fa

• FreeBSD adds sys/devices/system/cpu/{possible,present} to linsysfs(5) so Linux lscpu(1) now works.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=347015

• FreeBSD 12.0 Installed on GPD Pocket.
  https://adventurist.me/posts/0288

• In Other BSDs for 2019/05/04.
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/05/04/22865.html

• Bad utmp Implementations in glibc and FreeBSD.
  https://davmac.wordpress.com/2019/05/04/bad-utmp-implementations-in-glibc-and-freebsd/

• Firefox Addons Broken. Use about:config and set xpinstall.signatures.required to false.
  https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/05/04/update-regarding-add-ons-in-firefox/

• OPNsense 19.1.7 Released.
  https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=12611.0

• BSD Now 296 - Its Alive OpenBSD 6.5.
  https://www.bsdnow.tv/296

• Hello OpenBSD My Old Friend.
  https://westplaat-it.nl/2019/05/hello-openbsd-my-old-friend/

• Straightforward Guide for Setting Up Poudriere on FreeBSD.
  https://www.i-bsd.com/poudriere-guide/

Hardware

• Backblaze Hard Drive Stats 2019 Q1.
  https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1-2019/

• AMD 7nm Navi GPU and Rome CPU to Launch in Q3.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/14286/amd-7nm-navi-gpu-and-rome-cpu-to-launch-in-q3

Life & Other

• You should have personal web site.
  https://writing.markchristian.org/2019/04/29/personal-web-sites/

• Canada Border Services will Steal your Phone and Laptop.
  https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/cbsa-boarder-security-search-phone-travellers-openmedia-1.5119017

• Hackers went undetected in Citrix internal network for 6 months.
  https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/30/citrix-internal-network-breach/

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

Enter with the intention of growing as an individual.

You may not always enjoy your days but there can still be something that could help you grow. You may not always enjoy a conversation but it could help you grow.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Open Source stories
  https://dirkriehle.com/
  https://dirkriehle.com/publications/2019-selected/the-innovations-of-open-source/
  http://the-mobile-network.com/2019/04/open-source-and-telco-standards-to-play-nicely/
  https://www.etsi.org/newsroom/press-releases/1590-2019-04-etsi-and-the-linux-foundation-sign-memorandum-of-understanding-enabling-industry-standards-and-open-source-collaboration

  Different blogs and articles about open source. A partnership between ETSI and the Linux foundation to have open source collaboration on network automation.

• Recalling Unix
  https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/back-day-unix-minix-and-linux
  https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/why-linux-spelled-incorrectly

  Fun recollection of first encounters with Unix-like operating systems followed by the most ridiculous argument I've ever read "I don't like it so I'll find some reasons to disavow it, whatever it is", the comments are priceless. I advice, if you feel a bit frustrated then avoid both articles, they're pretty basic.

• Linux on 8-bit microcontroller
  http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linux%20on%208bit

  This is a repost of "Following through with the low level hacks" in 52, just felt like revisiting it because I recently got into the world of embedded devices and microcontroller. See also "Reducing/Shrinking the Linux kernel" in 66.

• Getting closer to good hidpi
  https://pointieststick.com/2019/04/28/kde-usability-productivity-week-68/

  The KDE UX team has been consistently pushing those posts every week for more than a year now. The consistency is fantastic for multiple reasons, it's a message to the world that things are moving and getting better, everyone can comment about possible changes that could be made so full fledge agile in play here, it's a message to possible devs that want to hop in and want to know what to work on, and finally it keeps the motivation for the team itself going.

• GPU card for chromebook
  https://www.androidcentral.com/will-somebody-make-me-chromebook-real-graphics-card

  Chromebooks used to be that extremely light and low hardware specs, cheap laptop, thin client. Now you can find chromebooks that are more powerful than laptops, can't we stop calling them chromebooks then?

• Misleading bug
  https://news.sherlock.stanford.edu/posts/when-setting-an-environment-variable-gives-you-a-40-x-speedup
  https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bhvwvl/when_setting_an_environment_variable_gives_you_a/

  You got to remove the fancy eye candies if you want your command line to be fast. My solution would've been way simpler than anything that was proposed in the above, just command ls instead, skip all aliases.

• Less
  https://www.lifewire.com/what-to-know-less-command-4051972
  https://ss64.com/bash/less.html

  Know your pager well, it's powerful, it has lots of features you might not know about.

• Shell and more shell madness
  http://250bpm.com/blog:153
  https://0x46.net/thoughts/2019/04/27/piping-curl-to-shell/
  http://cdaniels.net/shell_music.html

  The true hardcore Unix philosophy, having all the pieces of the programming language be represented as a file! Plus, the usual "please don't paste commands from the interwebs into your terminal blindly". The freaky one I was not aware of is the "Partial content returned by the server". And finalizing with a touch of musicality.

• Memsetting
  https://www.anmolsarma.in/post/stop-struct-memset/
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19766930
  https://lobste.rs/s/7aqidd/stop_memsetting_structures

  You probably have already seen it in tech news, I'll highlight the post here too. I like it when someone posts such "X considered harmful" or "Stop doing X" and then the flaming train falls upon the web.

• IPSec
  https://www.elastichosts.com/blog/linux-l2tpipsec-vpn-server/
  https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-ipsec/index.html

  Setting up a VPN isn't that hard, but the is it needed for your case. Is it enough to ssh and port forward instead? Isn't it faster according to "Tunneling/syncing data between machines securely" in 51?

• rdist(1)
  https://high5.nl/gist/rdist.html

  We discussed that topic a lot, distributing files over machines, so here's another take on it.

• IMSI catcher
  https://harrisonsand.com/imsi-catcher/

  Not really Unixy but it runs on Unix-like OS. Some of the equipment is hard to get your hands on in parts of the world but other than that it's nifty.

• Oh the mobile world
  https://textslashplain.com/2017/01/14/the-line-of-death/
  https://jameshfisher.com/2019/04/27/the-inception-bar-a-new-phishing-method/

  "Line of death", basically a bug because the UI is misleading. All of that to save screen estate.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

• Its now possible to use FreeBSD ASR in HardenedBSD 13-CURRENT.
  https://github.com/HardenedBSD/hardenedBSD/commit/553b58b88ecd166c040c87d22ca1554361b0fad2

• DragonFly BSD 5.4.2 Released.
  https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release54/

• Categorizing OpenBSD Bugs.
  https://www.collicutt.co.uk/notebook/openbsd_bugs.html

• The End of Scientific Linux.
  https://lwn.net/Articles/786422/

• OnionBSD aims at preserving your privacy/security/anonymity using OpenBSD as base.
  https://gitlab.com/onionbsd/onionbsd
  https://gitlab.com/onionbsd/onionbsd/wikis/home
  https://gitlab.com/onionbsd/onionbsd/raw/master/etc/logo.png

• Installing Bolt CMS on FreeBSD 12.
  https://www.vultr.com/docs/installing-bolt-cms-on-freebsd-12
  https://github.com/bolt/bolt
  https://bolt.cm/

• Reimplementation of Audio Subsystem on NetBSD.
  https://mail-index.netbsd.org/source-changes/2019/04/21/msg105272.html

• Intel Cascade Lake Windows/Linux/FreeBSD Benchmarks.
  <https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=cascadelake-windows-linux >

• Stunnel and Squid on FreeBSD 11.
  https://www.vcloudnine.de/stunnel-and-squid-on-freebsd-11/

• FreeBSD adds GRE-in-UDP encapsulation support as defined in RFC8086.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=346630

• The Art of Command Line. Master the command line all in one page.
  https://github.com/jlevy/the-art-of-command-line

• OS108 pairs NetBSD with MATE desktop environment to provide nice desktop. OS108 name - "1 and 0 being binary bits when represented 8 bits forms a byte also the distance of Earth from the Sun is about 108 times the diameter of the Sun. hence the name."
  https://os108.org/
  https://github.com/OS108
  https://forums.os108.org/
  https://www.phoronix.net/image.php?id=2019&image=netbsd_os108_1_large

• OpenBSD 6.5 Released.
  https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20190424132429
  https://www.openbsd.org/65.html
  https://www.openbsd.org/plus65.html

• QEMU 4.0.0 Released.
  https://www.qemu.org/2019/04/24/qemu-4-0-0/

• Seagate Shows Dual Actuator Speed Gains in Real World Setup on FreeBSD.
  https://blog.seagate.com/craftsman-ship/seagate-shows-dual-actuator-speed-gains-in-real-world-setup/

• FreeBSD ZFS/FreeBSD ZoL/Ubuntu ZoL Benchmarks.
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=freebsd-zol-april

• FreeBSD Ports Got 500,000th Commit.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/ports/500000

• Netdata 1.14 Released.
  https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/bhdm0x/netdata_the_opensource_realtime_performance_and/
  https://github.com/netdata/netdata/releases/tag/v1.14.0

• Dream Come True - My Very Own AMIGA A3000.
  https://amigalove.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1026

• GDB Dashboard - Modular Visual Interface for GDB in Python.
  https://github.com/cyrus-and/gdb-dashboard

• OpenBSD Jumpstart Updated to 6.5.
  http://www.openbsdjumpstart.org/

• BSD Now 295 - Fun with funlinkat().
  https://www.bsdnow.tv/295

• NomadBSD Handbook.
  <nomadbsd.org/handbook/handbook.html>

• Setup Replicated PostgreSQL on Tribblix.
  https://ptribble.blogspot.com/2019/04/setting-up-replicated-postgresql-on.html

• HA PostgreSQL on Tribblix with stolon.
  https://ptribble.blogspot.com/2019/04/ha-postgresql-on-tribblix-with-stolon.html

• Setup etcd Cluster on Tribblix.
  https://ptribble.blogspot.com/2019/04/setting-up-etcd-cluster-on-tribblix.html

• In Other BSDs for 2019/04/27.
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/04/27/22827.html

• Speedup ls(1) command by setting proper LS_COLORS environment variable.
  https://news.sherlock.stanford.edu/posts/when-setting-an-environment-variable-gives-you-a-40-x-speedup

• Docker Hub Hacked - 190k Accounts (5% of Users) with Usernames and Passwords Hashes.
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19763413
  https://success.docker.com/article/docker-hub-user-notification

• FreeBSD adds nvme to arm64 GENERIC along with if_ena. These changes allow stable/12 to boot on Amazon EC2 A1 family (arm64) instances.
  https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/svn-src-all/2019-April/179705.html

• Pot is Container Framework Based on FreeBSD Jails.
  https://github.com/pizzamig/pot
  https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/pot_container_framework/attachments/slides/2128/export/events/attachments/pot_container_framework/slides/2128/pot_slides.pdf

• Call for Testing: FreeBSD Package Base.
  https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2019-April/073202.html
  https://trueos.github.io/pkgbase-docs/

• Call for Testing: FreeBSD with ZoL (ZFS on Linux).
  https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2019-April/090915.html

• Official OPNsense Security Platform for Azure.
  https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/decisosalesbv.opnsense

Hardware

• Compulab Airtop3. Fanless passively cooled server with up to 95W Intel Core i9-9900K CPU and 170W Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000.
  https://www.fanlesstech.com/2019/04/compulabs-turbocharged-airtop3.html

Life & Other

• Satanic Temple is Now Officially an IRS Approved Tax Exempt Church in USA.
  https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2019/04/25/the-satanic-temple-is-now-officially-an-irs-approved-tax-exempt-church/

• People Who Claim to Work 75 Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours.
  https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/people-who-claim-to-work-75-hour-weeks-are-lying.html

• Steve Jobs Never Wanted Us to Use Our iPhones Like This.
  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/opinion/sunday/steve-jobs-never-wanted-us-to-use-our-iphones-like-this.html

• It Took 7 Years to Recreate Super Mario Bros on Commodore 64.
  https://kotaku.com/it-took-7-years-but-now-you-can-play-super-mario-bros-1834172015

• Google is Killing our Mail.
  https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2019/04/google_is_eating_our_mail/

• Google Index Coverage.
  https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2019/02/google_index_coverage/

• Contributing to Open Source Project - How to Get Started.
  https://medium.com/mindsdb/contributing-to-an-open-source-project-how-to-get-started-6ba812301738

• Future of Firefox for Android.
  https://www.ghacks.net/2019/04/26/the-future-of-firefox-for-android/

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• The runtimes wizard
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtEIq7fe_KQ
  http://atnan.com/blog/2011/11/04/blaine-runtimes-wizard-garst-retiring-after-21-years-at-apple/

  An interview with Blaine Garst, such a wondeful person. If you don't want only to hear about the Unix related stuffs then jump at 1h.

• Unexpected Coding
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/EdDesignedForCookedInput
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/EdDesignedForCookedInput?showcomments#comments
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/EdV7CodedUnusually
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/EdV7CodedUnusually?showcomments#comments
  https://github.com/DoctorWkt/Apout

  I like those articles about digging into old sources, someone replying with clarifications, the research intensifying, and in the end more truth coming out. It might confuse some, they might prefer a nicely polished post, but personally, I the intrigue in those keeps me reading. It's like uncovering knowledge.

• ELISA
  https://elisa.tech/
  https://lwn.net/Articles/780493/rss
  https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press-release/2019/02/the-linux-foundation-launches-elisa-project-enabling-linux-in-safety-critical-systems/
  https://sdtimes.com/softwaredev/the-linux-foundation-launches-new-project-to-enable-linux-in-safety-critical-applications/

  Oh we talked a lot about mission critical Unix-like OS, real-time OS, during our Keeping time and date series. Well, here's a new project that was launched called elisa (Enabling Linux in Safety Application), from the look of it this seems like a standardisation process with a set of tool to build a safety-critical application meeting specific requirements.

• All those X configurations
  https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2271

  So many dot files for different things, it's confusing. I've tried to compact some research into this post to make things more understandable. Maybe it does the job, let me know.

• And another
  http://zge.us.to/txt/unix-harmful.html

  Unix got fundings because it was good at text editing, it moved in new directions since then. How does this relate to Electron apps these days? "The fact that we need to layer abstraction upon abstractions says more about what we see the need to abstract from than where we are abstracting towards." An interesting point of view on the topic, maybe you agree, maybe you don't.

• Got and issue with sudo
  https://fosspost.org/opinions/sudo-asking-hiding-password

  This may seem like a meaningless issue to most of us (there's a vote button at the end of the article). It's a genuine point but I just don't see non-technical users spending time in their terminal typing commands as root... That's not a great combination there. Maybe display something not related to the count, anything that's a feedback, maybe a single character that changes at every key you enter.

• File history
  https://github.com/xorhash/fh

  An interesting take at building incremental and browsable diffs between files. It's quick to run, easy to get, portable. Overall, a cool project. Not sure I'll use it, but still cool.

• Are we there yet, are we there yet, where's my desktop year
  https://www.slashgear.com/what-the-linux-desktop-must-have-to-become-mainstream-09572504/
  https://funnelfiasco.com/blog/2019/04/22/the-linux-desktop-is-not-in-trouble/
  https://robey.lag.net/2019/04/21/darter-pro-review.html
  https://www.linuxlinks.com/foreignlanguagetools/

  In my opinion, a lot of those Linux desktop article are badly misinformed, usually relying on the disparity of choices as a valid argument. Amongst those links you can also find a review from someone jumping from an OS to another, and a list of fascinating programs to learn languages.

• Do you waddle the waddle?
  http://www.tuxmachines.org/taxonomy/term/98

  No idea what that motto means, forget it for a moment and check what Roy Schestowitz has been consistently posting for a while now. Every single day a big list of tutorials about many topics.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

• GhostBSD 19.04 Overview.
  https://twitter.com/ribalinux/status/1117856218251517956
  https://youtu.be/jFfVp_zfk1c

• Prometheus Exporter for FreeBSD CTL Daemon (iSCSI Target).
  https://github.com/Gandi/ctld_exporter
  https://twitter.com/_bapt_/status/1118001231384010753

• My Summer at Bell Labs (Part 1).
  https://akapugs.blog/2018/05/16/belllabspart1/

• Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU8 Available.
  https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/announcing-oracle-solaris-114-sru8

• FreeBSD adds initial version of DTrace support for ext2fs driver.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=346267

• OpenSSH 8.0 Released.
  https://lists.mindrot.org/pipermail/openssh-unix-dev/2019-April/037747.html

• BSD Now 294 - SSH Tarpit.
  https://www.bsdnow.tv/294

• Shawn Webb (@lattera) minimizes diffrences between HardenedBSD (ASLR) and FreeBSD (ASR) implementations.
  https://twitter.com/lattera/status/1119018409575026688

• Crossmeta ZFS - Another ZFS Port on Linux.
  https://www.crossmeta.io/another-zfs-port-on-linux/

• Minio now can behave as HDFS Gateway. # minio gateway hdfs hdfs://namenode:8200
  https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/docs/gateway/hdfs.md

• Unleashed 1.3 Released - Fork of Illumos for the 4th Time.
  http://lists.31bits.net/archives/devel/2019-April/000052.html

• The docbook2mdoc 1.0.0 Released.
  https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20190419101505

• Call for Testing - FreeBSD with ZFS on Linux Images Ready.
  https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2019-April/090915.html
  https://github.com/zfsonfreebsd/ZoF
  https://pkg.trueos.org/iso/freebsd12-zol/
  https://pkg.trueos.org/iso/freebsd13-zol/

• In Other BSDs for 2019/04/20.
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/04/20/22797.html

• FreeBSD adds support in psm(4) for 4 and 5 finger touches in synaptics driver.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=346455

• LibreSSL 2.9.1 Released.
  https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-announce&m=155590112606279&w=2

• NomadBSD 1.2 Released.
  http://nomadbsd.org/

Hardware

• NSA-B-GONE - Sketchy Hardware Security Device for Lenovo ThinkPad X220.
  https://hackaday.io/project/164343-nsa-b-gone
  https://github.com/zakqwy/NSA-B-GONE

• AMD Ryzen Embedded R1000 Family Launched.
  https://www.servethehome.com/amd-ryzen-embedded-r1000-family-launched/

• TSMC Reveals 6nm Process Technology: 7nm with Higher Transistor Density.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/14228/tsmc-reveals-6-nm-process-technology-7-nm-with-higher-transistor-density

• Samsung Completes Development of 5nm EUV Process Technology.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/14231/samsung-completes-development-of-5-nm-euv-process-technology

• Avalue EMX-KBLU2P Mini ITX Motherboard with Intel Core i7/i5/i3 and Passive Cooling.
  https://www.avalue.com.tw/news/Avalue-introduces-EMX-KBLU2P%2c-the-thin-Mini-ITX-Embedded-Industrial-motherboard_2984

• Whiskey Lake ZBOX is Official.
  https://www.fanlesstech.com/2019/04/whiskey-lake-zbox.html

Life & Other

• Paranoid Person Guide to Online Privacy.
  https://www.fastcompany.com/90316917/the-paranoid-persons-guide-to-online-privacy

• Facebook says it 'unintentionally uploaded' 1.5 million users email contacts without permission.
  https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/18/facebook-reportedly-uploaded-people-email-contacts-without-consent.html

• Unmasked: What 10 million passwords reveal about people who choose them.
  https://wpengine.com/unmasked/

• Evidence that Jesus ever existed is weaker than you might think.
  https://www.rawstory.com/2019/04/evidence-jesus-ever-existed-weaker-might-think/

• Former Mozilla Exec - Google Sabotaged Firefox for Years.
  https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/

• Vendors must add physical on/off switch to devices that can spy on us.
  https://larrysanger.org/2019/04/vendors-must-start-adding-physical-on-off-switches-to-devices-that-can-spy-on-us/

• These 17 Firefox tips make it easy to switch from Chrome.
  https://www.fastcompany.com/90333407/these-17-firefox-tips-make-the-case-for-ditching-chrome

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it.In engineering if you do not know what you are doing you should not be doing it.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Optimization, testability, and bug handling
  http://akaptur.com/blog/2017/11/12/love-your-bugs/
  https://microservices-on-my-mind.blogspot.com/2019/04/break-functional-and-orchestration.html?m=1
  http://carlos.bueno.org/optimization/

  Behind every bug there's a story, a learning experience. Bitrots, if you hear about them once, you can't forget them. Architecture issues, that's always something that morphs through time however we can apply some of the Unix philosophy to it. And finally a small book about optimization.

• Persistent memory 3
  https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/support-persistent-memory

  Follow up with "DAX on Linux" of 115 and "NOVA fs" in 114. I like where things are going, hopefully in the future we'll take advantage of those even more.

• glibc and DNS
  https://jrl.ninja/etc/2/

  A post that wonders about how DNS lookup works, for more info see "Networking" in 89 also "And an extra for the ride" in 93 for the series on DNS resolution.

• SSH forwarding issues
  https://defn.io/2019/04/12/ssh-forwarding/

  A discussion on why ssh forwarding created the situation that happened with matrix.org and to use instead ProxyJump or ProxyCommand, which are neat.

• Fixing web security
  https://www.volkerkrause.eu/2019/04/14/kde-privacy-automating-finding-fixing-insecure-http-links.html

  A nice initiative from the KDE team to fix HTTP url to HTTPS in an automated manner.

• Disk usage
  https://www.ostechnix.com/duc-a-collection-of-tools-to-inspect-and-visualize-disk-usage/

  I didn't hear about duc before, after doing the test-drive with it I'm quite surprised. It's a great tool to dive into what's taking disk space.

• Year of the Linux desktop or desktop in trouble?
  https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-linux-desktop-is-in-trouble/
  https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/04/13/0151256/is-the-linux-desktop-in-trouble

  "I'd love to see a foundation bring together the Linux desktop community and have them hammer out out a common desktop for everyone" Isn't that what the freedesktop organization is about? A fun discussion, an old topic.

• Botnets
  https://www.aboutchromebooks.com/news/chrome-os-75-adds-usb-device-adb-android-support-linux-project-crostini/
  https://neonsea.uk/blog/2019/04/14/chroot-shenanigans-2.html

  Take ownership of your devices. Install whatever you want on them. Support for connecting external devices to it is a must.

• Jailbreaking the Subaru StarLink
  https://github.com/sgayou/subaru-starlink-research/blob/master/doc/README.md

  A continuation with the spirit of the previous links. Head units in cars have become smarter, mine is still old school but still. Now obviously the question becomes how do we run something else on that machine. Find out in this impressive post. HINT: "A follow up on this QNX Desktop" in 117, "QNX" in 114.

• Another city trial
  https://www.shareable.net/blog/deputy-mayor-moves-grenoble-toward-free-open-software

  It's not really something new but it's nice to hear cities attempting openness approaches to solve their issues.

