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More on FreeBSD 6.0

by | Nov 5, 2005 | Usefull Things

With FreeBSD 6.0 now officially released I thought I’ll go through the Release Notes and post a few of the things I found useful from it.
The release notes list a LOT of changes and I’ve already noted a few that isn’t mentioned. This might be a easy upgrade but it’s a significant mile stone.

  • 80386 processors are not supported anymore.
  • A new sysctl called security.jail.enforce_statfs that controls what mounts are visible in a jail, I recommend setting this to 1 if you are using nullfs to share directories that way jail users can see for themselves that certain directories are mounted read only for example.
  • The IPDIVERT kernel option now causes a module to be built that is loadable at run time! Also libalias now supports being built as a kernel module.
  • ipfw have a option to only match packets for a given jailid, this is now support with mpsafenet=1
  • ipfw can now tag altq packets
  • bsdiff(1) and bsdpatch(1) has been added for binary diffs and patching
  • libarchive and therefore bsd tar now supports ISO files and ZIP files, try tar -tvzf blah.zip and tar -tvf blah.iso to see this in action, fantastic!
  • Two utilities – pgrep(1) and pkill(1) has some new options, these utilities makes it easy to find and kill processes by name
  • The fantastic portsnap(8) utility is now installed by default. This replaces the old cvsup method of keeping your ports tree in sync and is well worth investigating. It’s been the first thing I installed on any new box for a long time, great to see it included by default.
  • tcpdrop(8) has been added that enables you to reset any TCP session, very handy indeed.
  • rc.d scripts can now rename network interfaces at boot time using ifconfig_fxp0_name=”net0″ syntax.

So that’s just some of the highlights, there are loads more, and lots of work has gone in under the hood to improve threading and SMP from the 5.x branch, this should help with some concerns that were raised on the performance of 5.x series of FreeBSD.

FreeBSD 6.0 RELEASE and STABLE

by | Nov 4, 2005 | Usefull Things

A day or so ago RELENG_6_0_0_RELEASE got tagged, I also noticed that if you retrieve RELENG_6 you’ll get FreeBSD 6.0 STABLE. I upgraded a few machines to STABLE and have been quite happy so far. Right now the ISO images for 6.0-RELEASE is on the Main FreeBSD FTP Server ready for the taking.
As have been announced all over FreeBSD has decided to move the friendly daemon logo to the side to get something a bit more corporate. A few days ago they announced the new logo and said they’d update the site soon.
So far the first real knock on of this change in Logo and direction is obvious the moment the install CD boots, you’re greeted with this:


Any long term BSD users will immediately spot the absence of the old ASCII Art BSD Daemon. I like the new logo, but it’s a sad day either way.

Truecrypt Version 4

by | Nov 2, 2005 | Usefull Things

I’ve previously posted about Truecrypt and mentioned how much I like it and how I’m using for my OTFE needs.
Today they released version 4 which comes with a very long list of enhancements the most significant new feature is support for Linux and binaries for a number of distributions. There are so many enhancements in this version that I won’t attempt to go into much detail here the history file does a great job. If you use Truecrypt then check out the new version today.

Customize Google

by | Oct 24, 2005 | Usefull Things

After fiddling a bit with Flock I really liked the bookmarks integration but hated the rest of it so I figured I’ll try find some plugins for Firefox that does something similar, it has to be said these is a major gap here for plugins in that area, sigh.
So while doing that I came across Customize Google, it’s a fantastic little plugin that fixes up Google search results, some of its features:

  • Use Google Suggest (suggest words while you’re typing) on all searches
  • Add links to competitors that lets you search on other search engines for the same term
  • Rewrite links to point straight to the images in Google Images
  • Removes image copying restrictions in Google Print
  • Secure Gmail, switch to https
  • Remove ads, including gmail
  • Anonymize your Google userid
  • Filter spammy websites from search results
  • Add links to WayBack Machine (webpage history)
  • Remove click tracking

These are all fantastic features though I think the spammy link filter deserves special attention. I previously wrote a frontend to Google using the Google API to filter out those annoying user review sites, this does the same just right there in the actual google interface. Supports regex and all that, fantastic.
Check it out. There is an animated gif demo on their front page, that should get you hooked immediately.

DHTML Menus

by | Oct 10, 2005 | Usefull Things

It is time for a site redesign and I’ve been investigating DHTML menus. Till now I’ve used Visual Menu, it is nice but has this windows wizard type tool for building the menu otherwise you need to use a pretty complex but flexible config file format. Currently I’m on a mac so its just annoying, so I figured it’s time for something new.
A bit of browsing found TwinHelix a site with a couple of DHTML based menu’s and other gizmos, some really nice there, its donation ware but you can use it for free if you provide a link back to the author.
I’ll launch my new design once the new Movable Type is out with its tags and other new stuff since incorporating those will require a bit of template hacking, will get it all done in one go.