Episode Details

Replacing a (silently) failing disk in a ZFS pool, OPNsense 19.7 RC1 released, implementing DRM ioctl support for NetBSD, High quality/low latency VOIP server with umurmur/Mumble on OpenBSD, the PDP-7 where Unix began, LLDB watchpoints, and more.

Headlines

Replacing a (silently) failing disk in a ZFS pool

Maybe I can’t read, but I have the feeling that official documentations explain every single corner case for a given tool, except the one you will actually need. My today’s struggle: replacing a disk within a FreeBSD ZFS pool.
What? there’s a shitton of docs on this topic! Are you stupid?
I don’t know, maybe. Yet none covered the process in a simple, straight and complete manner.

OPNsense 19.7 RC1 released

Hi there,
For four and a half years now, OPNsense is driving innovation through modularising and hardening the open source firewall, with simple and reliable firmware upgrades, multi-language support, HardenedBSD security, fast adoption of upstream software updates as well as clear and stable 2-Clause BSD licensing.
We thank all of you for helping test, shape and contribute to the project! We know it would not be the same without you.
Download links, an installation guide[1] and the checksums for the images can be found below as well.

News Roundup

Implementation of DRM ioctl Support for NetBSD kernel

• What is DRM ioctl ?

Ioctls are input/output control system calls and DRM stands for direct rendering manager The DRM layer provides several services to graphics drivers, many of them driven by the application interfaces it provides through libdrm, the library that wraps most of the DRM ioctls. These include vblank event handling, memory management, output management, framebuffer management, command submission & fencing, suspend/resume support, and DMA services.

• Native DRM ioctl calls

NetBSD was able to make native DRM ioctl calls with hardware rendering once xorg and proper mesa packages where installed. We used the glxinfo and glxgears applications to test this out.

High quality / low latency VOIP server with umurmur/Mumble on OpenBSD

Discord users keep telling about their so called discord server, which is not dedicated to them at all. And Discord has a very bad quality and a lot of voice distorsion.
Why not run your very own mumble server with high voice quality and low latency and privacy respect? This is very easy to setup on OpenBSD!
Mumble is an open source voip client, it has a client named Mumble (available on various operating system) and at least Android, the server part is murmur but there is a lightweight server named umurmur. People authentication is done through certificate generated locally and automatically accepted on a server, and the certificate get associated with a nickname. Nobody can pick the same nickname as another person if it’s not the same certificate.

TMWL June’19 — JS Fetch API, scheduling in Spring, thoughts on Unix

• Unix — going back to the roots

From time to time, I like to review my knowledge in a certain area, even when I feel like I know a lot about it already. I go back to the basics and read tutorials, manuals, books or watch interesti