• TempleOS, the life of Terry Davis
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6HlbpczpDM

  Not Unix, but as we all love hobbyist OS I'll still share. This is a video, more of an eulogy to Terry Davis and his fabulous work with TempleOS.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

• The hey is tiny program that sends load to web application.
  https://github.com/rakyll/hey

• Handling Arguments in Bash Scripts.
  https://dev.to/rpalo/handling-arguments-in-bash-scripts-3o5m

• NetBSD - From Zero to NVMM.
  https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/from_zero_to_nvmm

• Introducing funlinkat() (on FreeBSD).
  https://oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/63/

• Customizing OpenBSD xenodm (and xdm).
  <https://www.tumfatig.net/20190208/customizing-openbsd-xenodm">
  https://www.tumfatig.net/20190208/customizing-openbsd-xenodm

• Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2019.
  https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019

• FreeBSD switches default version of Python to 3.6.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports?view=revision&revision=498529

• Dæmon Desktop - The High-Integrity Desktop.
  https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/the-daemon-desktop.66322/

• Portable ksh(1) Shell from OpenBSD 6.5.
  https://github.com/ibara/oksh/releases/tag/oksh-6.5

• ZFS without ECC is safer then most filesystems with ECC.
  https://twitter.com/allanjude/status/1116112323549257728
  https://twitter.com/allanjude/status/1116112323549257728

• The illuminate (formerly SolView) is Java utility to display information about an Illumos/Solaris.
  http://petertribble.co.uk/Solaris/illuminate.html

• Installing Snort on OpenBSD 6.4.
  https://functionallyparanoid.com/2019/03/18/installing-snort-on-openbsd-6-4/

• HOWTO: HA Router/Firewall Using OpenBSD/CARP/pfsync/ifstated.
  https://www.reddit.com/r/openbsd/comments/b33goi/howto_high_availability_routerfirewall_using/
  https://www.reddit.com/r/openbsd/comments/b33goi/howto_high_availability_routerfirewall_using/

• AWS OpenBSD Image Builder (AMI) and cloud-init Replacement.
  https://github.com/ajacoutot/aws-openbsd

• Install Mate Desktop on OpenBSD.
  https://twitter.com/wesley974/status/1116061247248773120
  https://twitter.com/wesley974/status/1116061247248773120

• OPNsense 19.1.6 Released.
  https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=12398.0

• BSD Now 293 - Booking Jails.
  https://www.bsdnow.tv/293

• Lessons Learned Scaling PostgreSQL Database to 1.2bn Records/Month.
  We have a lot better hardware than any of the cloud service providers could offer, point in time recovery (thanks to Barman) and no vendor lock-in, and (on paper) it is about 30% cheaper than hosting using Google Cloud or AWS.
  https://medium.com/@gajus/lessons-learned-scaling-postgresql-database-to-1-2bn-records-month-edc5449b3067
  https://medium.com/@gajus/lessons-learned-scaling-postgresql-database-to-1-2bn-records-month-edc5449b3067

• In Other BSDs for 2019/04/13.
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/04/13/22750.html
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/04/13/22750.html

• FreeBSD adds NUMA support to powerpc architecture Yields ~20% improvement in build times of LLVM on dual socket POWER9.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=346174

• GhostBSD 19.04 Available.
  http://ghostbsd.org/19.04_release_announcement

• GhostBSD 19.04 Switches To LightDM - Uses FreeBSD 13.0-CURRENT.
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GhostBSD-19.04-Released

• The pkgsrc-2019Q1 Released.
  https://mail-index.netbsd.org/pkgsrc-users/2019/04/10/msg028308.html

• Call for Testing - OpenSSH 8.0p1 is Almost Ready for Release.
  https://lists.mindrot.org/pipermail/openssh-unix-dev/2019-March/037672.html

• HardenedBSD Internals by Shawn Webb (@lattera).
  https://twitter.com/krnlpnc_/status/1117504683881443329
  https://twitter.com/krnlpnc_/status/1117504683881443329

• Resize ZFS Pool on FreeBSD GELI Partition.
  https://stderr.at/blog/freebsd/2015/09/20/freebsd-geli-resize/

Hardware

• Supermicro M11SDV-4C-LN4F Review mITX AMD EPYC 3151 Platform.
  https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-m11sdv-4c-ln4f-review-mitx-amd-epyc-3151-platform/
  https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-m11sdv-4c-ln4f-review-mitx-amd-epyc-3151-platform/

• ASRock Launches DeskMini A300 Barebones Mini-STX PC Supporting AMD RYZEN CPUs.
  https://www.pcper.com/category/tags/mini-stx

• AMD Launches 2nd Gen Ryzen Pro & Athlon Pro APUs.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/14185/amd-launches-2nd-gen-ryzen-pro-athlon-pro-apus

• Intel Xeon Follows AMD EPYC Lead Offering Discounted 1P Only SKUs.
  https://www.servethehome.com/intel-xeon-follows-amd-epyc-lead-offering-discounted-1p-only-skus/
  https://www.servethehome.com/intel-xeon-follows-amd-epyc-lead-offering-discounted-1p-only-skus/

Life & Other

• Case dropped against British facing jail in Dubai for calling ex-husbands wife 'horse' in 2016 on Facebook.
  https://www.itv.com/news/2019-04-07/british-mother-faces-two-years-in-dubai-jail-and-50-000-fine-for-old-facebook-posts/

• Moral Peril of Meritocracy.
  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/moral-revolution-david-brooks.html
  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/moral-revolution-david-brooks.html

• Urgent Quest for Slower and Better News.
  https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-urgent-quest-for-slower-better-news

• Great Developers are Raised not Hired.
  https://sizovs.net/2019/04/10/the-best-developers-are-raised-not-hired/

• Life Satisfaction Boosted by Sense of Oneness - Regardless of Religion - Study Finds.
  https://www.newsweek.com/life-satisfaction-boosted-sense-oneness-regardless-religion-study-finds-1391618

• There are now as many Americans who claim no religion as there are evangelicals and catholics.
  https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/13/us/no-religion-largest-group-first-time-usa-trnd/

• Protections Against Fingerprinting and Cryptocurrency Mining in Firefox.
  https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/04/09/protections-against-fingerprinting-and-cryptocurrency-mining-available-in-firefox-nightly-and-beta/
  https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/04/09/protections-against-fingerprinting-and-cryptocurrency-mining-available-in-firefox-nightly-and-beta/

• It is your moral obligation to use Firefox.
  https://0x46.net/thoughts/2019/04/09/use-firefox/

• Amazon Workers are Listening to What You Tell Alexa.
  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-10/is-anyone-listening-to-you-on-alexa-a-global-team-reviews-audio

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

https://jamesclear.com/deliberate-practice-theory

I was dumbfounded when I heard about this concept in the first link of this issue. Not because I didn't know about it but because it's something I'm doing instinctively, naturally. I couldn't even imagine having to write an article about it. And having it as a concept means that some people out there are not benefiting from this simple thing. So here we go, be it obvious to you or not.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Power UNIX
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uwW20odwEk

  A quick overview/tutorial about interacting with Unix systems. It even has the cliché fork jokes and zombies things. Highly recommended for beginners. Add it to your list of good content to spam the people that start off with Unix.

• A simple debugging story
  http://johnbokma.com/blog/2019/01/05/info-fouseragent-rendered-page.html

  I love those small blog posts tackling a simple issue. Light in nature but true to the spirit.

• Anomalies detection
  https://blog.floydhub.com/introduction-to-anomaly-detection-in-python/

  Now this is something new for me. Not really Unix but data science, it's related somehow to "Auditing" in issue 95, and all the things related to differential privacy (see issue 45).

• Network "BufferBloat"
  https://www.pauladamsmith.com/blog/2018/07/fixing-bufferbloat-on-your-home-network-with-openbsd-6.2-or-newer.html

  Congestion control is a tricky topic, it's nice to see easy solution like the one described in this post and especially when it's about setting up OpenBSD as a router. See also BBR in issue 33.

• Sega NetBSD
  https://youtu.be/ZAYgI1mfSd0

  Obviously it runs NetBSD! It's impressive that it's as easy as "playing" a GD-ROM with NetBSD, Cool work from the NetBSD team.

• Virtualization for NetBSD https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/from_zero_to_nvmm

  We started the discussion on that topic since "Emulate the right way on NetBSD" in 117. The BSDs are on the virtualization race these days. In this article gives and overview of the nvmm programming API and finishes of with its usage/patch to be used along with Qemu. Cool work.

• Gimp 2.10.10 release
  https://www.gimp.org/news/2019/04/07/gimp-2-10-10-released/

  Gimp new update is looking slick, two of the most cool improvements are the bucket filling for cartoons and the transformation tools.

• Ricing from cars to computers
  http://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2019/4/7_How_ricing_shifted_from_cars_to_computers.html
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co6FePZoNgE

  Probably the best explanation to "what is ricing" that I've found. Nifty little article. Followed by a great intro to distros and gamin (See also "On the desktop" of the last issue 121).

• CheatSheet for OpenSSL
  https://github.com/trimstray/the-book-of-secret-knowledge#tool-openssl
  https://why-vi.rocks/

  The one thing that caught my attention in this page is the weird use of variables declaration right before calling the openssl command. I guess that's to plug the commands in a script and only meddle with the variables and not the specific line. I've also added another cheatsheet website that appeared in the tech news regarding vi.

• Police Officer to OpenSource
  https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/police-officer-open-source-devotee-one-mans-story

  Not your usual "how did you get acquainted with Unix" type of article. Always fun to see people from all fields finding interests in something together.

• Fast directory listing
  https://github.com/romkatv/gitstatus/blob/master/docs/listdir.md

  This is a topic I've encountered during my research for the "special files" podcast (https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2017/06/04/special-files.html & https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2052). A tale of optimization, maybe not portable everywhere, but super fun to read.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

• FreeBSD on HiFive Unleashed.
  https://youtu.be/1rMNrfDu-uA

• OmniOS Community Edition r151028v/r151026av/r151022ct Available.
  https://omniosce.org/article/028v-026av-022ct

• Valgrind Ported to NetBSD/amd64.
  https://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-toolchain/2019/04/01/msg003429.html

• FreeBSD Foundation - FOSDEM 2019 Conference Recap.
  https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/fosdem-2019-conference-recap/

• Hikari - Window Manager for FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
  https://chaos.social/@raichoo/101858280176156092
  https://hub.darcs.net/raichoo/hikari
  https://chaos.social/system/media_attachments/files/003/012/109/original/4797d59e59ecb465.png

• The ezjail FreeBSD Jails framework ported to HardenedBSD. Focus is on automating TOR Jail deployment using gibson.
  https://github.com/emeraldonion/ezjail-hbsd

• Configuring Default Resolution for FreeBSD 11 with UEFI.
  http://www.codenicer.com/content/configuring-default-resolution-freebsd-11-uefi

• FreeBSD HEAD became possible to build on EC2 ARM64 AMIs.
  https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-cloud/2019-April/000215.html

• Slides from 2019 BHYVECON are now available at bhyvecon.org page.
  http://bhyvecon.org

• How to Get Started with FreeBSD.
  https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-get-started-with-freebsd

• BSD Now 292 - AsiaBSDcon 2019 Recap.
  https://www.bsdnow.tv/292

• GhostBSD - Solid Linux Like Open Source Alternative.
  https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/GhostBSD-A-Solid-Linux-Like-Open-Source-Alternative-85859.html

• FUDO Security implements automatic online expansion of GELI providers on FreeBSD.
  https://twitter.com/FreeBSDHelp/status/1113793688910458883
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=345862

• About ZFS recordsize Parameter.
  https://jrs-s.net/2019/04/03/on-zfs-recordsize/

• Silent Fanless FreeBSD Server - Redundant Backup.
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2019/04/03/silent-fanless-freebsd-server-redundant-backup/

• PostgreSQL Performance on Raspberry Pi.
  https://blog.rustprooflabs.com/2019/04/postgrseql-pgbench-raspberry-pi

• OPNsense 19.1.5 Released.
  https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=12320.0

• Blocking Ads Using unbound(8) on OpenBSD.
  https://www.tumfatig.net/20190405/blocking-ads-using-unbound8-on-openbsd/

• Building FFmpeg on Solaris 11.4 Using solaris-userland.
  https://notallmicrosoft.blogspot.com/2019/04/building-ffmpeg-on-solaris-114-using.html

• NetBSD Desktop Part 7 - Simple Performance Tweaks.
  https://www.unitedbsd.com/d/43-netbsd-desktop-pt-7-simple-performance-tweaks

• Installing Ghost on FreeBSD 11.1.
  https://idontwatch.tv/installing-ghost-on-freebsd-11-1/

• In Other BSDs for 2019/04/06.
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/04/06/22736.html

• Major Linux Problems on the Desktop - 2019 Edition.
  https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html

• TMUX Plugin tmux-battery adds support for OpenBSD apm.
  https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-battery/pull/77

• Scripting FreeBSD Updates.
  https://www.anserinae.net/scripting-freebsd-updates.html

• Vagrant adds proper VirtualBox share folders support for FreeBSD guests.
  https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/pull/10717

• entr(1) - run arbitrary commands when files change.
  http://eradman.com/entrproject/

Hardware

• Story of the 3Dfx Voodoo 1.
  http://fabiensanglard.net/3dfx_sst1/index.html

• TSMC and OIP Ecosystem Partners Deliver Industry First Complete Design Infrastructure for 5nm Process Technology.
  https://www.tsmc.com/tsmcdotcom/PRListingNewsAction.do?action=detail&newsid=THPGWQTHTH&language=E

• Why AMD EPYC Rome 2P Will Have 128-160 PCIe Gen4 Lanes and a Bonus.
  https://www.servethehome.com/why-amd-epyc-rome-2p-will-have-128-160-pcie-gen4-lanes-and-a-bonus/

• How SolidRun aims to bridge ARM developer gap with 16-core workstation board.
  https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-solidrun-aims-to-bridge-the-arm-developer-gap-with-a-16-core-workstation-board/

• Intel Xeon Platinum 9200 Formerly Cascade Lake-AP Launched. Including 56-core 112-thread dual-die 400W Beast.
  https://www.servethehome.com/intel-xeon-platinum-9200-formerly-cascade-lake-ap-launched/

• Hard Drive Temperature - Does It Matter?
  https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-temperature-does-it-matter/

• Why 2019 Foreshadows Per Socket Licenseageddon.
  https://www.servethehome.com/2019-foreshadows-per-socket-licenseageddon/

Life & Other

• Ctrl-Alt-Delete: Planned Obsolescence of Old Coders.
  https://onezero.medium.com/ctrl-alt-delete-the-planned-obsolescence-of-old-coders-9c5f440ee68

• Privacy is Just the First Step - the Goal is Data Ownership.
  https://thetoolsweneed.com/privacy-is-just-the-first-step-the-goal-is-data-ownership/

• Picture shows anti ageing drugs really DO work.
  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-6880899/Fascinating-picture-shows-anti-ageing-drugs-really-work.html

• Second Order Thinking -- What Smart People Use to Outperform.
  https://fs.blog/2016/04/second-order-thinking/

• Introducing Warp - 1.1.1.1 - Fixing Mobile Internet Performance and Security - Better VPN.
  https://blog.cloudflare.com/1111-warp-better-vpn/

• I tried creating web browser and Google blocked me.
  https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked-my-browser/

• Facebook secretly lobbied in favour of Article 13 of undesired EU copyright directive.
  http://hacknews.eu/2019/04/02/facebook-secretly-lobbied-in-favour-of-article-13-of-undesired-eu-copyright-directive/

• Serenity: New (x86) UNIX-like Operating System.
  https://www.osnews.com/story/129716/serenity-a-new-unix-like-operating-system/
  https://github.com/awesomekling/serenity
  https://youtu.be/hE52D-zbX3g

• Microsoft announces it will shut down ebook program and confiscate its customers libraries.
  https://boingboing.net/2019/04/02/burning-libraries.html

• Real Open Source - User Mindset.
  https://medium.com/@MartinCracauer/real-open-source-the-user-mindset-6c1c7bf4695b

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

Never be satisfied, that's the way you'll fall short. See past yourself.

A quote that may seem would lead to pessimism but that I think is about the contrary. I guess it goes along with the following:

Does the tournament make sense as you keep going?

or again:

There's no such thing as perfection.

It's not the end goal that matters, it's the path, the adventure on the way, the progress, the intention. Sometimes it has boundaries, sometimes it doesn't. However if you're satisfied with the status quo you'll stop your journey short.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Maddog history review
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZMA3Ge144U

  Sort of old (a year) but I like how maddog reviews UNIX history and his perspective on it. The informal format helps a lot. It's similar to the talk he gave at FOSDEM last February (https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/keynote_fifty_years_unix/). Unfortunately filmed by the same "annoying" guy from this thread however in this video he's more laxed.

• VMS vs UNIX
  http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/vms_vs_unix.html

  I like the introduction with old maps of ARPANET where you can see the machines and institutions that ran them. It then continues with a great chart comparison of VMS and UNIX both history and technology wise.

• x86 vs UNIX server
  http://mo.bi/2019/03/29/x86-versus-unix-servers/

  Another fighting round. What's better, a world of closed vendors optimizing for their operating system to fit exactly a piece of hardware or the open source Unix-like OS running on the well known x86 architecture. A fascinating article (and maybe also an indirect publicity for the Huawei server they mention at the end).

• On the desktop
  http://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2019/3/4_Pop!_OS__The_first_real_Linux_desktop.html

  An opinion pieces on the old topic of "Why Linux isn't that great on the desktop". This one focuses on the state of the desktop for developers that also need to access some specific "cloud" functionalities. It ends with a push for Pop, which is another UI over Ubuntu.

• Linux Lite 4.4.
  https://betanews.com/2019/03/31/linux-lite-44/

  Remember the days of PuppyLinux, Knoppix, Slax, DSL, Tiny Core Linux, Slitaz (oh I love that one) well there's a new one in town that I discovered and it's called Linux Lite (But apparently from the look of it it doesn't seem so light). Already at its version 4.4

• Firmware on Ubuntu
  https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/03/lvfs-linux-firmware-service-success

  Distributing binary blobs is a mess, welcoming more of this, we now have a full system in place to make this easier. Hey, at least there's going to be easy download of drivers and their updates. Things might get smooth for out of the shelf installs.

• Tutorials
  http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Teaching/Unix/index.html
  https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~kevin/unix-tutorial/toc.html

  Add those to our ever growing list of great Unix beginner tutorials.

• Neuroimaging, unix is everywhere
  https://neurohackweek.github.io/advancedunix/01-first-part/

  I just love seeing application of things, makers, especially with open resources. This link is similar to the previous one, as in it's also a tutorial/workshop on Unix basis but with an emphasis on its usage in the neuroimaging world.

• Remember the series on /proc
  http://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2018/217/Exploring-proc

  Yes, we've had lots of content on proc, see "top, proc, containers, and scratch" in 97, and it's not over yet. If you didn't get it the first time you'll get it the second time.

• Building a machine from scratches
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2019/04/03/silent-fanless-freebsd-server-redundant-backup/

  Vermaden does an excellent job at describing the steps he took to build this fanless FreeBSD server. It's impressive the length of details he go through and the benchmarks he has gathered.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

• Solaris - Network Configuration in SMF.
  http://blog.moellenkamp.org/archives/57-Network-configuration-in-SMF.html

• FreeBSD Mastery: Jails.
  https://mwl.io/nonfiction/os#fmjail
  https://i0.wp.com/mwl.io/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/fmjail-front-cover-2018-03-22.jpg?resize=200%2C300&ssl=1

• Security Hole on OpenBSD in VMD/VMM.
  https://twitter.com/m00nbsd/status/1109208948429725697

• FreeBSD 11.3-RELEASE to be released on 2019/07/09.
  https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.3R/schedule.html

• Coder's Bookshelf Humble Book Bundle.
  https://www.humblebundle.com/books/coders-bookshelf-books
  https://twitter.com/nostarch/status/1110240392363024384
  https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D2hdwIEWoAAjGmF.png

• FreeBSD nsysctl Tutorial.
  https://alfix.gitlab.io/bsd/2019/02/19/nsysctl-tutorial.html

• FreeBSD deskutils/sysctlview Updated to 1.0.
  https://gitlab.com/alfix/sysctlview
  https://twitter.com/alfsiciliano/status/1111469513516728320
  https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=236866

• OpenBSD in Stereo with Linux VFIO.
  https://jcs.org/2018/11/12/vfio

• Let's Encrypt with Dehydrated on FreeBSD.
  https://chargen.one/high5/lets-encrypt-with-dehydrated-on-freebsd

• DTrace QuickStart.
  http://www.tablespace.net/quicksheet/dtrace-quickstart.html

• Sun Microsystems Business Plan.
  https://www.khoslaventures.com/wp-content/uploads/SunMicrosystem_bus_plan.pdf

• The ping.gg - world's simplest monitoring service.
  https://ping.gg/

• FreeBSD 12.0 VNET Jail Using bridge/epair and PF.
  https://yom.iaelu.net/2019/03/freebsd-12-vnet-jail-using-bridge-epair-and-pf.html

• Illumos Port of wireguard-go.
  https://github.com/jclulow/wireguard-go-illumos-wip

• The tilde.institute of OpenBSD Education.
  https://tilde.institute/

• OpenBSD on CloudSigma - Easy Installation with Wizard Menu.
  https://dev.to/nabbisen/openbsd-on-cloudsigma---wizards-easy-installation-4k91

• Obtaining Active-Passive ProxySQL on FreeBSD.
  https://blog.pythian.com/obtaining-an-active-passive-proxysql-on-freebsd/

• Stupid ZFS Tricks - Expanding RAIDZ.
  https://medium.com/@MartinCracauer/stupid-zfs-tricks-expanding-zraid-79e716d41fad

• SoloBSD 19.03-STABLE based on HardenedBSD 1200058.4 Available.
  https://www.solobsd.org/index.php/2019/03/26/solobsd-19-03-stable/
  https://github.com/HardenedBSD/hardenedBSD-stable/releases/tag/HardenedBSD-12-STABLE-v1200058.4

• OpenBSD as Full Featured NAS.
  https://www.vincentdelft.be/static/post/post_20190203/openbsd-as-nas.pdf

• BSD Now 291 - Storage Changes Software.
  https://www.bsdnow.tv/291

• FreeNAS 11.2-U3 Available.
  https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/library/freenas-11-2-u3/

• Goal Services in SMF on Solaris 11.4.
  http://blog.moellenkamp.org/archives/59-Goal-services-in-Solaris-11.4.html

• FreeBSD Status Report 2018 Q4 is Available.
  https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2018-09-2018-12.html

• Quake 1 and Quake 2 for ... AIX.
  https://twitter.com/astr0baby/status/1112100008818548736
  ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/aix/freeSoftware/games/

• How to Use NetBSD on Raspberry Pi.
  https://opensource.com/article/19/3/netbsd-raspberry-pi

• Using OpenBSD Router with AT&T U-Verse.
  https://jcs.org/2019/03/21/uverse

• How I Created My First FreeBSD Port.
  https://aikchar.dev/blog/how-i-created-my-first-freebsd-port.html

• Interim Support Guarantee for FreeBSD 12.
  https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2019-April/001872.html

Hardware

• Pinebook - The $100 Laptop.
  https://onecutreviews.com/2019/03/25/the-100-laptop/

Life & Other

• How to Deliver Constructive Feedback in Difficult Situations.
  https://medium.dave-bailey.com/the-essential-guide-to-difficult-conversations-41f736e63ccf

• Oracle Swings Axe on Cloud Infrastructure Corps Amid Possible Bloodbath at Big Red.
  https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/25/oracle_headcount_cut/

• IBM purged 'grey hairs' and 'old heads' as it launched 'Millennial Corps' - lawsuit.
  https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/03/27/ibm-purged-gray-hairs-and-old-heads-as-it-launched-millennial-corps-lawsuit/

• FreeCS is free reimplementation of Counter-Strike 1.5 game.
  https://sourceforge.net/projects/freecs-1-5/files/
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FreeCS-Open-Counter-Strike

• Open Source Game Clones.
  https://osgameclones.com/

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. - Richard Feynman

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Blinking carburant
  https://lwn.net/Articles/317922/

  Much talk and fanciness over a blinking cursor to save power consumptions.

• Follow up on touchpad
  https://bill.harding.blog/2019/03/25/linux-touchpad-like-a-macbook-progress-and-a-call-for-help/
  https://github.com/Coffee2CodeNL/gebaar-libinput
  https://mouseaccuracy.com/

  I have been thinking of writing a post on the forums about this but apparently I couldn't manage to pull it off yet. So for the moment it's going to be a series in the newsletter. All about touchpads on X11 and in Wayland compositors, how it's still tricky in 2019 to configure them properly. A reminder of issue 116 "Free Software UI", where too many configurations and possibilities are more of a burden for accessibility and usability. See also "Pushing ideas" in issue 84.

• hwdb
  https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/hwdb.html
  https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-hwdb.html

  Udev is fantastic, it allows for a lot of flexibility when it comes to doing custom configuration and handling of devices.

• The Olive video editor
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AvfMMjHX-M
  https://www.olivevideoeditor.org/

  A very modern video editor I'm looking forward to try out asap. See also "Free and open source softwares for video and audio" in 112.

• Fuchsia OS
  https://bzdww.com/article/163937/

  It's not Unix but it has some scent of it all through, at least as an upgrade with containerization in mind. Lots of great technology coming together in the OS, new ideas are always refreshing.

• Hello there!
  http://ツ-ツ.com/
  http://subgenius.com/bigfist/eyes/gallery.html
  https://please.do.not.disturb.me/

  Some low quality stuffs unrelated to Unix, but hey, I've ran out of time this week to put the newsletter together.

• How it's made
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1Tmtd51clI

  Ever wondered how USB3 type-c are made? This is how, enjoy!

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

• OmniOS Community Edition r151028t/r151026at/r151022cr Available.
  https://omniosce.org/article/028t-026at-022cr

• Ghost in the Shell - Part 4.
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2019/03/15/ghost-in-the-shell-part-4/

• MATE 1.22 Released.
  https://mate-desktop.org/blog/2019-03-18-mate-1-22-released/

• LPAR2RRD 6.02 Available.
  https://www.lpar2rrd.com/note600.htm?4.6.23

• FreeBSD Desktop - Part 18 - Global Dashboard.
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2019/03/20/freebsd-desktop-part-18-global-dashboard/

• PuTTY 0.71 Released.
  https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/changes.html

• One click install and deploy FreeBSD.
  https://www.digitalocean.com/products/linux-distribution/freebsd/

• LLVM 8.0.0 Released.
  https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-announce/2019-March/000082.html

• FreeBSD adds NVMe support to arm64 GENERIC kernel.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=345408

• BSD Now 290 - Timestamped Notes.
  https://www.bsdnow.tv/290

• OpenRsync is a FREE easy to use implementation of the rsync program.
  https://www.openrsync.org/

• In Other BSDs for 2019/03/23.
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/03/23/22671.html

• Oracle kills @OracleSPARC and @OracleSolaris Twitter accounts. Follow @SolarisUpdate instead.
  https://twitter.com/OracleSolaris/status/1109099516291100673
  https://twitter.com/OracleSPARC/status/1109103107647201280
  https://twitter.com/SolarisUpdate

• ZFS Encryption is still under development (as of March 2019). On FreeBSD just use GELI encrypted setup for now.
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/ZFSEncryptionNotReady

• OpenBSD adds audio on both speakers on Huawei Matebook X.
  https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=155343827506953&w=2

• Using Syncthing between OSX Laptop and FreeBSD Server.
  https://dan.langille.org/2019/03/24/using-syncthing-between-my-osx-laptop-and-my-freebsd-server/

• Developing WireGuard for NetBSD.
  https://github.com/ozaki-r/netbsd-src/tree/wireguard

• Curseradio - Command Line Radio Player.
  https://github.com/chronitis/curseradio

• Pretty PuTTY - Make PuTTY pretty and apply modern PuTTY settings.
  https://github.com/jacktrocinski/pretty-putty

• CBSD Got cloud-init Support.
  https://www.bsdstore.ru/en/12.0.x/wf_bhyve_cloudinit_ssi.html

• The zrepl 0.1.0-rc4 Available.
  https://github.com/zrepl/zrepl/releases/tag/v0.1.0-rc4

• FreeBSD bhyve got Snapshot Save and Restore Feature.
  https://reviews.freebsd.org/D19495

• OpenBSD RAID 10 Howto.
  https://pluspora.com/posts/143322f02e8901370384005056264835

Hardware

• AMD is Free from SPOLIER security exploit
  https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/faq/pa-240

• Exclusive Look at Original Apple Red iPhone M68 Prototype.
  https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/19/18263844/apple-iphone-prototype-m68-original-development-board-red

• Creating Illumos Packages for Tribblix.
  https://ptribble.blogspot.com/2019/03/creating-illumos-packages-for-tribblix.html

• BSD Router Project 1.92 Available. Router distribution based on FreeBSD with FFRouting and Bird.
  https://sourceforge.net/projects/bsdrp/files/BSD_Router_Project/1.92/

• Nginx Quick Reference. These notes describes how to improve Nginx performance security and other important things.
  https://github.com/trimstray/nginx-quick-reference

Life & Other

• Even tech workers can’t afford to buy homes in San Francisco.
  https://www.recode.net/2019/3/19/18256378/tech-worker-afford-buy-homes-san-francisco-facebook-google-uber-lyft-housing-crisis-programmers

• Why is it always Polish women and foreign men, not the other way around?
  http://streetwise.pl/2018/07/13/why-is-it-always-polish-women-and-foreign-men-not-the-other-way-around/

• Firefox 66.0 Released.
  https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/66.0/releasenotes/

• Firefox Aims to Reduce Your Online Annoyances.
  https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/03/19/todays-firefox-aims-to-reduce-your-online-annoyances/

• Google Announces Stadia - Game Streaming Service.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/14105/google-announces-stadia-a-game-streaming-service

• Google hit with €1.5 billion fine from EU over advertising.
  https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47639228

• Oracle Swings the Layoff Axe and Clear Cuts Teams of Engineers.
  https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/oracle-swings-the-layoff-axe-and-clearcuts-teams-of-engineers

• Oracle Quietly Held Round of Layoffs This Week.
  https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-layoffs-2019-3?IR=T

• JavaScript Free Frontend.
  https://dev.to/winduptoy/a-javascript-free-frontend-2d3e

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

A cliched reiteration of issue 13:

Show me how you spend your day and I'll tell you what you care about.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• SSH as a hierarchy
  https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/usr.bin/ssh/PROTOCOL.certkeys?annotate=HEAD
  https://github.com/uber/pam-ussh

  Additional information and links in continuation with "A how to on OpenSSH" of issue 99. Props to the OpenBSD team for making such wonderful documents and to maze for sharing these links with me.

• Hardened Linux
  https://hardenedlinux.github.io/

  A continuation on the links from "Memory safety on Linux" in 110, this is a project regrouping security experts that want to demonstrate and elevate the security of the Linux kernel by taking the side of the offensive.

• Reverse engineering ELF
  https://medium.com/sector443/python-for-reverse-engineering-1-elf-binaries-e31e92c33732
  https://ghidra-sre.org/

  It's cool to build your own toolset for reverse engineering and debugging. It's even cooler to share it with the world, maybe a bit suspicious when it's coming from the USA NSA but still cool. You can review all the ELF, PLT and GOT, entries we've had before for more info.

• Beginners tutorial
  https://ryanstutorials.net/

  A fantastic blog that deals with many introductory topics to Unix. Add it to your list of material to point friends or students that are starting out.

• The definitive strace guide
  https://nanxiao.gitbooks.io/strace-little-book/content/

  A learn by example mini-book going over most of the facilities provided by strace. There's a lot to learn between the lines.

• Terminal prevalence
  https://www.lucasfcosta.com/2019/02/10/terminal-guide-2019.html

  With the same mindset as "life is not a t43" in issue 5 or "Unix as an IDE" in 62, we discuss again terminal interfaces, their utilities in these days and ages. Why are they still relevant.

• grep with /dev/null
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/GrepDevNull

  Glob matching can be a mess and such tricks emerge from this. Beware of expectations.

• Libinput and Synaptics driver
  https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6-RC1/doc/man/man4/synaptics.4.xhtml
  https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/configuration.html
  https://github.com/bulletmark/libinput-gestures
  https://github.com/iberianpig/fusuma
  https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/input/input.txt

  Synaptics is getting deprecated, it's good to learn what features it had and then match it against libinput. It's impressive how much you can configure and what's doable as a configuration nob from a GUI. I'd love to see a tutorial going step by step with images on how to set the touchpad properly, maybe I'll write it myself.

• Normalization of unicode
  https://github.com/begriffs/utofu
  https://withblue.ink/2019/03/11/why-you-need-to-normalize-unicode-strings.html

  We've had so many entries in the newsletter related to unicode "Unicode" in 116, "Plain text" in 57, "Unicode" in 72, even "Keeping thieves away" in 69 and "XIM and unicode" in 68. These links are simply a reminder that text is not really universal if we don't pay attention to use the right encoding everywhere.

• Microkernel and history
  https://tedium.co/2019/02/28/ibm-workplace-os-taligent-history/

  See also the link below by vermaden "Microkernel Failure". Yet another example of "worse is better", basically anything that works and is usable will prevail. You can be as idealist as you want, in the end, what works works.

• Social networking in 2011
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpB5q31pK2I

  We've come a long way since 2011, the world has moved in the direction portrayed in this talk even more. Things are serious and the discussions we've been having the past 3 years are at a peak.
  Just take a look at "What the Hell is Going On? Effects of Information Abundance." in this issue or "Keeping time and date (11)" of issue 116 to have an overview.

• The trouble with human
  http://jasonzweig.com/uploads/11.00Neuroeconomics.pdf

  An example of the issues with overrationality. The name of an author comes to mind, a fellow countryman, that specializes in statistics and the topic of improbability.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

• Proper VirtualBox Shared Folders support for FreeBSD guests.
  https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/pull/10717

• FreeBSD 12.0 ZFS AMIs Now Available.
  http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2019-02-16-FreeBSD-ZFS-AMIs-now-available.html

• Booting FreeBSD now more secure with loader capable of authenticating/verifying kernel integrity with UEFI metadata.
  https://twitter.com/Semihalf/status/1105052630810853376
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=344840

• How tracking storage issue lead to software change. NFS Ganesha fully ported to FreeBSD system.
  https://news.gandi.net/en/2019/03/tracking-a-storage-issue-led-to-software-change/
  https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/ports.cgi?query=nfs-ganesha

• FreeBSD backported (MFC) their Address Space Randomization (ASR) implementation to 12-STABLE.
  https://twitter.com/lattera/status/1105518473952849923
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=345067

• BSD Now 289 - Microkernel Failure.
  https://www.bsdnow.tv/289

• Thinkpad X1 Carbon 6 with OpenBSD.
  https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/t6x1c

• The FreeBSD's powerd++ 0.4.1 Power Daemon Released.
  <https://github.com/lonkamikaze/powerdxx/releases/tag/0.4.1 >

• FreeBSD - Unix I Always Wanted.
  https://kissitconsulting.com/blog/post/freebsd-the-linux-i-always-wanted

• In Other BSDs for 2019/03/16.
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/03/16/22653.html

• Falling in Love with OpenBSD Again.
  https://functionallyparanoid.com/2019/03/13/well-its-been-a-while-falling-in-love-with-openbsd-again/

• HardenedBSD Foundation 2019 Meeting Minutes.
  https://hardenedbsd.org/article/shawn-webb/2019-03-16/hardenedbsd-foundation-2019-meeting-minutes

• Moving Back to Lighttpd (from NGINX).
  https://chargen.one/high5/moving-back-to-lighttpd

Hardware

• Toshiba HDD Roadmap: SMR/MAMR/TDMR/HAMR Tecnologies.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/14077/toshiba-hdd-roadmap-smr-mamr-tdmr-and-hamr

• Google quietly added DuckDuckGo as search engine option for Chrome.
  https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/13/google-has-quietly-added-duckduckgo-as-a-search-engine-option-for-chrome-users-in-60-markets/

• Gamer uses eight (8!) 3DFX Voodoo2 GPUs to play Half-Life game. Actually four (4) Quantum3D Obsidian 2 200SBi cards - each card contains two (2) Voodoo2 chips.
  https://www.overclock3d.net/gfx/articles/2019/03/12051228136s.jpg
  https://www.overclock3d.net/news/software/retro_pc_gamer_uses_eight_3dfx_voodoo_2_gpus_to_play_half-life/1

• ASRock DeskMini 310 Mini PC Review - Cost Effective Mini-STX Platform.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/14089/asrock-deskmini-310-review

• ASUS PRIME N4000T Launched.
  https://www.fanlesstech.com/2019/03/asus-prime-n4000t-launched.html

• Chinese Enthusiasts Make and Fit Modern Motherboards in Classic ThinkPads.
  https://boingboing.net/2019/03/17/demand-signals-r-us.html

• ThinkPad X210.
  https://geoff.greer.fm/2019/03/04/thinkpad-x210/

Life & Other

• Future You Masturbation.
  https://www.howitactuallyworks.com/archives/future_you_masturbation.html

• What the Hell is Going On? Effects of Information Abundance.
  https://www.perell.com/blog/what-the-hell-is-going-on

• Firefox Send - Free File Transfers while Keeping your Personal Information Private.
  https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/03/12/introducing-firefox-send-providing-free-file-transfers-while-keeping-your-personal-information-private/

• Look Back at the History of Firefox.
  https://itsfoss.com/history-of-firefox/

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

In today's world what people say about things is more important than what they really are. Truth is now about whatever is more popular. Like it or not.

Thought provoking, isn't it?
What can we do about it.
Let's fight information overload!

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Distributed systems
  http://josuah.net/blog/2019-01-10-distributed-system-overview.md

  A beautiful piece of ASCII art by josuah to help you visualize the components required to build a full fledge distributed system.

• Distributed permissions
  https://stebalien.com/blog/dracl-thesis/static/thesis.pdf

  Building a distributed system for sharing content that respects our privacy, that's a big endeavour. Also related to "Keeping time and date (11)" in issue 116 and the digital identity trend and discussions we've seen develop the past few years.

• No reboot
  https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/226872/how-to-shrink-root-filesystem-without-booting-a-livecd/
  https://github.com/marcan/takeover.sh

  Ready to take it to the hardcore level, ready to risk it all, then this is the kind of thing that will grind your gears. Reboot is for sissies.

• BSDs and their love for signal innovation
  http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1411.0/03374.html
  http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=commit;h=27d2c738

  Why doesn't Linux implement the same behavior for SIGINFO as what the BSDs do. We are soon faced with the old cathedral vs bazaar and our dear friend the terminal line discipline.

• We had that conversation on irc
  https://dwheeler.com/essays/fixing-unix-linux-filenames.html
  https://linux.die.net/man/1/detox

  We had this talk before on irc and it was also in the newsletter too (Review "Let us never speak of it again" in issue 64). So here's an article (quite a long one) where the author proposes a solution.

• Removing a.out
  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=eac616557050737a8d6ef6fe0322d0980ff0ffde

  With the availability of ELF everywhere a.out is finally being marked as expired in the Linux kernel.

• Random enough
  https://darakian.github.io/2019/02/17/on-java-securerandom.html
  https://hackaday.com/2015/06/29/true-random-number-generator-for-a-true-hacker/

  Remember "Lavarand" from 93, there is here yet another source of randomness you could possibly use. And another post about blocking issues caused by randomness.

• Yubikey ssh auth
  http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20190302235509

  This is a repetition of "2FA using a USB" in our very first issue, a guide the use a Yubikey as an HSM device to store ssh keys and use them for authentication.

• Writing a book on Unix
  https://joecmarshall.com/posts/book-writing-environment/

  Unix can be used as an IDE but also as a full fledged book editor. This isn't the best environment to do this, as it requires some technical knowledge to setup but it's interesting to put together.

• Font rendering
  https://pandasauce.org/post/linux-fonts/
  https://mobile.twitter.com/tapbot_paul/status/1004361530018852864
  http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/

  We're back to the topic of fonts on Unix. So far we've covered so much, from font fallback and unicode, from specific engines tricks, to the actual stack and font rendering, to designing a font and custom typefaces, to creating fonts that will cover languages, to choosing the right typography, to making art with text, and more. This time we attack the subjective perspective, which fonts look good and what are the best techniques to apply. Be aware that opinions differ on the matter.

• Big words and new licenses
  https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/03/09/Deprecation-Notice.html

  Another jump into the legal world this week, a popular topic of discussion. You might already have caught the train or maybe not. Take this as a reminder. Do you think this license is ambiguous? Do you think MIT and BSD deserve to be deprecated (See also "Signals for IPC? NO!" in 81).

• Extra because we've already followed this stuff before
  https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-winding-down/
  http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9971-a-partial-defense-of-debian

  Way back, recall when we had multiple issues about that "Nagging about Debian" in 64, that "More on Debian ranting" in 65, "APT and https" in 60, "APT getting it again" and "Debian systemd maintainer will not maintain systemd anymore" in 111. Well folks, there's more this week, the internet couldn't leave Debian alone.

Thoughts

Risk means more things can happen than will happen - Elroy Dimson

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Emulate the right way on NetBSD
  http://polprog.net/blog/netbsd-hax/
  https://github.com/intel/haxm

  The quest to porting Intel hardare acceleration to NetBSD, the world of VM opens up.

• A follow up on this QNX Desktop
  https://membarrier.wordpress.com/2019/03/03/screenshot-galore/

  Everything seems to have fallen into place to build a desktop. There's even an hypervisor!

• Kernel headers
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-In-Kernel-Headers-Proc
  https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/1/18/975
  https://www.tecmint.com/remove-old-kernel-in-debian-and-ubuntu/

  If you need to build kernel modules you need those, but then when you upgrade kernel you have to get the new headers with it. It can get messy to clean. The idea brought up about using /proc is attractive however it has its own issues.

• Pipelines
  https://nanxiao.me/en/what-you-need-may-be-pipeline-unix-commands-only/
  http://www.gibney.de/the_output_of_linux_pipes_can_be_indeter
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/ShellPipelineIndeterminate

  When simplicity is key to solve big problems instead of relying on complex spidery solutions. But the same terseness may lead to confusion in rare cases. It's fun to run through the problem in the second link by trying out mixing builtin echo with non-builtin.

• OCaml for Unix
  https://ocaml.github.io/ocamlunix/index.html
  https://ocaml.github.io/ocamlunix/ocamlunix.pdf

  We see a lot of system programming in Go, Rust, even NodeJS these days (maybe we should share those too), but not a lot of OCaml.

• A quick history with dramatic music
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuHpABL46a8
  https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/keynote_fifty_years_unix/

  Going over the history of Unix never gets old, add some drama music in the background, lots of events, wars, and you got a full movie.

• Worse is better, or give me back that Unix haters handbook
  http://yosefk.com/blog/what-worse-is-better-vs-the-right-thing-is-really-about.html

  Why things get replaced in the market, why "worse is better", why some argue in opposite directions, what does this have to do with Unix. The author draws in the opinion piece a discussion on world views and how it affects the way we handle building things.

• SRP
  http://srp.stanford.edu/whatisit.html
  https://bert-hubert.blogspot.com/2012/02/on-srp-some-implementation-notes-and.html
  https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/8245/why-is-srp-not-widely-used
  https://matthewarcus.wordpress.com/2014/05/10/srp-in-openssl/
  https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-announce&m=140711256104278

  SRP is a nice protocol for secure exchange and verification of passwords, however it hasn't been widely adopted. In the links of this entry you'll understand a bit why and see that it has even been pushed out of libressl for instance. Zero knowledge proofs tie well with the topic of differential privacy (see issue 45).

• Dropping Linux
  https://dirkriehle.com/2019/01/15/why-did-munich-drop-linux-and-libreoffice-for-microsoft-windows-and-office/
  https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/27/lower_saxony_to_dump_linux/
  https://dirkriehle.com/2019/01/16/should-the-public-sector-consider-open-source-only-for-new-purchases/

  In the same vibe as the previous two sections, things get replaced for different reasons. All the arguments about worse and better are nil in face of public needs and things like habits.

• User perspective
  https://linuxmender.wordpress.com/2016/03/06/the-user-perspective/

  The conundrum of having something the most used not being maintained by the most competent possible contributors. "Taking is easy and talking is cheap".

• Extra on bots
  https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/white-paper/akamai-scrapers-and-bot-series-managing-professional-bots-white-paper.pdf
  https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d33vpq/inside-the-wild-world-of-sneaker-buying-bots

  With all the talk about fake internet this white paper does a good job at portraying the different methods used by bot programmers to do what they do best.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

• FreeBSD implements parallel mounting for ZFS filesystem.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=344569

• FreeBSD imported OpenSSL 1.1.1b into base system.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=344602

• Almost PHP 7.2 Composer with OpenBSD 6.4.
  https://dev.to/nabbisen/almost-php-72-composer-with-openbsd-64-100o

• Google Summer of Code - FreeBSD - Foundation of the Internet.
  https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/organizations/6583387272249344/

• Top 10 most popular Docker images each contain at least 30 vulnerabilities.
  https://snyk.io/blog/top-ten-most-popular-docker-images-each-contain-at-least-30-vulnerabilities/

• The pfSense 2.5.0 moving to FreeBSD 12.
  https://forum.netgate.com/topic/140586/heads-up-snapshots-moving-to-pfsense-2-5-0-on-freebsd-12-expect-initial-instability

• FreeNAS 11.2-U2.1 Available.
  https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/library/freenas-11-2-u2-1/

• BSD Now 287 - rc.d in NetBSD
  https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/129591/rc-d-in-netbsd-bsd-now-287/

• OPNsense 19.1.2 Released.
  https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=11849.0

• GhostBSD: Solid Linux Like Open Source Alternative.
  https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/GhostBSD-A-Solid-Linux-Like-Open-Source-Alternative-85859.html

• OmniOS Community Edition r151028q/r151026aq/r151022co Available.
  https://omniosce.org/article/028q-026aq-022co

• Solaris 11.4 - Filesystem Latencies with fsstat.
  http://blog.moellenkamp.org/archives/36-Filesystem-latencies-with-fsstat..html

• Solaris 11.4 - Latency Distribution with iostat.
  http://blog.moellenkamp.org/archives/34-Latency-distribution-with-iostat.html

• Building illumos-gate on AWS (2019 version).
  https://ptribble.blogspot.com/2019/02/building-illumos-gate-on-aws-2019.html

• NetBSD Foundation participating in Google Summer of Code 2019.
  https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/the_netbsd_foundation_participating_in

• OpenZFS Leadership Meeting - 2019/02/26.
  https://youtu.be/EXstK9ckcZQ

• Some Facts about why OpenBSD Rocks.
  https://why-openbsd.rocks/fact/

• Rich sh (POSIX shell) Tricks.
  http://www.etalabs.net/sh_tricks.html

• Looking at NetBSD from OpenBSD user perspective.
  https://www.tumfatig.net/20190301/looking-at-netbsd-from-an-openbsd-user-perspective/

• DTrace %Y print format with nanoseconds on Solaris 11.4.SRU6.
  https://milek.blogspot.com/2019/03/dtrace-y-print-format-with-nanoseconds.html?m=1

• In Other BSDs for 2019/03/02.
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/03/02/22593.html

• Tribblix - minimal plus pkgsrc.
  https://ptribble.blogspot.com/2018/07/tribblix-minimal-plus-pkgsrc.html

• LLDB from trunk is running on NetBSD once again.
  https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/lldb_from_trunk_is_running

• My FVWM BSD Desktop.
  https://www.unitedbsd.com/d/35-my-fvwm-bsd-desktop

Hardware

• Supermicro M11SDV-8C-LN4F with AMD EPYC 3251 8C/16T 50W Mini-ITX Review.
  https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-m11sdv-8c-ln4f-review-amd-epyc-3251-mitx-platform/

• AMD Athlon 240GE/220GE Review - Retaking Low Ground.
  https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-athlon-220ge-240ge-vega-cpu,5988.html

• USB
  https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/usb-3-2-is-going-to-make-the-current-usb-branding-even-worse/

• Lenovo 595 Gram Portable Display - ThinkVision M14 USB-C Monitor.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/14034/lenovo-unveils-thinkvision-m14-usbc-monitor-at-mwc-2019

• Chuwi To Launch Core M Powered AeroBook.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/14038/chuwi-to-launch-core-m-powered-aerobook-and-ubook-models
  <https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14038/ChuwiAerobook_678x452.jpg">

• Supermicro A2SDi-8C+-HLN4F with Intel Atom C3758 Review.
  https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-a2sdi-8c_-hln4f-review/

• No, ARM hasn't lost to X86... not yet.
  https://geektillithertz.com/wordpress/index.php/2019/02/27/no-arm-hasnt-lost-to-x86-not-yet/

• AMD Celebrating 50 Years of Innovation.
  https://www.amd.com/en/events/50th-anniversary

• AMD Ryzen V1000 and EPYC 3000 at Embedded World 2019.
  https://www.servethehome.com/amd-ryzen-v1000-and-epyc-3000-at-embedded-world-2019/

Life & Other

• Books I Recommend.
  https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/books/

• Senator Portantino Reintroduces SB 328 Landmark Bill on School Start Time.
  https://sd25.senate.ca.gov/news/2019-02-19/senator-portantino-reintroduces-sb-328-landmark-bill-school-start-time

• Top 10 Design Flaws in Human Body.
  https://getpocket.com/explore/item/top-10-design-flaws-in-the-human-body

• We Need Chrome No More.
  https://redalemeden.com/blog/2019/we-need-chrome-no-more

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

“I am not a pessimist but I am a realist” - Always coming from the pessimist in the room

I'm reviewing old articles on my blog and I'm surprised by how some ideas are even more true today. We live in a society that is increasingly attached to realism, that cannot take metaphors, abstract topics, and ambiguity. Maybe this is an idea worth sharing for those struggling out there.

https://venam.nixers.net/blog/psychology/2017/05/23/deliberate-positive-illusion.html

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Keeping time and date (11)
  https://venam.nixers.net/blog/psychology/2019/03/01/internet-time.html

  This is the concluding article of the time and date series. A reminder that time is subjective, that even though we can accurately calculate it we still feel it differently. Does this matter?

• Thiking in Csh, struggling like Csh
  http://blog.obligd.com/posts/the-joy-in-csh-and-vi.html

  A thought article praising the man behind a lot of good tech stil in use today. Softwares are like sysiphus, constantly fighting to stay relevant and kept alive. See also "Csh-ism" in 6.

• Patents
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/780078/e3ed9f6202d4b116/
  https://www.eff.org/effector/32/3
  https://letsknowthings.com/episode142/

  Enter into the legal sphere this week. We're discussing patents, derivative works, patent exhaustion, and patent trolls.

• Fear
  https://linux.co.uk/pages/for-enterprises/fear-uncertainty-and-doubt/

  FUD is a term that is thrown around a lot these days. This piece does a great job at demystifying this term.

• Viruses !
  https://news.sophos.com/en-us/2015/03/26/dont-believe-these-four-myths-about-linux-security/
  https://www.unixmen.com/meet-linux-viruses/
  https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Linuxvirus

  These articles will probably be read as cliché or too oldish thinking from the people that are reading this newsletter however I've chose to share them for the single reason that this is the mindset that a lot of persons still have. I kind of like how the mechanism of each of these malware is explained.

• DoH implementation
  https://c-skills.github.io/2019/02/11/harddns.html

  The author of a DoH client goes over the current state of efficiency for each providers of DoH.

• Mosh
  https://mosh.org/
  http://linuxpitstop.com/ssh-vs-mosh/
  https://www.unixmen.com/mosh-an-alternative-to-ssh/

  I'm surprised we haven't mentioned mosh even once in this newsletter. Those should cover the basic for those who are not accustomed to mosh.

• linux-libre
  https://www.fsfla.org/ikiwiki/selibre/linux-libre/
  https://www.parabola.nu/

  Want more than just a "Virtual Stallman" (issue 48) but not a full Libre laptop (issue 72) well this is for you, there are many distributions following the libre ethic. Parabola is one example of this.

• Linux boot
  https://manybutfinite.com/post/kernel-boot-process/

  The story of what happens when booting the Linux kernel and ending with a small comparison with Windows kernel boot.

• FuguIta
  https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=fuguita
  http://fuguita.org/index.php?Welcome

  It's rare to see live CD for BSDs, especially OpenBSD, a treat to have.

• Free Software UI
  https://ometer.com/preferences.html

  A memorable essay about how to design free software user-interfaces.

• Unicode
  https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html
  https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/font/index.htm

  A quite tedious (a bit old) review of everything related to how to write characters in all languages and standards, see also "Unicode" in 72, "XIM and unicode" in 68, "Plain text" in 57, and all the other links we've shared about fonts.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

• The Scanned versus Issued numbers for ZFS Scrubs (and Resilvers).
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSScrubScannedVsIssued

• The rclone is command line program to sync files and directories to and from many cloud services.
  https://rclone.org/

• Make ZFS Snapshots work with Samba as Windows Shadow Copies (VSS).
  https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs-auto-snapshot/wiki/Samba

• Dynamically linked binaries will be built as PIE on FreeBSD.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=344179

• Book of Secret Knowledge. Collection of awesome lists/manuals/blogs/hacks/one liners/cli/web tools and more.
  https://github.com/trimstray/the-book-of-secret-knowledge

• FreeBSD ZFS AMIs Now Available.
  http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2019-02-16-FreeBSD-ZFS-AMIs-now-available.html

• OpenBSD Desktop Using WindowMaker.
  https://www.tumfatig.net/20190215/an-openbsd-desktop-using-windowmaker/

• Wine Developers Release Hangover Alpha to Run Windows x86_64 Programs on 64-Bit ARM.
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Hangover-0.4-Alpha-Released

• Unix Architecture Diagrams - Modern FreeBSD.
  https://dspinellis.github.io/unix-architecture/arch.pdf

• Hacker News Discussion - Why don't companies use FreeBSD as much in production as Linux?
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12199394

• Pinboard tags for various BSDs. Social Bookmarking for Introverts.
  https://pinboard.in/t:freebsd/
  https://pinboard.in/t:openbsd/
  https://pinboard.in/t:netbsd/
  https://pinboard.in/t:dragonflybsd/
  https://pinboard.in/t:bsd/

• Bastille - Quickly Create and Manage FreeBSD Jails.
  https://bastillebsd.org/
  https://freshports.org/sysutils/bastille

• FreeBSD Starter Kit.
  https://github.com/BastilleBSD/starterkit

• FreeBSD nsysctl Tutorial.
  https://alfix.gitlab.io/bsd/2019/02/19/nsysctl-tutorial.html

• OpenBSD and iSCSI Part 1 - Target (Server).
  https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2019-02-21-iscsi-server.html

• OpenBSD and iSCSI Part 2 - Initiator (Client).
  https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2019-02-21-iscsi-client.html

• New Bhyve on FreeBSD vCPU limit will be 254.
  https://reviews.freebsd.org/D18815

• FreeBSD adds kernel support for Intel userspace protection keys feature on Skylake Xeons.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=344353

• Looking at MySQL 8 with PostgreSQL Goggles On.
  https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/looking-at-mysql-8-with-postgresql-goggles-on/

• FreeNAS 11.2-U2 Available.
  https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/library/freenas-11-2-u2/

• Free Algorithms book by Jeff Erickson.
  http://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/#book

• Mutatio is simple script to keep to date with OpenBSD updates and to download new snapshots.
  https://github.com/joedicastro/mutatio

• PXE Booting of FreeBSD Disk Image.
  https://blog.cochard.me/2019/02/pxe-booting-of-freebsd-disk-image.html

• XigmaNAS 11.2.0.4.6536 Available.
  https://sourceforge.net/projects/xigmanas/files/XigmaNAS-11.2.0.4/11.2.0.4.6536/

• XigmaNAS 12.0.0.4.6536 Available.
  https://sourceforge.net/projects/xigmanas/files/XigmaNAS-Beta/XigmaNAS-12.0.0.4.6536/

• HAXM in pkgsrc. HAXM is hardware-assisted virtualization engine (hypervisor).
  https://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-users/2019/02/13/msg022207.html
  https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/the_hardware_assisted_virtualization_challenge

• FreeBSD Imports Linux debugfs Support.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=344485

• FreeBSD Find Out All Installed Hard Disk Information.
  https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/freebsd-hard-disk-information/

• In Other BSDs for 2019/02/23
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/02/23/22569.html

• In Other BSDs for 2019/02/16.
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/02/16/22529.html

Hardware

• Western Digital RISC-V SweRV Core Design Released for Free.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/13964/western-digitals-riscv-swerv-core-released-for-free

• The Last POWER1 CPU on Mars is Dead.
  https://www.talospace.com/2019/02/the-last-power1-on-mars-is-dead.html

• Lasers vs. Microwaves - Billion Dollar Bet on the Future of Magnetic Storage. Seagate and Western Digital are pursuing rival technologies to push limits of hard disks.
  https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/lasers-vs-microwaves-the-billiondollar-bet-on-the-future-of-magnetic-storage

• AMD EPYC 3201 8-Core 30W Benchmarks Review and Milestone.
  https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-3201-8-core-benchmarks-review-and-milestone/

• Samsung 983 ZET (Z-NAND) SSD Review.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/13951/the-samsung-983-zet-znand-ssd-review/

• History - SUN Modular Data Center also known as Project Blackbox.
  https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20061018_blackbox/
  http://data-centers.in/portable-data-center/

• First Intel 4.0 GHz - Pentium Gold G5620 at Retail.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/13976/intels-first-40-ghz-pentium-pentium-gold-g5620-listed-at-retail

• Journey to Next Gen ARM Neoverse N1 and E1 Cores.
  https://www.servethehome.com/arm-neoverse-n-e-tech-day/

• AMD Hiring 10 More People for Their Open Source Linux Driver Team.
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Hiring-10-More-Open-Source

• Samsung Galaxy Fold - First Folding Smartphone.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/13981/samsung-announces-the-galaxy-fold-the-first-folding-smartphone

• Supermicro making push into high end gaming motherboards.
  https://www.zdnet.com/article/supermicro-making-a-push-into-high-end-gaming-motherboards/

• Intel believe that ARM Macs could come as soon as 2020.
  https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/02/21/intel-officials-believe-that-arm-macs-could-come-as-soon-as-2020

• Apple move to ARM based Macs creates uncertainty.
  https://www.axios.com/apple-macbook-arm-chips-ea93c38a-d40a-4873-8de9-7727999c588c.html

• Toshiba Collaborates with Showa Denko for MAMR 18 TB HDDs.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/13991/toshiba-collaborates-with-showa-denko-for-mamr-hdds

Life & Other

• Why I hate the weekends...
  http://www.cdahmedeh.net/blog/2017/4/15/why-i-hate-the-weekends

• Study finds no evidence cough medicines work with 1/7 patients experiencing negative side effects.
  https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/cough-medicine-work-help-persistent-symptoms-weeks-asthma-a8531286.html

• How We Lost Our Ability to Mend.
  https://dieworkwear.com/post/182126040434/how-we-lost-our-ability-to-mend

• Four day week trial - study finds lower stress but no cut in output.
  https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/feb/19/four-day-week-trial-study-finds-lower-stress-but-no-cut-in-output

• Google says the builtin microphone it never told Nest users about was 'never supposed to be a secret'.
  https://www.businessinsider.com/nest-microphone-was-never-supposed-to-be-a-secret-2019-2?IR=T

• How Jan and Martina Died.
  https://www.occrp.org/en/unfinishedlives/how-jan-and-martina-died

• By Summer 2019 Firefox will Block by Default All Cross-Site Third-Party Trackers.
  https://twitter.com/jensimmons/status/1098335173089873920

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

The internet is full of consequences now because real life is full of consequences. The membrane between online and real life has long since dissolved.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/18/17366528/snapchat-decline-internet-ghost-towns

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• DAX on Linux
  https://elinux.org/Kernel_XIP
  https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/dax.txt
  https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/349769/linux-dax-direct-access-details

  A continuation of last week talk about non-volatile memory. This week we discuss DAX and XIP, what they're used for, the advantage, and the usual talk about data storage.

• It's getting old at this point
  https://www.linux.com/news/kernel-tuning-sysctl
  https://sysctl-explorer.net/
  https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/configtuning-sysctl.html
  http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?sysctl+8.i386+NetBSD-8.0
  https://man.openbsd.org/sysctl.8
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sysctl

  Kernel tuning params has been discussed so much in this newsletter. It's surprising that it's still not part of POSIX though. Also it's interesting to see the different way that Linux and BSDs choose to implement it. See "Tuning the Linux kernel" in 112, and last week's "The sysctlview GTK tool to explore FreeBSD sysctl-mib-tree is now comited to FreeBSD Ports." of issue 114.

• Remote work
  https://www.instructables.com/id/Starting-your-linux-box-remotely/
  https://www.suse.com/c/rdp-linux-managing-gui-displays-remotely/
  https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E24628_01/em.121/e27046/appdx_pxeboot.htm
  https://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/pdf/Remote-Boot.pdf

  From wake-on lan, to ssh with X forwarding, VNC, to PXE, all about the remote stuffs.

• Live synchronization
  http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Productivity-Sauce/Live-Sync-with-lsyncd
  https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

  I remembered having shared unison before, but I'm not sure anymore because I can't find traces of it anywhere. As for lsyncd it's a most know.

• Syncing time in VMs and containers
  https://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vmtools.install.doc%2FGUID-C0D8326A-B6E7-4E61-8470-6C173FDDF656.html
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/276965/how-to-keep-a-vmware-vms-clock-in-sync
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22800624/will-docker-container-auto-sync-time-with-the-host-machine
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24551592/how-to-make-sure-dockers-time-syncs-with-that-of-the-host

  This is closely related to the keeping time and date series. A note on how to sync, if it's necessary or not, the time on guest machines with the host.

• Keeping time and date (10)
  http://www.ni.com/white-paper/3938/en/
  https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1016/j.jala.2006.10.016
  https://www.electronicshub.org/real-time-operating-system-rtos/
  http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/es/PDFs/RTOS.pdf
  https://www.intervalzero.com/real-time-2/the-many-challenges-of-real-time-linux/
  https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2013/03/intro-to-real-time-linux-for-embedded-developers/
  https://vzaigrin.wordpress.com/2015/08/04/real-time-clock-on-raspberry-pi-with-freebsd-11/
  https://www.freertos.org/FAQWhat.html
  https://riot-os.org/
  https://circuitcellar.com/cc-blog/tinkering-with-time/

  RTOS on Unix, the overview of what it is about, examples, and with some of those generic thinking about time articles. There's lots of repetition, but it never killed anyone, on the contrary it makes it stick more. That last one is truncated but still interesting enough to read through. There's still one part to this series but it's not really about Unix, so this is it.

• Numbering
  https://www.datafix.com.au/BASHing/2019-02-17.html

  Another one of those cool formatting pipelines articles. I like them because they add spices to your thoughts and keep your mind working about different ways to attack a problem on the command line.

• Another week another puzzle
  https://www.itworld.com/article/2811646/operating-systems/unix-tip--debugging-tales--ssh-command-failure.html

  I can never get bored of such debugging stories. There's always something to learn out of them. And the more you learn the more you get used to it. I bet anyone reading this newsletter has encountered someone putting their hands in the air and saying "I give up", those stories teaches you not to and be more patient.

• Shebang
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/779997/11de2bdc8dbc0d69/

  And old friend of ours "A thing which used to work stopped working, the unintended result of what should have been a harmless change. Ordinarily we’d call that a bug. Except this new behavior is actually what I wanted all along. So could the bug be a bug fix?", remember "OpenBSD doas update and virt" in 99 and "Kernel userspace boundary" in 108, we're at it again. While you're at it you can read those: "Do you need a blank line after the shebang?" in 36, "Magic bytes" in 100 and "Executables & default program" in 77.

• ETA
  https://github.com/aioobe/eta

  A tool that might not be useful to many but that you still need to know about. It's probably good for long running processes, or maybe those already have a monitoring mechanism in place. What do you think?

Thoughts

It's not that we have too little time to do all the things we need to do, it's that we feel the need to do too many things in the time we have. - Gary Keller

Sorry, no vermaden valuable news this week, he switched the publishing schedule to Mondays and so we'll get the issue next week. Or maybe we could start publishing the newsletter on Mondays too. Tell me what you think?

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• So many init systems, so much history
  http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/
  https://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2016/01/dumb-init-an-init-for-docker.html

  The history of the trend and evolution of init systems along with an example of a choice of init for a certain scenario, here containers.

• NOVA fs
  https://lwn.net/Articles/729812/

  Remember "Speed up tests without code" in 96 where the author uses an fs in the ram to speed up tests, well this is sort of similar but on nonvolatile memory. The filesystems are usually optimized for disks, but that concept doesn't apply to memory, so we have to build one from scratch so that it's optimized making it snapshot-able at the same time. A nifty idea to say the least.

• Keeping time and date (9)
  https://www.linux.com/learn/distributed-systems-quick-and-simple-definition
  https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSAL2T_8.2.0/com.ibm.cics.tx.doc/concepts/c_wht_is_distd_comptg.html
  https://www.unix.com/pdf/CEP_in_distributed_systems.pdf
  http://www.cs.wichita.edu/~chang/lecture/cs843/homework/dist-os.html
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_synchronization
  http://mathieu.delalandre.free.fr/teachings/dcomputing/part2.pdf
  https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/webfm_send/1232
  https://serverfault.com/questions/19257/distributed-storage-filesystem-which-one-is-there-a-ready-to-use-product
  http://xtreemfs.org/

  In this issue we continue talking about time sensitive systems and operations, things such as the importance of time synchronization (there's a summary of many things we've seen in that wiki article), distributed systems, relatedness of events, and distributed storages. When multiple machines are involved time because an important factor.

• QNX
  https://membarrier.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/qnx-7-desktop/
  https://membarrier.wordpress.com/2018/01/08/a-quick-update/
  https://blackberry.qnx.com/en
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX

  A forced reading and learning about a commercial Unix RTOS. This sort of leads into the coming links of next week for the Keeping time and date series.

• Building the networking stack
  http://www.saminiir.com/lets-code-tcp-ip-stack-1-ethernet-arp/
  https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/tuntap.txt
  http://www.saminiir.com/lets-code-tcp-ip-stack-2-ipv4-icmpv4/
  http://www.saminiir.com/lets-code-tcp-ip-stack-3-tcp-handshake/
  http://www.saminiir.com/lets-code-tcp-ip-stack-4-tcp-data-flow-socket-api/
  http://www.saminiir.com/lets-code-tcp-ip-stack-5-tcp-retransmission/
  https://linux.die.net/man/7/tcp
  https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/ip-sysctl.txt

  A series of articles about coding the TCP/IP stack from scratch on Linux. This is super interesting and makes you think about all the wraping and packing going around. I wasn't so accustomed with that stack before, it's good to know the inside out of it, at least a little. See also "Tun/Tap" in 64, and maybe all the encoding type of sections we've had too.

• Keeping time and date (9.5)
  https://www.unixtutorial.org/atime-ctime-mtime-in-unix-filesystems/
  https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/109003/what-are-the-legitimate-uses-of-the-touch-command
  https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/02/12/current_gps_epoch_ends/
  https://lobste.rs/s/6iemve/fun_fact_gps_uses_10_bits_store_week_means
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_formatting_and_storage_bugs

  A topic that may sound simple to some but that still needs to be mentioned for the series of links about time and date, this is about files/inodes metadata, timestamps. We're not talking here about ultra precision time keeping though. Related to the discussion of mtime in "TIMEZONEs" of 101 and "The Big Bang" in 29. I added three links about GPS and time formatting bug as they sprouted in the news recently and we've been discussing that since the start of this series. Hope you're enjoying it, there are still two entries I'm going to add to close the series, the last one isn't really about Unix but tie things well together. Maybe in the end I'll put it all together in an article.

• After 2 years of security improvements
  https://archive.fosdem.org/2017/schedule/event/linux_desktop_versus_windows10/attachments/slides/1730/export/events/attachments/linux_desktop_versus_windows10/slides/1730/fosdem_linux_desktop_security.pdf
  https://lwn.net/Articles/708196/
  https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-70-percent-of-all-security-bugs-are-memory-safety-issues/
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Security
  https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2019/q1/119

  Comparing a single corporate OS against a panoply of Linux distributions, that's not really fair. Maybe there are secure by default designs out there. In the meantime we've got a lot of work done in containerization, work on MAC, after meltdown and spectre, all the hype about fuzzing (especially Chrome team). How do you think we've done so far?

• Debugging ELFs
  https://osandamalith.com/2019/02/11/linux-reverse-engineering-ctfs-for-beginners/

  Tired of all the talk the past entries we've had about ELF, executables, LD, all sorts of formats, GOT and PLT. There's more in this one other than that talk, the thing I liked about this article is the thinking that goes into reverse engineering the executable, the whole process of dissecting it, this is the novelty here.

• XRender, wayland, composition, and Window management
  https://keithp.com/~keithp/renderproblems/render-title.html
  https://cmpwn.com/@sir/101568767470758639
  https://catfox.life/2018/07/31/exposing-the-wayland-lie/
  https://drewdevault.com/2019/02/10/Wayland-misconceptions-debunked.html

  I was about to share that presentation about XRender when those other posts and the flaming discussion about Wayland came up. I won't say much about the talking but let's just mention that there are some good points that were brought up, moreover the usual step needed for a new project hoping to replace something that has been there since forever, it'll take time and things will be missing and it'll take a lot of arguments to replace what is already working.

• Plan9 on static binaries
  https://9p.io/wiki/plan9/why_static/index.html

  A popular link this week. We've talked a lot about static builds in this newsletter, see "Static linked" in 111, "What to use other than statically linked executables" in 61. There are many opinions on the topic, what's your take?

• Glitches
  https://www.rob-sheridan.com/
  https://snorpey.github.io/jpg-glitch/
  http://www.mrspeaker.net/dev/jpgcrunk/
  http://ucnv.github.io/pnglitch/

  Multiple websites playing with the art of glitching, finding beauty in the non-perfect. See also both "Glitch art" in 84 and "DataErase" in 11.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

• How to Secure FreeBSD (server minimal edition).
  https://www.adminbyaccident.com/freebsd/how-to-secure-freebsd/

• GCC 8/9 vs. LLVM 7/8 Compiler Performance on POWER9 Raptor Talos II.
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=power9-gcc-clang&num=5

• FreeBSD Foundation - Love what FreeBSD has done for your organization? Send your testimonial to FreeBSD Foundation!
  https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/about/testimonials/

• SPARC and TOD Modules on Illumos .
  https://ptribble.blogspot.com/2019/02/sparc-and-tod-modules-on-illumos.html

• Customizing OpenBSD xenodm.
  https://www.tumfatig.net/20190208/customizing-openbsd-xenodm/

• Modern Data Lake with Minio.
  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MhWE2C59L7A5Oyv6x_PL1JGltykWjS6s/view

• Nord - arctic north-bluish color palette.
  https://arcticicestudio.github.io/nord
  https://github.com/arcticicestudio/nord

• NetBSD Desktop Part 6 - vi Editor - tmux - Unicode ${TERM}.
  https://www.unitedbsd.com/d/12-netbsd-desktop-pt-6-vi1-editor-tmux-and-unicode-term

• Customized Resolution for OpenBSD in VirtualBox.
  https://www.tumfatig.net/20190131/customized-resolution-for-openbsd-in-virtualbox/

• The mblaze is Maildir focused command line mail client.
  https://github.com/chneukirchen/mblaze

• Sony Pictures releases OpenColorIO under BSD license.
  http://opencolorio.org/

• Tricks QNX Uses to Outperform Other Microkernels.
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872640

• 2018 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards - Winners from 2018 Year.
  https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2018-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-128/?daysprune=-1

• 2017 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards - Winners from 2017 Year.
  https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2017-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-126/?daysprune=-1

• FreeBSD Implements ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization).
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=343964

• HardenedBSD has ASLR while FreeBSD just got (only) ASR.
  https://twitter.com/lattera/status/1094717146402377728

• Thoughts on SPARC Support in Illumos.
  https://ptribble.blogspot.com/2019/02/thoughts-on-sparc-support-in-illumos.html

• Handy AT&T UNIX Quick Guide from 1982.
  https://twitter.com/mattblaze/status/1092222055754489856

• Setup QEMU with HAX Acceleration on NetBSD.
  http://polprog.net/blog/netbsd-hax/

• OpenBSD imported OpenRsync (with pledge/unveil support) into its base system.
  https://twitter.com/openbsd/status/1094750961107697664
  https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20190211081518
  https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/rsync/
  https://github.com/kristapsdz/openrsync/blob/master/README.md

• FreeBSD on ARM64 on Scalable Cloud Platform.
  https://community.scaleway.com/t/freebsd-on-arm64/6678

• The gotop activity monitor inspired by gtop and vtop written in Go.
  https://github.com/cjbassi/gotop

• Thoughts on SPARC Support in Illumos.
  https://ptribble.blogspot.com/2019/02/thoughts-on-sparc-support-in-illumos.html

• OpenNebula 5.7.80 Beta Contextualization Packages for FreeBSD Guest. "With this beta version, we are excited to announce initial support for the FreeBSD guests!"
  https://opennebula.org/beta-contextualization-packages/

• OmniOS Community Edition r151028o/r151026ao/r151022cm Available.
  https://omniosce.org/article/028o-026a0-022cm

• First Impressions of Project Trident 18.12 from DistroWatch.
  https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20190211#trident

• First Draft of FreeBSD Mastery: Jails by Michael W. Lucas is complete.
  https://mwl.io/archives/4048

• IBM Looks at Adding Support for LLVM/Clang to AIX.
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=IBM-Looking-At-AIX-LLVM-Clang
  https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2019-February/130175.html

• Minio - Mminimalist Object Storage Technology.
  http://storagegaga.com/minio-the-minimalist-object-storage-technology/

• Deploying Kubernetes on SmartOS.
  https://youtu.be/rA0pcmqpRx4

• The sysctlview GTK tool to explore FreeBSD sysctl-mib-tree is now comited to FreeBSD Ports.
  https://freshports.org/deskutils/sysctlview/
  https://gitlab.com/alfix/sysctlview/raw/master/README-images/2_img_sysctlview.png

• KDE Plasma in FreeBSD Ports is updated to 5.15.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports?view=revision&revision=492811
  https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.15.0.php

• Arch Linux Easy ZFS (ALEZ) Installer - ZFS Boot Environments on Linux.
  https://github.com/danboid/ALEZ

• Middleton BIOS for ThinkPad X61/T61/R61/X300.
  https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Middleton%27s_BIOS

• Long Slow Death of Commercial Unix. "Apple MacOS and iOS are both derived from FreeBSD - and that installed base isn’t going anywhere."
  https://www.networkworld.com/article/3339381/data-center/the-long-slow-death-of-unix.html

• Proposal for new RPKI validator - OpenBSD rpki-client(1).
  https://medium.com/@jobsnijders/a-proposal-for-a-new-rpki-validator-openbsd-rpki-client-1-15b74e7a3f65

• The dm-pkg is simple script to use dmenu on FreeBSD to install package.
  https://github.com/nicholasbernstein/dm-pkg/blob/master/dm-pkg
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBhFNLyu3TU

• Red Hat Satellite choses PostgreSQL instead MongoDB.
  https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-satellite-standardize-postgresql-backend

• PostgreSQL 11.2/10.7/9.6.12/9.5.16/9.4.21 Released.
  https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1920/

• FreeBSD User Tries Out NetBSD 8.0.
  https://youtu.be/OxB70pg5Tsg

• BSD Now 285 - BSD Strategy.
  https://www.bsdnow.tv/285

• USE Method - FreeBSD Performance Checklist.
  http://www.brendangregg.com/USEmethod/use-freebsd.html

• In Other BSDs for 2019/02/09
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/02/09/22487.html

• Lazy Reading for 2019/02/10.
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/02/10/22508.html

Hardware

• Work on ARM - Issue 81.
  https://www.worksonarm.com/blog/woa-issue-81/

• Blackbird POWER9 Micro ATX Motherboard from Raptor.
  https://www.raptorcs.com/content/BK1B01/intro.html

• AMD Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X Review.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/13945/the-amd-ryzen-5-2500x-and-ryzen-3-2300x-cpu-review/

• FOSDEM 2019 - Pinebook Pro - PinePhone Dev Kits.
  https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=7093&pid=44316#pid44316

• PINE64 Community.
  https://twitter.com/thepine64/status/1021864868893405185
  https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=7158

• Why More Organisations Will Move Toward Offline Tape Based Storage Strategy in 2019.
  https://www.comparethecloud.net/articles/why-more-organisations-will-move-toward-an-offline-tape-based-storage-strategy-in-2019/

• New Hardware from PINE64.
  https://blog.hackster.io/new-hardware-from-pine64-a7c95e26684d

Life & Other

• Salary Negotiation - Make More Money - Be More Valued.
  https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

• People Who Struggle to Get Out of Bed Are More Intelligent. People who went to bed after 11 P.M. and got up after 8 A.M. earned more money and enjoyed a happier lifestyle.
  https://www.housebeautiful.com/lifestyle/news/a7911/people-struggle-to-get-out-of-bed-smarter/

• Why Childhood Indoctrination Messes Up Kids (feat. Sarah Rocksdale)
  https://youtu.be/WHunC3Z-ccE

• I Cut the 'Big Five' Tech Giants From My Life. It Was Hell.
  https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-the-big-five-tech-giants-from-my-life-it-was-hel-1831304194

• PKI for Busy People.
  https://rehn.me/posts/pki-for-busy-people.html

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

Talk about what you love.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Fast file system again, some slides
  https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse451/13sp/lectures/16-ffs.pdf

  Something to go along with "BSD fast file system" from issue 109 and our never ending love of the data storage stack on Unix.

• Unix and Beyond
  http://lsub.org/iwp92007/IWP9-Ritchie.mov

  Ritchie goes over a small overview of Unix history and then jumps into the innovation that Plan9 brings.

• SSD optimization
  https://www.thomas-krenn.com/de/wikiDE/images/c/c6/20111026-optimal-usage-of-ssds-under-linux-UPDATED.pdf
  https://linux.die.net/man/8/hdparm
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hdparm
  https://opensource.com/article/17/1/solid-state-drives-linux-enabling-trim-ssds
  https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/6/html/storage_administration_guide/ch-ssd
  https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/optimize-linux-ssds/
  https://askubuntu.com/questions/1400/how-do-i-optimize-the-os-for-ssds
  https://www.leaseweb.com/labs/2013/07/5-crucial-optimizations-for-ssd-usage-in-ubuntu-linux/

  Most of those articles repeat the same talk about optimization, which is also a reminder of "SSDs will mess you up" in 34, we learn from such repetition.

• Keeping time and date (8)
  ftp://ftp.iitb.ac.in/LDP/en/Clock/Clock.pdf
  https://serverfault.com/questions/284638/what-consequences-implications-can-arise-from-a-wrong-system-clock
  https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-Real-Time-Operating-Systems-RTOS-that-NASA-has-used-and-why
  https://web.archive.org/web/20070418040642/http://users.wmin.ac.uk/~beusdul/papers/scsc-space.pdf
  https://www.rapitasystems.com/blog/cooperative-and-preemptive-scheduling-algorithms

  This week let's focus on the concept of clock (similar to the tldp article in the third part of this series), reliant systems, what could go wrong if the time isn't right on a machine. This all leads to discussions about distributed systems, real-time OS, and other sensitive domains that require the time to be accurate.

• Anatomy of a shell
  https://drewdevault.com/2018/12/28/Anatomy-of-a-shell.html

  Are you thinking of implementing your own shell or get to know it better. This small post gives an overview of some thinking that goes into the parsing phase.

• Numeric username
  https://www.dampfkraft.com/how-to-make-a-numeric-username-in-linux.html

  Unexpected usernames made out of numbers only, want to do that and get weird unsolvable bugs, get ready. We do it because we can, is there any better reasons?

• Networking stuffs
  https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/eve-online-bgp-internet

  What about launching 8000 VMs to run a simulated game-like network environment, check up what's needed to achieve this. The true BGP genius at his craft again.

• From the heap to the stack
  https://thesquareplanet.com/blog/smashing-the-stack-21st-century/

  Remember that series we did on the heap, well now let's tackle the stack a bit too.

• The internet of nags
  https://0x46.net/thoughts/2019/02/01/dotfile-madness/

  Dotfile management is hard, it requires knowledge of everything you've installed, default locations, environment variables, maybe a repository or directory, symbolic links, and much more.

Thoughts

In the absence of information, opinions become facts.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

id:24ec1e06-21b7cac4-48144cc6-e49e090d

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Audio arch
  https://www.learndigitalaudio.com/how-linux-audio-works-vs-windows-audio-2017
  https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/akhwyr/tutorial_changing_pulseaudio_defaults_and_getting/

  In conjunction with "Bird eye over pulseaudio internals" from 105, we get another small overview of the audio stack on Linux and an extra tutorial to crank up your pulseaudio config instead of wasting hq headphones on lq resampled sound.

• Free and open source softwares for video and audio
  https://obsproject.com/
  https://wiki.linuxaudio.org/apps/daw_apps
  https://lmms.io/
  https://ardour.org/

  A list of well polished programs that are super useful when doing media creation on Unix.

• How much freedom, my freedom
  https://eerielinux.wordpress.com/2019/01/28/zfs-and-gpl-terror-how-much-freedom-is-there-in-linux/
  https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2240

  This week we have strong opinion pieces about licenses and what it means to have freedom in an open source project. Is all open source equal?

• FreeBSD direction
  http://www.leidinger.net/blog/2019/01/27/strategic-thinking-or-what-i-think-what-we-need-to-do-to-keep-freebsd-relevant/

  An opinion article about the FreeBSD project, its perception on the world, its direction, its possible improvements, and weak points.

• Don't freak out
  https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1483
  https://github.com/tdkehoe/blog/wiki/UNIX;-or,-Yes,-I%27m-Afraid-It%27s-Terminal
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYDYSSOA2f8

  A nice blog we've seen before in "Undefined behaviour (a relapse)" of issue 38, a while ago. I've recently had to explain hard CS concept to someone and it's always helpful to review the basic, make things less freaky.

• Tools of automation
  https://github.com/zevweiss/enthrall
  https://gitlab.com/mort96/remotedotool
  http://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2017/205/Tutorial-Devilspie2

  You might not have a use for the tools listed in this section whoever there's no loss in knowing they exist, you never know maybe this knowledge will be valuable someday.

• Checkpoint mode
  https://access.redhat.com/articles/2455211

  The fascinating topic of process state recovery. I forgot to mention it along with "Desktop Pausing" of 110, it's a better explanation of the "Cryogenic on Unix" in issue 24.

• Terminal madness again
  http://blog.robertelder.org/detect-keyup-event-linux-terminal/

  A discussion that involves two topics that I love, the TTY and X11. It's about how it's not really possible, and is probably a bad idea, to intercept key events in the TTY, especially key up events.

• Tuning the Linux kernel
  https://docs.tibco.com/pub/ast/2.5.4/doc/html/tuningguide/ch04s06.html
  https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/6/html/performance_tuning_guide/s-memory-captun
  https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/6/html/performance_tuning_guide/s-memory-tunables
  https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/57890/finding-out-the-values-of-kernel-options-related-to-sysctl-conf-and-sysctl-d

  A review on some common options that can be configured in the Linux kernel, see also "The mighty proc" in 52.

• Keeping time and date (7)
  https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-etymology-of-cron
  http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/
  https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/cron.c
  https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-do-i-add-jobs-to-cron-under-linux-or-unix-oses/
  https://mjanja.ch/2015/06/replacing-cron-jobs-with-systemd-timers/
  https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/278564/cron-vs-systemd-timers

  Tick-tock tick-tock, Chronos is ticking the clock making things happen whenever they need to happen. In this series we explore cron and scheduled execution of programs. From the explanation of the word, the standard, an early simple implementation, to examples and a new kind of system with a different thinking.

• Websockets the Unix way
  http://websocketd.com/

  In the same style as stunnel and inetd (see "Network and servers" in 58), we now have a simple websocket implementation taking input from normal streams.

• Your phone is listening
  https://www.geekrant.org/2016/05/08/phone-scam-part-1/
  https://www.geekrant.org/2016/05/12/phone-scam-part-2/
  https://www.geekrant.org/2016/05/25/phone-scam-part-3a/
  https://www.geekrant.org/2016/05/31/phone-scam-part-4/

  Nasty bugs laying deep inside the core network, obviously on an Ericsson node... This is not really Unix-related but super interesting to share.

• False news
  http://ide.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/2017%20IDE%20Research%20Brief%20False%20News.pdf
  http://www.public.asu.edu/~fwang25/poster/Davis2013.pdf
  https://snopes.com
  https://politifact.com
  https://factcheck.org
  https://truthorfiction.com
  https://hoax-slayer.com
  https://urbanlegends.about.com

  Along with "7 items you won't believe are shockingly amazing!" in 85 those should arm you against hoax, false information, and all that nasty stuff propagating on the WWW.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

• FreeBSD powerdxx 0.4.0 Released.
  https://github.com/lonkamikaze/powerdxx/releases/tag/0.4.0

• FreeBSD ZFS vs. TrueOS ZoF vs. DragonFlyBSD HAMMER2 vs. ZFS on Linux Benchmarks.
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=bsd-initial-zof

• Install FreeBSD 12.0 plus KDE Plasma and Basic Applications.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qq3H8pflU0

• OpenBSD Escape Key with Puffy for Cherry MX Keyboard.
  https://www.etsy.com/listing/190868529/custom-esc-keycap-for-cherry-mx-swtich

• The sysctlview is GTK tool to explore FreeBSD sysctl-mib-tree.
  https://gitlab.com/alfix/sysctlview
  https://gitlab.com/alfix/sysctlview/raw/master/doc/1_img_sysctlview.png

• The Laarc.io is new Lobste.rs and Hacker News companion. ... and it runs FreeBSD :)
  https://laarc.io/

• Thunderbolt 3 on AMD motherboard using FreeBSD Bhyve PCIe passthru on Linux guest.
  https://twitter.com/michael_yuji/status/1089769779961851904

• Strategic thinking, or what I think what we need to do to keep FreeBSD relevant.
  http://www.leidinger.net/blog/2019/01/27/strategic-thinking-or-what-i-think-what-we-need-to-do-to-keep-freebsd-relevant/

• Installing FreeBSD with Dual-Boot on ThinkPad X1 Carbon 6th Generation.
  https://market-ticker.org/post=234936

• HardenedBSD 2018Q4 Quarterly Update.
  https://github.com/HardenedBSD/freebsd-quarterly/blob/hardenedbsd/2018q4/2018q4/hardenedbsd.md

• ClonOS to be Rolled Out. ClonOS is web UI for controlling/deploying/managing FreeBSD Jails containers and Bhyve/Xen VMs.
  https://hype.codes/clonos-be-rolled-out

• Making OpenBSD Boot Logo with Spleen.
  http://akpoff.com/archive/2019/making_an_openbsd_boot_logo_with_spleen.html

• Setting the Boot Logo on ThinkPad.
  http://akpoff.com/archive/2019/setting_the_boot_logo_on_a_thinkpad.html

• FreeBSD Foundation Update - 2019/01.
  https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/news-and-events/newsletter/freebsd-foundation-update-january-2019/

• New ASLR code in review on FreeBSD.
  https://reviews.freebsd.org/D5603

• Credativ Group massively expands U.S. footprint with OmniTI acquisition.
  https://omniti.com/remembers/2019/credativ-massively-expands-us-footprint.html

• Alpine Linux moved back from LibreSSL to OpenSSL.
  https://lists.alpinelinux.org/alpine-devel/6308.html

• Avoiding Duplicate cron Jobs.
  https://dan.langille.org/2019/01/13/avoiding-duplicate-cronjobs/

• Upgrade Process Using GPT.
  https://oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/62/

• BSD Now - Episode 283.
  https://bsdnow.fireside.fm/283

• Iocage 1.1 Release.
  https://github.com/iocage/iocage/releases/tag/1.1

• Bareos 18.2.5 Released.
  https://www.bareos.com/files/press/english/bareos_18.2_final_en.pdf

• OPNsense 19.1 Released.
  https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=11398.0

• FreeBSD CI Weekly Report 2019-01-27.
  https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-testing/2019-January/001777.html

• OpenIndiana Monitoring with Icinga.
  https://community.icinga.com/t/openindiana-monitoring/248

• Reimplement BIO_ORDERED handling in nvd(4) on FreeBSD. Sync write latency from ~2.0 ms to ~1.1 ms by not sleeping without reason till next HZ tick. ZFS pool with 8 ZVOLs writing 4KB blocks shows ~950 IOPS instead of ~750 IOPS before.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=343562

• ZFS Feature Matrix.
  https://zgrep.org/zfs.html

• Setting Up Quick Minimal Jail on FreeBSD (ZFS).
  https://markdownshare.com/view/981a46a3-8fba-4793-9b8f-b576760312bc

• In Other BSDs for 2019/01/26.
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/01/26/22439.html

Hardware

• You can now get FreeBSD daemon on the WASD keyboards.
  http://www.wasdkeyboards.com/index.php/products/keycap-mod-packs/os-cherry-mx-keycaps-set-of-2.html

• New Pinebook Pro from PINE64. More powerful but keyboard layout still sicks.
  https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=7093&pid=43850#pid43850
  https://liliputing.com/2019/01/pinebook-pro-linux-laptop-coming-this-year-for-199-and-up.html
  https://baldnerd.com/pine64-pinebook-pro-rk3399-laptop/
  https://i.imgur.com/OxoxmRo.jpg

• Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 'Kittson' Processor - Last of the Itaniums.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/13924/intel-to-discontinue-itanium-9700-kittson-processor-the-last-itaniums

Life & Other

• Do they have work/life balance? Investigating potential employers with GitHub.
  https://codewithoutrules.com/2019/01/31/does-company-have-worklife-balance/

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

Culture is shaped by the best behaviour a leader is willing to promote.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• The design of Unix OS
  http://160592857366.free.fr/joe/ebooks/ShareData/Design%20of%20the%20Unix%20Operating%20System%20By%20Maurice%20Bach.pdf

  This is complementary to "The classic, the beautiful" of issue 105. Get your source from this issue and image from the next link. It goes in depth into the thinking needed to build an OS. As with this type of content, this is quite a big read so enjoy it over a long period or until you get bored, which hopefully will take some time.

• Installing research Unix
  http://decuser.blogspot.com/2015/11/installing-and-using-research-unix.html
  http://simh.trailing-edge.com/

  This is to go alongside with the previous link. The instructions are clear and simple to follow, enjoy! Kind of similar to "Doing it in V7" of 58.

• An upgrade
  https://github.com/hughpyle/ASR33

  Or how to connect the old to the new, quite an adventure in terminal land.

• A user's view of the OS
  http://www.kean.edu/~gchang/tech2920/http___professor.wiley.com_CGI-BIN_JSMPROXY_DOCUMENTDIRECTORDEV+DOCUMENTID&0471715425+DOCUMENTSUBID&1+PRFVALNAME&pdfs_ch16.pdf
  https://blog.simon-frey.eu/how-switching-my-parents-over-to-linux-saved-me-a-lot-of-headache-and-support
  https://medium.com/@idarwin/openbsd-on-the-acer-aspire-one-at-ten-48e3e0caf243

  To take the place of your user and give them what they need you first need to know who your users are. That first link lists everything that is required, and not so often thought about, to create a usable OS interface. A reminder of "Ever installed a Unix-like system for a friend who's not techie?" in issue 54. And finishing with yet another of those trendy OpenBSD on a laptop type of post.

• Hey can you xerox this for me
  https://haydenjames.io/finding-linux-compatible-printers/
  http://www.openprinting.org/

  I finally found how to use the printer at work, it wasn't that hard but it's nice to put the information out there for others.

• rc.d on OpenBSD
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjHDvO_haQY

  Let's see how an init and service/daemon manager could be implemented simply and effectively, are you interested in this, does it entice you?

• Keeping time and date (6)
  https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/232767/does-ntpd-have-a-default-driftfile
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd-timesyncd
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SwitchingToTimesyncd
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SystemdTimesyncdFailure
  https://chrony.tuxfamily.org/comparison.html
  https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp/html/discipline.html
  https://www.ijs.si/time/temp-compensation/
  https://blog.dan.drown.org/beaglebone-black-ntpgps-server-temperature-compensation-part-2/
  https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/design/tools/calculators/product-design/rtc.cfm
  https://forums.parallax.com/discussion/130410/timing-drift-how-do-you-read-ppm
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_Time_Protocol
  https://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~pxk/417/notes/ptp.html
  https://blog.meinbergglobal.com/2013/10/21/ieee-1588-clock-types/
  https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2327884
  https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slides/lcjp14_ichikawa_0.pdf

  This week we switch the focus to NTP (see number 5 again), have a discussion about things we may not directly think about that affect time precision, and that finally leads us to talk about PTP for when NTP is not enough. Some interesting things to keep in mind: ppm, parts per million of beats can be used to measure clock accuracy, normalized frequency offset is also called drift. This will take us next week on the journey of real time clock, real time Unix systems, and maybe the use of time in distributed computing or other time sensitive operations.

• Static linked
  http://s.minos.io/
  https://github.com/minos-org/minos-static

  Building static binaries isn't that easy, this project aims at making it easier by providing recipe to do this.

• A post from that blog to follow
  https://begriffs.com/posts/2019-01-19-inside-c-standard-lib.html

  Remember the "New blog to follow" of 58, in this article we do a roundup of the C89 standard, a quick brief overview... Well brief but still quite thorough and entertaining.

• Getting inspired by OpenBSD
  http://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=1134
  http://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=859

  I find this case to be a convincing one, this is something that is required these days and that probably needs to be standardized across the Unix panoply.

• APT getting it again
  https://justi.cz/security/2019/01/22/apt-rce.html

  Remember "Nagging about Debian" in 63 and "APT and https" in 60, this is an update on the topic.

• Bonus
  https://markplusplus.wordpress.com/2006/10/01/pitch-correct-play-speed-with-mplayer/

  I've been listening to a lot of talks recently and speeding up the tempo changes the pitch, so if you don't want everyone to sound like a martian this will help. I've also learned that mpv has this behavior by default or through --audio-pitch-correction.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

• FreeBSD fixed pfsync change that break CARP.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=343130

• Restoration of Early UNIX Artifacts.
  https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/usenix09/tech/full_papers/toomey/toomey.pdf

• Amiga 500 Papercraft Pattern.
  http://rockybergen.com/whatsnew/2019/1/15/amiga-500-papercraft-design
  https://www.docdroid.net/file/download/PE7D4vg/amiga-500-ver1.pdf
  https://static1.squarespace.com/static/564229dee4b0d16067409cb0/t/5c3e9fb2575d1f82ff89dabc/1547779216745/Amiga+500+-+Papercraft+Pattern?format=750w

• Ansible BSD Working Group.
  https://github.com/ansible/community/wiki/BSD

• Ansible Solaris Working Group.
  https://github.com/ansible/community/wiki/Solaris

• In Other BSDs for 2019/01/19.
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/01/19/22394.html

• Debian systemd maintainer will not maintain systemd anymore. "What's going on is just too stupid/crazy."
  https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2019-January/041971.html
  https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/agna5n/debian_systemd_maintainer_steps_down_over/

• AMIGA gets LZ4 for 68k CPUs.
  https://github.com/arnaud-carre/lz4-68k

• [POLISH] ZFS - Rewolucja w Systemach Plikow (Mariusz Zaborski).
  https://oshogbo.vexillium.org/pdf/programista_zfs_2015.pdf

• LiteCLI is user friendly command line client for SQLite database.
  https://www.pgcli.com/launching-litecli.html

• OpenBSD can now join any open WiFi network.
  https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20190120142708

• OpenBSD deletes vmm(4) on i386.
  https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20190120142529

• NomadBSD 1.2-RC1 Released.
  http://nomadbsd.org/index.html#rel1.2-rc1

• Open source Spotify UNIX client available on FreeBSD as audio/spotifyd port.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports?view=revision&revision=490765

• OpenBSD added support for 2TB of memory on amd64.
  https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20190121081245

• HardenedBSD 1200058.2 Available.
  https://hardenedbsd.org/article/op/2019-01-20/stable-release-hardenedbsd-stable-12-stable-v12000582

• SoloBSD 19.01-STABLE based on HardenedBSD 1200058.2 Available.
  https://www.solobsd.org/index.php/2019/01/23/solobsd-19-01-stable/

• OmniOS Community Edition r151028l/r151026al/r151022cj Available.
  https://omniosce.org/article/028l-026al-022cj

• Wayland Support on BSDs Continuing to Improve.
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wayland-BSD-Improving-2019

• Lumina from Project Trident will replace Fluxbox with their own WM after its finished.
  https://twitter.com/q5sys/status/1087422097499062274

• For the Love of Pipes.
  https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/for-the-love-of-pipes/

• FreeBSD adds trim(8) command for devices with wear leveling algorithms.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=343118

• ClarityOS is Safe/Secure/Modern/Reliable HardenedBSD fork. Goal is to make BSD as open and customizable as possible, while keeping it easy, simple and accessible to as many people as possible!
  https://clarityos.net/
  https://clarityos.net/images/screen.png

• MidnightBSD Developer Journal.
  https://www.justjournal.com/users/mbsd/entry/33772

• Out-of-the-Box 10GE Network Benchmarks on Linux Distributions and FreeBSD 12.
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=10gbe-linux-freebsd12&num=3

• FreeBSD in top(1) will not now show swap line if there are no swap devices.
  https://reviews.freebsd.org/D18928

• Wine 4.0 Released.
  https://www.winehq.org/news/2019012201

• AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan.
  https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/AMDVLK

• Kerberized NFS4 in Mixed Environment. FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE as KDC/Kerberos/NFS4 Server with Windows/Ubuntu as Clients.
  https://amoradi.org/public/kerberized_nfsv4.txt

• XigmaNAS 11.2.0.4.6400 Released.
  https://sourceforge.net/projects/xigmanas/files/XigmaNAS-11.2.0.4/11.2.0.4.6400/

• FreeBSD utility nsysctl to show MIB tree in XML.
  https://twitter.com/alfsiciliano/status/1087561685693427712

• HOWTO - VNET Jails on FreeBSD 12 with ZFS.
  https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/ahdbbq/howto_jails_freebsd_12_vnet_zfs/

• Building FreeBSD based home router.
  https://kamila.is/learning/building-my-home-router/

• Project Trident 18.12 Overview.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YizY1YblzU

• What's Wrong with tar?
  https://www.cyphar.com/blog/post/20190121-ociv2-images-i-tar

• BSD Now 282 - Open the Rsync.
  https://bsdnow.fireside.fm/282

• ClonOS 19.01-RELEASE Available - First Public Release.
  https://clonos.tekroutine.com/download.html

Hardware

• Rock Pi 4 Review - Is this Raspberry Pi challenger you've been looking for?
  https://www.techrepublic.com/article/rock-pi-4-review-is-this-the-raspberry-pi-challenger-youve-been-looking-for/

• Freedom and Privacy in the Datacenter.
  https://media.ccc.de/v/froscon2018-2170-freedom_and_privacy_in_the_datacenter

• Introducing Ultra EPYC AMD Powered Sun Ultra 24 Workstation.
  https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-the-ultra-epyc-amd-powered-sun-ultra-24-workstation/

• Thin-ITX AMD AM4 Motherboard.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/13885/the-true-shortest-am4-motherboard-thinitx-comes-to-amd

• Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018.
  https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2018/

• Double Height DDR4 - 32GB Modules Reviewed.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/13694/double-height-ddr4-gskill-zadak-2x32gb-ddr4-3200

Life & Other

• Men's and Women's Brains.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ9L9YBJkk8

• Philip Zimbardo’s Response to Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment.
  https://www.prisonexp.org/response/

• 50 Years Ago Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to Point Blame at Fat.
  https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat

• Students Learn From People They Love.
  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/opinion/learning-emotion-education.html

• The Process of Mastering a Skill.
  https://azeria-labs.com/the-process-of-mastering-a-skill/

• Real Hardware for the FreeBSD BeaST Storage System.
  https://mezzantrop.wordpress.com/2019/01/18/the-real-hardware-for-the-beast-storage-system/

• Remote Code Execution in Linux apt/apt-get Commands.
  https://justi.cz/security/2019/01/22/apt-rce.html

• The Alarming Decline of Quality Youth Playtime.
  https://houseoflawandorder.com/the-alarming-decline-of-quality-youth-playtime/

• Quake 1.5 Refreshed FPS Classic with New Maps/Monsters/Mayhem.
  https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/01/18/quake-1-5-is-a-massive-mod-overhaul-for-the-fps-classic/amp/

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Reminiscence of the olden' days
  https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190111
  https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190114
  https://medium.com/@bblfish/what-are-the-failings-of-pgp-web-of-trust-958e1f62e5b7

  I like it when someone applies their expertise of the past to a problem that they find similar in the present. Here we're discussing containers and showing a demo while saving a lot in the size of the image. As an extra there's a deep well thought meditation about the topic of multi-factor authentication, highly recommended.

• Desktop Pausing
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/09/19/freebsd-desktop-part-16-configuration-pause-any-application/

  One of the perfect and useful example of last week 109 "What's that wmutils thingish on suckless rocks list".

• Looking for answers
  https://unix.stackexchange.com/users/885/gilles

  One of the top contributors in the Unix section of stackexchange, his replies are thorough and straight to the point.

• Making things colorful
  http://jvns.ca/zines

  If you've never heard of this blogger this is your lucky day. There's a lot of book and helping sheets on the website in the same style as _why, no wonder the author is also involved in ruby.

• Xenix tales
  https://github.com/retrohun/blog/tree/master/dt/xenixtales

  This jumped in the news recently, it's fun to have a blog hosted on github but inside of a readme instead of a github page.

• Explaining what is FreeBSD without shooting yourself in the foot
  https://www.fossmint.com/what-is-freebsd-why-should-you-choose-it-over-linux/

  Actually, scrap that title aside, it's not a perfect article at all. See also "And BSD for the Linux guys and gals" of issue 40 which was a bit better.

• FreeBSD malware
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT_k06Xg-BE

  Remember all that talk about PLT/GOT we had previously, well it's paying off, we're now able to understand what this talk is about. Also a continuation of "BSD hacking and security" in issue 63.

• Memory safety on Linux
  https://blog.araj.me/state-of-memory-safety-in-linux/
  https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/security/self-protection.html
  https://kernsec.org/wiki/index.php/Kernel_Self_Protection_Project

  With all that talk about FreeBSD we're interested in a refreshment, let's see what's up in the Linux world. We could've checked OpenBSD but we're too used to jumping in that direction when it comes to security.

• Keeping time and date (5)
  http://www.oc.nps.edu/oc2902w/gps/timsys.html
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Timekeeping
  https://developers.google.com/time/smear
  https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp/html/ntpd.html
  https://www.masterclock.com/company/masterclock-inc-blog/network-synchronization-internet-ntp-servers-vs-gps-ntp-servers
  https://linux.die.net/man/1/rdate
  https://archive.li/l4A9J#selection-1131.46-1137.278
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/NtpdToChrony
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/NTPDaemonWhyAvoid
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/NTPDaemonWhen
  https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/making-every-leap-second-count-with-our-new-public-ntp-servers

  Let's first review the first issue "Keeping time and date (1)" to refresh our memory about what is time and if days are really 24h. Are there instruments available to measure time precisely, how do they take into account the earth uneven speed. We want to still track time as a drift from that stable time but how do we propagate the changes, let's hear again about leap seconds and the new concept of smear time. And we finish with the introduction to the standard method to propagate external time, to sync up with the world and the sources of precise time, along with different examples on how to do that.

• TTY, change?
  https://lwn.net/Articles/343828/

  Traveling back to 2009 to remind us of the state of the TTY infrastructure on Linux, and mostly in general what needs to be supported and expected from all platforms.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

• Installing and Updating FreeBSD 11.0 on Raspberry Pi.
  https://solence.de/2017/03/15/installing-and-updating-freebsd-11-0-release-on-a-raspberry-pi/

• ZFS on Linux Runs into Snag with Linux 5.0.
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ZFS-On-Linux-5.0-Problem

• Create your own video streaming server with Linux or FreeBSD.
  https://opensource.com/article/19/1/basic-live-video-streaming-server

• hexyl - command-line hex viewer for terminal. Colors different categories of bytes (NULL/printable ASCII/ASCII whitespace/other ASCII/non-ASCII).
  https://github.com/sharkdp/hexyl

• How Vim Shaped My Writing.
  https://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2016/10/how-vim-shaped-my-writing.html

• Debugging Rust with VSCode on FreeBSD.
  https://venshare.com/debugging-rust-with-vscode-on-freebsd/

• In Other BSDs for 2019/01/12.
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/01/12/22379.html

• How OpenBSD is secure compared to other operating systems?
  https://www.reddit.com/r/openbsd/comments/af1s00/how_openbsd_is_secure_compared_to_other_operating/

• FreeBSD adds bluetooth-config script to simplify setting up Bluetooth connections.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/342945

• The good and the bad of Linux's NetworkManager.
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/NetworkManagerGoodBad

• Linux network-scripts being deprecated.
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/NetworkScriptsAndPPPoE

• The CADT Model - mostly used in Linux environments.
  https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

• We are now closer to the Y2038 bug than the Y2K bug.
  https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/01/we-are-now-closer-to-the-y2038-bug-than-the-y2k-bug/

• FreeBSD adds support for Clang Coverage Sanitizer in kernel (KCOV).
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=342962

• Powersaving with DragonFly BSD Laptop.
  https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/user/Powersave/?updated

• Difference Between ZFS Scrub and Resilver.
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSResilversVsScrubs

• Risk that comes from ZFS on Linux not being GPL Compatible. Actually its GPL that is not compatible with CDDL (ZFS license). Not the other way around.
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/ZFSNonGPLRisk

• FreeBSD takes vmm(4) towards multicore Bhyve AMD support.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=343075

• Ansible plugin for remotely provisioning FreeBSD Jails separately from their Jail host.
  https://github.com/austinhyde/ansible-sshjail

• Update Intel Microcode on FreeBSD.
  https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/Update_Intel_Microcode_on_FreeBSD

• Building spotifyd on NetBSD.
  https://atomicules.co.uk/2019/01/17/Building-Spotifyd-on-NetBSD.html

• Building my FreeBSD-based home router.
  https://kamila.is/learning/building-my-home-router/

• HardenedBSD 1100056.12 Available.
  https://hardenedbsd.org/article/op/2019-01-18/stable-release-hardenedbsd-stable-11-stable-v110005612

• BSD Now 281 - EPYC Server Battle.
  https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/128846/epyc-server-battle-bsd-now-281/

• OpenRSYNC - clean-room implementation of rsync with a BSD (ISC) license.
  https://github.com/kristapsdz/openrsync

• FreeBSD and UEFI Boot.
  https://blog.tyk.nu/blog/freebsd-and-uefi-boot/

• Synaptics Touchpad on FreeBSD.
  https://wiki.freebsd.org/SynapticsTouchpad

• OpenBSD Content Filtering Proxy HOWTO in One Tweet :)
  https://twitter.com/ogmaconnect1/status/983813448504094721

• Aphelia - minimalist window manager.
  https://github.com/vardy/aphelia

• The tinywm.c is a window manager in 50 lines of C code.
  https://github.com/mackstann/tinywm/blob/master/tinywm.c

• OpenDoas: Portable Version of OpenBSD doas Command.
  https://git.duncano.de/opendoas/about/

• OpenBSD Packages Statistics.
  https://pkgstat-openbsd.perso.pw/

• The Art of Unix Programming by Eric Steven Raymond reformatted by Martin Tournoij.
  https://arp242.net/the-art-of-unix-programming/

• Reproducible NetBSD!
  https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/netbsd/netbsd.html

• FreeBSD PR (Problem Reports) Stats.
  https://people.freebsd.org/~miwi/gnats/

• Using cloud-init with SmartOS.
  https://shaner.life/using-cloud-init-with-smartos/

• Shawn Webb (co-creator of HardenedBSD) started new project to rewrite FreeBSD bhyve in Rust.
  https://twitter.com/lattera/status/1085711849469952000

Hardware

• Flashing my Lenovo x230 with Coreboot.
  https://www.chucknemeth.com/flash-lenovo-x230-coreboot/

• POWER9 Scales Up To 1.2 TB/s of I/O.
  https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/1653/power9-scales-up-to-1-2-tb-s-of-i-o-targets-nvlink-3-opencapi-memory-for-2019/

• V-Raptor is 24-Core ARM Server Based on SocioNext SC2A11 SoC.
  https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/01/08/v-raptor-24-core-arm-server-socionext-sc2a11/

• AMD Opteron X3421 Benchmarks and Review Low Cost Atom Competitor.
  https://www.servethehome.com/amd-opteron-x3421-benchmarks-and-review-a-low-cost-atom-competitor/

• Computer for CyberSecurity BSD-OS (SecBSD).
  https://www.gofundme.com/computer-for-cybersecurity-bsdos

Life & Other

• Australia Becomes First Western Nation to Ban Secure Encryption.
  https://www.extremetech.com/internet/281991-australia-becomes-first-western-nation-to-ban-secure-encryption

• Facebook's 10 Year Challenge is Just a Harmless Meme Right?
  https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-10-year-meme-challenge/

• Łódź Revitalised - Poland's Third Largest City is Under Transformation.
  https://uml.lodz.pl/files/public/dla_biznesu/investlodz/fdi-lodz-revitalised.pdf

• Why Microsoft Word must Die.
  http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/10/why-microsoft-word-must-die.html

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

Food for thoughts of this week.

"To maintain these strong counter-scientific consensus views, you kind of have to have a lack of knowledge." - Philip Fernbach

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• The philosophy still matters
  http://marmaro.de/docs/studium/unix-phil/unix-phil.pdf

  We often hear the "what is" or "how to", this paper is about the "why is".

• BSD fast file system
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF_J-itJDwM

  A really beautiful and approachable presentation about the BSD FFS, data storage on Unix is so much fun. A highly recommended talk.

• Bitrot data integrity
  https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2017-03-17-integrity.html

  We might have mentioned bitrot indirectly in this newsletter so let's do it explicitly now. This article should cover the basic concept.

• Remember university days?
  http://fabiensanglard.net/floating_point_visually_explained/

  Are you a university student and want to refresh your memory about how to encoding floats or maybe you've never seen those before, don't worry it's all explained in there. It's all about finding a way to represent and pack information in bits, just like what we saw in 71 "Let's play with encoding and formats" or 61 "ID3 tags" and many more issues before.

• Process infection
  https://www.tarlogic.com/en/blog/linux-process-infection-part-i/

  How to hide your mischevious deeds without them being noticed spontaneously, this is what is tackled in this article. It's only the tip though, the first one in the series touching listing processes that can be ptraceable.

• Keeping time and date (4)
  https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2018-09-15/0/POSTING-en.html
  https://lobste.rs/s/jeeq9d
  http://strugglers.net/~andy/blog/2018/12/24/the-internet-of-unprofitable-things/

  Let's take a small pause from the kernel stuff and start reviewing again DST, and slowly introducing the topic of NTP.

• Fun guy
  https://lukesmith.xyz/blogindex.html

  You might or might not like what this person is doing on their platform but it still deserves some attention.

• Console replacement
  https://arcan-fe.com/2018/10/31/walkthrough-writing-a-kmscon-console-like-window-manager-using-arcan/

  It's my first time cloning the Arcan project and trying it first hand by going through the tutorial, it's really nifty, give it a try. It gives that gaming framework vibe which is quite interesting and makes you wonder about what kind of user interfaces could possibly look like.

• What's that wmutils thingish on suckless rocks list
  https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2019/01/07/win-automation.html

  I wrote an article to clarify things to those who get confused about X11 window manipulation utilities and for everyone else who simply are looking for new ideas. This was principally made to cover only wmutils but I thought of making it broader.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

• In Other BSDs for 2019/01/05.
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/01/05/22307.html

• Devin Teske made sysconf(8) to safely edit system config files on FreeBSD. Another great tool after sysrc(8) that allows safe edit of system rc files.
  https://github.com/freebsdfrau/FrauBSD/tree/master/sysconf

• New PEFS 2018.12.29 Release.
  http://pefs.io/blog/2018/12/release-20181229/?fbclid=IwAR2fPxLnl18rfAVcQ6OmMR7FhsRGuorHq84xYhQ-cnO2m7_7Z2aSFB65PLI

• Revive Cisco IDS Into Capable OpenBSD Computer.
  https://komlositech.wordpress.com/2018/12/30/revive-a-cisco-ids-into-a-capable-openbsd-firewall/

• How I did start using FreeBSD.
  https://www.banym.de/how-i-did-start-using-freebsd.html

• MacBook Pro 9.2 Gets FreeBSD Support.
  https://twitter.com/FreeBSDHelp/status/1081395210259595265

• New HardenedBSD 13.0 Image for RPI3.
  https://hardenedbsd.org/~shawn/rpi3/2019-01-05/HardenedBSD-aarch64-13.0-HARDENEDBSD-fa32a12f857-RaspberryPi3.img.xz
  https://twitter.com/lattera/status/1081919725611950082

• FreeBSD gives sh(1) proper default prompt instead of just "$".
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=342812

• More FreeBSD RFC Sendmail Deprecation Discussion.
  https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arch/2017-December/018712.html

• DistroWatch - Feature Story - FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE Review. "(...) this release feels like a polished and improved incremental step forward."
  https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20190107#freebsd

• DistroWatch - Musings on Distros After Prolonged Use (2019). "FreeBSD is probably my favourite server-oriented operating system, mostly because it never surprises me. FreeBSD tends to do what you tell it to do, and just do what you tell it to do."
  https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20190107#lookback

• New ZFS on FreeBSD Implementation Can Now Be Tested with TrueOS.
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ZFS-On-Linux-Test-TrueOS-Spin
  https://pkg.trueos.org/iso/snapshot-zol/

• OmniOS Community Edition r151028j/r151026aj/r151022ch.
  https://omniosce.org/article/release-028j-026aj-022ch

• FreeBSD Foundation - December 2018 - Development Projects Update.
  https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/december-2018-development-projects-update/

• Zackup - Backup to ZFS - Inspired by BackupPC.
  https://github.com/digineo/zackup

• POSIX Shell and Utilities.
  https://shellhaters.org/

• OPNsense 18.7.10 Released.
  https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=10903.0

• A wc clone written in Rust.
  https://crates.io/crates/cw

• FreeBSD as my Network Storage Server (Part 1).
  https://www.jasonvanpatten.com/2015/11/26/freebsd-as-my-network-storage-server/

• FreeBSD as my Network Storage Server (Part 2).
  https://www.jasonvanpatten.com/2015/11/26/freebsd-as-my-network-storage-server-part-2/

• Knightmare: DevOps Cautionary Tale.
  https://dougseven.com/2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautionary-tale/

• IOCCC: Best of Show.
  https://www.ioccc.org/2018/mills/hint.html

• Quick Naive Benchmarks on AMD A8-5550M APU on FreeBSD (with and without AESNI).
  https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2018-December/072466.html

• Goal of GameBSD is to provide a place for students to learn about programming and technology.
  https://gamebsd.com/index.html

• AIX 7.2 running on AARCH64 (ARM) Pinebook with QEMU.
  https://twitter.com/astr0baby/status/1082811124897251328
  https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dwbq92OXgAAUZ7z.jpg

• OpenBSD Router.
  http://www.homeandofficeit.com/Main/OpenBSDRouter

• New console font Spleen made default on OpenBSD.
  https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20190110064857
  https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dwida_RW0AE9VOq.jpg

• Interactive VIM Tutorial.
  https://openvim.com/

• ZFS on Linux does not work on Linux 5.0 kernels.
  https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=154714516832389

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Kernel userspace boundary
  https://lwn.net/Articles/571934/
  https://wiki.freebsd.org/Releng/ABI
  https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/what-about-gaming-on-freebsd.723/page-5#post-401401

  A follow on "Stable API nonsense" from last issue (107) and also "OpenBSD doas update and virt" in 99. Versioning and setting the boundaries of what can be considered backward compatible is hard.

• Namespaces
  https://www.toptal.com/linux/separation-anxiety-isolating-your-system-with-linux-namespaces
  https://medium.com/@teddyking/linux-namespaces-850489d3ccf
  https://lwn.net/Articles/531114/#series_index

  If you're not getting tired of containerization yet then this is for you, more content and explanation about namespacing on Linux.

• Unix domain sockets vs internet sockets
  https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-performance/2005-February/001143.html
  https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-performance/2005-February/001144.html

  Another case of wanting to optimize too early but an interesting discussion to have nevertheless. This reverbs back with the c10k and async problems ("Async IO" 105, "The C10K problem" in 52, "c10k follow up and a bit about flamegraphs" in 53).

• NetBSD Kern modules
  https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/mbalmer/fosdem2012/kernel_mode_lua.pdf
  https://www.netbsd.org/~lneto/dls14.pdf
  https://www.netbsd.org/~lneto/eurobsdcon14.pdf

  Somewhat related to "Kernel module" 64, some presentations about the innovation (not so new though) of having a lua interpreter in kernel space making it an extensible operating system.

• Keeping time and date (3)
  https://access.redhat.com/solutions/18627
  https://elinux.org/Kernel_Timer_Systems
  https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Precision_Event_Timer
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Stamp_Counter
  https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=eventtimers&sektion=4&manpath=freebsd-release-ports
  https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=eventtimers&apropos=0&sektion=9&manpath=FreeBSD+9-current&format=html
  https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=hpet&sektion=4&manpath=freebsd-release-ports
  https://linux.die.net/man/8/hwclock
  https://lkml.org/lkml/2005/10/19/46
  https://lwn.net/Articles/223185/
  https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/timers/highres.txt
  https://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Clock.html#toc1

  We started a bit last week with the types of hardware clocks the kernel can rely on, it's the point that we will focus on this time. Where is time stored on a machine, what actually ticks. As a bonus in this series and because it should be part of it, I'm adding again "What is time" from 85, this should include some ideas that will introduce future topics.

• Why X Is Not Our Ideal Window System
  http://www.std.org/%7Emsm/common/protocol.pdf
  https://developer.gnome.org/wm-spec/
  https://standards.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-latest.html

  I got a bit back into the WM world the past days, especially reading icccm and ewmh format specs. That first link is an interesting paper about issues that can happen when implementing a WM.

• IO Atomicity
  https://pluspora.com/posts/654da0f0d6120136b4f6005056264835

  In continuation with some topics from the previous research link such as race conditions, we review a tale from the old days about atomic writes. You can get "The classic, the beautiful" from 105 and tag along.

• Raw TTY inputs
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/RawTtyInputThenAndNow

  A great article to add to your list of other great articles about terminal understanding, I'm not going to list them again here but you can search the newsletter archive for them.

• Monitoring
  https://docs.moodle.org/23/en/System_Monitoring_and_Server_Statistic_Software
  https://www.linode.com/docs/uptime/monitoring/
  https://blog.serverdensity.com/80-linux-monitoring-tools-know/

  I'm not a fan of listicles in general but I thought it would be fun to share these. A follow up on all the performance articles we've shared before but that don't tackle or even mention "perf".

• Next year upcoming
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Looking-Forward-To-2019

  A list of things to look forward to about Linus in 2019.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

• SSH Examples - Tips & Tunnels.
  https://hackertarget.com/ssh-examples-tunnels/

• OpenBSD Gaming Resource.
  https://mrsatterly.com/openbsd_games.html

• Unleashed 1.2 Released.
  http://lists.31bits.net/archives/devel/2018-December/000033.html

• Taming the Chaos: Can we build systems that actually work? Possible paths from today's ghastly hackery to what computing should be.
  https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9647-taming_the_chaos_can_we_build_systems_that_actually_work

• FreeBSD Ports unable to use multiple Github repos with the same name.
  https://hashbang0.com/2018/12/28/freebsd-ports-unable-to-use-multiple-github-repos-with-the-same-name/

• In Other BSDs for 2018/12/29.
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2018/12/29/22262.html

• F-Stack: FreeBSD TCP/IP stack on DPDK by Tencent.
  http://f-stack.org/

• NetBSD entering 2019 with more complete LLVM support.
  https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_entering_2019_with_more

• Survey of ${RANDOM}.
  https://nullprogram.com/blog/2018/12/25/

• The pkgsrc-2018Q4 Announced.
  https://mail-index.netbsd.org/pkgsrc-users/2018/12/30/msg027871.html

• FreeBSD 12.0 Performance Against Windows & Linux on Intel Xeon Server.
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=freebsd-12-windows

• GhostBSD 18.12 Available.
  http://ghostbsd.org/18.12_release_announcement

• Support for RTL8188EE chipset added in rtwn_pci(4) driver on FreeBSD.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=342682

• PostgreSQL is the DBMS of the Year 2018.
  https://db-engines.com/en/blog_post/79

• BSD Now 279 - Future of ZFS.
  https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/128671/future-of-zfs-bsd-now-279/

• One year of flying with the Raven - Ready for the Desktop? [DragonFly BSD]
  https://eerielinux.wordpress.com/2018/11/30/one-year-of-flying-with-the-raven-ready-for-the-desktop/

• NES/Famicom: Visual Compendium.
  https://www.bitmapbooks.co.uk/collections/all/products/nes-famicom-a-visual-compendium

• I Made MPD Index SoundCloud.
  https://polyfloyd.net/post/soundcloud-fuse-mpd/

• The zackup Tool - Backup to ZFS.
  <https://github.com/digineo/zackup>

Hardware

• Fujitsu A64FX Post-K Supercomputer - World's Fastest ARM Processor.
  https://connect.linaro.org/resources/yvr18/interviews/fujitsu-a64fx-post-k-supercomputer-worlds-fastest-arm-processor/

• Does tape still have a place in my backup strategy?
  https://www.cloudpro.co.uk/it-infrastructure/backup/7836/does-tape-still-have-a-place-in-my-backup-strategy

Life & Other

• How Much of the Internet Is Fake? (...) less than 60 percent of web traffic is human.
  https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html

• Apps Are Revealing Your Private Information To Facebook And You Probably Don't Know It.
  https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/apps-are-revealing-your-private-information-to-facebook-and

• Thunderbird in 2019.
  https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2019/01/thunderbird-in-2019/

• OpenAGE - free (as in freedom) clone of the Age of Empires II engine.
  https://openage.sft.mx/

• Algorithms by Jeff Erickson.
  http://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/

• Hackers Bypassed Gmail and Yahoo 2FA.
  https://www.hackread.com/hackers-bypassed-gmail-yahoos-2fa-to-target-us-officials/?fbclid=IwAR03OJTgck8MrJqD9MLcUMX3a2q9nTgcXoi1Gd0z6Ul01B3SkyKZCvi2hFE

• Personal & Banking Data of 120 Million Brazilians Leaked Online.
  https://www.hackread.com/personal-banking-data-of-brazilians-leaked-online/

• Moving to Require Python 3.
  https://python3statement.org/

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

This is the first fressh issue of this new year. As cliché as it sounds let's emphasize some thoughts about change.

Remember those "Culture clash" from 86 and "Edge effect" from 84, let's start on this tone. Give yourself permission to make yourself a priority, at least for a while. Try out new things, or continue what you've left behind, or simply grow on the same path.

"We often underestimate our capacity to reinvent ourselves" - Shankar Vedantam

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Keeping time and date (2)
  https://superuser.com/questions/382568/relationship-between-hardware-clock-and-system-clock
  https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:hardware:syncing_hardware_clock_and_system_local_time
  https://serverfault.com/questions/850815/freebsd-how-to-syncronize-the-system-clock-with-the-hardware-clock-in-bash
  https://www.computerhope.com/unix/udate.htm#01
  https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/unix-set-date-command/
  https://www.systutorials.com/1760/linux-setting-date-time-and-timezone/
  https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/110522/timezone-setting-in-linux#110529
  https://www.jusfeel.com/2018/10/28/TimeZone-Explained/
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_date_and_time_functions#time_t
  https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/chrono/time_t
  https://access.redhat.com/solutions/18627

  Let's start this issue with a continuation of this series. Those should answer the following questions: What are the types of times: hardware and system (more on it later), how to get/set the current times, how to set the current timezone, what is this Unix/POSIX time we often hear about, what is one source of time (also more on it for next issues, leaving it ambiguous for now).

• Another one about fonts
  https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-Reference-Manual/RM02/Chap2.html
  https://www.canva.com/learn/kerning/
  https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/glyphs/glyphs-4.html
  https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/tutorial/step2.html

  Font engines are interesting, and kerning and glyph metrics too. That world is so deep there's always something to learn.

• CV and Graphics
  http://lodev.org/cgtutor/raycasting.html
  http://www.themtank.org/a-year-in-computer-vision

  Two somewhat unrelated articles about graphics and computer vision. I can barely grasp what's being explained but I love reading the content.

• Exchange points
  https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/bgp-battleships
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gOoPxGKKjA

  It's BGP fun content now, a building block protocol still has some cool stuffs to offer.

• Performance
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/12/27/a-perf-cheat-sheet/
  http://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbmEDXq7es0
  http://www.slideshare.net/brendangregg/linux-systems-performance-2016

  We covered a bit before what flamegraphs are about in "c10k follow up and a bit about flamegraphs" of issue 53, also about dtrace in some others, so let's continue with the whole performance suite.

• A last one please
  https://www.technovelty.org/linux/plt-and-got-the-key-to-code-sharing-and-dynamic-libraries.html

  You know the drill, linking, GOT and PLT.

• Stable API nonsense
  https://dri.freedesktop.org/docs/drm/process/stable-api-nonsense.html#stable-kernel-source-interfaces

  A well written piece of documentation for Linux driver creators, see also "Linux Kernel ABI reference" in issue 4.

• Premature optimization
  http://www.cipht.net/2017/10/03/are-jump-tables-always-fastest.html

  This is quite an interesting case of "don't try to play it smarter than your compiler". An enjoyable read.

• Law enforcement guide to Linux
  https://cs.nyu.edu/~xiaojian/bookmark/linux/linuxintro.pdf

  Linux for forensic, this reminds me of "Command line for the data scientists" in 72, Linux can be for anyone. This is really just introductory (and a bit outdated), touching the basis but could still be considered a follow up on "We discussed a lot of forensic..." in 56, "File system forensic" in 43, "A forensic version of dd" in 42, and "Data security" in 73.

• Built with security in mind
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Security
  https://web.archive.org/web/20060504192215/http://rentzsch.com/notes/virtualizationAsAnAntivirus
  https://web.archive.org/web/20070621155813/http://jya.com/paperF1.htm
  https://www.open-scap.org/
  https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/4/html/SELinux_Guide/generated-index.html
  https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/4/html/SELinux_Guide/selg-preface-0011.html
  http://selinuxproject.org/page/Main_Page
  http://tomoyo.osdn.jp/
  https://gitlab.com/apparmor/apparmor/wikis/home/

  I knew the Arch wiki was good but I'm still surprised by how thorough the security article is. As for all the rest of the content you can enjoy how security can be implemented in so many different ways, this covers a lot of ground. Maybe you can also read again about PAM, it's been a long time, "Everything you need to know about PAM" in issue 12.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

• The iocage 1.0 Released.
  https://github.com/iocage/iocage/releases/tag/1.0

• FreeBSD in Audio Studio. FreeBSD is usually not the first choice for music art, but it has quite a lot to offer.
  https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/freebsd_in_audio_studio/

• Install DragonFly BSD 5.4.
  https://gitlab.com/jacekkowalczyk82/freebsd/blob/master/DragonFlyBSD.md

• FreeBSD and USB MIDI.
  https://meka.rs/blog/2017/06/17/freebsd-usb-midi/

• In Other BSDs for 2018/12/22.
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2018/12/22/22216.html

• HardenedBSD 1100056.11 Available.
  https://hardenedbsd.org/article/op/2018-12-22/stable-release-hardenedbsd-stable-11-stable-v110005611

• HardenedBSD 1200058.1 Available.
  https://hardenedbsd.org/article/op/2018-12-22/stable-release-hardenedbsd-stable-12-stable-v12000581

• DragonFly 5.4.1 Released.
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2018/12/24/22268.html

• FreeBSD 2018/01-09 Status Report.
  https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2018-01-2018-09.html

• FreeBSD Had Very Successful 2018 - Performance Improvements - Better Hardware Support.
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FreeBSD-2018-Q1-Q3-Status

• Blender 2.8 Released.
  https://www.blender.org/2-8/

• FreeBSD Foundation Created FreeBSD Timeline.
  https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/freebsd/timeline/

• Gitea On OpenBSD - Using Official Package.
  https://dev.to/nabbisen/gitea-on-openbsd-using-official-package-2ogl

• BSD Now 278 - Real McCoy.
  https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/128586/the-real-mccoy-bsd-now-278/

• FreeBSD switches mutexes to atomics in GEOM_DEV I/O path. IOPS increases from 600K to 800K+ on NVMe at 72-core systems.

• FreeBSD Wireless Quickstart.
  http://srobb.net/fbsdquickwireless.html

• Haiku Beta - Release Heard Around the World.
  https://medium.com/@andrewgreimann_62789/haiku-beta-the-release-heard-around-the-world-d776cae5f3e7

• Mac OS X Kernel Programming Guide - BSD Overview. How much BSD is in the macOS system.
  https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/KernelProgramming/BSD/BSD.html

• FreeBSD on ThinkPad X240.
  https://unrelenting.technology/articles/freebsd-on-the-thinkpad-x240

Hardware

• Distrowatch.com - First Impressions of Pinebook.
  https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20181224#pinebook

• Slimbook PRO2.
  https://slimbook.es/en/pro-ultrabook-13-aluminium

• Banana Pi to Launch 24-Core ARM Server.
  https://www.cnx-software.com/2018/12/26/banana-pi-24-core-arm-server/

Life & Other

• Sugar Sick Secrets: How Industry Forces Have Manipulated Science to Downplay the Harm.
  https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/12/412916/sugars-sick-secrets-how-industry-forces-have-manipulated-science-downplay-harm

• World's Newest Major Religion - No Religion.
  https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/160422-atheism-agnostic-secular-nones-rising-religion/

• What is each country’s second-largest religious group?
  http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/22/what-is-each-countrys-second-largest-religious-group/

• Evolution Is Finally Winning Out Over Creationism.
  https://slate.com/technology/2015/11/polls-americans-believe-in-evolution-less-in-creationism.html

• 35 years ago Isaac Asimov was asked by Star to predict world of 2019.
  https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018/12/27/35-years-ago-isaac-asimov-was-asked-by-the-star-to-predict-the-world-of-2019-here-is-what-he-wrote.html

• DOOMBA - Convert your Roomba tracking data into randomized DOOM map.
  http://richwhitehouse.com/index.php?postid=72

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

This week is a week of festivity in a lot of parts of the world. So let's share a piece that I've found helpful, maybe you'll find some value in it too.

https://www.theminimalists.com/understanding/

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• How programs are loaded
  https://lwn.net/Articles/630727/
  https://lwn.net/Articles/631631/

  Let's start with a question: How are programs loaded, what are they made of, and what's the link with the kernel.

• What is an ELF
  https://wiki.osdev.org/ELF
  http://www.cirosantilli.com/elf-hello-world/

  Alright, so now let's get a bit more accustomed with what ELF are about.

• Weaponization
  https://medium.com/@dmxinajeansuit/elf-binary-mangling-part-1-concepts-e00cb1352301
  https://medium.com/@dmxinajeansuit/elf-binary-mangling-pt-2-golfin-7e5c82bb482c
  https://medium.com/@dmxinajeansuit/elf-binary-mangling-part-3-weaponization-6e11971108b3
  http://www.linuxsecurity.com/resource_files/documentation/virus-writing-HOWTO/_html/index.html

  Those ones are easier to start with after diving into all the previous content, it wraps things cleanly together. As far as the last link is concerned, it's a bit of a hassle to read for me so far, not so well ordered and explained, but probably a must to bookmark it for later.

• Tools to manipulate ELFs https://github.com/BR903/ELFkickers

  There's nothing better than hands on experience to learn what we've been reading about. Other than using the usual tools such as readelf, objdump, and all the hex editors available, this repo offers much more.

• Linker
  http://s.eresi-project.org/inc/articles/elf-rtld.txt
  https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2011/11/03/position-independent-code-pic-in-shared-libraries

  What about libraries and linking in all that. A reminder of what we've seen in other issues about GOT and PLT.

• Some of the standard reference
  http://www.skyfree.org/linux/references/ELF_Format.pdf
  http://refspecs.linuxbase.org/elf/elf.pdf

  To wrap this up, this another week of long reads. In continuation with the dynamic linking articles series, we now tackle the body of concern: ELF. Also review "Magic bytes" in 100 and "Executables & default program" in issue 77. Maybe you should start with getting used to manipulating simpler byte structures, such as what we did before in issue 71 "Let's play with encoding and formats".

• NO ram, just registers
  https://emsea.github.io/2017/12/31/register-buffer/

  An interesting try at using available registers as a buffer. This might be useless but pretty cool nevertheless.

• Learn GRUB commands
  http://dcjtech.info/topic/grub-commands/
  https://askubuntu.com/questions/76309/play-a-sound-before-or-after-grub-loads
  https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-password-protect-your-grub-menu/

  A quick and nice review of what the grub CLI offers. You probably can bookmark that when you're in a pinch and need to check them or maybe you just want to "play" a sound (that can't be muted), or add a password to your booting process, or boot from a network image.

• Awesome blog, xlib, ephemeral ports
  https://gavv.github.io/blog/ephemeral-port-reuse/
  https://gavv.github.io/blog/xlib-usage-examples/

  Two enjoyable articles, a tricky question of reuse and race-conditions over ephemeral ports, and the other a basic Xlib tutorial.

• HTTP2 and X509
  https://http2-explained.haxx.se/content/en/
  https://http3-explained.haxx.se/en/
  https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.04959.pdf

  Two quick books by Daniel Stenberg, the author of cURL, on HTTP2 and HTTP3 and what has been attempted the last few years to speed up the web. The last link is your weekly dose of crypto, a study of common crypto libraries and how they handle X509 parsing. OpenSSL might be written by monkeys as vermaden mentioned but it's still doing fine. As far as I'm concerned I've dealt my good share with BouncyCastle, and it's not that bad as far as the programming side goes.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

• First FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE Errata.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/doc?view=revision&revision=52685

• OPNsense 18.7.9 Released.
  https://opnsense.org/opnsense-18-7-9-released/

• How to Install and Configure Basic OpnSense Firewall.
  https://www.tecmint.com/install-and-configure-opnsense-firewall/

• IPv666 - Address of the Beast.
  https://l.avala.mp/?p=285

• Let's Encrypt - Certbot for OpenBSD's httpd.
  https://dev.to/nabbisen/lets-encrypt-certbot-for-openbsds-httpd-3ofd

• FreeBSD ZFS vs. Linux EXT4/Btrfs RAID with 20 SSDs.
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=freebsd-12-zfs

• FreeBSD Commit That Can Drastically Lower Load on gssd(8) on Large NFS Servers.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=342114

• In Other BSDs for 2018/12/15.
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2018/12/15/22185.html?utm_campaign=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitter

• HardenedBSD 13-CURRENT on Pinebook.
  https://twitter.com/lattera/status/1073699720923615232
  <https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DuaMM3wWwAEi3W6.jpg:large">

• Rouge Legacy on OpenBSD using PS4 dual shock pad.
  https://twitter.com/mulander/status/1074015714363826176

• How to Install GNOME or KDE PLASMA 5 on FreeBSD 12.
  https://www.osradar.com/how-to-install-gnome-or-plasma5-kde-on-freebsd-12/

• Write your Own Virtual Machine.
  https://justinmeiners.github.io/lc3-vm/

• OpenSMTPD 6.4.1 Released.
  https://www.opensmtpd.org/announces/release-6.4.1.txt

• Fix boot/install hangs/panic on HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Servers.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=342160

• HardenedBSD first to ship with LLVM Non-Cross-DSO CFI applied to entire base operating system.
  https://twitter.com/lattera/status/1074807820959342593

• HardenedBSD 12-STABLE v1200058 Available.
  https://hardenedbsd.org/article/op/2018-12-17/stable-release-hardenedbsd-stable-12-stable-v1200058

• FreeBSD fixes PCI shared interrupts during suspend and resume.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=342170

• KDE ports on FreeBSD 12 (amd64).
  https://euroquis.nl/bobulate/?p=2013

• Aberdeen FreeBSD Hackathon on 2019/04/17-19.
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2019-aberdeen-freebsd-hackathon-registration-53410505259

• OPNids - Integration of Suricata IDS with purpose-built Machine Learning Scripting Engine Available.
  https://www.opnids.io/

• Running FreeBSD on Pinebook - Review.
  https://blog.madadipouya.com/2018/12/19/running-freebsd-on-pinebook-a-review/

• VirtualBox 6.0.0 Released.
  https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog-6.0#v0

• Cartika ISP switches from Bacula Enterprise to Bareos. Clusterlogics - Backup as a Service (BaaS) with Bareos.
  https://www.bareos.com/files/references/english/cartika-case-study-en.pdf
  https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/evolution-software-platform-importance-open-source-andrew-rouchotas/

• The Future of ZFS in FreeBSD. FreeBSD will rebase its ZFS code from Illumos to ZFS on Linux (ZoL).
  https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2018-December/072422.html

• OpenRC on FreeBSD.
  https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2018-December/053740.html

• Bye Bye Mongo - Hello Postgres. The Guardian migrated from Mongo DB to PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS.
  https://www.theguardian.com/info/2018/nov/30/bye-bye-mongo-hello-postgres

• FreeBSD 12 Review - Used as My Daily OS on Bare Metal.
  https://youtu.be/revOJcX2rLs

• BSD Now 277 - Nmap Level Up.
  https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/128526/nmap-level-up-bsd-now-277/

Hardware

• ESXi VSAN HP MicroServer Homelab.
  http://www.cheesyboofs.co.uk/esxi-vsan-microserver-homelab

• IBM Partners with Samsung to Include 7nm Chip Manufacturing.
  https://newsroom.ibm.com/2018-12-20-IBM-Expands-Strategic-Partnership-with-Samsung-to-Include-7nm-Chip-Manufacturing

Life & Other

• FBI Secretly Collected Data on Aaron Swartz Earlier Than We Thought.
  https://gizmodo.com/fbi-secretly-collected-data-on-aaron-swartz-earlier-tha-1831076900

• 99 Good News Stories You Probably Did Not Hear About in 2018.
  https://medium.com/future-crunch/99-good-news-stories-you-probably-didnt-hear-about-in-2018-cc3c65f8ebd0

• “How to Grow Old” by Bertrand Russell.
  https://sites.google.com/site/gobenyan/essay

• Ask Hacker News - How did you decide where to live?
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18688647

• Digital Dissidents - What it Means to be Whistleblower.
  https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/specialseries/2016/03/digital-dissidents-160323141254755.html

• Firefox 64 built with GCC and Clang.
  https://hubicka.blogspot.com/2018/12/firefox-64-built-with-gcc-and-clang.html

• Johnson & Johnson Knew for Decades that Asbestos Lurked in its Baby Powder.
  https://www.reuters.com/article/us-johnson-johnson-cancer-special-report-idUSKBN1OD1RQ

• Signal: We can't include a backdoor in our app for the Australian government.
  https://www.zdnet.com/article/signal-we-cant-include-a-backdoor-in-our-app-for-the-australian-government/

• The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got.
  http://russolsen.com/articles/2012/08/09/the-best-programming-advice-i-ever-got.html

• Logitech app security flaw allowed keystroke injection attacks.
  https://www.zdnet.com/article/logitech-app-security-flaw-allowed-keystroke-injection-attacks/

• How Peter Jackson Made WW I Footage Seem Astonishingly New.
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/movies/peter-jackson-war-movie.html

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Random

Thoughts

This season needs elves, and this is what I'm giving you the most in this issue (actually this was so time consuming I couldn't give anything else).

I hope you enjoy it, and happy holidays!

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• The classic, the beautiful
  http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/Lions/book.pdf
  http://warsus.github.io/lions-/
  https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~brewer/cs262/UNIX-annotated.pdf

  The original papers with additional commentaries to help you read through them. As time goes by we're more impressed by how it's a breeze to read through such fundamental building blocks to the current ecosystem. The second link is fun because you have the source attached on the window on the right, though it's missing the name of the files/sheets. This is quite a big reading so take your time, I'm not done myself.

• Exception handling in tricky code
  https://binarydebt.wordpress.com/2018/11/16/try-catch-in-linux-kernel/
  https://medium.com/@lduck11007/operating-systems-development-for-dummies-3d4d786e8ac

  An explanation of the macros used within the Linux kernel to catch faulty code with an extra article about building an OS from scratch.

• Network drivers in Rust
  https://www.net.in.tum.de/fileadmin/bibtex/publications/theses/2018-ixy-rust.pdf

  Everything can be rewritten in rust, that's the spirit we've learned from "How to for a Rust kernel" in 103. This fantastic and approachable paper (at least in the beginning) doesn't only cover how to translate a driver from C code to Rust but, as with the kernel one, gives a tutorial on how network drivers and on Rust in general work.

• Async IO
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/06/03/async-io-on-linux--select--poll--and-epoll/
  http://aivarsk.github.io/2017/04/06/select/
  https://github.com/aivarsk/misc/tree/master/select

  A revisit of a basic topic under a new angle. Be sure to review the "The C10K problem" in 52 and "c10k follow up and a bit about flamegraphs" in 53

• Keeping time and date (1)
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich_Mean_Time
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Time
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/locale

  Keeping track of time is important for the activities humans do. Old mechanisms were based on the apparent sun position. However, appearances can be misleading, the earth speed is uneven and the sun is rarely at the highest point at noon. Not to mention that a day is not exactly 24h (we'll see the leap seconds in another issue)
  Improvement in worldwide communication and travel required parties/entities to agree in a mutually comprehensible time reference/standard.
  But time differs locally and so a synchronization mechanism needed to be adopted world wide, even if it differed from sun time. Many standards have been tried. The concept of time zones was put in place, an offset from the standard time, but had to be flexible depending on the people and especially countries and their economies. This is what UTC is about.
  Most timezones are whole number of hours but a few of them are offset by 30 or 45min. Then to make it more complex, daylight saving time (DST) appeared for weird economic reasons. Which these days are being reconsidered in the EU (see "TIMEZONEs" in issue 101).
  A nice start to the topic would be to know how we write time, the formatting. This is where the concept of locale on Unix comes in. The $LC_TIME where you specify one of the well known format you want to use for time.
  For the next issue more questions arises: What is time exactly, a unit, how is it measured in computers and electronic devices these days, especially on Unix? What about errors, drifts? How do we specify the base standard time and our offset from it on Unix. And much more to come.

• Bird eye over pulseaudio internals
  https://gavv.github.io/blog/pulseaudio-under-the-hood/

  Big projects, big planning and engineering, you need at least to have worked with one of those in your life as a programmer. Pulseaudio creates a lot of flamewars on the internet but it's still a nice humbling piece of engineering. This is quite a long read, so prepare yourself. It has everything, from the overview, to objects used within the code, to complex examples and applications.

• Docker Internals
  http://docker-saigon.github.io/post/Docker-Internals/

  Another dive into a deep topic, similar to "Talking about fan base" of 92, "Containers management" of 91, "Contain and protect" 76, "Contain and protect" of 104, "Containers from scratch" of 51.

• Font rendering
  http://dcjtech.info/topic/fonts-gui-and-x11/
  https://keithp.com/~keithp/render/Xft.tutorial
  https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/xorg-docs/fonts/fonts.html#More_about_core_fonts
  https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/xorg-docs/xlfd/xlfd.txt

  Another exploration into the world of fonts on Unix, see "More on typography" in 63, fonts on Unix, and "Xft but for xcb" in 91. The first article is a review of the stack we've already encountered, the second one goes over the Xft library design and usage, the last ones are a bit more explanation about the core fonts XLFD format so that you can compare it with the fancier Xft matching features (which is fontconfig matching actually). I highly recommend them to anyone interested in fonts and that want to follow up on what we've shared before.

• Building and interpreting
  https://url.spec.whatwg.org/#url-parsing
  http://www.craftinginterpreters.com/strings.html

  You might think it's straight forward to parse URLs but it's not, have a look. And the representation of the strings themselves is not as easy either. We also talked about this in the article "How to implement strings" of "Programming tricks and knowledge" of issue 100.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

• For The Love Of UFS.
  https://youtu.be/oqbc7ICylcw

• Introspection of My Thoughts on GhostBSD 18.10.
  https://youtu.be/ESAlQjEvEHo

• Visual Defragmenter for the Commodore 64.
  https://www.pagetable.com/?p=978

• From Bedrooms to Billions.
  http://www.frombedroomstobillions.com/about-the-film

• From Bedrooms to Billions: Amiga Years.
  https://vimeo.com/ondemand/amiga

• 10 of the Best Video Game Documentaries.
  https://www.vintagewave.net/blog/2018/11/30/10-of-the-best-video-game-documentaries

• I Told You So. Again! OpenSSL is Written by Monkeys.
  https://www.peereboom.us/assl/assl/html/openssl.html

• In Other BSDs for 2018/12/08.
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2018/12/08/22175.html

• Portability of tar features.
  https://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/articles/portability-of-tar-features.html

• How Douglas Engelbart Invented the Future.
  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/douglas-engelbart-invented-future-180967498/

• More Cavium Thunder X2 Commits landed un FreeBSD.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=341742
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=341743
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=341744

• The tuxmachines.org Reviews GhostBSD 18.10.
  http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/118061

• Awesome UNIX®. Exploration of the world of UNIX® including UNIX history and its relevance of today.
  https://github.com/sirredbeard/Awesome-UNIX

• FreeBSD 12 is Running Great On Dell PowerEdge R7425 EPYC Server.
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=freebsd12-dual-epyc

• OpenSSH - Configuration To Keep Connection Alive.
  https://dev.to/nabbisen/openssh-configuration-to-keep-connection-alive-to-suppress-timeout-3pa6

• OPNsense Security Device Build.
  https://cormier.co/post/opnsense-security-device-build/

• OpenBSD on Laptop.
  https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/openbsd-on-a-laptop/

• Borg Backup 1.1.8 Released.
  https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/releases/tag/1.1.8

• FreeBSD Graphics Blog - Getting Started With drm-kmod.
  https://freebsddesktop.github.io/2018/12/08/drm-kmod-primer.html

• All HaikuOS kernel memory is now W^X.
  https://git.haiku-os.org/haiku/commit/?id=cb0977326dd79327ff3e342816e0dd118019b058

• FreeBSD adds ACPI based NUMA support for arm64.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=341744

• Installing MariaDB Server on OpenBSD.
  https://dev.to/nabbisen/installing-mariadb-server-on-openbsd-5lm

• OmniOS Community Edition r151{028f/026af/022cd}.
  https://omniosce.org/article/release-028f-026af-022cd

• FreeNAS 11.2 - Whats New?
  https://youtu.be/uAbEFqnRJz0

• Unprivileged Linux Users With UID Greater Then INT_MAX (2147483647) Can Execute Any Command.
  https://thehackernews.com/2018/12/linux-user-privilege-policykit.html

• OpenBSD on Microsoft Surface Go.
  https://jcs.org/2018/08/31/surface_go

• Sunny Valley Networks sponsored netmap(4) support for vtnet(4) to make it functional on FreeBSD.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/stable/11/sys/dev/netmap/if_vtnet_netmap.h?revision=341478&view=markup

• BSD Now 275 - OpenBSD in Stereo.
  https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/128321/openbsd-in-stereo-bsd-now-275/

• Oracle VM VirtualBox 6.0 RC1 Available.
  https://blogs.oracle.com/virtualization/oracle-vm-virtualbox-60-release-candidate-1-now-available

• KDE4 and QT4 Deprecated in FreeBSD. KDE4 will be removed at the end of this year (before 2019/01). QT4 will be removed in the middle of 2019/03.
  https://euroquis.nl/bobulate/?p=2007

• Clang updated to 7.0 in FreeBSD 13-CURRENT.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=341825

• PowerVM iSCSI Support.
  https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/wikis/home?lang=en_us#!/wiki/Power%20Systems/page/iSCSI%20Support%20on%20PowerVM

• Support for MacBookAir 7.1/7.2/8.1 added in FreeBSD.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=341820
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=341988

• OPNsense 18.7.9 Available.
  https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=10650.0

• Why should I have written ZeroMQ in C not C++ (Part I).
  http://250bpm.com/blog:4

Hardware

• ARMed Attack - Intel And AMD Do Not See The Torpedo Headed Their Way.
  https://seekingalpha.com/article/4227086-armed-attack-intel-amd-see-torpedo-headed-way

• Gigabyte MZ31-AR0 Review Single Socket AMD EPYC Motherboard.
  https://www.servethehome.com/gigabyte-mz31-ar0-review-a-single-socket-amd-epyc-motherboard/

• Super Micro says review found no malicious chips in motherboards.
  https://www.reuters.com/article/us-supermicro-chips/super-micro-says-review-found-no-malicious-chips-in-motherboards-idUSKBN1OA12R

• Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us.
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/SSDDeathDisturbing

• First Pictures of 10nm Intel Ice Lake Xeon Server Chips.
  https://www.servethehome.com/first-pictures-of-intel-ice-lake-xeon-server-chips/

• Intel Architecture Day 2018 - Future of Core/Intel GPUs/10nm/Hybrid x86.
  https://www.anandtech.com/show/13699/intel-architecture-day-2018-core-future-hybrid-x86

Life & Other

• Reason Many Ultrarich People Are Not Satisfied with Their Wealth.
  https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/12/rich-people-happy-money/577231/

• Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night and They’re Not Keeping It Secret.
  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/location-data-privacy-apps.html

• Golden Age of Rich People Not Paying Their Taxes.
  https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/12/rich-people-are-getting-away-not-paying-their-taxes/577798/

• Qualcomm says native Firefox browser is coming to Windows on ARM.
  https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/6/18129456/qualcomm-snapdragon-pc-firefox-web-browser-64-bit-native-mozilla

• Browser Diversity Starts with Us.
  https://www.zeldman.com/2018/12/07/browser-diversity-starts-with-us/

• Firefox Dilemma.
  https://blog.tawhidhannan.co.uk/tech-zoomed-out/industry/firefox-dilemma/

• Firefox 64 Released.
  https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/12/firefox-64-released/

• Midori Browser 7.x Available.
  https://www.midori-browser.org/2018/11/30/lorem-ipsum/

• Google transfered ownership of Duck.com domain to DuckDuckGo.
  https://www.namepros.com/blog/confirmed-duck-com-transfers-to-duckduckgo.1113728/

• 50 CVEs in 50 Days - Fuzzing Adobe Reader.
  https://research.checkpoint.com/50-adobe-cves-in-50-days/

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

As you may have noticed I've removed the Random section of this newsletter. There's already enough content, brace yourself for a long read this week. Sorry for the double email, I almost missed vermaden valuable news.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• A war of names
  https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2018/11/26/why-bsd-os-is-the-best-candidate-for-being-the-only-tested-legally-open-unix/

  A review of the legality surrounding the UNIX name and which part of which UNIX system is open sourced, to which degree and what manner. This is probably the first article with as many German words as this one that I read, it's fun.

• Shared lib how to
  https://www.akkadia.org/drepper/dsohowto.pdf

  This is the research paper I was talking about last week (103) in "ELF symbol resolution". As with anything written by Drepper, it's heavy content and emphasizes on things to do so that code is optimized by the compiler and when running. Be sure to read last week entry because you'll need it to understand this one.

• Terminal block mode
  ftp://ftp.invisible-island.net/shuford/terminal/block_mode_news.txt

  I got reminded of this last week during our conversation on the forums about future interfaces. Maybe we'll got back to terminals that update per block depending on form filling, just like what we have today with web APIs.

• Foundations and groups
  https://www.linuxfoundation.org/the-linux-foundation/2018/11/the-linux-foundation-and-risc-v-foundation-announce-joint-collaboration-to-enable-a-new-era-of-open-architecture/

  A new hardware mixing with software alliance has formed. Focused on RTOS that may be better supported on Linux in the future.

• What's in a userland
  https://tilde.town/~elly/userland.txt

  A straight forward intro to the thinking that goes into building a user-space on Unix, from init to useful processes and putting it together.

• Contain and protect
  https://www.netmeister.org/blog/restricting-processes.html

  A deep dive into all the techniques used on Unix to containerize, restrict, protect processes.

• Scripting
  https://blog.dalanmiller.com/2018/12/02/easily-removing-all-your-files-from-flickr/

  I had no idea flickr was still a service. This post is another instance of replacing a paid service with another one and use a script to help you do that.

• Makefile best practices
  https://danyspin97.org/blog/makefiles-best-practices/

  Another article about make best practices, see "Make" in issue 66 and "Makefiles, Ohoh those Makefiles" of issue 38. This one covers basic things such as variable assignment for specific parts of the Makefile, pkg-config to find libs, and more.

• vi and vim
  https://vimways.org/2018/
  https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/vim-koans/
  https://vfoley.xyz/vi/
  https://www.qemu-advent-calendar.org/2018/

  With the third article from our friend tejr this ought to be an interesting advent calendar, a month of vi and vim tips. Lots of fun articles so far! Adding along the way the beautiful vim koans of tejr and another opinion piece about vi. There's also a qemu advent calendar now, checkt it out too.

• Architectures and portability
  https://begriffs.com/posts/2018-11-15-c-portability.html

  A reminder of "Computers without binaries"in 79 and all the C related articles.

• Linux on MacBook
  https://int3ractive.com/2018/09/make-the-best-of-MacBook-touchpad-on-Ubuntu.html

  And this one deals with the touchpad. One idea I could take from this post is to disable the touchpad while typing. Those are all pretty hard to configure and don't come out of the box, maybe in the future distributions can focus on making this easier.

• NFS debug story
  https://about.gitlab.com/2018/11/14/how-we-spent-two-weeks-hunting-an-nfs-bug/

  As with other investigative stories in this newsletter we're so captivated by the story and the action, those are the movies of our world.

• Another newsletter
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/12/01/valuable-news-2018-12-01/

  As you might have noticed we've linked vermaden's blog more than once in this newsletter, there's great content in there. On it the author also pushes more or less weekly/bi-weekly news/updates similar to this newsletter. You should check it out. I've contacted vermaden to see if it would be interesting to add a column in the newsletter with his/her content also. This is what we'll try out from now on. As you will notice there's a new section inserted here with links that will be as new for you as they'll be for me. Vermaden Valuable news is usually composed of Unix news&updates, some hardware related news, and a life&other section similar to the "Random" section. Let's hope you enjoy the Unix love. This week we have a lot of links about BSD desktops, lots of new releases, ext4 fs on FreeBSD, bringing back old Unix to life (you can even download the image), and much more. We also brought back Xero's ricing tips section.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

• In Other BSDs for 2018/12/01.
  https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2018/12/01/22135.html

• History of Dell UNIX.
  https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2008/01/10/a-brief-history-of-dell-unix/
  http://gunkies.org/wiki/Dell_UNIX
  https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2012/03/20/dell-unix-lives-again/

• What makes BeOS and Haiku unique.
  https://osvoyager.wordpress.com/2018/11/30/what-makes-beos-and-haiku-unique/

• DragonFly 5.4.0 Released.
  https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release54/

• OpenBSD Desktop.
  https://cryogenix.net/openbsd_desktop.html

• Buying Commodore Amiga 30 Years Later.
  https://www.vintagewave.net/blog/2018/11/30/buying-a-commodore-amiga-30-years-later
  https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c01a45cf93fd4d1606252b1/5c01b1b04ae2373a235bbc4c/5c01b1b14fa51ac227153f1b/1543614905733/amiga-a1200-keyboard-logo-close-up.jpg
  https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c01a45cf93fd4d1606252b1/5c01b1b04ae2373a235bbc4c/5c01b1b1898583f03afd882b/1543614906359/amiga-a1200-1084s-monitor-tank-mouse-joystick-.jpg

• GhostBSD 18.10 Review by Distrowatch.
  https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20181203#ghostbsd

• Using the GOG.com installers for Linux, on NetBSD.
  https://dressupgeekout.blogspot.com/2018/12/using-gogcom-installers-for-linux-on.html

• HardenedBSD 1100056.10 Available.
  https://hardenedbsd.org/article/op/2018-12-05/stable-release-hardenedbsd-stable-11-stable-v110005610

• FreeNAS 11.2 Available.
  https://www.freenas.org/blog/freenas-11-2-has-arrived/
  https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/library/freenas-11-2-release/

• Running AIX 1.3 Inside VirtualBox.
  https://astr0baby.wordpress.com/2018/09/14/running-aix-1-3-inside-virtual-box-5-2-16/

• Running macOS Mojave 10.14 on VirtualBox.
  https://astr0baby.wordpress.com/2018/09/25/running-macos-mojave-10-14-on-virtualbox-5-2-18-on-linux-x86_64/

• Running AIX 7.2 TL3SP1 on x86_64 via qemu-system-ppc64.
  https://astr0baby.wordpress.com/2018/11/04/running-aix-7-2-tl3sp1-on-x86_64-via-qemu-system-ppc64/

• Reverse Shell on AIX 7.2.
  https://astr0baby.wordpress.com/2018/11/05/reverse-shell-on-aix-7-2/

• Get Smart with SmartOS.
  http://www.admin-magazine.com/Articles/SmartOS-Cool-Cloud-Platform-Rises-from-the-Ashes-of-Solaris

• OpenBSD on Dell Inspiron 1090 Duo.
  https://grosu.nl/systems/inspiron-duo.html

• NetBSD Desktop Part 3 - Simple Stateful Firewall with NPF.
  https://unitedbsd.com/t/netbsd-desktop-pt-3-simple-stateful-firewall-with-npf/286

• NetBSD Desktop Part 4 - X Display Manager (XDM).
  https://unitedbsd.com/t/netbsd-desktop-pt-4-the-x-display-manager-xdm/292

• FreeBSD 12 got full support for writing ext4 filesystems.
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=341505

• GhostBSD tested on real hardware ThinkPad T410.
  https://panoramacircle.com/2018/09/23/ghostbsd-tested-on-real-hardware-t410-better-than-trueos/

• MeetBSD California 2018 Talks Available.
  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb87fdKUIo8Q41aoPE6vssP-uF4dxk86b

• FreeBSD News and Links Roundup - Edition 2018-48.
  https://www.freebsdbytes.com/2018/12/freebsd-news-and-links-roundup-edition-2018-48/

Hardware

• Raspberry PCI.
  https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2720009

• Seagate Reveals World Biggest HDD At 16 TB.
  https://nexthive.com/seagate-biggest-hdd-16-tb/

Life & Other

• Parents Guide to Protecting Kids Privacy.
  https://techlife.asurion.com/feature/parents-guide-to-protecting-kids-privacy/

• Designing cities to counter loneliness? Let’s explore possibilities.
  https://theconversation.com/designing-cities-to-counter-loneliness-lets-explore-the-possibilities-104853

• The Making Of: Dust (Counter-Strike de_dust map).
  https://www.johnsto.co.uk/design/making-dust/

• The Making Of: Dust 2 (Counter-Strike de_dust2 map).
  https://www.johnsto.co.uk/design/making-dust2/

• Everything you need to know about pointers in C.
  https://boredzo.org/pointers/

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Xero's Weekly Ricing Tips

zathura is a vi{m,} like pdf and comicbook viewer.

besides having vi like bindings and a minimal ui, zathura is extremely "riceable" and has a awesome feature called "recolor". when set to true, you can define custom colors for bg and fg of textual documents, but it also sets images to greyscale and tints them in matching inverted hues. :set recolor is a toggle command, so if your set it to run by default in your ~/.config/zathura/zathurarc file, manually calling it from the ui will disable the feature.

here's my config for reference: https://github.com/xero/dotfiles/blob/master/zathura/.config/zathura/zathurarc

cite:

• man 5 zathurarc
• https://pwmt.org/projects/zathura/documentation/
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/zathura

____  ___
\   \/  /___________  ____
.\     // __ \_  __ \/ _  \
./     \  ___/ | | \( <_>  )
/___/\  \___  >__|---\____/
|     \_/   \/        |
| xero harrison       |
| xero.nu@gmail.com   |
| http://0w.nz        |
| http://xero.nu      |
| http://fontvir.us   |
`---------------------'

rocx rocks at skteches

Random

• Am I smart enough
  http://nautil.us/issue/65/in-plain-sight/your-iq-matters-less-than-you-think
  https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/napoleons-englich-lessons/
  https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/psychologys-replication-crisis-real/576223/
  https://lemire.me/blog/2018/12/06/asking-the-right-question-is-more-important-than-getting-the-right-answer/

  The first link I've stolen from vermaden's "valuable news" and went on a spree of related ideas. We live in a society/world that loves to find clear causes to things, see "Development and learning" in 93, especially when it comes to finding out if we're doomed/fated/determined for a path. We want to find heroes and villains, distinctions and no ambiguities. In those 4 articles this is the topic that comes across.

• Regulatory capture
  https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/regulatory-capture.asp

  Yet again a topic that follows a train of thoughts from earlier issues, see "The Shirky principle" in 72 and the thought section of issue of issue 99.

• Web engines
  https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/12/06/microsoft-edge-making-the-web-better-through-more-open-source-collaboration/

  I'll just leave this here, you can have the conversation you want about it.

Thoughts

Issue 104, yet another 52 weeks have gone by.
After passing the 100 issues mark we've finally made it to two years of Unix newsletters.

Thanks to everyone who contributed and to all the readers.

It's fantastic, spread the word around!

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Capsicum wrapper
  https://github.com/myfreeweb/capsicumizer

  I love it when tools like this come out. While we could be satisfied with the default, usually not so user friendly, proof of concept the original developers have come up with, it's awesome when the community builds upon the starting block to create what they need from them.

• ELF symbol resolution
  https://0x00sec.org/t/linux-internals-dynamic-linking-wizardry/1082
  https://0x00sec.org/t/linux-internals-the-art-of-symbol-resolution/1488

  We've talked a lot about memory allocation, garbage collection, how to write your own malloc ("In memory layout and Go" in issue 96, "sbrk and malloc" in issue 53, "Malloc source" in 42, "Pointers, pointers, and pointers" in 25), linking parameters ("LD.SO" in issue 54), the heap (see "Heap, malloc, glibc" in issue 85), the ELF format ("In-memory-only ELF execution" in issue 69, "Tiny ELF" in issue 47, "The world most prominent virus has erased all the source code" in issue 52, "Diving into and ELF" in issue 44, and more) and whatnot in this newsletter, this is a continuation of the thought process. I've got an extensive PDF for next week also, let's hope I can finish it to put it in the next issue.

• How to for a Rust kernel
  https://dominuscarnufex.github.io/cours/rs-kernel/en.html

  A complementary on "For all those people trying to rewrite a kernel" of issue 96. This is a tutorial on both kernel system calls and rust programming at the same time.

• Data structures in the Linux VFS
  https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/lk/lk-8.html

  More and more on the VFS internals, continuation of "VFS, proc and root filesystems" in 58, and "VFS in more details" of 62, and certainly the podcast about "Data storage on Unix".

• Fuzzing (continue)
  https://irssi.org/2017/05/12/fuzzing-irssi/

  This one is quite old compared to the other links I've shared about fuzzing in the newsletter before but I waited on it to be a full fledge popular topic. The article itself is a smooth introduction to fuzzing.

• Big Opinions
  https://github.com/JpOnline/Blog/blob/master/language.md
  https://dpc.pw/the-faster-you-unlearn-oop-the-better-for-you-and-your-software
  https://lobste.rs/s/l5hrk1/faster_you_unlearn_oop_better_for_you_your
  https://github.com/kamranahmedse/design-patterns-for-humans

  If you carry with you absolutes on the internet you'll certainly bring about discussions and arguments. "Every system is built from a DSL designed by the programmers to describe that system. The art of programming is, and has always been, the art of language design. Robert Martin". Having a lot of quotes in a piece and is a mark of an opinionated piece.

• Open source and culture
  https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba9519972d9

  Yet another instance of big opinions, this one I found quite interesting to read and it's written by a nice fellow you probably know. A follow up type of link for a sort of new series of ideas, see "Open internet/source/culture and the future of this all" in 101 and "A year of big acquisitions, big changes in priorities" from week 99.

• Praising truth
  https://cryptosumer.com/2018/11/24/free-software-messiah-richard-stallman-we-can-do-better-than-bitcoin/

  Click-baity title but a pretty decent discussion by RMS on the Taler system and how it compares with cryptocurrencies. This is in contrast with the previous link, OSS vs FOSS.

• More Emacs
  https://ambrevar.xyz/emacs-everywhere/

  We've shared that blog before in "Shells and pipelines" of issue 75. In this one we're being sold the idea of having emacs for everything with only benefits.

• Oregano
  https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/comp.unix.wizards/kFdPoJBpcSA

  A fun discussion I haven't heard about before that xero shared this week about the famous Unix wizard poster.

• Extra cringy music
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHNKTlz1lps
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4YRPdRXKFs

  Similar to "Unix Rap" in 7, enjoy this "nerd" music.

Random

• One of those habit building blog
  https://jamesclear.com/reset-the-room
  https://thecreativeindependent.com/guides/how-to-balance-full-time-work-with-creative-projects/

  But a good one, not an annoying listicle type. It gets 2M hits a month on the blog and I've just discovered it. The second post is also related to organizing yourself, the usual work-life balance, a quite popular topic on technology news website. It reminded me of the discussion we had on the forums about Scientifically Proven Digital Attention Helpers, things such as knowing the times in the day when you are more focused, finding what works when guiding yourself towards an intent, what keeps you focus or reminds you of what you need to do (environment or not), splitting big tasks into smaller achievable ones to be able to track them, going with the intent rather than a goal, etc.. See also "Time management and management in general" of issue 98. While also ending on a good note about the histrionic busy: see "Over-Productive" in 78, "Production" in 66, and "The busy trap" in 32.

• Akira
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqVoEpRIaKg

  There was a time when anime wasn't associated with what it is today, a time of burgeoning. Probably one of the most impressive animated movie I've seen, along with the Studio Ghibli.

• Information war
  https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/11/28/the-digital-maginot-line/

  Complementary to "7 items you won't believe are shockingly amazing!" in issue 85 and to all our "state of the internet" kind of articles.

• Custom typeface
  https://www.arun.is/blog/custom-typefaces/

  Also, yet again, a recurrent talk in this newsletter: fonts. This episode covers custom typeface, why companies do it, should they continue doing it, and if you should you pay attention.

Thoughts

Judgment is but a mirror that reflects the insecurities of the person who’s doing the judging.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpBC_jyg-go

Some people live in a world where there are haters and lovers, people that get you and others that don't, everyone judging each others, scaling and measuring their behaviors, inspecting if everyone moves in their plastic manner, pantomime, and making sure they never diverge from their cookie-cutter molds otherwise we'd have to re-invent how we perceive them. It's a world where one move means everything, where you can't make mistakes.
The thing is this only exists when we are teenagers full of hormones living the school days life (or if you're a politician). Real life is much more complex, so get over it.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Unikernels
  http://250bpm.com/blog:138

  Unikernels are getting more popular in the world of containerization. Other discussions about kernel talks in the newsletter such as the classic "Monolithic vs micro" from 37 and "Not really unix but close and soon will be" in 41 come to mind.

• Linux Redhat and kernels
  https://next.redhat.com/2018/11/14/ukl-a-unikernel-based-on-linux/
  https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/powering-its-future-while-preserving-present-introducing-red-hat-enterprise-linux-8-beta

  While being corporate-ish Redhat is still one of the front face, along with Oracle and others, to Unix-like operating systems. That first link brings hope to the first entry of this newsletter.

• Safe bash
  https://vaneyckt.io/posts/safer_bash_scripts_with_set_euxo_pipefail/

  Another topic that keeps showing up, see "POSIX shell and no bashism" in 93, "A new shell, why?" in 87, "One liners again..." in 79, "Shells and pipelines" in 75, "Using bash not only for small scripts" in 64, "Bash and shells" in 57, "Bash the bash for bash the bash" in 23, and "Expansion & Globs" in 17. That amount of articles on bash and shell tricks in general is an example of how tricky it is to use them safely.

• Gnome history
  https://www.bassi.io/articles/2018/10/25/the-history-of-gnome/
  https://www.bassi.io/category/history/podcast.xml

  I'll subscribe to this and listen to it during the week, I have a huge podcast list. The first episode sounds captivating. This should add some spices to all the recent news such as the drop of KDE in RedHat in favor of Gnome support, the shell extension and themes discussion, the hackathons follow up, and much more.

• Designing a font
  https://www.cambus.net/spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/

  Creating a font that looks nice in all situations is hard, and it's even harder when it's a bitmap font. Also, be sure to disable antialiasing, subpixel rendering, and hinting to keep the crispiness of the bitmaps.

• Standards
  http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/k95manual/arrow.html
  http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Ecma-048.pdf

  Want to go deeper in the world of terminal codes, well this is your lucky day.

• Celebrating Unix
  https://unix50.org/

  The anniversary was quite a while ago in internet time but we're still sharing and discussing it.

• GCC arguments
  https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2001-07/msg02150.html

  Should you care about the people that are relying on unintended behaviours to build software using your libraries. What about when you break/fix this behaviour. We've seen that a bit recently in "OpenBSD doas update and virt" of issue 99.

• D'you have a problem?
  https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3mgxb/the-internet-has-a-huge-cc-problem-and-developers-dont-want-to-deal-with-it

  A title that shouts "CLICK ME" with an article that is more or less fair. In my opinion switching from one language to another is only moving the problem from one space to another space, a whole lot of new security issues will arise. What do you think?

• Gaming on FreeBSD
  https://oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/58/

  We've done gaming on Linux ("Missing games?" in 50 and "Free games" in 10) and recently gaming on OpenBSD ("Extra" in issue 90), this time we're doing gaming on FreeBSD.

Random

• Cringiest articles of the year?
  https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/11/tech-worker-organizing-google-union-walkout
  https://www.jotform.com/blog/how-google-is-slowing-innovation/

  I don't think I've read a more politically loaded articles this year, I'm not sure why but this is not a trend I'm found of and from the discussions on the forums and irc I know a lot agree that this is getting tiresome. Trying to paint a narrative over whatever is happening, especially a narrative that only applies in certain parts of the world. Keep away with your anti or pro capitalism talk from the 60s and let us enjoy the tech instead. Especially when it comes to the second article and the author nagging about Google being a corporate evil because their own product features are not supported in their pdf reader.

• A world post-rest
  https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/11/18/Post-REST

  Lots of thinking about how the world will evolve, speculations.

• It feels slow
  https://www.inkandswitch.com/slow-software.html

  Another revisit of the topic of "the slow feel", this one feels complete. Somehow related to "Learning From Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces" in issue 22, "Latency, second round" in 33, and "This is why NES games are awesome" in issue 28.

• Spammy content
  https://howwegettonext.com/how-bots-were-born-from-spam-62f6c621351f

  The history of spammers and spam content.

Thoughts

The mind can be trained just like the body.

Thinking About Thinking

Meditation, learning psychology, taking the time to teach ourselves about cognitive biases, controlling our day to day intents and attention, leading our future changes and directions. All those are things that are possible and we live in the best time to try them. As much as a cliché as this is I still thought of putting this as the thought of the week.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Fixing audio on OpenBSD
  https://jcs.org/2018/11/12/vfio

  It's hard to be on the same level of dedication as this person when it comes to debugging hardware drivers and making them work. Kudos for that.

• Capsicum
  https://oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/57/

  We're seeing this blog more in this newsletter and there's a reason for that. A follow up on "Contain and protect" from issue 76. It's the counterpart of pledge and unveil from OpenBSD on FreeBSD.

• Openstack and debugging story
  https://blog.codecentric.de/en/2014/09/openstack-crime-story-solved-tcpdump-sysdig-iostat-episode-1/
  https://blog.codecentric.de/en/2014/09/openstack-crime-story-solved-tcpdump-sysdig-iostat-episode-2/
  https://blog.codecentric.de/en/2014/09/openstack-crime-story-solved-tcpdump-sysdig-iostat-episode-3/

  A new adventure of debugging using sysdig and others, checkout "Let's setup a honeypot" from issue 18. Beware of defaults!

• Preventing sqli
  https://tapoueh.org/blog/2018/11/preventing-sql-injections/
  https://github.com/s0md3v/XSStrike

  Diving into the internals of how sql injections are prevented in Postgres. I've also added one of the brand new XSS finding tool.

• TIMEZONEs
  http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/howto_create_your_own_time_zone/
  https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/europe-may-scrap-dst.html
  https://apenwarr.ca/log/20181113

  Timezones are complex, and adding DST to it doesn't make it easier. I wish I could live in my own timezone like that author, maybe my wish would come true using that trick. It's also my first time encountering the utility zic. As a bonus, because we've saved some hours with our custom timezone, we'll get a wonderful discussion about mtime, the modification timestamp set in the inode (see stat(1)). In my opinion only two or three of the issues brought are actually issues to care about, the others are some edge case outside of scope.

• Open internet/source/culture and the future of this all
  http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2018/11/09/the-evolution-of-open/
  http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html
  https://the-pastry-box-project.net/ed-finkler/2014-july-6

  Some meditation on topics some might be accustomed to: open source culture, geek groups, developers thoughts of their own future and balance of life. While I can't really get some of the discussion I can still sympathize with it and have seen it displayed in people I know.

• The History of Unix, Rob Pike
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2NI6t2r_Hs

  Another Unix history presentation.

• vim for everything?
  http://alangrow.com/blog/turn-vim-into-excel-tips-for-tabular-data-editing
  https://emily.st/2018/11/13/vim-in-the-future/

  That first post could be listed as a case of using the wrong tool for the task, shooting yourself in the foot at the same time. The second post has a discussion on vim usages across ages, a pretty basic one but something you can share with someone not knowledgeable about vim.

• Gnu stow tuto
  https://stevenrbaker.com/tech/managing-dotfiles-with-gnu-stow.html

  A tool revered in our small corner of the internet. Along with Nix we got a good pair.

Random

• How many computers are in your computer
  https://www.gwern.net/Turing-complete#how-many-computers-are-in-your-computer

  Gwern's articles are always well researched and usually get updated a lot over time. This section in his "Surprisingly Turing-Complete" one makes you think about how complex system stack up layers over layers with time.

• Being unsaid
  https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ambigamy/201110/the-silent-treatment-when-people-leave-you-guessing

  How can the absence of a thing be a sign? And yet it is.

Thoughts

If you can't tell me what you'd like to happen it means you don't have a problem yet. It's simply nagging. A problem exist only if there's a difference between what is effectively happening and what you'd like to happen.

Going along with the last link of the random section, a thought that's been playing in my head for some time now is to "Make explicit what is implicit". We often assume wrongly that some things should go unsaid but it's always better to be clear about what we have understood, what we expect, what we would wish would be the best possible outcome, that's the only good way to avoid mistakes and misunderstandings. Also we need to add that this does not only apply to problematic scenarios but to any others, if we like something we should be explicit about what exactly what done right and what exactly we liked, this way everyone progresses.

Have a wonderful week everyone.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.